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When I left America in 1988, that was an idiomatic New York sneer at something worthless.

Since that time, most subway fares in New York have gone up to $2.90, which makes the idiom too unwieldy. I mean, who’s going to say “that and two-ninety will get you on the subway”? Too much of a mouthful, that.

Whatever the numeral in the expression, in those days it wasn’t often uttered in reference to American security guarantees. Europeans, especially those in NATO countries, were confident in the knowledge that, push come to shove, America will rush to their aid.

Many of those hopes were associated with the US nuclear umbrella. But not only that. Ever since the Cold War started, the US Army Court of Engineers had been busy turning West Germany into a terrain friendly to heavy American tanks.

New bridges and hundreds of miles of new roads were built, old roads were widened, old bridges fortified. Fulda Gap, the lowland corridor running from Thuringia to Frankfurt, was identified by Western strategists as a possible route for a Soviet invasion. Hence it was fortified to become a death trap for Soviet armour.

It wasn’t just America’s military might that helped the Europeans sleep peacefully, while making the Soviets toss and turn through the night. It was the certainty that, regardless of who was the US president, America would use her strength to repel a Soviet aggression.

However, while the subway fare in NYC has since been inflated almost three-fold, the value of the American security guarantee has gone down to a square root of sod-all. And it’s that New York native, Donald Trump, who is largely responsible for this crash.

I don’t know how many Ukrainians are familiar with the expression in the title above. But those who are must be uttering it to react against Trump’s latest bright idea of how to extinguish the Ukraine’s sovereignty.

Having had his emetic powwow with Putin, Trump has summoned Zelensky to the White House, where the Ukrainian will be given an offer he can’t accept. Perhaps ‘offer’ is the wrong word here.

Trump will issue an ultimatum to the Ukrainian president, and unlike his ultimatums to Russia, that one will be ironclad. The US will withdraw all support from the Ukraine and instead will form an economic alliance with Russia – unless Zelensky agrees to the peace terms on offer.

Russia will get all of Donbas, including the parts her troops have been unable to occupy despite suffering horrendous casualties. The Ukrainians have turned the unoccupied section of Eastern Ukraine into a fortified zone putting all those Maginot and Mannerheim Lines to shame.

If the Russians are ever able to take those areas, they’ll have to bury it under an avalanche of Russian corpses – tens if not hundreds of thousands of body bags travelling back east. And these are the fortifications that the Ukraine is supposed to cede without a shot. In exchange for what, exactly?

Here comes Trump’s lightbulb moment. Sign the deal, he’ll tell Zelensky, and the US – well, he, Donald Trump – will give the Ukraine NATO-style security guarantees. No, the Ukraine wouldn’t be able to join the alliance because that would upset Vlad too much. She’ll have to remain neutral in perpetuity.

But not to worry: the umbrella of Article 5 will cover the Ukraine as securely as it covers all full-fledged NATO members. Now, is that a great deal or what?

I hope Zelensky will be able to withstand the ensuing harangue delivered in the tones often heard on the NY subway and tell Trump in words of one syllable what he could do with his ‘deal’. For the umbrella in question is already leaking, and it may soon be folded altogether.

That is, if Trump’s earlier pronouncements on that subject are to be believed – and, when it comes to his denigration of America’s NATO allies, I find those statements utterly believable.

Trump has for years made his feelings about Article 5 known: as far as he is concerned, its application is strictly contingent on Europe’s behaviour. Unless America’s European allies “pay up” for their defence, that Article is null and void.

Moreover, if European NATO members fail to pay up, Trump will actually encourage Putin to attack them. As he put it in February 2024, Trump “would encourage the Russians to do whatever the hell they want.”

Encouraging the Russians to do “whatever the hell they want” goes beyond simply withdrawing American protection from NATO members. It means Trump would be prepared to form an alliance with an aggressive fascist regime threatening a global nuclear holocaust.

The US president is known for uttering incoherent and irresponsible phrases in the heat of the moment. It’s possible he didn’t mean that threat (and countless others in the same vein) the way it sounded. He might have merely tried to emphasise the need for Europe to take more of a hands-on approach to its defence. If so, the point is perfectly valid.

Europe has been criminally negligent for decades, relying on American protection rather than its own resources. Most European countries are belatedly coming to that realisation, largely because of Trump’s pressure. They are now prepared to commit up to five per cent of GDP to defence, which is higher than America’s own spend.

But translating that commitment into an actual defence capability will take years, especially if the US doesn’t go all out to help. If Trump refuses to recognise the provisions of Article 5 in the interim, that effectively gives Putin a carte blanche to pounce.

Thus, Zelensky has every reason to believe that the deal on the table means the Ukraine will have to cede much of her territory for nothing, or rather for a certainty that Russia will come back in force within a couple of years, possibly sooner. And America won’t lift a finger to help.

The Ukraine has tangible reasons to feel that Trump sees NATO as a yoke around America’s neck, something he’d happily shed to carve up Europe Yalta-style with Putin.

Commentators indulge in such historical analogies with abandon. Munich, Yalta, Tehran and Potsdam all get an airing, but this only goes to show how imprecise such parallels are.

Much closer to the current situation, both chronologically and substantively, is the 1973 Paris Peace Accord between the US and North Vietnam. That was supposed to end the Vietnam War, with South Vietnam keeping its sovereignty. In fact, that was America delivering South Vietnam to the communists on a platter, and the only surprise was that it took Hanoi two years to claim its prize.

Even closer and much more relevant to the Ukraine’s plight is another security guarantee that has turned out to be a sham. On 5 December 1994, the USA, Britain and Russia (!) signed the Budapest Memorandum, guaranteeing the Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for her relinquishing nuclear weapons.

The nuclear weapons were duly given up, and as for that security guarantee, the less said about it, the better. President Zelensky and all Ukrainians must be cursing the day on which their country tossed away her only real security blanket, agreeing to cover herself with nothing but a piece of paper worth even less than the New York subway fare.

Now, after 11 years of Russian aggression, escalating to a full-scale invasion on 24 February, 2022, the Ukraine is expected – let’s not mince words – to capitulate in exchange for another worthless security guarantee.

I don’t know how far Zelensky’s English goes, but I hope he’ll have the testicular fortitude to tell Trump exactly where to put his ‘deal’. That and a buck, okay, make it 2.9 bucks, will get you on the subway, Donald. You can scream till you’re blue in the face, but the Ukraine isn’t going to fall for another bogus ploy.

If, as I suspect, Zelensky’s English isn’t quite up to such idiomatic scratch, I’m hereby offering my services as ventriloquist. Free of charge.   

Some, however, will call it treason, and I may well join that chorus.

This morning, I had to look at the calendar to make sure I got the date right. Yes I did. It’s indeed 16 August. Eight days since the expiration of Trump’s latest ultimatum to Putin.

Trump proclaimed he was “pissed off” with Putin’s “bullshit”. He might have added a few of his favourite intensifiers, but these were omitted from the reports.

As a result, Trump issued an ultimatum. If Putin didn’t agree to a ceasefire by 2 September, no, make that 8 August, Trump would visit any number of Egyptian plagues on Russia and her trading partners.

The Ukraine would get a new batch of American weapons, implicitly including long-range cruise missiles. Russia would be hit with new sanctions from hell. And whoever keeps Russia’s economy afloat by buying her oil – are you listening, China and India? – would be thumped with secondary tariffs of 500 per cent. No make that 100 per cent. Whatever, high enough to hurt, was what Trump meant.

The U-Day came and went, but none of that happened. What did ensue was the bafflement of commentators who failed to see any rhyme or reason in Trump’s actions. The ultimatum sank into the Lethe, that river of oblivion. All the deadlines were forgotten too.

Instead of agreeing to stop his aggression, Putin accepted Trump’s invitation to lose his international pariah stigma, come in from the cold and be reinstated as a legitimate world statesman. He magnanimously agreed to fly to Alaska for a heart-to-heart with Trump.

The flight from Moscow to Anchorage took nine hours. The meeting itself, just three. And the subsequent press conference, 12 minutes. There wasn’t much to say, other than Putin repeating, and Trump pretending to believe, the same lies. Actually, Trump has met many world leaders, but he never sounded so servile as he did with Putin yesterday.

The meaningless noise was harmonised with the background of Russian missiles raining on Ukrainian cities. But the solo part was unmistakable: Putin was manipulating Trump like a spy master running a two-bit agent blackmailed with naughty off-focus photos.

I don’t know whether Trump has been coerced into doing Putin’s bidding. I’m sure the truth, one way or the other, will out eventually. However, even if Trump isn’t Putin’s agent, I can’t imagine what he’d be doing differently if he were.

Trump is manifestly accepting at face value Putin’s lies about the “root causes” of the war. The Russian chieftain was supposedly so worried about NATO’s eastward expansion that he simply had to lash out. As himself a man of his word, Putin couldn’t forgive America for breaking her promise not to draw Eastern Europe into the alliance.

It was in 1990 that US Secretary of State James Baker supposedly assured Gorbachev that the unification of Germany wouldn’t entail the expansion of NATO. Gorbachev’s subsequent accounts of that event differed. In some interviews he said the assurance had taken place; in some others, that it hadn’t.

One way or the other, no formal agreement was reached. It’s laughable that Russia, which has broken every treaty she has ever signed (full list available on request), would try to hold the West to an informal oral flourish that might or might not have taken place.

Everyone not doing Putin’s bidding for one reason or another knows that there exists only one “root cause” of the brutal Russian aggression: the Ukraine’s independence.

It’s not for nothing that Putin’s foreign minister Lavrov showed up at Anchorage with the letters CCCP on his T-shirt, the Russian for USSR. Amusingly, the outside two letters were covered by his gilet, with only CC visible, the Russian for the SS.

Some commentators had a good time with that, saying that the latter acronym was closer to the truth. Such fun can be had, but the actual reality is even worse: Putin is dead set on rebuilding the Soviet empire. This noble aim is impossible to achieve without the Ukraine returning to the fold as the bigger and more important version of Lukashenko’s Belarus.

It’s not about getting a part of the Ukraine’s territory. It’s about turning the Ukraine as a whole into Russia’s stooge, a sham ‘republic’ run by a quisling like Yanukovych or Medvedchuk.

Anyone who thinks Putin genuinely wants peace, especially at a time his troops are inching forward over piles of their comrades’ corpses, is sorely misguided. What he wants is Trump’s acquiescence in pursuing that objective. And the Alaska travesty showed yet again that this is exactly what Putin is getting.

“The war wouldn’t have happened had Trump been president in 2022,” lied Putin, and Trump beamed from ear to ear. That’s exactly what he has been saying for years.

Of course, he has also been saying he’ll end the war in 24 hours (three days, three months, six months and so on), but Putin never confirmed those deadlines. He did confirm that Don Trump could have prevented – and now can stop – the killing. What further proof of Trump’s genius can anyone, including the Nobel Committee, possibly want?

Putin was playing Trump’s ego like a violin virtuoso plying his trade. That favour was repaid: both the Ukraine and Europe were reduced to the role of extras floating in and out behind the two stars of the show.

The only tangible result of the meeting was that, courtesy of Trump, Putin shed the striped clothes of a war criminal under an international arrest warrant. Overnight, he regained the status of a world leader, equal partner to Trump if perhaps not quite yet to Xi.

That was his reason for going to Alaska, but Putin’s reason was Trump’s treason. He betrayed the Ukraine, NATO, the West in general. He allowed the fascist regime threatening Europe to gain time for continuing its aggression, with all ultimatums forgotten, all deadlines buried.

Now Trump will meet Zelensky, trying no doubt to bully him into surrender. He’ll then probably accept Putin’s invitation to have another pointless chinwag, in Moscow this time. There we’ll go, round and round, to and fro, while the Ukraine bleeds white.

Eventually, she’ll bleed out, with Putin claiming his spoils and Trump his Nobel Peace Prize. And the epigram by the Elizabethan poet John Harrington will be vindicated yet again: “Treason doth never prosper? What’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”

As Trump and Putin meet in Anchorage to carve up the Ukraine, I can’t help remembering the KGB myth involving Alaska.

As a career KGB officer of a certain age, Putin certainly remembers it, as I’m sure he remembers many others. His parent organisation was known for indulging in that genre on a vast scale.

One of the few words Russian contributed to English is ‘disinformation’. The components of the word are Latin in origin, but the concept is Russian, something to make that nation proud.

Much of KGB disinformation was meant for internal consumption, not just to dupe the West. I was a little boy when I was exposed to a KGB myth I still remember.

Soviet troops invaded Hungary in 1956 to drown the anti-Communist revolution in blood. As our schoolteachers, all of them willing conduits for KGB lies, explained to us, that action was in fact a pre-emptive strike. West German and American troops had been poised at the Hungarian border, ready to pounce on our fraternal regime, and only prompt action by our heroic army saved the day.

I don’t recall whether I believed that lie at my mature age of nine, but I probably did. I definitely believed some of the others.

They were assiduously spread to reassure the people that their abject poverty wasn’t as bad as all that. The West might have had a higher standard of living on average, but that level was made up of contrasts between a few fat cats and many paupers.  

And anyway, some, if not quite all, Soviet products were superior to any Western equivalents. For example, every Soviet citizen of my generation knew for sure, and was happy to repeat to all and sundry, that Soviet ice cream was the best in the world.

The KGB created that myth secure in the knowledge that no one would be able to disprove it by a comparison test.

Most Soviet citizens weren’t allowed to travel abroad. Those few who were deemed sufficiently trustworthy to be granted that privilege weren’t going to abuse it by contradicting the KGB. They knew which side their bread was buttered.

When I grew up, I no longer believed anything the authorities said on any important subject. But the unsurpassed excellence of Soviet ice cream was such a trivial point that I never bothered to question it. Then, in 1973, I found myself in Rome, and the first taste of gelato shattered that myth to smithereens.

Another one involved Armenian brandy, which, according to another myth, was superior to any alcoholic beverage available in the West. Supposedly, both Winston Churchill and the Queen wouldn’t even consider drinking anything else. They had to have crates of that rather revolting treacly beverage shipped to London, for otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to slake their thirst.

Again, that was a free hit for the KGB – drinks like French cognac and Scotch whisky were unavailable to common folk. The same went for Soviet sparkling wine, which they larcenously called ‘champagne’ (just as they called their brandy ‘cognac’).

Even when marked ‘dry’, it was nauseatingly sweet and had bubbles the size of peas. Typically, every sip would get stuck in one’s gullet and create an unpleasant reflux – at best.

Some 30 years ago, a friend gave me a bottle of Sovetskoye shampanskoye he had brought from Russia. Ever since, I’ve been using it as a meat mallet, trying not to pound too hard lest it explode in my face.

Yet another myth involved the Russian language, supposedly by far the richest in the world. Actually, the English vocabulary has roughly three times more words than Russian, but that fact wasn’t widely advertised. Something else was, and that myth actually had a kernel of truth to it.

It concerned swearwords, and there I can testify to the relative paucity of English. A Russian speaker can express most ideas, including some rather involved ones, using nothing but four-letter words in different combinations and with variable affixation.

You may think that isn’t much to be proud of, but every little bit helps. That’s why the KGB insisted on spreading the news about the superlative quality and variety of Russian obscenities.

That part of it was actually true, but they also said that Anglophone capitalists, frustrated by their own puny language, routinely swore in Russian. Having now lived in English-speaking countries for 52 years, I know that claim was false, as I actually knew it when I still lived in Moscow. But many of my former countrymen insisted on repeating that nonsense, and some still do.

The myth relevant to current events involved Alaska. The government of Alexander II sold it to the US in 1867, for today’s equivalent of $130 million. Nicholas II, Alexander’s grandson, lived to regret that transaction.

In 1896, local miners discovered gold in the Klondike, which started a major gold rush. The sum those Yankees paid for the largest peninsular in the Western Hemisphere began to feel like a slap in the Russian face. And the slap became a punch when vast deposits of oil were found in Alaska in the 1960s.

But not to worry, went another KGB myth, which everyone believed. Russia didn’t actually sell Alaska to the US. That risible sum paid not for a purchase but only for a 100-year lease. The lease was to run out in 1967, and as a child I often wondered whether the Soviet Union would reclaim Alaska when I turned 20.

Long before that age, I knew that Alaska gained statehood in 1959, which made it unlikely that the US government would honour the conditions of that lease. It was only closer to the supposed deadline that I found out that the mythical lease was indeed a sale.

I wonder if Putin will test Trump’s knowledge of such arcana by suggesting that Alaska rightfully belongs to Russia. He is certain to make that claim about the Ukraine, and – call me a pessimist – I doubt Trump will reject that myth outright.

P.S. Actually, Trump did say in his press conference that he was going to Russia to meet Putin. Was it a slip or a reflection of an agreement on the table?

People shouldn’t complain that police aren’t doing enough to combat rampant shoplifting and burglary. Unlike such naysayers, our police and the government they serve understand the inner logic of the modern state.

Treating shoplifting as an innocent prank and burglary as a minor offence is a faithful reflection of that logic, and there’s only one way our state could stop such crimes: making them legal, so they wouldn’t be considered crimes.

Today’s policing and crime tend to grow in parallel. Though England is being policed at a level that would make Robert Peel envious (the Met, for example, had 895 constables under him; today, it has 33,000), an Englishman’s person is increasingly unsafe in the streets, and his property is at the mercy of any derelict who can smash a window and shove his tattooed arms inside.

Contradiction? None whatsoever.

The modern state’s genetic code compels it to expand its power over individuals ad infinitum, regardless of such incidentals as the will of its subjects. That’s why, when it destroys the legal foundations of the West, the state is acting in character.

Governments are no longer there to protect society and individuals within it. They are out to protect the sacred cow of statism from whose udders they have sucked out what passes for their conscience.

For that reason, a crime committed by one individual against another is of little consequence to them, and yet petty crimes against the state, such as driving after a sip of wine too many or neglecting to pay customs duty on a watch, take on an almost religious significance, eliciting swift and sure punishment.

While failing to protect us, British laws also deny us the right to self-defence. If a burglar breaks in, we aren’t allowed to defend our property with anything other than our bare hands, useless against the murderous hammy palms of yet another ‘victim of social injustice’ who is unlikely to be overburdened with concerns about the sanctity of human life.

Yet a man has a God-given duty to protect himself, his family and his property against criminal intrusion. This always was an unshakeable certitude in Christendom, but old certitudes no longer apply. Western countries are now run not by statesmen but by glossocracies, wielding wokery like a club. The glossocratic logic they apply runs roughly as follows:

A criminal, say a serial shoplifter or a burglar, isn’t really to blame for his actions. He is plying his trade, like anybody else.

Of course, his trade is slightly naughty when compared with that of a butcher, a baker or a candlestick-maker. But the poor man isn’t to blame for plying it. He grew up needy and downtrodden, and it’s we, society at large, who are to blame for his plight.

The house or shop he robs belongs to a person who has amassed greater wealth because he was privileged. And anyway, though we shouldn’t talk about this out loud, the burglar is in the same business as the state: re-distributing wealth.

Burglary is a form of income tax, and the burglar merely collects the excess that has evaded the HMRC’s net. Because he hasn’t been authorised to act in this capacity, he deserves to have his wrists slapped. If he is caught, and we shouldn’t go out of our way to catch him, he may be tried, perhaps even convicted. But ideally he shouldn’t spend any time in prison, even if this isn’t his first offence.

The owner of the house doesn’t have much to complain about. His possessions are insured, so he can always buy another TV and replace the smashed window without suffering a great fiscal loss. Therefore, he shouldn’t resist the poor man breaking into his house. If he does, the burglar may have to defend himself, as he is entitled to do, and the whole thing may turn nasty.

If it’s the burglar who initiates violence, unlikely as it may sound, then the owner has the right to defend himself, too. But this right isn’t a licence to kill.

The force used by the owner must be exactly commensurate with the force he is trying to repel. Thus, if the burglar brandishes a baseball bat (shops selling those are doing brisk business in the UK, even though nobody plays baseball), the owner is allowed to use a baseball bat in self-defence. If the burglar pulls a knife, the owner is allowed to use a knife.

If the burglar brandishes a gun, the owner – well, let’s not get carried away. The owner still isn’t allowed to have a loaded gun handy, so he shouldn’t have provoked the poor young man into resorting to such egregious extremes.

If the owner does use a force that exceeds whatever he is threatened with, then he is the criminal and the burglar is the victim. If the owner, for example, panics and kills the burglar with a meat cleaver when none is found in the burglar’s possession, then the owner shall be convicted of manslaughter.

There goes another certitude, according to which a criminal violating a citizen’s property isn’t entitled to the benefit of the doubt. He may have broken in ‘just’ to steal a TV set, not to rape and murder. But the burden of proof should be on him.

However, a frightened, confused owner of the house, awakened in the middle of the night to find a gorilla-like stranger in his bedroom, has no time to grant the intruder to produce such proof. He has to assume the worst.

The owner’s duty to himself and his family is to assume that the intruder has come to do murder. Even if murderous intent is unlikely, the risk is always there, and that isn’t a risk a law-abiding man should be expected to take with his life.

This ancient certitude, however, flies in the face of modern times by negating the logic above. A man who takes a swing at a burglar or a shoplifter presents a greater threat to the state than the criminal does. The former assails the glossocratic premise of the modern state; the latter merely attacks individuals.

These observations apply to all our recent governments, regardless of which party formed them. But our government today is latently Marxist, which is why it’s also taking  profitable lessons from totalitarians.

Both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks treated enemies of the state with murderous efficiency, while petty criminals often got away with no more than avuncular admonishment. The Soviets, for example, developed the concept of ‘the socially close’ to describe criminals of proletarian or peasant descent.

The concept was expounded in detail by Anton Makarenko, manager of the first Soviet colony for juvenile delinquents. The underlying assumption was that, because they were ‘socially close’ to the state, young criminals, many of them murderers, ought to be rehabilitated, not punished.

“It is only the intelligentsia, children of the upper classes, priests and landowners who are beyond redemption,” wrote Makarenko.

While today’s bureaucrats are unlikely to have read this, they proceed from similar assumptions. An illiterate criminal in no way jeopardises state power. The lout’s victim may.

Hence, every new law will favour the criminal over the victim. Even if an ancient law remains on the books, and an attempt at enforcement is made, the state will make sure that whenever possible an arrest won’t result in a conviction, or a conviction in imprisonment.  

Instead of protecting the ‘rights of Englishmen’, the law is becoming a weapon of mass destruction in the escalating class war. Except that only one side is fighting it.

There’s nothing more annoying than foreigners criticising Britain for exactly the same things as Britons do. Words like ‘glass houses’ and ‘stones’ come to mind as if by themselves.

American politicians especially like to adopt a hectoring tone when talking about Britain and to the British. Many Americans in general feel they’ve solved every little problem of life, which makes it not just their right but their duty to teach others how to do the same.

J.D. Vance in particular, a hillbilly bully from a place in Ohio no one has ever heard of, is deeply concerned about our deficit of free speech. So deeply, in fact, that one may think he has nothing else to worry about.

Mind your own business, Mr Vice President, which is far from being good. Of course, Britain suffers from an advanced case of wokery, which does put clamps on free speech. But the original contagion came from the US and its campuses, where the very term and concept of ‘political correctness’ originated.

In fact, I first heard the expression from my son, at that time a student at Berkeley. That was only putting a name to a phenomenon I myself observed in the early 1970s, when I moved to America. The US was already at that time a lot more woke than Britain was in the late 1980s, when I settled there.

For example, the war against masculine pronouns and the word ‘man’ was already raging in 1974, when I was working at NASA. I was told in no uncertain terms that there were no men and women working there, only ‘persons’, and all ‘persons’ with the same job description should be paid the same regardless of the quantity and quality of work they did.

By the time I moved to London in 1988, wokery had become stifling in America. I was amazed how freely Britons expressed themselves on such thin-ice subjects as sex and race. One could hear jokes on TV that would have been impossible in the US even a generation earlier.

Alas, Britons only ever borrow Americans’ vices, not their virtues. Step by step, that particular vice infected Britain, but there was a time lag, some 10 years or thereabouts. However, it wasn’t as if wokery had left American shores behind when it migrated to Britain.

Talking to my American friends, especially those in academe, I get a distinct impression that things are no better there than here, and could even be worse. It’s those glass houses again. I wish Vance just shut up.

Now the US State Department, having taken a break from paying lickspittle to such bastions of freedom as China and Saudi Arabia, has issued a statement citing “credible reports of serious restrictions on freedom of expression” in Britain.

There are “specific areas of concern” involving curbs on “political speech deemed ‘hateful’ or ‘offensive’.” Whose concerns? The State Department’s? Surely they can’t imply that things in Britain have got so bad that she can no longer be seen as America’s ally?

The report singled out laws establishing ‘safe access zones’ around abortion clinics in England and Wales: “These restrictions on freedom of speech could include prohibitions on efforts to influence others when inside a restricted area, even through prayer or silent protests.”

They were referring to a specific case last year, when a praying Christian was arrested for breaching such a zone and refusing to move on. An outrageous case no doubt, but not one as straightforward as those Americans think.

My position on the issue is that abortion ought to be outlawed, and such clinics shouldn’t exist. I also think that heatwaves like the current one shouldn’t exist, and rain should only ever come down when it’s necessary for agriculture.

Alas, rain refuses to come when it’s needed and, when it does come, it sometimes floods vast areas. Also, heatwaves exist – and so, much to my regret, do abortion clinics. Unfortunately, abortion isn’t against the law, and neither are the places in which those offensive procedures are administered.

There have been many instances of activists harassing abortion clinics, threatening those who worked there with violence and vandalising their cars. Eventually, the police had to establish those quarantine zones, and anyone who breaches them breaks the law.

Some of such activists scream abuse at the personnel of those clinics, some – such as the gentleman the State Department had in mind – offer a prayer for the souls of abortionists and those they abort. But some others may well pack a firebomb, which has been known to happen in the US.

This isn’t a free-speech issue. For example, my right to oppose abortion has never been curtailed, even though over the years I must have written dozens of articles on the subject. A law exists and, as the Romans used to say, dura lex, sed lex. In a country ruled by law, my disagreement with a law doesn’t mean I’m free to break it.

Another touching concern expressed by the State Department is about violence “motivated by anti-Semitism”. This is indeed a problem, although again I fail to see how it is any of America’s official concern. Any American or, for that matter, anyone else, is welcome to express disgust at this appalling problem, but the State Department’s job is diplomacy, not moral outrage.

America is fortunate in that most migrants to her shores don’t espouse a religion preaching hostility to Jews. God knows there are many anti-Semites among Christians too, but when they express such feelings publicly and especially violently, they do so in spite of their religion. Muslims do it because of theirs.

Throughout Europe, the frequency of anti-Semitic incidents is directly proportional to the percentage of Muslims in the country. Consecutive British governments have been complicit in letting swarms of alien migrants into the country, but this is our problem, not America’s.

If Americans want to help, perhaps they should think a bit longer next time they feel like attacking a Muslim country than they did before their ill-advised invasion of Iraq in 2003. That created a tsunami-strength wave of Muslim migration to Europe and Britain, making one think that particular hornets’ nest should perhaps have been left unpoked.

Another popular complaint one hears from Americans is that major British cities are so crime-infested that God-fearing Americans are afraid to go out after dark. I wonder if they have similar fears in New York, where the murder rate is four times that of London.

Nor has His Majesty’s Government felt compelled to use the army as a crime-fighting force, as the US administration has done in Washington DC. Much as I’d love to watch the paras of the 82^nd Airborne dropping on the South Bronx, I’m not sure about using the army to do police work.

But it’s America’s business, not mine, and it’s tactless for outlanders to offer unsolicited advice to other countries. I wish those Americans extended the same courtesy to us, at least in their official communications on record.    

The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy describes Mill as “the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century”.

That may well be true. Yet influence can be good or bad, and I find most of Mill’s ideas repugnant. But not all of them.

Mill’s works, especially his essay On Liberty, can be legitimately regarded as the scripture of modern liberalism, its New Testament building on, and deviating from, the legacy of the eighteenth-century Whigs.

Hence Mill’s advocacy of placing definite limits on state power, of free speech and even of private education, which he correctly judged as essential to fostering diversity of opinion. Yet all those good things aren’t philosophy but only some of its derivatives.

These particular derivatives of Mill’s philosophy are benign, but the philosophy itself was flawed. In fact, most perversions of today’s modernity can be traced back to Mill’s basic ideas.

For example, while critical of state interference in general, Mill argued that it was justified when it promoted and enforced Enlightenment egalitarianism.

Thus he was in favour of inheritance taxation because equality was to him a higher principle than property rights, and taxing inheritance prevented some people from getting a head start in life. But then Mill contradicted himself by opposing progressive taxation, partly redeeming himself in my eyes.

Progressive taxation, he argued, was “a mild form of robbery” because it penalised hard work, enterprise and fiscal prudence. True. But exactly the same could be said about inheritance taxes, which penalise the same man’s family by not allowing them the full benefit of his hard work, enterprise and fiscal prudence.

The clue to understanding Mill is his statement that he regarded “utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions.” Actually, that idea was neither good nor original.

It was a development of utilitarianism, the trend championed by Jeremy Bentham in the generation previous to Mill’s. Mill’s thought was more nuanced than Bentham’s “greatest good of the greatest number”, but ultimately as capable of injecting toxins into subsequent ideas.

Utilitarianism severed every strand of the ganglion linking society to Christendom with its concept of natural law and absolute moral truths.

According to Mill, “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant… .”

Hence any individual must have “the freedom to pursue tastes (provided they do no harm to others), even if they are deemed ‘immoral’.” This sounds good, but it leaves a logical hole through which can creep in “the tyranny of the majority”, the term Mill borrowed from Tocqueville.

Define harm, as any conservative thinker would insist. If you can’t, who can? Since we no longer recognise religious authority, this has to leave the state as the arbiter of what constitutes “harm to others”. And the state is happy to oblige.

In a series of statutes, the British state has for all intents and purposes equated physical and psychological harm. This reminds me of the spoof of country and western songs my Yankee friends and I sang in Texas years ago: “Honey, you broke my heart, and I broke your jaw.”

A broken heart is becoming in Britain a moral and legal equivalent of a broken jaw. Hurting someone’s feelings may still be a lesser offence than hurting someone’s body, but it may be treated as a crime nevertheless.

Hence various statues, most of recent coinage, that penalise ‘hate speech’. Our laws now say that “something is a hate incident if the victim or anyone else think it was motivated by hostility or prejudice based on: disability, race, religion, gender identity or sexual orientation.”

We can ridicule this nonsense to our heart’s content. We could say, for example, that surely there ought to exist more objective criteria of criminality than the opinion of a passerby who overheard one man calling another ‘a fat bastard’.

But this illustrates the intellectual paucity of liberal thought, as exemplified in this case by Mill’s theory of harm. Loose lips may sink ships, but loose definitions sink laws – and ultimately justice.

Mill himself laid down the directional vector of his ideas. In his later work Socialism, he waxed downright Marxist.

The prevalence of poverty in contemporary capitalist societies was “a failure of the social arrangements”. This state of affairs couldn’t be condoned as being the result of individual failings. An attempt to do so represented a denial of “an irresistible claim upon every human being for protection against suffering.”

Subsequent history has shown that the liberal state is more likely to cause suffering than protect “every human being” from it. Loose definitions again: Mill neither defines suffering nor cites the source of that “irresistible claim”. That’s slapdash thought.

This champion of the individual ended up preaching collectivism at its most soaring, something I’d argue to be the only direction in which utilitarianism can go. Mill rejected the Christian view of morality as a matter of free will, with the Church doing its best to help the individual make the right moral choice conforming to its teaching.

That’s a losing proposition, according to Mill. Society should concentrate not on making individuals moral, but on ensuring that a generation is moral as a whole.

Translating this dictum into today’s realities, our generation is generally moral because it believes in animal rights (another one of Mill’s pet ideas, as it were), global warming, hate speech as a crime worse than theft – and so on, all the way down the list. Some individuals whose ideas of morality may be different and therefore inferior can’t spoil the otherwise serene moral landscape.

The same goes for Mill’s economic ideas, which didn’t start out as socialist but ineluctably moved in that direction. Bothered by inequality of wealth, Mill believed it was the state’s task to institute economic and social policies that promote equality of opportunity.

This has become the favourite shibboleth of modern egalitarians who develop Mill’s ideas. They acknowledge that equality of result is an indigestible pie in the sky. However, they insist that equality of opportunity is a goal that’s both laudable and achievable. In fact, it’s more or less the other way around.

The state can promote equality of result by enforced levelling downwards (the only direction in which it’s ever possible to level).

It’s possible to confiscate all property and pay citizens barely enough to keep them alive (this was more or less achieved in the country where I grew up). It’s possible to put in place the kind of dumbed-down schools that will make everybody equally ignorant (this has been more or less achieved in the country where I grew old).

What is absolutely impossible is to guarantee equality of opportunity. A child with two parents will have better opportunities to get on in life than a child raised by one parent. A boy who grew up surrounded by books will have a greater opportunity to get ahead intellectually than his coeval who grew up surrounded by discarded syringes and crushed beer cans.

A girl who goes to a good private school will have greater opportunities in life than one who attends a local comprehensive (closing private schools down, an idea Mill rejected but his heirs champion, wouldn’t redress this imbalance: middle-class parents will find a way of supplementing their daughter’s education either abroad or at home).

A child of two professional tennis players will have a better chance of becoming good at the game than a child of two chartered accountants. A young businessman who inherits a fortune will have a better opportunity of earning a greater fortune than someone who has to start from scratch (again, confiscatory inheritance laws, which Mill didn’t really mind, will fail: as with all unjust regulations, people will either find a way around them or flee).

The title above is jocular: I don’t really blame Mill for all our ills. Although a brilliant and erudite man, he was as much a product of wrong philosophies as their originator.

But the philosophies were fundamentally wrong, and we are all reaping the poisonous harvest of ideas planted by Enlightenment thinkers. Such as John Stuart Mill.

Thanks to Kemi Badenoch’s loquacity, we now know how she feels about God. Personally, I’d be more interested to know how God feels about Kemi Badenoch, but He isn’t talking – yet.

Second-guessing God is a losing proposition, and I can’t guarantee that he’ll consign Mrs Badenoch to the fires of hell. But I am sure perdition awaits the Conservative Party, specifically because it’s led by Mrs Badenoch and similarly unimpressive politicians.

In broad strokes, Mrs Badenoch says she used to believe in God but doesn’t any longer. In itself, there is nothing remarkable about this loss of faith: apostasy from Christianity is as old as Christianity itself.

Religious faith is a gift, something presented by an outside donor. Or perhaps that’s not quite accurate: a gift, once presented, becomes one’s irrevocable property.

Faith, on the other hand, is more like a loan, something the lender grants but can also foreclose. Since we can’t know God’s reasons for either giving or taking away, we can no more rebuke a man (or in this case a woman) for losing faith than we can praise him for acquiring it.

We can, however, be horrified to see that our venerable political institution is led by a woman who talks about Christianity like a 10-year-old child. And not a particularly bright one at that.

St Augustine said, and St Anselm repeated, that we don’t understand in order to believe. We believe in order to understand, which establishes the proper sequence of religious experience.

To be valid, any rationalisation of faith has to be post-rationalisation. No amount of study, however intensive and extensive, will lead one to faith. Faith, however, may activate one’s intellectual faculties and lead one on a lifelong quest for the truth (and not just religious truth).

But this is strictly derivative and ultimately unnecessary. A tiny majority of egg-headed believers apart, billions of devout Christians over the past two millennia never read any patristic literature, theology, Christian philosophy or for that matter Scripture. This didn’t make their faith any less strong and pure.

However, one should expect an intelligent and educated Christian to have some basic understanding of doctrine. After all, intuitive, mysteriously acquired faith doesn’t put one’s mind on hold. Faith activates the mind, lets it soar to new heights – and not just in religious thought.

The reverse is also true. If a supposedly intelligent and educated believer is pig-ignorant about Christianity, then that person is neither intelligent nor educated. And when an unintelligent and uneducated person leads a major political party, its future is bleak.

Kemi Badenoch was a Christian who lost her faith in 2008, after reading about that Austrian monster Josef Fritzl. He kept his daughter imprisoned in the cellar for 24 years, raping her regularly and producing thereby seven children of whom six survived.

Throughout, the woman prayed for her deliverance, but her prayers went unanswered. Reading about it “killed” Mrs Badenoch’s faith, but I don’t think it died hard.

As she explains, “I thought, I was praying for all sorts of stupid things and I was getting my prayers answered. I was praying to have good grades. My hair should grow longer, and I would pray for the bus to come on time so I wouldn’t miss something. It’s like, why were those prayers answered and not this woman’s prayers?”

In other words, Mrs Badenoch, whose parents were Christians with advanced university degrees and whose grandfather was a Methodist minister, grew up without having a clue about Christian prayer, what it does and what it’s for.

Making supplications to God isn’t like ordering a meal in a restaurant, expecting it to be to one’s liking and sending it back if it isn’t. Every prayer is ultimately a version of the Lord’s Prayer, a statement of faith.

By talking to God and asking him to do certain things, a Christian reaffirms his belief in a loving deity. He knows his prayers will be heard, and he hopes they will be answered.

But he doesn’t expect to have a transactional relationship with God, exchanging prayers for favours. God has his own ways and his own reasons, which our own reason can never grasp. The very definition of God precludes any possibility of complete intelligibility: a higher system can understand a lower one, but not vice versa.

When an adult (Mrs Badenoch was 28 in 2008) loses faith because God didn’t keep his end of the bargain, that adult isn’t very bright. Losing faith can happen to anyone, but when it happens for that reason, neither the believer’s faith nor her mind can be especially strong.

Mrs Badenoch served up a version of the traditional gripe: “If God exists, then how come he allows [insert your favourite calamity]?” Such questions have been asked even by people manifestly more intelligent than Mrs Badenoch, such as David Hume.

He applied his intellectual gifts and literary brilliance to the perennial issue of reconciling God with the existence of evil. If God is merciful and good, Hume kept asking, then why does he allow suffering? If that’s beyond his control, then how omnipotent is he? And if he doesn’t know what’s going on, is he really omniscient?

Countering such questions is called theodicy, vindication of God. Its principal argument is based on free will, God’s gift enabling us to make our own free choice between good and evil.

We are free to make it, just as God is free to punish us if we choose wrong and, one hopes, reward us if we choose right. And, though Christ showed a clear path to individual salvation, we remain free to take that path or not.

Josef Fritzl chose not to take it, thereby abusing God’s gift of free will. But the gift remained on offer, which puts the blame not on God but on Fritzl.

Be that as it may, if Mrs Badenoch chose to follow Hume’s faulty logic, I wonder why she had to wait so long. Surely she must have heard about other acts of evil, those committed on an infinitely vaster scale?

Millions of Russians also prayed on the way to the NKVD’s shooting cellars, as did millions of Jews marching to the Nazi gas chambers. And yet their gruesome fate didn’t shake Mrs Badenoch’s faith. It took the plight of one continually raped woman to do that.

It then got even worse: “I rejected God, not Christianity. So I would still define myself as a cultural Christian.” She is clearly not a cultured one, but let me repeat the question in the title. What in hell is a cultural Christian?

If you reject God, you may still be a wonderful, caring, intelligent person. But you can be no kind of Christian. That breed is defined by the Creed first enunciated exactly 1,700 years ago at Nicaea. It starts with the words “I believe in one God…” and goes on from there. That’s it, in a nutshell.

Does Mrs Badenoch mean she likes Christian culture, say Byzantine iconography, Dante’s poetry and Byrd’s motets? I doubt she is familiar with such recondite things, but I’ll take her word that she is.

But one doesn’t have to be any kind of Christian to have such tastes. For example, a friend of mine, a successful icon trader who genuinely loves his wares, is an atheist. Another friend, a brilliant performer of Western, which is to say Christian, music is himself no Christian.

Mrs Badenoch lists Roger Scruton among her influences, which may shed some light on her curious statement. He was what I’d call a Christianist, someone who believed Christianity was essential for keeping the masses in check, but he himself was above it.

I recall arguing with him, saying that Christianism meant believing that a successful society could be built on a false premise. That was a long time ago, and I don’t remember how Roger replied, although I’m sure he was more eloquent and precise in his statement than Mrs Badenoch was in hers.

More recently, I heard similar arguments from a French friend who, unlike Scruton, actively dislikes Christianity. My point is the same: if you think that Christianity is a pernicious lie, which is nonetheless essential for civilised society, you despise not only God but also people.

You see them as a mindless herd that can be duped by any old lie, provided its sounds good. Is that how Mrs Badenoch sees her electorate? If so, I hope for her sake, and also her party’s, that she doesn’t say that out loud. If she did, I wouldn’t rate her electoral chances highly. Come to think of it, I don’t anyway.

The White House has announced that Trump and Putin will hold peace talks in Alaska on Friday.

This just goes to show how lackadaisical I am in following world events. I didn’t even know that the US and Russia were at war, nor that the hostilities are about to end.

If they are, I’m glad: no one likes to see two nuclear powers go at each other hammer and tongs. One wrong move and the whole world goes kaboom, or so we’ve been told…

Hold on a moment. Penelope has this annoying habit of looking over my shoulder, and she tells me I’ve misread the whole situation. Apparently, there has been no war between the US and Russia, which means no peace treaty is necessary.

That is, between those two countries at any rate. America isn’t currently involved in any conflict, but fair enough: Russia is indeed waging a brutal war of aggression against the Ukraine. Hence the peace the two presidents will be discussing is supposed to end the war between those two countries, with America looking on from the outside.

Now I’m really confused. If America isn’t fighting Russia but the Ukraine is, then surely any peace talks should be held between the two belligerents? A third party, such as the US, may act as the mediator, but that’s strictly optional. The sine qua non of any peace treaty is that it must be concluded between the warring parties, isn’t it?

Enough of this buffoonery. I resorted to it only to make a gravely serious point: Trump and Putin are ganging up on the Ukraine. This regardless of what kind of agreement, if any, they concoct in Alaska. The very fact that the meeting is bilateral and not trilateral proves that neither president regards the Ukraine as a sovereign state.

Putin’s view on this matter is no secret: like all totalitarian leaders, the Russian chieftain is quite open about his monstrous ideas.

The official Kremlin position is that the Ukraine is a province of Russia and, as such, can only have as much sovereignty as Russia allows. In 2014, the Ukraine brazenly went over her allowance, which set in train a series of punitive acts culminating in Russia’s full-scale invasion of 2022.

Trump hasn’t been quite so forthright on the issue – decorum demands that US presidents express themselves equivocally and, if at all possible, within diplomatic protocol. But, as the cliché goes, actions speak louder than words.

By cutting the Ukraine out of the talks in which her national sovereignty and territorial integrity are to be decided (or even discussed), Trump implicitly accepts Putin’s assessment of that heroic country. The Ukraine is the naughty boy sent out of the room not to interfere with a serious talk between the grown-ups.

Trump’s statement on the forthcoming event bespeaks wishful thinking at best, most refreshing ignorance at worst. “President Putin, I believe, wants to see peace, and Zelensky wants to see peace.” Trump said. “In all fairness to President Zelensky, he’s getting everything he needs to, assuming we get something done.”

The talk surrounding the meeting speculates that the grown-ups will agree to trade some of the naughty boy’s territory for a ceasefire. However, saying that Putin wants to see peace and would therefore be happy with such terms is naïve bordering on moronic.

Putin didn’t start this war because he wants more land. Russia already has more than she knows what to do with, and she is de facto ceding to China greater areas, in the Far East, than all of the Ukraine.

Nor does Russia need Ukrainian natural resources. Putin already has the entire periodic table sloshing underfoot everywhere he takes a step in Russia. What Putin wants is to rebuild the Russian Empire to its former wicked grandeur, an unachievable task if even a rump Ukraine keeps her independence.

Putin doesn’t want peace, Mr Trump. He wants victory – over the Ukraine first, Eastern Europe second, the West in general third. Hence no cessation of hostilities Putin will ever accept will amount to genuine peace if it doesn’t include the Ukraine’s capitulation. Otherwise, it can only ever be a short pause.

If Trump doesn’t understand this, he is ignorant and stupid. If, as is more likely, he understands it and still carries on as if he didn’t, he’s immoral and perfidious.

If I read the US president correctly, he wants that whole mess out of his dyed hair. He thinks he can bully Zelensky into some sort of phony peace, collect his Nobel Peace Prize and wash his hands of the whole affair.

He’ll then remove all sanctions on Russia, cut all sorts of ‘deals’ with Putin helping him rebuild Russia’s economy, and watch with avuncular insouciance as Russia rearms, regroups and gets ready to pounce again. As long as Putin can wait until 2029, whatever happens thereafter won’t be Trump’s problem.

Nor is Zelensky “getting everything he needs to”. He understands, even if Trump doesn’t, that ceding 20 per cent of the Ukraine’s territory to Putin will only mean a short delay before Russia gobbles up the rest. What Zelensky needs is Russia withdrawing to the 1991 borders and staying there for ever behind the wall of international peace guarantees.

But he isn’t going to get that, is he? What he’ll get is Trump twisting one of his arms, and Putin the other. Quite possibly, the disgusting scene in the Oval Office will be re-enacted, with a slightly different cast, featuring Putin instead of Vance.

That’s provided a trilateral meeting ever takes place, which isn’t a foregone conclusion. A more likely scenario is Trump and Putin putting on dove plumage and announcing urbi et orbi that they’ve agreed peace terms, of a kind that would be unacceptable to the Ukraine.

If Zelensky then rejects the ‘deal’, Trump will declare him the warmonger, the Ukraine a pariah state, and Russia a peace-loving country that must have all sanctions against her summarily removed.

Then off to Stockholm to collect his gong and read an “I’d like to thank…” speech off the teleprompter. Job done – Trump will go down in history as a blessed peacemaker; the Ukraine will go down, full stop; and Putin will go down as another Ivan III, the 16th century grand duke known as ‘the gatherer of the Russian lands’.

Another possible scenario is that Trump and Putin decide, and Zelensky agrees, to halt temporarily the aerial bombardment of each other’s territory. In exchange, Trump may lift most sanctions on Russia and all the secondary tariffs on her trading partners.

That wouldn’t be a fair exchange either because, while the Ukraine hits only Russian military and strategic targets, the Russians attack Ukrainian cities, murdering civilians in the hope of breaking the nation’s morale. Any pause in that criminal activity would save some lives, which is good news, but only from the humanitarian standpoint.

By contrast, a pause in Ukrainian drone attacks of Russian troops, infrastructure, communications, oil refineries and munitions factories would allow the Russians to catch their strategic breath, beef up their AA defences and then come back in force.

Hence even this palliative measure would hurt the Ukraine and benefit Russia – while also probably sending Trump on the road to Stockholm. Any way you look at it, the announced chinwag will either be useless, if an agreement isn’t reached, or detrimental to the Ukraine, if it is.

One just hopes the Russians won’t demand the return of Alaska, which they sold to the US in 1867 for today’s equivalent of a derisory $130 million. At least, if that happens, Trump will be in his comfort zone of a property developer haggling about a piece of land.

Robert Tombs answers this question in the affirmative. “Being English is not a matter of your ancestry,” he writes, but I think he left an important word out.

Had he written “… not only a matter…,” I’d agree without demurring. As it is, I have reservations.

Still, it’s wrong to accuse Prof. Tombs of being a defender of multiculturalism, as some of his detractors apparently do. On the contrary, his point that “to see little girls in headscarves reciting Kipling and singing the national anthem showed that becoming English was possible” says exactly the opposite.

It’s certainly better than to see such girls reciting the Koran and singing “from the river to the sea”. But that example still doesn’t constitute an argument. Not by itself.

Still, Prof. Tombs isn’t a champion of multi-culti subversion. He doesn’t want those little girls to grow up in the culture of their forebears. He wants them to become English and he thinks it’s possible, given the proper motivation and encouragement.

I’m not so sure, not completely. The other day I watched an old Peter Ustinov show, and he described himself as “a foreigner, although one who feels more at home in England than anywhere else in the world.”

Now, Ustinov’s genetic inputs were a hodgepodge of ethnicity: Russian, German, French, Jewish, Ethiopian – and I’m sure I’ve left a few out. He was also fluent in several languages and lived and worked all over Europe and the US.

Yet he was born in London, grew up in England and English culture, and his mother tongue was unquestionably English. However, he recognised that he was still a number or two short of winning what Cecil Rhodes called “first prize in the lottery of life”.

Prof. Tombs correctly draws a distinction between British and English: “The United Kingdom is technically a ‘state nation’. England is a ‘culture nation’, based on shared history, customs and emotions. Without these, the UK is an empty shell.”

All of these can, he writes, be learned by immigrants, provided they make an effort to integrate and eventually assimilate. And we must help them do so: “We have a very clear choice. Either we do everything possible to make them and their eventual descendants part of our nation. Or we treat them as perpetual outsiders, ‘ethnic minorities’ in a tribalised England.”

All true. The question is: Can a fully integrated and assimilated Afghani or, to take another purely random example, Russian become English, in the same sense in which my wife Penelope is English?

Much as I dislike clichés, this boils down to the old argument about nature and nurture. There is no question that English culture can be learned and adopted, and I could name at least one Russian who has made a fair fist of it. But that’s not all there is to it.

Penelope and her whole family look English, or, as my former advertising colleagues. who associated Englishness with ‘poshness’ and therefore quantified it, used to say, very English. Granted, not every Englishman born and bred boasts the same appearance, but that doesn’t negate the observation that a stereotypical English look exists.

Hence dozens of English generations leave a genetic imprint on a person’s physique. But is it just physique? Surely, there exist many innate character traits that are uniquely English?

Is there really no genetic component to being English? Is it true that one’s ancestry plays no role in a nation’s “shared history, culture and emotions”?

“Every baby is born with a blank mind,” writes Prof. Tombs, which may be true. But the same baby’s DNA is far from blank. It has been encoded over millennia by hundreds of generations.

I think those genes transmit at least some cultural and spiritual traits, but this may be ignorance speaking. I’m no expert in genetics. Neither, for that matter, is Prof. Tombs, but I’d be interested to hear what such scientists have to say.  

If I were privileged to have a conversation with Prof. Tombs, I’d ask him a question or two. Such as, imagine that a boy is born to a family in which every male member has been a soldier, going back to 1066. What are the chances of that boy choosing the same line of work?

Certainly not 100 per cent. But they have to be higher than the same boy growing up a pacifist.

Let’s skew this hypothetical example in Prof. Tomb’s favour. Suppose that boy was adopted at birth and grew up in a family not imbued with martial mores. I’d suggest, without being able to prove it, that, even if he’d be less likely to become a soldier, he’d be no more likely to become a pacifist.

Or take another example. Penelope grew up some 10 miles from the sea, and most Englishmen are within 50 miles. That may be why the English are a nation of mariners, sea travellers, naval tars, pirates, explorers, colonisers.

Every English person I’ve ever met, including all members of my family, goes weak-kneed at the sight of a vast expanse of salty water. I, on the other hand, grew up some 400 miles from the nearest sea, which I first saw when I was 20 years old.

As a result, I quite like the sea, but it doesn’t hold any mystical fascination for me. I much prefer rivers and lakes, the water features I grew up with.

This, though I dare say I’m as assimilated as one can get. I meet all of Prof. Tombs’s criteria: knowing English history, following English customs and even having English emotions. In an exercise of hubris, I may even feel that I write English as well as Prof. Tombs.

In fact, my good friend, an Anglican priest and a proud Englishman, once said that I’m more English than he is, in that I showed more emotional restraint.

He meant it is a compliment, which is how I took it. But, though we both acknowledge that stereotypical English behaviour exists, we are both aware that there is more to Englishness than that, some ineffable quality that he possesses and I don’t.

I have to disagree with Prof. Tombs when he writes: “We have no single religion …”. England is traditionally a Christian country, and has been since AD 597. That’s long enough for Christianity to have become a universal formative force of English character, regardless of how many people have abandoned it.

If he means we have no single confession of Christianity, he is almost right, although, unlike most Western countries, England has an established confession, one to which my good friend has devoted his whole life.

But by that criterion, no national character exists anywhere in the West – no Western country has a single (or any other) religion any longer. “For centuries,” he adds, “Englishness revolved round institutions – the Kingdom, the Church, the Common Law and the inherited rights of ‘free-born Englishmen’.”

Yes, but what if an Englishman is ill-advisedly a republican, an atheist and a proponent of the Roman Law? I’d maintain that, “in spite of all temptations”, he remains an Englishman, if a deracinated one.

All of this is conjecture on my part, something I sense but can’t prove. However, Prof. Tombs’s assertions are also open to debate, or at least sensible discussion.

The rest of his article makes an indisputable case, to me even a self-evident one. Whether or not Englishness can be learned, writes Prof. Tombs, it can certainly be unlearned, and what passes for our intellectual elite is busily trying to indoctrinate both children and adults in that spirit.

He lists all the usual culprits, “from the National Trust via the Museums Association to the Church of England”, with, I’m sure, schools, universities and mass media in between. They are busily working towards denigrating what’s left of Englishness, destroying social and cultural cohesion in the process.

If I wanted to show off the extent to which I’m assimilated, I’d call those reprobates ‘jammy buggers’. As it is, I’ll call them deliberate and perfidious subversives, and I think Prof. Tombs would agree. Alas, I can’t quite repay the courtesy by accepting that ancestry plays no part in Englishness.   

In mid-July Trump delivered a 50-day ultimatum: if Putin doesn’t agree to a ceasefire in the Ukraine by 2 September, Trump will punish Russia with any number of the Plagues of Egypt.

If Trump expected a reaction, none came, not a verbal one at any rate. Putin’s response took the shape of missiles raining on Ukrainian cities with renewed intensity, and Trump’s disappointment deepened.

He upped the ante, cutting the 50 days down to 10-12, with the ultimatum now expiring on 7-9 August. Yet again Putin said nothing, other than remarking that Trump’s disappointment came from excessive expectations.

A longer reply was delivered by Putin’s poodle Medvedev, who issued yet another nuclear threat to the West. In response, Trump announced that he was moving two Trident-bearing nuclear submarines closer to Russia.

Nuclear blackmail has, of course, been a standard feature of Russia’s dialogue with the West for at least 20 years. The message is simple: we are prepared to take millions of casualties and have our major cities incinerated. Are you? Are you ready to swap New York and London for Moscow and Petersburg? You aren’t, are you? So watch your step.

The blackmail has worked. The West watched its step in 2008, when Russia attacked Georgia. It did so again in 2014, when Russia annexed the Crimea and parts of Eastern Ukraine. Yet again in 2022, when the full-scale invasion began. And ever since.

That’s why NATO hasn’t even mooted a direct military involvement in the Ukraine. And even military supplies to the beleaguered country have been carefully measured out not to provoke Russia into a cataclysmic retaliation.

Hence there was nothing new about Medvedev’s threats, but America’s answer with subs rather than just words supposedly signalled a change. Trump’s announcement looked like America’s substantive response to nuclear blackmail, but that impression is illusory.

The US Navy keeps on permanent patrol seven or eight of its 18 Ohio-class subs, each capable of carrying 24 Trident ICBMs. I don’t know where they tend to sail but, at a wild guess, I doubt they concentrate on the coast of Argentina or New Zealand.

Thus, they can’t be very far from Russia anyway and, even assuming they’ve now shortened the missiles’ time to target by a few minutes, the difference is trivial. As is Trump’s much-vaunted toughness provoked by Putin’s intransigence.

What’s going to happen at the end of this week, when the 10-12 days of America’s ultimatum have expired?

Steve Witcoff, the sorriest excuse for a strategic negotiator I’ve ever seen, will fly to Moscow a day or two prior, but he is unlikely to get anything other than yet another run-around designed to gain time for Putin.

What will America do then? Introduce tougher sanctions on Russia? Putin has already announced the country is immune to them – with a little help from her friends in China, India and some EU members.

Hit all those friends with secondary tariffs? Trump already threatened astronomical levies on China once but backed off when the latter retaliated in kind. Competent economists have explained to Donald that America can afford a trade war with China no more than she can afford a nuclear war with Russia.

How else can Trump make good on his threats and ultimatums? I doubt he knows, mainly because his understanding of global relations doesn’t allow him to know.

Trump has raised his transactional, property developer’s view of the world to an absolute. Every little problem of life can be solved with a deal, he believes, an offer the other side either likes or at least can’t afford to refuse.

That’s why Trump was sure he could end the war in the Ukraine within 24 hours of his inauguration. All he had to do was make Putin an offer better than anything that demented villain Biden could even think of.

Sure enough, the offer Trump ended up putting on the table made Munich, 1938, look like a resolute stand on principle.

All Putin had to do was agree to some, any ceasefire. In return, he was welcome to keep the 20 per cent of the Ukraine’s territory he already controlled.

The Crimea was to be declared Russian in perpetuity. The rump Ukraine would become a neutral country forfeiting all plans of joining NATO or the EU. All sanctions on Russia would be rescinded. All American military aid to the Ukraine would cease. Trump even advanced that last offer on spec, as a gesture of good will. Military supplies to the Ukraine slowed down to a trickle and even stopped altogether for a while.

No other president, not Biden, not Obama, not Clinton, not even Nixon, could have offered Russia a better deal. There was no better deal imaginable, short of US troops going into action on Russia’s side.

Trump fully expected Putin to gobble up the deal and bite Donald’s arm off. Instead, the man Trump had always admired told him, not in so many words, exactly where he could shove his offer. Excessive expectations indeed.

Neither Trump nor Witcoff nor, alas, most Western leaders and commentators understand what Putin wants to get out of this conflict. That’s why they are perplexed: Trump is giving Putin what appears to be victory on a platter. But the US president doesn’t realise that, for the Russian chieftain, that offer is tantamount to defeat.

The KGB rulers of Russia don’t want 20 per cent of the Ukraine. They want to extinguish the Ukraine’s sovereignty and incorporate 100 per cent of the country into the empire they strive to recreate on the ruins of the Soviet Union. The KGB didn’t oust the Communist Party and dismantle the USSR to turn Russia into an essentially Asian country, a vassal to China in all but name.

And without the Ukraine, Russia has no claim to being an empire and a European power. In fact, the Duchy of Muscovy only became Russia, and eventually the Russian Empire, when the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth began to fall apart in the 17^th century. Much of the Ukraine was then incorporated into Russia, with the rest to follow after the three partitions of Poland in the 18^th century.

The Ukraine became the westernmost part of the Russian Empire not only geographically but also civilisationally. Quite apart from the strong Catholic influences west of the Dnieper, the Ukraine has always been more Western than Russia.

Even her Orthodox bishops were culturally and intellectually closer to their Western colleagues than to the Russian clergy. In fact, when Peter I set out to westernise the Russian Church, he had to rely on two Ukrainian bishops, Stefan Yavorsky and Theophan Prokopovych, to provide the theological and philosophical impetus of the reform.

Nevertheless, the Russians have always looked down on the Ukrainians with the condescending smirk of an imperial bully. Ukrainians have been treated as Little Russians boasting no culture of their own and speaking a corrupted Russian patois, not their own language.

When, towards the end of Yeltsyn’s tenure, the government of Russia de facto moved from the Kremlin to Lubyanka, the recreation of the Russian Empire moved to the forefront of the country’s desiderata.

In 2005, Putin described the collapse of the Soviet Union, which is to say the communist version of the Russian Empire, as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century”, and one he was implicitly committed to reverse. And his Munich speech of 2007 made the imperial ambitions clear: Russia wasn’t going to accept any world order in which she played no dominant role.

Both Yeltsyn and Putin knew from the start that an independent Ukraine was a major obstacle to their far-reaching imperial ambitions. Russia couldn’t recreate her 19^th century role of “the gendarme of Europe” or especially her 20^th century domination of half of Europe if a sovereign Ukraine stood in the way.

Without incorporating the Ukraine, Russia can’t be an empire. Without being an empire, its ruling KGB/FSB can’t lord it over Europe. Whether an independent Ukraine is neutral or allied with blocs like NATO or the EU is immaterial. Her very independence in any form is stuck in Putin’s craw.

I mentioned Munich, 1938, earlier. That attempt to appease an evil aggressor turned the dial of world war from possible to inevitable. True to form, the West never learned that lesson – history is more likely than any other science to have its lessons unheeded.

The countdown for another, more devastating, war has been started, and no ‘deal’ will stop the timer’s ticking. Some military analysts believe that Russia will be ready to test the West’s courage with nuclear blasts by 2036. Others insist Putin will want to settle matters during Trump’s tenure.

Making such predictions is their job, not mine. All I can suggest is that the danger is real, I’d even say imminent. And it can’t be averted by haggling with Putin, on the assumption that a good deal could bring him round.

However, just as the Second World War could have been prevented by a resolute show of united force, so, one hopes, can the Third one be averted by reminding Putin in tangible, physical terms that the West’s military potential is several times greater than Russia’s.

The West has greater numbers, more sophisticated and numerous weapons, much stronger and bigger economies, more advanced technologies, greater financial resources. Yet these matter nothing without spiritual and moral strength, and I hope our deficit in such qualities won’t prove fatal.

Putin’s silence is thunderous. As far as he is concerned, there is nothing to discuss. I’ll be curious to see what will happen in the next few days, if Witcoff is sent home empty-handed. I do hope I’ll live to see my next birthday (10 August).