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The other day, Moscow authorities unveiled a life-sized bas-relief panel of Stalin in one of the central tube stations. The panel is a replica of the original sculpture, People’s Gratitude to the Leader and Commander, destroyed in 1966 during the destalinisation campaign.

According to Marx, “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce”. Be that as it may, but my own history has indeed come full circle.

My early childhood was overshadowed by Stalin, literally so on high holidays. We lived in the very centre of Moscow, where the Soviets developed a clever trick to remind us of true divinity.

They’d project a giant image of Stalin onto the cloud cover and every night illuminate it with floodlight beams. There he was, bigger than the biggest buildings in Gorky Street, brighter than the brightest star, overlooking his charges from high above, a deity sometimes wrathful, more rarely merciful, but always divine.

“How did they do that, Mummy?” “I don’t know, but isn’t he wonderful? We must all be thankful to him.”

Since I was only five when Stalin died, I was deemed too immature to offer the requisite gratitude, “Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for my happy childhood”. But I do remember feeling sad that I’d never see him alive. The mummified figurine lying next to Lenin in the Red Square Mausoleum wasn’t a satisfactory substitute.

Another three years, and history ended. Not in the way Francis Fukuyama so foolishly opined 40 years later, but in the sense that Stalin personified and encompassed Soviet past, present and future. Stalin was Soviet history, and in 1956 it was erased with him.

Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes (of which he himself was a major perpetrator) and Stalin’s personality cult (replacing it with his own). Overnight the landmarks signposting history began to disappear.

Stalin’s statues were being taken down and either destroyed or tucked away for future use. Places named after Stalin were being renamed, and even Stalingrad, né Tsaritsyn, became Volgograd. From now on, quipped Moscow wags, Stalin would be known as Joseph Volga.

When mummified Stalin was taken out of the Mausoleum, I was 14 and already an anti-Soviet vermin in the making. The destalinisation campaign was in full swing, but that wasn’t enough for me. I wanted the whole diabolical contrivance to bite the dust.

By the time it did, in 1991, I had been out of the Soviet Union for 18 years, happy to confirm the old adage that true beauty is best perceived from afar. A few more years, and that long-distance observation began to yield a curious phenomenon. Stalin was making a gradual comeback.

Prodded by Kremlin propaganda, more and more Russians began to hanker after the past, as embodied by Stalin. I wouldn’t call it nostalgia because neither they nor increasingly even their parents had lived under Stalin. It’s something deeper than that, the historical Russian craving for one strong hand on the tiller while the other one is cracking a whip.

Stalin’s redux gathered momentum and accelerated no end under Putin, who increasingly sees himself, and is seen by his flock, as Stalin Mark II. When reminded that Stalin murdered 60 million of his subjects, the new worshippers wave such petty gripes away.

He had to be as tough as the times dictated, they shrug. And anyway, that number is exaggerated. Khrushchev only owned up to 20 million. Oh well, that’s all right then. (The Russians are notoriously lackadaisical about keeping such statistics. If you wish to know how the number of 60 million was arrived at, I’d recommend Prof. Rummel’s books Lethal Politics and Murder by Government.)

Putin’s Stalinist propaganda glosses over the bloodiest reign in history, concentrating instead on the rabble-rousing ultra-patriotic message Putin sees as vital to his own reign. Statues and busts of Stalin, those presciently kept in storage for decades, are again going up all over Russia, to educate the populace in the martial spirit deemed essential at present.

Understandably, this process picked up after Russia invaded the Ukraine in 2014. At least 100 new statues have since adorned the Russian skyline, while Stalin is being glorified as an effective manager and, above all, the great military leader who won the Second World War singlehandedly.

The Russian Orthodox Church, whose hierarchy are bearded and cassocked KGB agents, is doing its bit. Stalin’s moustachioed visage now appears on numerous icons, reinforcing the message of divinity I remember from my early childhood. Blasphemy, what blasphemy? No such thing in a country gone rabid.

Quasi-serious Russian historians try to put forth various simulacra of sensible arguments. It’s wrong, they say, to rewrite history on the spur of the moment. Yes, Stalin was a bit rough at times, but above all we must recognise his achievements.

Anyway, didn’t Churchill say, “Stalin took Russia with horse and plough and left it with an atomic bomb”? Well, actually Churchill didn’t, even though various billboards around Russia claim he did. The phrase comes from the book Russia After Stalin by Isaac Deutscher, Stalin’s Marxist biographer.

The USSR did win the war with Stalin as Commander-in-Chief, continue those advocates, and they are even prepared to admit the Allies played some minor role in that victory. What they’d rather not admit is that Stalin started that war as Hitler’s ally, which he remained for two years, but then there are limits to people’s flexibility.

And yes, one has to agree with them that Stalin is a significant part of Russian history. And no, he shouldn’t be written out of history books, as he more or less was under Khrushchev. However, there exists a big difference between keeping Stalin in history books and putting him on hundreds of pedestals for the brainwashed population to worship.

Hitler, after all, was also part of German history, which fact is probably acknowledged by German historians. (The qualifier ‘probably’ refers to the tendency of woke modernity to expurgate historical figures it finds objectionable.) Yet one doesn’t see any statues of Hitler adorning Berlin or Vienna, with Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer etched on the pedestal.

Alas, what one does see in Vienna’s central Schwarzenbergplatz is a revolting Soviet War Memorial, densely covered with Stalin’s quotations about the Red Army bringing freedom to Europe. I hope that obscene eyesore, erected by the Austrian Communist Party during the Soviet occupation, will one day be removed.

However, tributes to Stalin will enjoy a long life in Russia, under Putin or his successors. That Georgian tyrant captured the essence of Russia, and the people will be eternally grateful – just as they are in that bas-relief.

Perhaps ‘understands’ is the wrong word. It implies a prior intellectual effort, and I don’t think Sir Keir is capable of such exertions.

Yet on a purely visceral level he understands the nature of modern politics better than his Leave opponents – and I mean real Leavers, not people like Boris Johnson who saw the light purely for career reasons.

Starmer’s surrender to the EU has caused a predictable outcry in all the expected quarters. The prime minister is accused, correctly, of betraying Brexit and, also correctly, of being a lackey to the eurocrats across the Channel.

Leavers, which tag applies to all my English friends, say that Starmer has ignored the democratically expressed will of the people. That’s true, considering that more Britons voted to leave the EU than have ever voted for anything less. Starmer, my friends continue, has surrendered a chunk of British sovereignty, and so he has.

Yet all of it is irrelevant when seen against the background of the current version of Western democracy. I mean its subtext, not text; its connotation, not denotation; its undercurrents, not its undulating waves.

Democracy has succeeded in some things, but it has failed in perhaps the most vital one. It no longer elevates to government those fit to govern. This is a deadly disease and, like everything else about modernity, it’s progressive.  

Tocqueville – and he was a champion of democracy – warned against this with his usual prescience. But he missed one detail: he thought the onset of this disease was a possibility rather than a certainty. It was the latter though, an inexorable result of a steadily expanding franchise and the concomitant laxity in the demand for proper qualifications to take part.

“I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office,” wrote Tocqueville, “but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.” (Replace ‘the United States’ with ‘the West’, and the prophesy would be just as accurate.)

It ought to be remembered that Tocqueville formed his ideas of American statesmen on the basis of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, to name but a few. One wonders what the Frenchman would say today, observing modern politicians in action. The reliable guess is he would feel that what has come true was not his prophesies but his nightmares. The former, after all, were always leavened with optimism.

Modern politicians don’t persuade people to vote for them. They trick them into doing so by making promises they have neither the means nor indeed the intention of keeping; by telling people what they want to hear, not the truth.

They unfailingly claim an undying commitment to democracy, and this isn’t a lie, although neither is it the whole truth. They do appreciate democracy, but only as so many rungs on the ladder they can scale to power.

When they get to the top, our newly elected leaders justifiably fear they will be found out. Hence they strive to put some serious acreage between themselves and the people who have elected them.

They seek to remove every remaining bit of power from the traditional local bodies, which stay close to the voters, and to shift it to the centralised Leviathan, claiming all the time that the people are governing themselves.

The subsequent transfer of power to international bodies, which is to say as far away from the national electorate as geography will allow, is a natural extension of the same process. This explains the otherwise inexplicable rise of the European Union, for one has yet to hear any rational argument in its favour. 

Thus expanded franchise inevitably leads to greater centralisation, and for that reason it is wrong to complain, as today’s conservatives so often do, that growing centralisation undermines democracy. This is like saying that pregnancy undermines sex.

The burgeoning political centralisation of modernity also reflects a deeper trend, that of reversing two thousand years of Christendom and reverting to idolatry and paganism.

People have been hollowed out, their metaphysical certitudes removed or inverted, the resulting vacuum filled with idols whose selection is left to individual choice independent of any group affiliation or loyalty. Falling by the political wayside is the familial localism inherent to Christendom.

It has been replaced with hysterical adulation of central government, leading in extremis to totalitarianism. In an important way, however, all modern states are totalitarian, in that they seek control over areas hitherto seen as being off-limits for governmental meddling. In that sense the differences between, say, the USA and the USSR are those of degree, not principle.    

While perpetrating centralisation run riot, the ostensibly democratic, but in fact neo-tyrannical, state acquires more power over the individual than any monarch ruling by divine right ever saw in his dreams.

French subjects, for example, were shielded from Louis XIV by several layers of local government, and the Sun King wielded more power over his loftiest courtiers than over the lowliest peasants. The King was aware of this, and his famous pronouncement on the nature of the state fell more into the realm of wishful thinking than reportage.

Modern ‘democracies’ never tire of insisting that sovereignty resides with the people. Yet they, along with their ultimate supranational extensions, consistently demonstrate how far this is from the truth. Britain is the only country where the ruling elite couldn’t ignore the popular vote against European federalism, for the time being.

David Cameron agreed to the 2016 referendum only because he was sure people would vote Remain. They didn’t though, in spite of all major media, especially broadcast, campaigning for that vote with unabating vigour and maniacal persistence. Yet our EU gauleiters sensed that enough of the British political ethos was still extant to make it impossible for them to ignore the vote.

Not so with the democratically held referenda in Denmark, Austria and Ireland. In the first instance, the Danes rejected the Maastricht Treaty. In the second, Austria voted in Jörg Haider, who today would be described as far-right. In the third, the people of Ireland voted not to ratify the Nice Treaty on the enlargement of the EU.

In all three cases, the European Union, that great champion of pooled democracy, put its foot down and its boot in. People’s choice is all fine and well, provided it’s the choice the elite favours at the moment. Otherwise, people will have to choose again – and keep choosing until they get it right.

Removing sovereignty from the people and vesting it in supranational institutions is the keenly felt imperative of modern mainstream politicians, regardless of their party affiliation. Sovereignty, as they understand it, must run away from the national electorate all the way to the national capital – and then keep running until it finds a safe haven beyond the nation’s reach.

Starmer, with his unerring instincts of a career apparatchik, senses this in his subcortex. That region of the brain is responsible for sensory processing, which functions in lieu of reason and, push come to shove, overrides it completely.

In that, he and the whole nomenklatura to which he belongs resemble animals who are also driven by their innate instincts. Hence they act without choice, just like dogs who drink from puddles and chase cats because their DNA tells them to do so, not because they have rationally weighed the pros and cons.

Our apparatchiks’ instincts demand that they drift towards Brussels, towing the whole country behind them. Since they couldn’t dismiss the Brexit referendum outright, they have to rely on the subterfuge of rejoining the EU by a series of stealthy incremental steps, each seemingly insignificant.

Should acting that way jeopardise their power, another instinct may take over, that of political survival. In that case they may slow down, or even temporarily discontinue, that drift. But barring such a threat, they’ll continue on their meandering path.

They won’t be stopped by any appeals to reason, morality or especially the traditional political culture of Britain – any more than a dog will listen to sensible arguments about the inalienable feline rights of cats.

These people can’t be persuaded; they can only be ousted. And I don’t mean Starmer or any other particular politician – the whole political cabal must be unseated.

But a distinct danger exists that such an upheaval may throw away the baby of political tradition with the bathwater of political corruption. Damned if we do, damned if we don’t.

In 1990, John Major succeeded Margaret Thatcher, and this is the only time the words ‘John Major’ and ‘succeeded’ have ever been used in the same sentence.

How a man who early in his career failed a maths test for bus conductors went on to become first chancellor and then prime minister isn’t something I can even hope to understand. One thing I can say for sure is that basic intelligence doesn’t seem to be an ironclad qualification for such jobs.

Today Sir John has regaled us with interesting proposals on how to relieve prison overcrowding. What Britain is essentially looking at is a situation New Yorkers call ‘blivet’: ten pounds of sh*t in a five-pound bag.

Our prison population is 88,000 at present, but, since present is followed by future, that number is expected to reach six digits in a few years. Alas, we haven’t enough spaces to accommodate them all, hence the blivet.

If you think that we should build more prisons to tackle this problem, you simply don’t understand the ‘liberal’ mind. People like Major don’t think in straight lines. For them the shortest distance between two points is the cube, and they’ve never heard of Occam’s razor.

“Too many prisoners are sentenced to short-term imprisonment,” writes Sir John, and this is the only statement in his article that makes me nod vigorously. Yes, our judges routinely mete out derisory sentences for the kind of crimes that used to make malefactors dance the Tyburn jig when England was still a world power.

Come to think of it, bringing back hanging would go a long way towards relieving prison overcrowding, but such an outlandish idea has never crossed Sir John’s mind (I use this word in a manner of speaking). Instead he tugs at our heart’s strings:  

“Prison means the loss of liberty, but for the prisoner it often means much more besides. Very often it means the loss of their job, their home and their relationships.”

(Note the woke syntax: ‘their’ instead of ‘his’. Such verbal monstrosities can easily be avoided even if masculine pronouns burn one’s lips. Here, for example, Major could have written “but for the prisoners…,” but he is above such subterfuge.)

Sir John goes on to explain that such deprivations complicate rehabilitation by making it harder for the ex-con to insinuate himself into normal life on the out:

“This does not bode well for when they are released: both common sense and empirical evidence suggests that prisoners who have lost those stabilising influences are more likely to return to crime. That is in no one’s interest – and certainly not the public at large.”

That’s doubtless true, but the chap should have thought about this before nicking that car or burgling that flat. As for recidivism, I quite like the system of ‘three strikes and you’re out’ used in some American states, where a third criminal conviction entails a mandatory life sentence. That strikes me as good deterrence.

Yes, well, you see, according to Sir John, non-violent crimes aren’t really serious enough to warrant imprisonment. So what if a tattooed yahoo broke into your house and stole your possessions? At least your wife stayed unraped, you stayed uncrippled, and both of you stayed alive.

Major begrudgingly admits that “prison works” for violent crimes – but only for them: “Protecting the public from violent crime is a key responsibility of any government and, in such cases, stern sentences must continue to be delivered. But we should beware that excessive zeal to be ‘tough on crime’ does not lead us into unwise policy.

“We are told that ‘prison works’, and, where it holds the worst of criminals in custody, it does. But I do not believe our justice system – or our society – is well served if it also imprisons those who could be better punished by non-custodial sentences.”

Such as community sentencing, driving bans, curfews, passport confiscation, which, explains Sir John, would be cheaper than building more prisons (true) and more conducive to rehabilitation (false).

The problem with Sir John’s views isn’t so much the specifics of each alternative he proposes as the ‘liberal’ mindset behind them.

Our government treats habitual burglars and thieves with avuncular benevolence because they redistribute wealth, which is essentially the same job the government does. Granted, criminals go about that worthy task in a slightly unsavoury way, but they still deserve every benefit of the doubt.

That’s why most burglaries in Britain go uninvestigated or else unprosecuted. Protection of property, one of the few legitimising functions of the state, has fallen by the wayside.

But woe betide any subject of His Majesty who protects his own property by hurting or, God forbid, killing the criminal. Not just the book but the whole library will be thrown at him for failing to realise that the burglar was “merely doing his job”, as ‘liberal’ people have explained to me many times.

When he supplanted Major at 10 Downing Street, Tony ‘Anthony’ Blair promised to be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”. Sounds good, provided Messrs Blair, Major et al. trace the causes of crime to the primary cause: original sin. But they don’t, do they? Thus Major:

“Very often – although I concede not always – low-level criminality is a consequence of mental illness or addiction to drink or drugs. In these cases, if we are serious about stopping reoffending, the better response must surely be treatment rather than imprisonment… Many are vulnerable: addicts, mentally ill, or – in a distressing number of cases – themselves the victims of trauma and abuse.”

No free will or any human agency is involved. Most (although Sir John generously concedes that not all) criminals act without choice, driven that way by mental illness, drug addiction or history of abuse.

It’s true that the kind of families most criminals grow up in make them more likely to be abused when children, and then to take drugs and become mentally ill as a result. Yet they still had a free choice not to take drugs, and denying that betokens a false understanding of humanity.

As for mental illness, the term has lost much of its meaning. It now covers not just clinical madness but also a tendency to bad moods, an innately violent or otherwise criminal nature and a whole raft of other conditions that have no business being medicalised.

Prisons do work for any crimes, not just violent ones – provided we understand what working means in this case. To Sir John and his ilk, the primary role of prisons is therapeutic and educational redemption, aka rehabilitation. But that’s a fallacy: rehabilitation is an aim of incarceration, but only a secondary or rather a tertiary one.

The primary purpose of imprisonment isn’t rehabilitation but punishment. And the purpose of punishment is to make sure justice is done – and seen to be done. The rule of law is impossible without the people knowing that the law protects them, rather than criminals.

When, on the other hand, people realise that their property is at the mercy of any moron intrepid enough to steal it, and the law merely raps him on the wrists, they lose respect for the law, becoming more likely to break it themselves.

Speaking of the causes of crime, a brief look at the demographic break-down of the relevant statistics shows the preponderance of certain ethnic, racial and religious groups, many of whose members are recent arrivals at these shores. It never occurs to the likes of John Major that one way to reduce the prison population is to redress the demographic imbalance by, say, stopping the cross-Channel dinghies.

Letting criminals go free is so much easier and, well, nicer – as the term is understood in Sir John’s circles. But I do have one question: would he be able to pass the bus conductor’s exam should he choose to re-sit it? No, forget that. We don’t have bus conductors any longer.

P.S. Would you like to double your net worth in just one year? Easy.

Just issue your own cryptocurrency and, if you have influence, peddle it through pay-to-dine schemes, earning tens of millions each time for your hospitality. Have your wife do the same, on a smaller scale.

Then use that influence to enable your family members to get multi-billion-dollar property development deals in the Middle East. Ideally, make those countries finance the deals at least partly. Open a series of luxury hotels and trade favours by making foreign, mainly Middle Eastern, dignitaries block-hire whole floors at $300,000 a night.

That’s it, Don’s your uncle, Melania’s your aunt. Oh, sorry, I left one detail out: first you must become the most corrupt president in US history.

In 1839 the French writer Marquis de Custine travelled to Russia in search of arguments against representative government.

Custine associated that political system with the French Revolution, during which both his father and grandfather had been guillotined. Little Astolphe was an infant at the time, but he understandably grew up with a reactionary mindset.

Hoping to find a sensible alternative to revolutionary depredations, Custine spent three months in Petersburg, Moscow and Yaroslavl. What he found was a tyranny so appalling that he felt suffocated and only began to breathe freely when his carriage crossed the border into Prussia.

Custine then wrote one of the most perceptive books about Russia ever produced by a foreign observer, La Russie en 1839. Three months was enough for Custine to single out a salient Russian trait and gasp: “This country is always on a war footing. It knows no peacetime.”

Well, as Custine’s contemporary so aptly put it, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Fast-forward two centuries, and Russia is on the warpath again. It first attacked the Ukraine in 2014, and the invasion went full scale in 2022.

The war has been raging ever since, and not just all over the Ukraine. The real battlefield in any conflict is laid out in the people’s heads, and it’s there that Putin’s fascist regime has scored a crushing victory.

Perpetual war that so terrified Custine has worked its way into the Russian DNA, where it sometimes stays dormant but never for long. Some expert prodding by perfidious propagandists, and the roar “Let’s march!!!” bursts out of millions of throats.

War, specifically against the West, circumscribes the Russian national identity, even more so than do the thievery and drunkenness so trenchantly described by great satirists from Gogol onwards. Even when Russian troops aren’t in action, any reader of Russian papers may get the impression that war is in full swing.

Every 9 May, when the Russians celebrate victory in the big war, the slogan “We can do it again!” is chanted by millions of marchers. Now that Russia has actually launched a brutal invasion against what is described in the press there as the West, not just the Ukraine, the screams have become deafening.

Putin has made a speech vowing to restore what he called “Russia’s historical territories” and comparing himself to Peter the Great. Since Peter is idolised in Russia partly for his defeat of Sweden, Putin’s braggadocio may be interpreted as a hint that Russia’s expansionist ambitions are directed towards the north-west.

The recent reports by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) and the RAND think tank add weight to this interpretation.

“In Russia,” say the reports, “the war has become the political system”, and Custine is vigorously nodding wherever he is. “But not ‘has become’,” he adds. “Always has been.”

Both Putin and his propagandists never stop issuing threats against the West, with nuclear annihilation figuring prominently. Mystical allusions, such as Putin’s “We’ll go to heaven, and they’ll just croak,” add poignancy to such diatribes.

But lately the threats have become more focused, with NATO’s newest members bearing the main brunt. Only last month, former Russian president, Medvedev, warned that these neophytes may become targets of nuclear revenge.

That means the three former Soviet Baltic republics along with Sweden, Peter the Great’s nemesis, and Finland, which was Russia’s “historical territory” from 1809 to 1918. In the winter of 1939-1940, Stalin made an attempt to reclaim what Russia considered rightfully hers, but only succeeded in purloining a small piece of Finland at a cost of up to 500,000 Russian lives.

The man who led the Finns’ heroic resistance, Gustaf Mannerheim, had been a lieutenant-general in the Russian Imperial Army, but he wasn’t held back by any nostalgic recollections. Now both IISS and RAND point out the likelihood of another confrontation between the descendants of Mannerheim and the heirs to Stalin.

Satellite intelligence is showing a massive build-up of Russian forces just miles from the Finnish border. Russia is busily expanding the infrastructure at the major bases threatening NATO’s northeastern flank.

Putin has announced the establishment of the ‘Leningrad Military District’ near the Finnish border and the deployment of additional military units in the area. History buffs will remember that it was the forces of the original Leningrad Military District that attacked Finland in 1939. Note that it’s still called the Leningrad, not Petersburg, Military District. The city has changed its name, but the Kremlin hasn’t changed its tune.

“Russia is strengthening its military presence and activities in its northwestern direction in all operational environments as quickly as possible,” says the RAND report. At the same time the Russian high command is war-gaming a massive assault in the direction of the Baltic.

Estonia, Lithuania and Finland are the obvious targets, and the terrain used in the exercises involving some 100,000 Russian troops is similar to that of those countries. Both IISS and RAND insist that, should a ceasefire be agreed in the Ukraine this year, the Russian army will be ready for the next round as early as in 2027.

That’s not to say the Russians will necessarily launch a full-fledged assault straight away. This isn’t how fascist regimes operate, as history shows. Hitler, for example, had made several incremental steps before invading Poland, gradually upping the ante each time.

Neither did Putin invade the Ukraine in one fell swoop. The blow did come in 2022, but not before the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and gradual occupation of parts of the Eastern Ukraine over the subsequent eight years.

Attacking NATO countries would raise the stakes even higher, what with Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty stating that “an armed attack against one NATO member is considered an attack against all”. And then what happens?

At this point, the language becomes rather nebulous: “If an attack occurs on a NATO ally, all other members are obligated to assist the attacked party, potentially including the use of armed force.” [My emphasis.]

Potentially may or may not mean definitely, and Putin is likely to test the meaning of that word empirically, by launching a small-scale attack to claim a chunk of Russia’s “historical territory”. NATO will then be faced with a stark choice: either to turn potentiality into reality or effectively to disband, giving Putin the freedom of Europe.

Though the reports don’t say this, I believe the likeliest first target will be the Estonian city of Narva, almost 90 per cent of whose population are native Russians.

The roadmap is well-charted: Hitler cited as his casus belli the plight of native Germans in Czechoslovakia and Poland, while Putin used the same stratagem to attack the Ukraine where supposedly a genocide of Russian speakers was taking place. (Version of this lying claim are regularly regurgitated by a certain British columnist.)

The two reports also state the self-evident truth that NATO is ill-prepared for war. Trump is ready to remove US troops and weaponry from Europe, possibly even to withdraw the US from NATO. Whichever way he goes, under his presidency Europe can’t count on US support and must stand on its own hind legs.

That, by the way, adds credibility to the 2027 date put forth by IISS and RAND. Putin isn’t going to delay the attack until another, possibly less amenable, president takes over. Trump’s second term expires in 2029, which makes 2028 the latest, and 2027 the likeliest, date Putin must have earmarked.

The reports also say something that many commentators don’t seem to realise: “Once [the Ukraine war] ends, this shift to a wartime economy, and the attendant effects on the defence industrial sector, will be difficult to reverse without provoking a backlash. As a result, Russia’s leaders may decide to pursue the permanent militarisation of the Russian economy even after the war ends.”

That’s true, except for one detail: Russia’s leaders may not be free to make any other decision even if they wanted to, which they don’t. They simply won’t be able to afford a lasting peace.

The Russian economy has been put on a total war footing, which means it grows without developing. Russia’s cash reserves are close to complete depletion, and no wherewithal exists for transferring the economy into a peaceful mode.

Even if Trump succeeds in easing the sanctions on Russia, nothing resembling the post-perestroika inrush of Western investment is on the cards to smooth the country’s economy going peaceful.

Then, any West-brokered peace treaty with the Ukraine will involve compensation for damages, which at present are roughly equal to Russia’s annual GDP. There will also be the problem of repairing the damage caused by Ukrainian strikes, mainly against the Russian energy infrastructure.

Successfully hit just between September and mid-February were 27 Russian oil and gas storage facilities, refineries, and pumping stations, plus 97 oil storage tanks. It takes hundreds of millions of dollars to restore a refinery, 3-6 billion to build a new one, and that’s just for starters.

Above all, too many resources, especially human ones, are directly involved in the war effort for Russia to be able to change horses in mid-stream. As Custine spotted with his eagle eye, war is the spiritual sustenance of the Russian people – and their rulers’ claim to legitimacy.

Every day I watch appalling videos of life in the Russian provinces, where 20 per cent of the population have no access to indoor plumbing and most people live in abject poverty, below even the miserly poverty level of $150 a month. Nothing new in that, and the Russians can forgive their tyrants for any kind of penury.

What they can’t forgive is the rulers’ failure to ‘make Russia great again’. And greatness is associated in the Russian mind with the ability to bully the world, starting with the country’s immediate neighbours.

As commentators correctly point out, the Russian government is unaccountable to anyone, and it can’t be voted out of office. Yes, but it can be unseated by what Pushkin called “the Russian revolt, senseless and merciless”. Such a revolt breaks out whenever the government is perceived as weak, meaning unwilling to fight wars or unable to win them.

Putin, or whoever follows him, knows that Russia can’t afford peace for both physical and, if you will, metaphysical reasons. That’s why all indications are that the West has a maximum of two years to prepare for the next barbarian onslaught. So we’d better get cracking – or else.

Many books state the bleeding obvious, but, by the sound of it, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson takes pride of place.

The book documents Biden’s descent into senility and frailty, rendering him what the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution calls “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office”.

When that becomes the case, says the Amendment, and the president acknowledges so in writing, the vice president becomes acting president. Yes, but what if a president is so far gone that he is unable to acknowledge his own incapacity, nor even to recognise his close friends and to tell his wife from his sister (leading the likes of me to crack salacious jokes about the intimatemost aspects of Biden’s family life)?

I’m sure the Constitution must have provisions for such a situation, but in Biden’s case they were never invoked because both his family and his party covered up his condition. Moreover, they tried to force him to stand for re-election when he was already completely away with the fairies. (Americans run for elective offices, while Britons stand for them. What other proof does one need for the more dynamic nature of US politics?)

That, says Michael Deacon’s review of the book, “sounds downright cruel”. Yes, it does. But more important is that it sounds downright criminal.

The Constitution is the scriptural foundation of the American republic, and public officials in the US take a vow to protect and defend that sainted document. Violating the Constitution is regarded as a heinous crime in America, and rightly so.

Falsely claiming competence to act as president and then covering up the physical and mental incompetence to do so is thus a crime against the very foundations of American statehood. And crimes must be prosecuted and punished.

Since poor Joe was made to issue wholesale pardons for the entire phone directory of the DC Beltway, no prosecutions will ensue. That’s most regrettable.

Biden isn’t the first president to suffer such collapse. Mrs Wilson was de facto president during her husband Woodrow’s second term, while James Baker performed the same role at the same stage in Reagan’s tenure. Both Wilson and Reagan became demented after winning their second terms, and their condition was also covered up by their entourage.   

Yet Biden is unique because he was the only president who started out that way. This was obvious to any outside observer, including such faraway ones as me. Poor Joe slurred his words, couldn’t tell different members of his family apart, kept falling down, couldn’t stay on any subject even for a short spell and in general showed every sign of a man ready for pasture.

And that was even before he won his campaign and a four-year term in the White House. This means he, his family and his party deliberately deceived the voters into believing they elected a president, whereas in fact they put into that office a cardboard cutout, a puppet whose strings were pulled by people lacking an electoral mandate. This strikes me as criminal conspiracy, not just cruelty.

The penny dropped when Biden’s friend of long standing, George Clooney, you know, the chap who wants us to give the Elgin Marbles “back to the Pantheon”, realised Biden didn’t recognise him any longer. He then withdrew his support, and Kamala was off and running.

What is it about current American politicians that makes them conspire to make a mockery of the highest offices in the land? I’d suggest that the cover-up of Biden’s dementia constitutes a worse abuse of the presidency than Trump’s Qatari plane or even Nixon’s Watergate.

The issue cuts deeper than the shabby personalities drawn into politics, in America and elsewhere. Surely, if Biden’s condition was obvious even to casual observers on this side of the Atlantic, it was no secret to American voters either? If we read the odd article and saw a short video or two, they must have been saturated with stories and images.

And yet over 81 million of them voted for Biden, more than for any other presidential candidate in US history. Even assuming, as MAGA people continue to do quite vociferously, that there was some legerdemain involved, this ought to bring into focus the very validity of one-man-one-vote democracy.

It has been known since at least Plato and Aristotle that democracy becomes a travesty in the absence of a responsible and informed electorate. That sine qua non doesn’t exist in the US, nor in any other democracy I’m aware of.

One hears MAGA chaps boasting that their idol was elected by the American People (always implicitly capitalised). True. Yet four years earlier the same populace had voted in droves for a man conspicuously half a step removed from a nursing home.

Moreover, had Biden’s people managed to keep him out of the public eye for another few months, those same implicitly capitalised People might have put him into the White House again. Whatever this says about universal franchise, it’s not something one should repeat in front of children.

Voters no longer cast their ballots for rational reasons, sound or misguided. They respond to the echoes of a propaganda din not dissimilar to commercial advertising.

Ads no longer sell products. They sell some vague values that buying their product would confer on the purchaser. By buying this toothpaste, they communicate, you show that you [have sex appeal, care for your health and appearance, protect the environment, save ‘our planet’, whatever]. Any claim, no matter how inane, will work, provided the advertisers have the means of shouting it long enough and loudly enough.

If anything, a buyer of political messages is even easier to dupe. He pays good money for his toothpaste and he works by the sweat of his brow to earn it. Politics, on the other hand, is removed from his quotidian concerns. If paying his hard-earned for a product is real life, politics is make-believe.

He is asked to vote for someone he doesn’t know and whose message he doesn’t really believe or, in most cases, understand. The voter casts his ballot not for something a candidate says to him but for what he thinks voting that way would say about him. He buys not into a political philosophy but into the zeitgeist, into goodness as he has been brainwashed to define it.

That’s why every few years voters everywhere are faced with the choice of what I like to call the evil of two lessers. They listen to the zeitgeist and, if it tells him that today’s goodness means wokery, they’ll vote for the appropriate candidate. If the message is hard-nosed common sense, they’ll vote that way. When their choice predictably messes up, next time they’ll opt for his opposite. And so it goes, round and round.

Alas, poor Joe. He got caught up in that merry-go-round and wouldn’t have been able to get off even had he wanted to. But he didn’t.

Biden was programmed to seek office, and he knew that even when he no longer knew who his friend George Clooney was. At least Joe didn’t think he was married to George.

To paraphrase a Saltykov-Shchedrin aphorism I cited the other day, Trump’s task seems to be keeping the world in a state of constant bewilderment.

One day he moots the possibility of invading American allies Denmark and Canada, along with some small fry like Panama. Then he puts that idea off, instead trying to shut down international trade or at least suffocate it with irrational and vindictive tariffs. The next moment he lowers the tariffs, only then to raise them again, evidently deriving joy from watching people suffer dizziness and vertigo.

The world gasps on cue, then to be told it was the Ukraine that attacked Russia, not the other way around. Hence Trump suspends all aid to the Ukrainian aggressor, only to resume it, albeit on a limited scale, a week later.

And so on in the same vein: the roller-coaster of what passes for Trump’s thought shoots up at breakneck speed, then dips even faster, distorting the faces of those unable to keep up and scared of falling out.

Yet even against that background, Trump’s latest escapade takes the cheesecake. The Donald gratefully accepted the gift of a luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet from Qatar. The plane is to be used as Air Force One while Trump is in office, and as his personal ride thereafter.

Oh, of course the jet won’t be his personal property de jure – that would be too much even for him. After a long career of bankrupting his Atlantic City casinos and balancing on the knife edge of the law, Trump can handle loopholes with the dexterity of a Parisian Gobelins maker.

The plane will be transferred to Trump’s Library Foundation, which will probably keep the men in blue off his back. But that will be a distinction without a difference. Niceties observed, he’ll then use the jet as he sees fit.

Predictably, this grossly immoral, nay amoral, act has created a mighty backlash in all sorts of quarters – and not only among the Trump haters on the Democratic benches. Even fully paid-up, card-carrying, cap-wearing MAGA zealots are aghast.

“I think if we switched the names to Hunter Biden and Joe Biden, we’d all be freaking out on the right,” said Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro, whose politics place him firmly to the right of Attila the Hun’s security chief (I mean this as a compliment).

I’ve been proposing similar switches for a long time. Just imagine the weeping and wailing and gnashing of MAGA teeth had Hunter Biden said: “In terms of high-end product influx into the US, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.” Or, “We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”

Screams of ‘Conflict of interest!’ and ‘Impeachment!’ or even of ‘Treason!’ and ‘Imprisonment!’ would be bursting out of every MAGA mouth in a geyser of spittle. Yet the two statements were made by Trump’s sons, Donald Jr and Eric respectively, and MAGA mouths stayed shut, giving us all a welcome if brief respite.

Even Laura Loomer, whose adoration of Trump is nothing short of erotic, was aghast: “I love President Trump. I would take a bullet for him. But, I have to call a spade a spade. We cannot accept a $400 million ‘gift’ from jihadists in suits.”

The idea of Laura taking a bullet for Trump or indeed for anyone else isn’t without a certain appeal. But calling a spade a spade could get her into even bigger trouble in the current climate.

Trump dismissed the naysayers in a manner almost refreshing in its unalloyed cynicism: “I think it’s a great gesture from Qatar. I appreciate it very much. I would never be one to turn down that kind of an offer. I mean, I could be a stupid person saying ‘No, we don’t want a free, very expensive plane’.”

That Trump, with his amorality, both innate and lovingly cultivated over a lifetime, would never be the one to turn down a bribe, provided it’s big enough, is self-evident. As is the fact that his action is grossly unethical. But is it also unconstitutional?

Not according to Attorney General Pam Bondi, a comely blonde Trump found uniquely qualified to hold the top legal post in the US. Far be it from me to question her credentials, which do look a bit scanty, but in her pre-Trump life she was a lobbyist for Qatar. I’m not saying this ipso facto disqualifies her from ruling on this case, but, for appearances’ sake if nothing else, she should have recused herself.

In fact, Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution forbids any US officeholder to “accept any present … of any kind whatever from any King, Prince, or foreign State” — without congressional approval. Commentators who mention this loophole usually add that it’s meaningless in this case since this Congress will rubber-stamp anything Trump wants.

Judging by the reaction of some of his closest supporters, I’m not so sure. If just a handful of Republicans oppose this gross corruption, it may never happen, and one hopes that there are some Republicans in Congress who don’t think morality and honour have a monetary equivalent.

When I first saw the photographs of the plane’s interior, I was sure it was designed by a Qatari artist with an eye on the emirs’ taste for kitschy opulence. I was then surprised to find out that the plane was actually designed by a reputable French firm, Albert Pinto Cabinet.

Surely they ought to know better? They probably do, but any commercial firm has to cater to the customers’ tastes. Had Albert Pinto designed the same Boeing for, say, King Charles III (not that he could afford it), it would look very different.

Suddenly it hit me: the interior of the plane was designed with the end user in mind. Aesthetically, it’s a flying Trump Tower, with its glistening gold paint everywhere, including on the walls of reflective gilded corridors, and the general air of tasteless gaudiness.

Yet the problem here goes way beyond aesthetics. Trump is urinating from the roof of his tallest tower on the dignity and honour of his office, one that demands qualities in excess of bean counting.

Accepting such a gift from anyone brings the institution of the presidency into disrepute. But the matter becomes infinitely graver when we consider the donor.

The plane is the quid (or rather 300 million quid at the current exchange rate). What’s the quo? For little in Qatari history supports the view that it’s bursting with affection for the US and the West in general. Its sympathies lie elsewhere. In fact, Laura Loomer’s description of the gift-bearers as “jihadists in suits” is spot on, and she now rates a footnote in my good books.

Since Hamas seized Gaza by force in 2007, Qatar has pumped some $1.8 billion into the territory. And after the 7 October massacre of Israeli civilians, Qatar’s foreign ministry released a statement holding “Israel alone responsible”.

Doha’s five-star hotels hospitably house Hamas dignitaries, such as Ismail Hanyeh, chief of Hamas’s political bureau, and Khaled Mashal, head of the Hamas diaspora office. The two jihadists are worth over $4 billion each, by the way.

In June 2017, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt severed ties with Qatar and imposed a blockade on the country. Saudi Arabia said it did so to “protect national security from the dangers of terrorism and extremism,” while the UAE pointed out Qatar’s “ongoing policies that rattle the security and sovereignty of the region.”

Such considerations apparently don’t prevent the president of the United States from accepting gifts from Qatari “jihadists in suits”. Provided the gifts are expensive enough.

Vlad Putin, take notice, you’re on next. May I suggest a yacht worth more than $400 million? Yes, that should work.

Vile MAGA attacks on Robert Prevost started the moment he became Pope Leo XIV.

Using the language favoured by the MAGA demiurge, podcaster Joey Mannarino called him a “liberal piece of s**t”. Laura Loomer, the half-crazy conspiracy theorist, adopted her idol’s syntax by writing “MARXIST POPE!” in all-caps.

Quite. But then she also claimed that Springfield, Ohio, was inhabited by “20,000 cannibalistic Haitians”, and that the American ‘deep state’ had created a winter storm before the Iowa presidential caucuses to boost the chances of an anti-Trump Republican.

Like all cults, MAGA attracts a plethora of unbalanced individuals, and not only in the US. Their typical claim is that everything Trump says or does is right because Trump says or does it, which effectively deifies their idol. After all, only God is always right.

That’s a first step on the road to madness. Of course, equally insane is the opposite claim that diabolises Trump by insisting that everything he says or does is wrong just because it’s Trump who says or does it.

All ideological zealotry courts mental illness by disengaging reason and replacing it with febrile emotions. That’s why MAGA is as objectionable as anti-MAGA, and the statement “Trump was right about everything” is as inane as “Trump was wrong about everything” (even if the former marginally less so).

However, proceeding as I usually do from an aesthetic rather than party-political starting point, I find both sides not so much equally wrong as equally tasteless, which, to me, is the greater failing. And nowhere is it more manifest than when either side co-opts Jesus to its cause.

Jesus Christ isn’t for or against MAGA, and he is neither a Democrat nor a Republican. He is the second hypostasis of God, accepted as such by 2.4 billion people around the globe. And as Jesus himself stated in no uncertain terms, his kingdom is not of this world.

His is the kingdom in which all Christians are subjects and the Pope is the viceroy. This doesn’t mean that the two worlds don’t overlap at all. But when they do, and a Pope pronounces on quotidian affairs, he does so strictly as God’s vicar on earth, not as a mitre-wearing version of JD Vance.

For all I know, Pope Leo may well be a liberal or even a Marxist, or then again he may not. Let’s wait and see, shall we? Give us a little time to get to know His Holiness. So far all we know is that he is American, and a registered Republican to boot.

As Cardinal Prevost, he had an exemplary missionary record in Peru, living the life of his flock and sharing in their hardships and dangers. At the same time, I’m not aware of any flirtation with liberation theology, a popular aberration in those parts.

The pontiff has a good face, and he is also a tennis player which testifies to his character. A man who chases fuzzy yellow balls can’t be all bad, as far as I’m concerned, although I may be biased.

The vitriol he is drawing from MAGA zealots was caused by several instances when His Holiness dared to express mild criticism of Trump and his acolytes. To that lot no such criticism is ever mild or, God forbid, justified. One word against, and the hapless critic is Satan’s spawn, if not the devil himself.

Specifically, when still a cardinal, His Holiness committed the sacrilege of pointing out that JD Vance was speaking out of turn when trying to marry Catholic doctrine with Trump’s immigration policy. And he was absolutely right.

This is what JD, who calls himself a Catholic, said: “There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbour, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.”

I don’t think that “a lot of the far left” think in theological terms, and, come to think of it, neither should JD. At least not until he has read up on the subject. Even then, he should realise that dragging in Catholic doctrine to score party-political points is vulgarity at its most soaring.

He was referring to the doctrine of ordo amoris, order of love, first put forth by St Augustine and later expounded by St Thomas Aquinas. However, neither of them made an overt statement about Donald Trump’s policy regarding illegal aliens.

What Augustine meant by ordo amoris was that one should love God first, people second and material things a distant third. And Jesus specifically refused to categorise love depending on the object’s proximity to oneself.

On the contrary, when asked, “Who is my neighbour?”, he responded with the parable of the Good Samaritan, whom Trump and Vance would probably describe as an alien, and possibly an illegal one. Yet it was that foreigner who treated a wounded man with kindness, and so it was he who was the true neighbour.

In Luke 14:26 JC disavows JD explicitly, perhaps anticipating the onset of ignorant Christianist vulgarity 2,000 years later: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.”

And also: “For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye?… And if ye salute your brethren only, when do ye more than others?”

Unlike Vance, Christ establishes a different pecking order of love: God first, then everyone else regardless of kinship, origin or their feelings about you. St Paul was also unequivocal on this subject: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” What, even illegal aliens?

While adopting the doctrine of ordo amoris, Aquinas emphasised that love must be first offered those who are in greater need of it, not necessarily to one’s own family:

“For it must be understood that, other things being equal, one ought to succour those rather who are most closely connected with us. And if of two, one be more closely connected, and the other in greater want, it is not possible to decide, by any general rule, which of them we ought to help rather than the other, since there are various degrees of want as well as of connection… .”

Let me stress that I’m not criticising Trump’s immigration policy. In fact, from the standpoint of this world’s politics, his administration is doing what needs to be done, if not always how it ought to be done. But the Pope looks at such matters from a different standpoint – and he recognises that it’s indeed different.

Vance doesn’t. He tried to blend the two standpoints into one and succeeded only in confirming his credentials as an ignorant vulgarian who doesn’t understand Catholic doctrine but tries to twist it for political gain. That makes him a bad Catholic too.

Well, at least he is unlikely to imitate his co-religionist Biden who throughout his career voted for every anti-Catholic legislation, specifically on abortion. If these chaps can’t do politics along Christian lines, they should just shut up about religion and attend to their day job as best they can.  

Trump described the US-UK trade deal with his favourite adjective, ‘beautiful’. Well, if you don’t mind the old saw, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

And this beholder can’t help asking the question in the title above. This beholder looks at the key personages involved, who are Trump, Starmer and Mandelson, considers the source and then looks for the catch.

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch went further than just asking a polite question. Switching from the interrogative to the affirmative mode, she expressed herself in the elegant style we’ve learned to expect from politicians. According to her, Britain has been “shafted”. Well, at least she didn’t say ‘f***ed’. Good to see that some restraints are still in place, for the time being.

Perhaps the coital reference was a tad too strong, but the US does come out ahead when all is said and done. British tariffs on American goods were 5.1 per cent on average before the deal and are now 1.8 per cent. However, US tariffs on Britain were 3.4 per cent and are now 10 per cent, just as they are on most other countries. That’s what Trump calls “reciprocal”.

Where Britain got some relief was in the tariffs on car, steel and aluminium exports. Our car exports were spared the extra 27.5 per cent tariff Trump has slapped on everyone else, while the tariffs on our steel and aluminium go down to zero.

Yet even 10 per cent is four times the 2.5 per cent tariff on our cars that was in effect before Trump’s misnomer, ‘Liberation Day’. Still, things could have been much worse, and Messrs Starmer, Mandelson et al. are jubilant. This is great news for British luxury car makers, they say.

This inspires another question: What British luxury car makers? It’s true that British labour is still used to manufacture those vehicles. But all the profits go to the company owners, who are none of them British.

McLaren is owned by the Kingdom of Bahrain. Aston Martin, by a Canadian consortium. Land Rover, Range Rover and Jaguar, by the Indian Company Tate. Rolls Royce, by BMW. Bentley, by Volkswagen. These are the real winners in this so-so deal, although it’s true that some British jobs will be saved.

In return, US agricultural products, including beef and ethanol, will enjoy easier access to UK markets, which gets our farmers’ overalls in a twist. According to the National Farmers’ Union, its members are the ones bearing the brunt of the reduced tariffs.

On the plus side, American chlorinated chickens and hormone-laden beef will remain banned in Britain, although US meats conforming to British food standards will be coming in on a larger scale. This is good news for me, what with the taste of Texas steaks remaining for ever a fond memory.

Yet one part of the trade deal upsets my sense of balance and insults my intelligence, which hates being insulted. Trump said that the agreement had been struck “because of Brexit”, and he is right.

Neither this agreement nor the one with India signed earlier this week would have happened had Britain still had the yoke of the EU around her neck. If Trump and I agree on one thing, it’s certainly our feelings about that bureaucratic monstrosity with socialist leanings.

However, as part of the deal, Starmer has given Trump a virtual veto over Chinese investments in Britain. Specifically, the US has concerns about Chinese companies buying up key infrastructure in Britain, and it’s a valid concern.

China should be treated as a hostile power that can’t be allowed to gain control over such strategic resources as our electronic communications, transport or power supply. However, giving a foreign country, however friendly it may be, a veto power over Britain’s economic policy doesn’t sit well with Brexit ideals.

Some 10 years ago, when I still had access to the rarefied atmosphere of British politics, I chatted with some leaders of UKIP, the progenitor of today’s Reform Party. We agreed that Cameron’s government was useless, and some of its economic policies were inferior even to their EU equivalents.

That, however, wasn’t the point, I was told. It’s better for our own government to adopt bad policies than to let those bloody foreigners impose their policies on Britain, however good they might be. That’s what sovereignty is all about.

That argument made sense, and it still does. Sovereignty means that all our policies are established by our own government, not that contrivance in Brussels, and endorsed by our own Parliament, not that aberration in Strasbourg.

But how is relinquishing our sovereignty to the US any different from relinquishing it to the EU? It’s not, and I’m not going to swallow that old chestnut about the ‘special relationship’.

Trump has every right to be concerned about China’s strategic muscle growing in bulk and strength. But we shouldn’t depend on foreign countries to save us from the craven stupidity of His Majesty’s Government. Isn’t that what Brexit is all about?

One outcome of this trade agreement, and also the one with India, isn’t what Sir Keir intended. His federastic loins are aching to sneak Britain back into the EU through a crack in the back door.

That door has always remained ajar, and Britain didn’t just turn around and walk out. Her exit wasn’t what is called ‘French leave’ in English and ‘English leave’ in French (another example of such mutual appreciation is that a certain contraceptive is called ‘French letter’ in English slang and ‘capote anglaise’ in the French equivalent). Britain didn’t really leave, banging the door behind her.

Hundreds of EU laws are still in force here, and we still haven’t left the European Convention on Human Rights, a pernicious pact making it next to impossible for Britain to limit the influx of illegal immigration. It’s as if our two main parties, both predominantly Remain, are reluctant to burn the bridges, hoping one day to use them to walk back across the Channel.

All in all, I can’t describe this deal as ‘beautiful’, ‘major’ or ‘comprehensive’. Its economic benefits are slight, though not non-existent.

In general, however, whenever tariffs come down, it’s a good thing even if the reductions aren’t exactly equitable. What’s unequivocally welcome about this agreement is that dragging Britain back into the EU will now become more difficult. That’s quite a big deal.

Today’s Victory in Europe Day marks the 80^th anniversary of the unconditional surrender of Nazi troops in Europe.

The surrender entered into force at 23:01 on 8 May. Because the time in Moscow was an hour later, the Russians celebrate victory on 9 May.

This also gives them the chance to emphasise the difference between their own war effort and that of the Western Allies. The difference is indeed huge, but not in the way the Russians mean.

Even Stalin himself acknowledged that the Soviet Union would have lost the war but for the Allies’ help. Yet that’s not what the post-war generations were taught in Russia. The Allies were at best assigned a minor role in the hostilities, if any. And Putin still says that the Soviet Union stood alone.

Ask Russians when the Soviet Union entered the war, and most of them – in my day, practically all – will say 22 June, 1941, the day when the Nazis attacked the Soviets. Such people merely regurgitate the line fed to them by cradle-to-grave propaganda.

In the West, the start of the Second World War fell on 1 September, 1939, when the Nazis invaded Poland. A day later, England and France honoured their treaty obligations by declaring war on Germany.

Some historians consider that date arbitrary. They nominate other, earlier events to act as catalysts and real starts of the Second World War. The 1938 surrender at Munich gets quite a few votes, as do the Anschluss, the occupation of Czechoslovakia, Italy’s assault on Ethiopia (Abyssinia, as it then was) or Japan’s foray into Manchuria.

Yet 1 September, 1939, still leads by a wide margin in scholarly opinion. My own preference is 24 August, 1939, when the foreign ministers of Germany and the USSR, Ribbentrop and Molotov, signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact, with Stalin flashing an avuncular smile in the background.

The secret protocol of the Pact, the existence of which the Soviets continued to deny for decades, divided Europe between the two totalitarian predators. That was, in my view, when the war really started, not just when it became inevitable.

The Germans moved into Poland a week later, on 1 September, to claim their share of the spoils. A deal is a deal, agreed Stalin, and on 17 September Soviet troops invaded Poland from the east, putting an end to the country’s stubborn resistance.

Stalin started as he meant to go on. The Soviets promptly occupied the three Baltic republics and Bessarabia, which had been mentioned in the secret protocol, and even Bukovina, which hadn’t been. Yet Hitler just shrugged: what’s another province more or less. Let Stalin have his fun.

Finland was also identified in the Pact as Stalin’s rightful possession, and on 30 November, 1939, the Soviets launched a massive assault to claim ownership. The vastly outnumbered Finns, however, presaged today’s Ukrainians by beating the Soviets to a standstill, managing to preserve their independence and 89 per cent of their territory.

Now, the Soviets captured the Baltics, Bessarabia and Bukovina without a shot. But they lost 737 KIA in Poland and some 120,000 in Finland (estimates vary from 53,000 to 200,000, but that kind of arithmetic never bothered Russian or Soviet leaders).

At the same time, 17,269 German soldiers were killed in 1939, when the Second World War started with that assault on Poland. So which war were the Soviet soldiers killed in, before 22 June, 1941? The same one, of course. This means the Soviets entered the war in August, 1939, unofficially, and in September, 1939, officially.

Why are they so coy about that date? Simple. They don’t want to acknowledge the obvious fact that the Soviet Union entered the war as an ally to Hitler and hence enemy to the West, including Britain.

The Soviets kept their end of the bargain by more than just knifing Poland in the back. According to the terms of the Pact, they were shipping trainloads after trainloads of raw materials to Germany, including 16 per cent of her crude oil.

When, due to the heroism of the RAF Fighter Command, the Battle of Britain kept raging on longer than expected and the Luftwaffe was running out of bombs, the Soviets happily made up the deficit. Many Britons were killed by bombs bearing Soviet markings.

Yet the two totalitarian allies both regarded their cooperation as an ad hoc marriage of convenience. Both were planning to strike against their temporary friend, making the conquest of Europe their own undivided achievement.

That Stalin was planning to attack Germany, ideally if the Nazis landed in Britain and got bogged down in a desperate fight, is an historical fact. Historians agree that Hitler beat Stalin to the punch on 22 June, 1941, but they aren’t sure by how much. Some say a month, some a week, and the Russian historian Mark Solonin makes a good argument in favour of just a single day.

One way or another, beat Stalin to the punch Hitler did, which instantly created an unnatural, if necessary, alliance between Stalin and the Western powers he cordially wished to destroy. After VE Day things got back to normal, and a confrontation between Russia and the West returned.

Yet it never came down to a shooting war because for the next several decades international law was more or less respected – not everywhere and not at all times, but at least the two hostile camps never came to nuclear blows. The reason is evident.

Neither individuals nor nations respect the law only out of the goodness of their hearts. They do so because of effective enforcement.

Acting as the enforcer of post-war international law was the USA, the only country that came out of the war stronger than she had been going in. Specifically, the Soviet nuclear gun stayed in its holster because America’s gun was at least as big, and she was as ready to brandish it.

That situation has changed. The US manifestly no longer has either the means to police the world nor indeed the wish to do so. No one else has stepped up to assume that role, and we can confidently assume that no one else will.

That’s why the world is in greater danger of another world war than it has been for 80 years. Any number of conflicts around the globe can potentially turn into a lethal vortex sucking the whole world in.

Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine is continuing, and Putin’s cabal makes no secret that it sees the Ukraine not as the final destination but as a stopover along the way. India and Pakistan, nuclear powers both, are about to start a major war. Iran either already has a nuclear bomb or will acquire one shortly, and you know whom the ayatollahs will drop it on. China may attack Taiwan at any moment, dislodging the US from her perch of Pacific dominance.

The West clings to its customary position of supine appeasement and, in the absence of American support, won’t stop doing so until directly attacked, if then. In our attempt to get fat on the mythical peace dividend, we have stripped our military down to the bone.

Should push come to shove this time, things will be disintegrating much faster than in 1939. What used to take months may now take days, perhaps even hours. And yet Europe again lies bare, open to a possible enemy thrust.

Today we celebrate the heroism of the soldiers who died to create a peace that lasted for so long. Such a prolonged period without a major war was an aberration in European history, for war is a natural state of man, a direct result of original sin.

As victory drums roll and bugles toot, we should all doff our hats in memory of those fallen. But while we commemorate the end of one monstrous war, we should prepare for the next one. Because if we don’t, it’ll be sure to come.

Si vis pacem, para bellum, as the Romans used to say. If you want peace, prepare for war.

Happy VE Day!

Good satire makes you laugh. Great satire also makes you think.

Great satirists are able to penetrate the essence of their targets, all the way down to human nature in general. They thereby approach universality, transcending their own time and place.

This is true of Aristophanes, Juvenal, Rabelais, Swift, one or two others. I’d also include a few Russians in that category, especially Gogol and his lesser-known near-contemporary Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin (d. 1889).

Few writers anywhere have ever possessed Gogol’s artistic genius, but as far as the universal appeal of their satire, I’d go so far as to say that Saltykov was superior. Gogol’s targets were too deeply embedded in the Russian soil, whereas the shock waves of Saltykov’s bombs reached the whole world.

Still, Russia was at the epicentre, and today’s Russian rulers, hellbent on all that Third Rome nonsense, are taking Saltykov’s books out of school curricula. They don’t want the pupils’ virginal souls to be sullied with any criticism of Holy Russia.

Now, I actually wrote about Saltykov back in 2016, translating some of his aphorisms and letting them speak for themselves. This time around I’ll add a few parenthetical comments, pointing out how widely Saltykov’s wit applies to today’s West in general or some specific countries in particular.

I think you’ll find they read like contemporary reportage:

“Credit,” he was explaining to Kolia Persianov, “is when you have no money… you follow? You have no money, but then – bang! – you’ve got it.” “But, mon cher, what if they demand repayment?” Kolia lisped. “Fool! You can’t even understand such simple things! If you’ve got to repay – more credit. Repay again – still more credit! All states live that way nowadays!”

They still do: there isn’t a state in the West that pays its way. France, Germany, all Anglophone countries, Japan are bending to breaking point under the intolerable burden of national debt. And, following Saltykov’s prescription, they somewhat illogically try to spend their way out of indebtedness.

“Mon cher,” Krutitsyn would say, “divide everything up equally today, and tomorrow inequality will still reign.”

This was a slap in the face of socialists, who already in the 19^th century began to dominate the intellectual landscape. The idea of redistributive justice is just as popular today, and one would think that the abject failure of every attempt to practise it in earnest would warn people off.

When all you get for our rouble abroad is fifty kopeks, that’s fine. The trouble will start when all you get is a punch in the snout.

Replace ‘rouble’ with ‘dollar’, and I think American travellers to Europe will nod with sad understanding. The dollar has already lost 10 per cent of its exchange value as a result of Trump’s shenanigans, and it’ll continue its downward slide as long as they persevere.

They sat thinking how to turn their loss-making business into a profitable one without changing anything.

Does this remind you of how our government operates? British ministers, Tory and Labour alike, bemoan high public spending – and never lower it, quite the opposite. They know that our comprehensive schools churn out ignoramuses, and do nothing other than making the schools worse. They promise to make the NHS more efficient, and do nothing other than making it less efficient.

When has there ever been a bureaucrat who wasn’t sure that Russia is a pie he can freely approach, slice and sample?

Our public service has become rather self-serving. Look at any government department, and you’ll see untold riches disappearing into some dark hole, eventually, one suspects, finding their way into someone’s deep pockets. British officials aren’t as corrupt (this way, at any rate) as some of their continental colleagues, but this is only a difference of degree.

Idiots are generally very dangerous, and not because they are necessarily evil, but because they aren’t aware of any restraints and always charge ahead, as if the road they are on belongs to them only.

Do you recognise any Western leader in this sketch? I’ll give you a clue: although teetotal, he shares his initials with delirium tremens.

Russian powers-that-be must keep the people in a state of constant bewilderment.

Replace ‘Russian’ with any Western nation, and you’ll recognise the modus operandi with ease. Especially, but not necessarily, if you again cast your eye across the Atlantic.

Education must be leavened with moderation, avoiding bloodshed if at all possible.

Khmer Rouge leaders, from Pol Pot down, received the full benefit of liberal education at the Sorbonne and other French universities. They then reminded us that nowadays ‘liberal’ means despotic by annihilating a third of Cambodia’s population. This is an extreme example, but much of today’s education everywhere spans the range from blood-curdling to potentially blood-spilling.

God’s world apparently has corners where all periods are transitional.

‘Jam tomorrow’ used to be the stock in trade of communist tyrannies. Just tighten your belts for a while, comrades, and universal bliss will arrive in due course. But these days I struggle to think of a Western government that doesn’t make versions of such promises to the people. We are in transition, just bear with us for a year or two, and all your problems will be over – where have I heard that? Where have you? The same places: government statements.

The strictness of Russian laws is mitigated by optional compliance therewith.

Again, replace ‘Russian’ with your favourite geographical adjective, and you’ll find that police forces and courts take a lackadaisical approach to enforcing the law. Unless, of course, the transgression was committed against the state and the ethos it’s trying to inculcate.

It’s but one step from irony to subversion.

In my Soviet youth, one could go to prison for telling a joke deemed subversive. It’s refreshing to see how assiduously our woke governments are trying to emulate that model. It’s enough to crack a joke someone out there claims to be offensive for the wag to have his collar felt. Or perhaps, for the time being, only to receive a warning visit from the police – but the beauty of progress is that its momentum accelerates.

A citizen is always guilty of something.

When some laws are stupid, all laws tend to lose respect. While laws going back to the Decalogue are enforced with ever-increasing laxness, woke, which is to say stupid, laws turn practically every citizen into a law-breaker.

Nowadays, Mum, they live without a husband as if with a husband. Nowadays they mock religious prescriptions. They find a bush, get hitched under it – and Bob’s your uncle. They call it civil marriage.

There, Saltykov charted the road for modernity to follow, but even his fecund imagination fell short of foreseeing some destinations along the way. He was right about mocking religious prescriptions – this is commonplace these days. But his invoking civil marriage as the regrettable outcome is too tame. I wonder what Saltykov would write today, reading stories about a man who used to be a woman bearing a child by a woman who used to be a man, and then the happy couple getting married, possibly in church.

When spreading wise thoughts, one can’t avoid being called a bastard.

Or a fascist. Or a reactionary. Or a racist. Or something worse. Any attempt to spread wise thoughts runs the risk of rude opprobrium or, increasingly often, ‘cancellation’.

In 1849 the French journalist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr came up with a spiffy epigram: the more things change, the more they remain the same (plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose).

I think you’ll agree that Saltykov-Shchedrin’s aphorisms go a long way towards vindicating the one by his French contemporary. Perhaps, with the benefit of hindsight, we can slightly embellish Karr’s adage: the more things change, they don’t just remain the same. They change for the worse.