Dave tried to move Angie closer and turn her around. “Assume a more flexible position, Liebchen,” he said.

“Nein,” gasped Angie, “nein, bitte, nein…”

“Nine?” thundered Dave. “Eight-fifty and not a million more!” He spun around and left.

Or, to be more exact, he left and George spun. Angie agreeing to an EU surcharge of merely £850 million payable in two instalments next year, as opposed to the initially demanded £1.7 billion on the nail, said George, proves that she’s ready to bend over backwards to satisfy us.

However, upon closer examination it turned out that Angie’s position remained as unbending as ever. All she did was agree to apply to the payment demand the rebate we were due anyway.

That makes the whole thrust of Dave’s and George’s triumphant declaration as feeble as we suspected. They’re impotent in the face of an irresistible EU fronted by Angie.

Having failed at conducting any meaningful intercourse with Angie, HMG switched its attention to promoting sexual intercourse among consenting infants.

Children as young as nine, decreed our Department of Education, ought to be taught the whole gamut of exciting and acrobatic possibilities offered by both heterosexual and homosexual fornication or, in the absence of a partner, masturbation.

That way they’ll be ready to put theory into practice by the time they turn 13, exploring such wide-open avenues as “consenting oral and/or penetrative sex with others of the same or opposite gender who are of similar age and developmental ability.”

This would reflect “natural curiosity, experimentation, consensual activities and positive choices.” In the past children used to apply all such commendable impulses to playing with erector sets together, but now that’s deemed to be a wrong kind of erection.

I’m appalled. Here we have a government supposedly committed to equality and yet indulging in blatant ageist discrimination.

The whole timeframe must be moved several years back. Instead of imposing arbitrary age limits on healthy ‘consensual activities’, HMG should embark on a campaign under the provisional umbrella of ‘Eight Is Too Late”.

After all, in our enlightened and physically stimulating age, many boys, and more girls, are technically capable of ‘consenting oral and/or penetrative sex’ at the very age of nine at which, according to the discriminatory guidelines, they’re still supposed to be in the training stage only.

How much better would it be then to start such training when the tots are still in their prams. Their dummies could then be used as valuable teaching aids, augmented by their parents’ gently whispering obscenities in their ears.

By the time their age moves into double digits (no pun intended), boys will be fully ready to impregnate girls and exchange not the obsolete vows but utterly modern and upbeat STDs.

Neither eventuality is particularly off-putting, what with the instant availability of both antibiotics (or antiretroviral drugs if appropriate) and abortion.

Speaking of which, another news item has caught my eye. Drinking alcohol during pregnancy will soon subject women to criminal prosecution, as is already the case in some American states.

I must say I don’t get it. Here I was, thinking that a foetus has no legal rights because it’s dependent on the mother’s body and therefore constitutes but a part of it, like the appendix or, say, an ingrown toenail.

Hence a mother is perfectly justified to have the foetus scraped out of her womb bit by bit, which is a moral and legal equivalent of appendectomy. But God forbid she should harm the foetus by doing what these days comes so naturally to our women of child-bearing age: getting pissed.

The whole thing doesn’t seem to add up, but perhaps I’m missing a couple of intermediate logical steps. As it is, it sounds to me as if killing a human being is fine, but buying him a drink isn’t.

According to our laws, the foetus has no legal rights more or less throughout pregnancy, and some women get abortions in the third trimester, even though this isn’t recommended. Yet the very same foetus, once pregnancy tests establish the fact of conception, instantly acquires legal rights when the mother decides to keep it.

I’m confused, and fresh news about those Libyan soldiers confuse me even more. As their officers kindly enlightened us, some of those chaps had never seen a woman other than their mothers and sisters before being sent to Cambridgeshire for training.

That means they had led a rather cloistered existence, but I don’t know enough about life in Libya to prove or disprove the claim. However, the explanation still strikes me as wanting.

For example, I was roughly the same age as the Libyan warriors when I first saw an armadillo. Yet that visual jolt didn’t make me try to corrupt the morals of a sheep.

Similarly, I don’t understand why, shaken by the seismic exposure to a strange woman for the first time, some of those Libyans went on to rape a man, and some others tried to buy a few male British soldiers for sexual purposes.

To be fair, some of them did rape women too, which is a more logical, if no less objectionable, response to the visual shock. But then those Cambridgeshire lasses had been warned by the police not to go out ‘for their own safety’.

At first glance, staying under virtual house arrest for five months (the planned duration of the training programme, now cut short) would have been a hard thing to do for the local women and, come to think of it, men.

Such advice was probably also difficult to accept, for the locals must have been labouring under the misapprehension that their village was their home. This goes to show the government must step up its already impressive efforts to educate people about the delights of multiculturalism.

Well, at least they’re doing a superb job training prepubescent children to experience the joys of ‘consenting oral and/or penetrative sex’ – and the rest of us to accept economic chicanery at face value.

 

My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is available from Amazon and the more discerning bookshops. However, my publisher would rather you ordered it from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.htmlor, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

In the past I’ve found myself in the ranks of Dave detractors. So much more pleasing it is to be able to commend our beleaguered PM on his enlightened approach to selecting possible successors to the office Dave himself occupies with such distinction.

Specifically, he expressed a heartfelt desire to see an Asian prime minister in his lifetime, and the multi-culti egalitarian in me has to rejoice.

The occasion for this coup was the GG2 Leadership Award Dave had the honour of presenting to the Culture Secretary Sajid Javid.

Now, for the benefit of outlanders, in this context the word ‘Asian’ doesn’t mean a Korean, Japanese, Chinese or Mongolian. It means a Pakistani, whether born in this country or not.

Yet Dave had to say ‘Asian’. First, it sounds more inclusive than ‘Pakistani’, though in fact it means exactly the same thing. Second, it sounds less specific than ‘Muslim’, and also less potentially threatening.

Had Dave said he dearly hoped that one day we’d have an Arab Muslim prime minister, there would be more defections to Ukip, which could put Dave on course to a lucrative lecture tour immediately after May, 2015.

As it was, who could have possibly complained about the word ‘Asian’? Only inveterate racists and Ukip members, or simply Ukip members who, as we all know, are inveterate racists to a man.

Oh yes, then there are those reactionaries, some of whom are also to be found among Ukip members, who come up with the outdated objection that the race of a prime minister matters rather less than his ability to govern.

This can only mean that they too are inveterate racists, but those lacking the courage to come out and say what they really mean. What’s important in a candidate for any political office is his ability to tick all the relevant boxes. Any other ability is irrelevant and often undesirable.

Dave in his wisdom realises this better than anyone. Hence in 2012 he promoted to the cabinet Baroness Sayeeda ‘Token’ Warsi, whose sole prior foray into politics had been losing a winnable Tory seat.

Therefore she had to be fast-tracked into Dave’s cabinet via the House of Lords. After all, Sayeeda Warsi ticked all the relevant boxes. Woman – tick. Muslim – two ticks at least. Working class – tick. Multi-culti accent – tick. Under 40 – tick.

Painfully aware that neither he himself nor anyone else in his cabinet possessed all such vital qualifications, Dave used the Lords as a clever detour to pave Sayeeda’s way into government.

However, eventually the ungrateful Baroness let Dave down. She resigned from the cabinet because it didn’t overtly share her deep – in fact only – conviction that Israel has no right to exist.

Still, on the scale of Dave’s criteria, Mr Javid must be distinctly second best to Baroness Warsi. But judge for yourself.

When still at university he campaigned against the disastrous decision of Margaret Thatcher’s government to join the ERM. This may suggest that he harbours latent Eurosceptic views – that’s one point against him, actually a handful of them.

Then, before entering politics, Javid had had a successful career in finance, earning the better part of £3,000,000 a year. That’s another two points against him: he’s clearly out of touch with the prevalent trend in our politics, and he’s probably clever. Call yourself a politician, Sajid?

Two more negatives: though a son of a Pakistani bus driver in Lancashire, Javid neither espouses Islam nor sounds like a son of a Pakistani bus driver in Lancashire.

The first negative suggests he isn’t sufficiently multi-culti, and nor does he realise the importance of appealing to the growing bloc of Jihadist voters.

The second black mark shows that, while Dave and his fellow Etonians in the cabinet are desperately trying to drop their ‘haitches’ all over the place, Mr Javid speaks in the cadences of his education, not his birth.

How reactionary is that? Dave must have made a mental note to tell Sajid to start working on his glottal stops if he’s ever to become the first Asian PM.

To throw a bit more black dye on his record, Mr Javid is the wrong side of 40, which is almost a disqualifying circumstance in our paedocratic (not to be confused with paedophiliac) times.

Then – are you ready for this? – Javid is on record as saying that “we should recognise that Christianity is the religion of our country”. Dave knows we should do no such thing. Christianity is only as good as any other religion, and not nearly as good as atheism.

Next thing you know Javid will suggest that our policies should agree with Christian principles, which is another way of saying that Dave should be out of a job. Can’t have that, can we now?

And to crown it all, this overachiever dares to say that, if he had to live in the Middle East, Israel would be the only country that would make him and his children feel free.

Now, in view of the recent parliamentary vote inspired by Dave, this is borderline treasonous. What’s wrong with Saudi Arabia, Sajid? Don’t you remember where oil comes from?

It’s a massive feather in Dave’s cap that he’s ready to overlook all these tragic failings and still reward Mr Javid with the leadership accolade. In Dave’s eyes, Sajid has one merit that outweighs the demerits: HE IS ASIAN.

I’m sure Mr Javid is happy to know that, if he ever ascends to Downing Street, everyone will think that it’s because of his ethnicity, not his other accomplishments that would be extremely impressive in a man of any other genetic makeup.

While praising Dave for grasping what’s really important in statesmanship, I have to admit with some sadness and bemusement that not everyone joins in. One commentator, for example, quipped that he wished we’d have a conservative prime minister in his lifetime.

The implication is that Dave isn’t one such, which is most unfair. Dave is conservative in exactly the same sense in which Nick is a liberal.

It’s just that the modern political lexicon operates on the principle of inversion: party nomenclatures mean exactly their former opposites.

Thus a party dedicated to increasing the power of the state vis-à-vis the individual would have been called anti-liberal in the past. However, it’s called Liberal now because, as the less literate of my acquaintances keep telling me, the language changes.

And someone like my friend Dave, who believes in reverse discrimination on the basis of PC criteria, is a true conservative PM.

Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis, as Dave must have been taught at Eton, and he knows he must atone for that blip on his CV.   

 

My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is available from Amazon and the more discerning bookshops. However, my publisher would rather you ordered it from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.htmlor, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

 

Before all my friends disown me, my wife hits me on the head with a frying pan and my detractors flash QED smiles, allow me to reassure you.

I’ve in no way changed my views on the EU generally and our membership in it specifically. In fact I go quite a bit further than my Ukip friends in my contempt for this wicked offshoot of the wartime alliance between Nazi Germany and Vichy France.

Just as they do, I dearly hope we can shake the dust of that foul obscenity off our feet. But I also hope all other countries will follow us out of the door, reducing the EU to a ghastly memory that’ll for ever make them cringe recalling it.

Since I’m still opposed to the In-Out referendum so dear to Ukip hearts, it’s obvious I don’t believe this vehicle will carry us to the desired destination.

As a general observation, direct democracy by plebiscite is the worst possible kind of this method of government, which isn’t without fundamental problems even at its best.

This sort of thing only became possible after the Enlightenment perverted the metaphysical premise on which Western civilisation was built. Our formative notion of original sin was replaced with the modern notion of original virtue.

Rather than being compromised by the Fall, man, according to Rousseau and his jolly friends, was both perfect and tautologically perfectible ab initio. Since man demonstrably didn’t end up perfect, it was the fault of society, what with its two-pronged oppressive strategy based on the crown and the church.

The conclusion was obvious: man could return to his original virtue if the oppressors were eliminated and paths leading to liberation were opened.

One of the paths was political: the Enlighteners insisted that perfect and further perfectible citizens could play a hands-on role in government with no outside help necessary. Hence democracy, the rule of the people.

Such Enlightenment thinkers as Smith and Hume realised that people would vote on the basis of their selfish interests, not all of which would be praiseworthy. They just felt that all those private, often clashing, interests could be tossed into a giant cauldron to produce a tasty stew of public virtue.

The two Scots made one fundamental error. They thought that society could for ever continue to draw on the moral capital amassed by Christianity, thereby keeping base passions in check. They couldn’t imagine in their scariest dreams that one day their own atheism would reign supreme.

Once the transcendent restraints on behaviour were removed, no tasty stew would emerge from the cauldron. On the contrary, the resulting concoction would emphasise the rancid taste of each ingredient.

Liberty without “wisdom and virtue”, wrote Burke prophetically, “is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice and madness, without tuition or restraint”. The great Whig had no doubts on the sole possible source of such restraining mechanisms.

That source has run dry in our public life. Consequently collective wisdom and virtue are no longer in evidence, and therefore neither is liberty in whose name modernity conquered.

Democracy no longer reliably produces virtuous results, nor brings to power virtuous people. The nature of modern politics, nay modern societies, is such that people will vote wrong even when they have a valid choice (which they increasingly don’t).

This isn’t to say that people’s instincts are always, indeed usually, wrong. It’s just that, in the absence of Burkean ‘wisdom and virtue’, those instincts can easily be overridden by mass propaganda and general demagoguery.

That’s why democracy, when it goes unchecked by competing methods of government, ends up belying its etymology, withdrawing power from the people and passing it on to professional demagogues who manipulate the electorate using increasingly sophisticated means at their disposal.

Issues put to a vote are thus decided not by their intrinsic merit but by the agitprop weight brought to bear on one end or the other.

It follows that any In-Out referendum will be decided not by a contest between truth and falsehood but by the decibel level of the propaganda pro or con. 

In practical terms this means that Her Majesty’s government, especially if it’s supported by Her Majesty’s opposition, is the odds-on favourite to get the result it wants: its agitprop resources can’t be matched by any rivals.

So let’s assume for the sake of argument, and it’s an unsafe assumption, that the Tories will either form the next government on their own or at least play a decisive role in it.

Since all other parties except Ukip are fanatic European federalists, the Out vote could only result from the Tories aggressively campaigning for it. Supported by our most popular newspapers, they could realistically expect to counteract the vast resources of the EU propaganda machine.

How likely is it that the Tories will commit to such a campaign? Well, about as likely as the MPs on both front benches sporting T-shirts saying This Is What a Spiv Looks Like.

Dave made this abundantly clear yesterday, when asked in the Commons six times whether he’d ever campaign to get the country out of the EU.

Each time his reply branded him not only as the fanatic of European federalism he is, but also as the unprincipled spiv he pretends not to be: “I want Britain,” he said, “ to stay in a reformed EU.”

This after both the de jure head of the EU Jean-Claude Juncker and its de facto head Angela Merkel declared publicly, unequivocally and, for once, truthfully that no meaningful reform was going to happen.

Had Dave wished to follow Angela’s lead and be truthful this once, he would have simply replied no, he’d never campaign for the Out vote. As it was, he couched the answer in his usual waffle without changing its meaning.

Therefore we can confidently assume that if the Tories somehow cling on to power next May, and if Dave keeps his promise to hold the referendum in 2017, he’ll campaign to stay in.

No doubt the EU will throw the bone of one or two meaningless concessions his way to help Dave propagate his lie about ‘a reformed EU’. The two spivocracies, national and supranational, will fling the sluice gates open and flood the British with an outpouring of scaremongering lies – just like they did in 1975.

The result will also be the same: the Out vote will lose, at which point the unwritten EU law will come into play.

If a national referendum yields a result that’s not to the EU’s liking, the people will be told to vote again and continue to do so until they get it right. However, a pro-EU vote is irreversible, chiselled in indestructible stone.

Hence an In-Out referendum will spell relinquishing Britain’s sovereignty irretrievably and eternally, which is hardly the result desired by those who are pushing for it.

The only way for the country to get out is for the next election to produce a government in which Ukip will play a serious role. This can only be a Tory-Ukip coalition in which Ukip could mobilise the anti-EU faction within the Conservative Party to force Dave to do what he hates: campaign for the Out vote.

In any other scenario Britain is almost guaranteed to become and remain but a gau in an EU dominated by Germany. I just hope we’ll still be allowed to wear poppies on 11 November.

My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is available from Amazon and the more discerning bookshops. However, my publisher would rather you ordered it from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.htmlor, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

Now that the celebrated group is no longer performing, trust the Ministry of Defence to step into the breach.  

What prompted its officials to seek an alternative career in stand-up comedy is the clever plan to train 2,000 Libyan soldiers in Cambridgeshire, which produced highly predictable results.

The need to whip the Libyan army into shape arose in the first place thanks to HMG’s inspired policy of unseating Col. Gaddafi’s government, thereby plunging the country into a blood-soaked chaos.

That policy slotted neatly into our overall strategy of radicalising the Middle East to a point where it would implode, conceivably burying millions under the rubble.

The shockwaves of the implosion are already reaching Europe, where Muslim violence, not least towards Jews, is becoming uncontainable.

Displaying the staggering hypocrisy we’ve learned to expect from our leaders, Ed Miliband yesterday shed a tear for British Jews, who feel insecure in the face of rising anti-Semitism.

He forgot to mention that most anti-Semitic violence in Britain, France and elsewhere in Europe is committed by Muslims, either native-born or cordially invited from the Middle East to add the spice of multi-culti variety to our otherwise humdrum life.

The increasingly anti-Israeli policy of our main parties, including Ed’s own, acts as a spur to violence, and a sharp one at that.

The parties on either side of the aisle are sending a loud and clear signal by their endorsement of what they call a Palestinian state and what in effect will become a legitimised base for global terrorism.

This can’t help encouraging our resident Muslims in feeling that their hatred of Jews, only slightly more febrile than their hatred of the West, has been justified all along. Their cause has been just, as Western governments are acknowledging.

But God forbid our leaders utter a single word suggesting they realise that the West and Islam are irreconcilable – that even in its present debauched state our civilisation simply can’t accommodate Islam as a dynamic force within our borders.

Yet our electorate has been corrupted to such an extent that, for any ‘statesman’ to be politically successful, he has to be politically correct. Hence the respect, both preached and practised, for any religion or civilisation, provided it isn’t Christian.

Hence also the criminal stupidity of our leaders who destroyed the demonstrably un-Western but still workable power balance in the Middle East to plunge the region into a blood-filled abyss of violence and unrest.

Now that the violence looks as if it’s about to spill over way beyond Iraq, Syria and Libya, our governments are reviewing their options.

One of them is yet another direct military intervention, and we all know how hugely successful this has proved so far.

Another is to intervene by proxy, using Iran (what with the Nato member Turkey refusing to play) to do the fighting for us. Ancient Rome had that kind of arrangement with the Vandals, remember how that turned out?

We may suffer the same way, since the inevitable price for Iran’s involvement will be the opportunity to acquire nuclear weapons, and you aren’t getting three guesses to figure out how they’ll be used.

The third option is related to the second: arming and training those local groups we perceive as our friends. ‘Perceive’ is the operative word: there are no groups in the Islamic world that are genuinely friendly to the West.

Some, however, are ready to fake amiability for tactical reasons, something we accept as the real thing. Both sides are perfectly aware of the ad hoc nature of any such alliance, invariably underpinned as it always is by background hostility.

They pretend to be our friends, we pretend to believe them. However, the two sides still diverge in one important area. They have a long-term strategy, we can’t think beyond the next election.

That’s why we refuse to recall that every time we trained and armed Muslim soldiers in the past they eventually turned their weapons against us. Who do you think armed the Taliban? Al-Qaeda? Saddam? Gaddafi? Isis?

Training thousands of Libyan soldiers at our Cambridgeshire base is a sign that we’re as ever prepared to equip our future enemies while pretending they’re our present friends.

We simply refuse to admit that our quarrel isn’t with this or that Islamic faction but with Islam as such. Well, if we still haven’t realised that there’s a clash of civilisations under way, we ought to be thankful to the Libyan soldiers for clarifying the point.

Since arriving in June they’ve succeeded in turning their corner of sleepy Cambridgeshire into a scaled-down version of Tripoli’s outskirts.

The Libyans went on an alcohol-fuelled rampage and there I was, thinking Muslims were supposed to be teetotal. A few of them spent £1,000 on booze in a single visit to a supermarket, an amount that buys a lot of mayhem.

Two of the soldiers have now been charged with raping a man, who presumably was wearing a provocative business suit. Not to discriminate, three others are being held on remand for several counts of sexual assault against women.

These peccadilloes were augmented by attendant charges of theft and threatening behaviour towards a police officer, which is legalese for head-butting. (Since no one has suggested that ‘Glasgow kiss’ be renamed ‘Tripoli kiss’, I’m hereby putting this initiative forth as my own.)

Anyway, this is where our MoD officials unveiled their comedy routine, and I thank them for making my morning so much more upbeat for it.

In a nutshell, the training programme, originally supposed to last until the end of the month, is being terminated effective immediately, and no future training will be done in Britain, what with the UK’s surfeit of tasty men and women roaming the countryside freely.

Instead of describing this simple development in this kind of language or, as would be my preference, more colloquially, the MoD spokesman delivered his first knee-slapping line:

“We have agreed with the Libyan government that it is best for all involved to bring forward the training completion date”. (“We can’t have too many raping and thieving Muzzie soldiers about…”)

Encouraged by the outburst of laughter, he continued in the same vein: “There have been disciplinary issues.”

I suppose homosexual rape, sexual assault on women, theft and head-butting a cop could be described that way for comic effect, but, playing it straight, I’d have settled for ‘crimes’ instead.

And then came the kicker, having punters rolling in the aisles: “As part of our support for the Libyan government, we will review how best to train Libyan security forces – including whether training further tranches of recruits in the UK is the best way forward.” (“…and neither do we want them to darken our doorstep ever again.”)

To add a few delicious touches to the stand-up gig, several Libyan soldiers, presumably not the defendants, have requested political asylum in Britain. And their government has so far failed to pay for the programme, while not offering much hope it’ll do so in the future.

Oh well, we’ve made our bed of nails, so we must lie in it – and it’s no laughing matter.

 

My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is available from Amazon and the more discerning bookshops. However, my publisher would rather you ordered it from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.htmlor, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

How do you say ‘I’d rather not indulge in hypothetical speculations’ in Russian?

Let’s ask that celebrated translator Col. Putin, who is past master at finding idiomatic equivalents to the desiccated, denatured vocabulary of diplomatic discourse.

At a press conference in elegant Milan, the colonel was asked the other day what would happen to the Russian economy if oil prices continued to slide.

The phrase I used above was the reply Putin wished to deliver, but how colourful is that? How naked-to-the-waste muscular? How vox populi?

Above all, how close would such effete wording be to the hearts of the Russians who, like our own Peter Hitchens, have an almost erotic craving for a strong leader, a man’s man whose language must reflect martial arts, a nude torso in front of which a rifle is gripped, a career in history’s most murderous organisation?

Not at all close, is the answer to that. That’s why the ultimate man’s man won’t talk sissy. None of those indulgings in hypothetical speculations or speculatings in hypothetical indulgences or hypothesisings in indulgent rathers.

A real man must speak in a real man’s language, which in Putin’s case means that of the ‘common Leningrad street thug’ he self-admittedly and proudly was in his formative years.

That’s why he smiled scabrously and uttered the phrase my mother first scolded me for using when I was five years old: “If Grandma had balls she’d be not a Grandma but a Grandpa.”

Actually he made a concession to decorum by replacing the word ‘balls’ in this common Russian saying with ‘external sex organs’, but the job was done. ‘Balls’ was what the Russians heard, and this mellifluous word was music to their ears.

They had their confirmation: Putin is a real muzhik, a man’s man. He won’t let the country down.

This is yet another valuable entry in the thesaurus of Putin’s vulgarities, filling up rapidly with sinewy phrases, many uttered in press conferences.

Thus, when a journalist once asked a question implicitly critical of the atrocities the Russians were then committing in Chechnya, the colonel put him in his place with some élan:

“If you want to become an Islamic radical for real, to the point of getting circumcised, I invite you to Moscow… I’ll tell them to do the surgery so that nothing will grow back.”

And what about those Chechens who had the temerity to resist? “We’ll pursue terrorists everywhere… If we catch’em in the toilet, we’ll whack’em in the shithouse.”

On the dangers of procrastination: “If we chew on our own snot for years, we won’t change anything.”

On the papers publishing something the colonel didn’t like: “They dug bogies out of their noses and smeared them all over the papers.”

On Israel’s president Moshe Katsav who was later sentenced to seven years in prison: “He raped ten women! I never expected that from him! He surprised us all! We all envy him!”

“Like priest, like parish”, says another Russian proverb. It’s in no way surprising that Putin’s henchmen fall over themselves trying to emulate, or possibly even outdo, their leader in using the language of the gutter.

For example, Prime Minister Medvedev and Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the Russian LibDems, have regaled YouTube viewers with long clips that succeeded in the unlikely feat of making even me wince.

The former was giving unsolicited advice to President Mubarak of Egypt on how to deal with Islamic rebels, which advice heavily centred on using a length of steel pipe to “f*** them up the a***”.

The latter also relied on sexual imagery in his criticism of America’s then State Secretary Condoleezza Rice, whose global aggressiveness, according to Zhirinovsky, was a function of a sluggish sex life. To remedy that deficiency he invited Miss Rice to visit Spetsnaz barracks where she would be “f***ed until the soldiers’ sperm would be coming out of her ears”.

Lest I be accused of digging up ancient stuff, here, for the delectation of the Russophones among you, is a clip barely a fortnight old: http://www.compromat.ru/page_35033.htm

It shows Vitaly Mutko, Putin’s Minister for Sport and Tourism, wishing the denizens of Cheboksary a happy National Sports Day. The words the Minister chose to convey his warm feelings came from the depth of his mysterious Russian soul: “I congratulate you all from the bottom of my f***ing heart!” (I’m open to other versions of the translation, never an easy task when it comes to Russian idioms.)

All these clips show that Messrs Medvedev, Zhirinovsky and Mutko were visibly inebriated when expressing themselves with so much poignant lucidity. Putin, on the other hand, is always sober when speaking ex cathedra.

But their drunkenness can’t be used as a mitigating circumstance any more than Putin’s sobriety can serve as an aggravating one. In all three cases, and many others one could cite, Russian politicians know exactly what they are saying, and why.

Their flock have been thoroughly brutalised by relentless propaganda based on fascist values and images. Julius Streicher didn’t pull his punches when addressing the readers of Der Stürmer, and neither do members of Russia’s kleptofascist government when addressing their captive audience.

The Russians do so for the same reason the Germans did: the public must be imbued with the cult of muscular strength and crude testosterone-spewing aggressiveness. Using robust, vulgar language is part and parcel of this on-going effort.

Conventions of civilised speech have to be cast aside when what is planned is an assault on that very civilisation. Hence I wouldn’t dismiss the verbal savagery of Russian leaders lightly.

They are clearly house-training the populace to be real men towering above effete etiquettes and other paraphernalia of good behaviour. The words they use are neatly harmonised with the roar of drum and bugles in the background.

 

My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is available from Amazon and the more discerning bookshops. However, my publisher would rather you ordered it from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.htmlor, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

 

 

 

 

 

A friend of mine sent me an e-mail the other day, saying “Good piece by Edward Lucas in today’s Daily Mail: Putin’s Russia and the New Cold War.”

Since this particular friend hardly ever gets things wrong, I read the article and sure enough – it was good.

Mr Lucas in general is one of the few mainstream journalists who have a secure grasp on Russia, which is as commendable in someone without native knowledge of the place as it is rare.

Peter Hitchens, for example, has no native – and not much of any other – knowledge of Russia either, but he does have a strong ideological bias. This is often deadly and, when combined with both ignorance and arrogance, invariably so.

Thus his ex-Trotskyist loins ache for a strong leader like Putin, someone he wishes we had. Now a desire for a powerful man at the helm usually arises in a weak society. Mr Hitchens correctly diagnoses ours as such, but the treatment he’d dearly love to administer is worse than the disease.

A version of Putin’s kleptofascist regime can’t cure any of our ills. Thinking it can is both immoral and stupid; not knowing Putin’s regime is kleptofascist is ignorant.

Mr Lucas harbours no such illusions. He knows the true worth of Putin’s Russia and he correctly identifies it as a great threat to the West, greater even than the Soviet Union was.

Actually anyone who just follows the news, without refracting it through nostalgic ex-Trotskyist longings, shouldn’t need expert opinion to reach the same conclusion. Facts alone should do the job.

Russia is clearly reviving Leninist-Stalinist ambitions of gaining control over as much of the world as feasible, definitely including Europe.

Unlike Lenin and Stalin, however, Putin can add hydrocarbon blackmail to the levers operated by Lenin and Stalin: military conquest and relentless propaganda.

This isn’t to say that Putin ignores either military or propaganda offensives. Far from it.

Like Hitler in his heyday, Putin is probing the West to see how much he can get away with. Like Hitler, he is getting the answer he needs: as much as he wants.

The West has swallowed the unlawful annexation of the Crimea with nary a whimper. Ditto, the effective dismemberment of the Ukraine, with an eventual Anschluss no doubt in the works. Ditto, the non-stop violations by Russian nuclear bombers of the airspace over the three Baltic republics and several Western European countries.

From Turkey to Finland, Nato interceptors are being scrambled almost every day to escort Putin’s death machines a safe distance away. One wonders if the Nato fighter planes carry live ammunition. If they do, five gets you ten they’re under orders not to use it even as warning shots.

We have ample historical evidence to support the commonsensical view that cowardly passivity on the part of the West doesn’t so much deter fascist aggressors as embolden them. But the West traditionally has learning difficulties when it comes to the lessons of history.

Mr Lucas knows all this, and he communicates it in a lucid and forthright manner, as his regular readers have been accustomed to expect.

But one short paragraph in his narrative partly undid the good work done by all the other paragraphs. In it Mr Lucas describes his sense of unbridled joy at the sight of the Berlin Wall coming down.

Finally, he felt, democracy had triumphed in Russia and everywhere. History had ended, although, being a more intelligent man than Francis Fukuyama, he didn’t express himself so crudely.

“How high the hopes were then,” concludes Mr Lucas. “And how empty they seem a quarter of a century on.”

Now I differ from Peter Hitchens not only in my understanding of Russia, but also in my reluctance he doesn’t share of saying I told you so (as, for example, in today’s Mail: “As usual, I first wrote about this subject long before it was fashionable to do so.”).

So suffice it to say that those who really do know and understand Russia had no such ‘high hopes’ even then – especially if they applied proper criteria to rating foreign countries.

Too many Western commentators don’t ask themselves the question “Is the country good?” Instead they ask “Is it democratic?”, implicitly equating democracy with virtue.

Since by now democracy has been reduced to its empty shell even in its native habitat, such commentators, especially if they espouse neoconservative views, tend to apply purely formal criteria even to the question they do ask. As long as the citizens of the country under the spotlight go to voting booths at regular intervals, the commentators are satisfied.

This creates a mighty potential for wicked sham democracies to trick the West into a wrong understanding, and therefore a wrong policy based on such understanding (to cite a recent example, witness the Arab Spring, which may yet turn into a nuclear winter).

Hence, rather than realising instantly that the USSR’s evil energy was vindicating the First Law of Thermodynamics by merely transforming into a different but equally evil kind, they tossed their hats in the air and hailed the advent of goodness.

Virtue had prevailed, history had ended, no further debate was either needed or possible. Well, even assuming that history can ever end this side of the Second Coming, it always restarts – as it did after Hegel first made this feeble claim following the Battle of Jena.

Simply put, the West allowed itself to be duped by cynical villains who knew that its adulation of democracy was but half a step removed from wishful thinking. They were right: after the ‘collapse of the Soviet Union’, the West, especially its European vanguard, hastily disarmed, hoping to get fat on the peace dividend.

Now all but strident ideologues with multiple chips on their shoulders realise that Soviet Russia never changed in its evil essence. It has merely been rebuilt (which is what ‘perestroika’ means), and so has the threat it presents to the civilised world.

Similarly, the penny dropped on 1 September, 1939, or, for some, a week earlier when the Soviet-Nazi pact was signed, pushing the button for the carnage. By then it was too late as, one fears, it may be now.

 

Next week my new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick will be available from Amazon and the more discerning bookshops. However, my publisher would rather you ordered it from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.html or, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

Do you feel offended by this statement? If so, I beg your forgiveness, even though I was simply stating a fact. So please don’t call the police to have me arrested for ‘racially or religiously aggravated harassment, alarm or distress.’

I’m not being crazy – our world is, and I know you’ve heard me say so before. Well, you’ll hear me say it many times again.

For Paul Griffith, 75, was arrested by armed police on that very charge for uttering the phrase in the title.

Going through airport security at Stansted, Mr Griffith was asked to remove his shoes. He complied, but in the process uttered the offensive, nay criminal, sentence above.

The security chap (whose religion isn’t specified in the news reports) felt mortally and racially offended, which I hope you weren’t when I said the same thing.

The uncharacteristically lackadaisical policemen turned up armed to the teeth, but allowed the pensioner to go on his trip. When he returned, they were lying in wait.

Mr Griffith was kept in airport detention for six hours, had his fingerprints and an oral DNA swab taken and was told to report to his local police station.

When he did so the next day, he was told that he had been charged with an offence under the Crime and Disorder Act. To be fair, Mr Griffith was then magnanimously offered to accept a caution, which is to say a criminal record.

When the wrongdoer refused, claiming he had done nothing wrong, the charge was made official and Mr Griffith was given a court date for a trial.

I’m with him on this one: he did nothing wrong. Mr Griffith simply denied any adherence to Islam, and his statement was factually correct.

Then of course he was charged not with lying but with a racial offence. Since we’ve already agreed that the phrase ‘I’m not a Muslim’ is semantically inoffensive, it must have been deemed criminal contextually.

In that context the phrase ‘I’m not a Muslim’ really meant something more than just a statement of religious disassociation.

In effect Mr Griffith was saying that, since he manifestly wasn’t a Muslim, he was statistically unlikely either to hijack or to blow up his flight to Malaga.

Implicitly he was thereby suggesting that this statistical probability was somewhat higher for Muslim passengers, as opposed to, say, Buddhist ones.

Otherwise he would have said, ‘I’m not a Buddhist’ or, for that matter, ‘…Taoist’, ‘…Zoroastrian’ or ‘…Presbyterian’.

Now if that’s what he really meant, as seems likely, then his contextual statement seems as factually correct as the textual one.

To verify this, I opened an appropriate Google page and scanned the headlines of the articles cited. Here they are, in the right order with none left out:

“Muslim Terrorist Who Detonated Bomb on Pan Am Flight 830 Freed from Prison”

“Canada: Muslim arrested after flight escorted back to Toronto – said on plane, ‘I just want to bomb Canada’.”

“Three British Muslims have been convicted of planning a series of co-ordinates suicide bomb attacks on transatlantic airliners, which could have killed up to 10,000 people.”

“British Muslims ‘planned to kill thousands by bringing down SEVEN transatlantic airliners in one go with liquid bombs’.”

“Three guilty of airline bomb plot: Tanvir Hussain, Abdulla Ahmed ali and Assad Sarwar”

“F-16 jets escort Toronto-Panama plane after Mohammadan ali Shahi bomb threat”

Then of course, bygones be bygones and all that, but it’s hard to forget it was Muslims who flew airliners into those tall New York  buildings, killing 3,000.

And – you’ll never know how it pains me to say this – it was Muslims who on 7 July, 2005 conducted a series of coordinated bombings on London public transport, killing 52 and crippling God knows how many more.

Muslims. Not Buddhists, Taoists, Zoroastrians – nor even Presbyterians, Lutherans or Ultramontane Catholics.

Hence Mr Griffith made a statement correct in every possibly way, explicit or implicit. Neither did it contain any rude words, threats or a general assessment of the Muslims’ moral character. It was purely factual, if ill-advised.

Yet he barely escaped a criminal sentence, possibly even a custodial one. In fact, the case didn’t get as far as the trial. Twenty-four hours before the gavel was to fall, the CPO dropped all charges, if with clearly perceptible regret.

Deputy Chief Crown Prosecutor Frank Ferguson said: “In order to successfully prosecute a charge of racially or religiously aggravated disorderly conduct, we first have to show that the language used was threatening or abusive and in these particular circumstances we could not show that to the high criminal standard required.”

Don’t worry, Frank, you’ll get your man next time or, if not him specifically, someone like him.

After all, most mental disorders, including the one our society is suffering from, are degenerative, meaning they get worse with the passage of time.

Even a paltry 10 years ago an airport security man wouldn’t have called the cops under similar circumstances, nor would the cops have arrested the transgressor.

Ten years from now, and I’m being optimistic, a man like Mr Griffiths will be sent down, to spend a few years in the company of murderers.

Meanwhile, this lunacy has done little to endear the authorities, or indeed Muslims, to the rest of us. Quite the opposite, I dare say – but please don’t report me to the police.

 

 

 

 

 

“The abolition of God necessarily leads to the abolition of man,” wrote C.S. Lewis, ever the prophet.

True enough, half a century or so later we’ve developed a knack for talking about people not as individuals but as groups.

By doing so, we’ve jumped backwards, leapfrogging two millennia of our civilisation and landing smack in the middle of the pre-Christian Greco-Roman antiquity.

Rather than rejoicing in the Christian notion of the sovereign individual, we wallow in the defacing collectivism of modernity – and love it.

Group identity has replaced individual dignity, and any personal affront is instantly taken as an assault on the group with which the target identifies, especially if the group enjoys a minority status in public perception.

Hence women, who, in defiance of maths, are supposed to be a minority, and an oppressed one at that, routinely demand – and are given – certain privileges not on merit but simply on the strength of their being women.

Having ridden their sex to a particular job, such women then erect around themselves a protective wall to ward off any insinuations about their incompetence. Like Nato’s charter stipulating that an attack on one member is an attack on all, they accuse the insinuator of misogyny, not a legitimate gripe against a certain woman but hatred of women as such.

In that spirit, since I’m about to point out the cosmic incompetence of two of our female ministers, I hasten to offer this disclaimer: neither women nor men in general are fit to govern. However, some men are, and so are some women.

It’s just that neither Nicky Morgan nor Helen Grant is, and they both happen to have ministerial portfolios, for Equality (along with Education) and Sport respectively.

Helen is grievously hurt by the observation that some professional women athletes get paid less than their male counterparts.

As if setting out to vindicate my belief that the world has gone mad, she’s particularly upset about the gross discrimination suffered by female footballers. These ball-kickers, she claims, should be paid as much as the men.

This raises many questions, not least those about Miss Grant’s professional competence.

For example, which male footballers should be used as the standard to follow? We have in England four professional leagues: the Premiership, the Championship, the First and the Second Divisions.

The average salary in the Premiership is roughly eight times higher than in the Championship. In the Championship Division it’s three times higher than in the First, which in turn towers over the Second by a factor of two.

The same goes for those teams’ managers. Those working in the top flight typically get about £3,000,000 a year, as opposed to something like £50,000 in the Second division.

Presumably Miss Grant sets her sight stratospherically high, seeing in her myopic mind’s eye female strikers earning as much as Rooney or Costa. This brings to mind a purely commercial question.

Apart from the generosity of billionaire owners, football revenues come from ticket sales, TV income, kit sales and endorsements. Comparing, say, the FA Cup Final with a similar women’s competition, which do you think will be more commercially virile?

Don’t answer that. Instead answer another question: how can someone capable of uttering such stupid, ideologically driven statements be trusted with running the country? On second thoughts, don’t bother with that one either: there is no good answer.

Front-bencher Nicky Morgan was one of 161 MPs who opposed the legalisation of homomarriage in 2013, thereby defying her party leader Dave.

However, she has since changed her mind. If the vote were held today, Miss Morgan says, she “probably would” vote in favour. She now welcomes “anybody who enters into a commitment”.

Since she didn’t qualify the statement in any way, one could infer that she’d welcome marital commitment between mother and son or brother and sister. But let’s not indulge in such reductio ad absurdum.

Instead let’s wonder what has happened in the intervening year to make Miss Morgan change her mind.

Actually, there was no change. What passes for Miss Morgan’s heart was even then firmly on the side of Dave and all those who helped him push that subversive bill through Parliament.

However, she went against her deeply held convictions because her constituents were asking her to oppose the bill “by ten to one”. This is how Miss Morgan explains the decision-making process in a style that’s rather lamentable in someone who holds the Education portfolio to augment the Equality one:

“We are all, as Members of Parliament, here to represent, to listen, to hear, to change minds but I have a lot of constituents who asked me to vote in a particular way and I listened to them and it was an issue of conscience too.”

Leaving aside the disputable claim to possessing a conscience, one has to say that, for an Education Minister or simply a halfway educated person, Miss Morgan has little idea about her parliamentary responsibilities or indeed our constitution.

On the off chance that she’s one of the few politicians who ever read books, perhaps one could recommend she acquaint herself with the writings of Edmund Burke, who knew a thing or two about constitutional matters.

An MP, wrote Burke, should be the people’s representative, not their delegate. As such, his vote should reflect not his constituents’ wishes but their interests – whatever he judges those to be.

The underlying assumption was that voters sent to Parliament those they trusted to represent their interests, even if these diverged from their wishes. In his turn, an MP felt free to vote according to his conscience, a freedom that had been vouchsafed to him by the electorate.

Hence, if Miss Morgan’s conscience called for a vote in favour of that perverse legislation, she presumably felt that the law would be in the interests of the community she represented.

Hence, by acting on the voters’ wishes rather than their interests, she effectively betrayed their trust – not to mention the constitution of this country.

Sorry about indulging in such subtleties. They have no place in a nation governed by a parliament stuffed to the gunwales with self-serving, intellectually inadequate, morally corrupt nonentities.

 

Both male and female.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

His Holiness has regaled us with two more statements, to which one doesn’t immediately know how to react.

The first one, on evolution, is generally unassailable from any position, other than the stridently and unscientifically atheist one. It does, however, raise the question of why it had to be made at all. Also, some of the wording may be interpreted as more deist than Christian.

The second one, on the death penalty and life imprisonment, which the pontiff equates, is open to criticism from a wider base, both secular and orthodox Christian.

Let’s take them in turn.

Reassuring his audience that there is no contradiction between God and evolution, the Pope began by saying: “When we read about creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything.”

Why the pontiff decided to give an airing to a patently vulgar idea of God escapes me. It’s best kept for the exclusive use of atheist propagandists, who put forth the notion of a magician deity the better to mock God.

Since the Pope clearly believes no such thing, one would think he would eschew the language of those he must regard as enemies of Christianity.

“God is not a divine being or a magician,” continued Francis, “but the Creator who brought everything to life. Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve.”

In other words, before things evolve, they have to be. This is true at every level: theological, philosophical, logical and scientific.

There are a couple of slight problems though. One could argue that ‘brings’ would have been a better word than ‘brought’: the latter hints, probably unwittingly, not at a living God but at the Cartesian, deist ‘clock winder’, who set the world in motion but then lost all interest in it.

The other problem is that it isn’t clear exactly what this statement adds to the thinking prevalent in the Church not just since Pius XII, but actually since Cardinal Newman, Darwin’s contemporary, who saw no conflict between Christianity and evolution.

Being omnipotent, God can obviously choose to create things not only quickly but also slowly. The six days mentioned in Genesis convey the spiritual, but not literal, truth of Creation.

After all, since God exists outside time, as we don’t, a day can only be metaphorical: on our earthly clock God’s six days could mean six nanoseconds or six billion years.

The Pope seems to misunderstand the nature of the modern debate. This isn’t about evolution as a formative element of the world before our eyes.

It’s about evolution as the sole and sufficient explanation of the world. Insisting, as Dawkins and other strident ignoramuses do, that Darwin’s theory explains everything has little to do with science. Nor is it even faith, as is frequently but inaccurately suggested.

It’s a pernicious ideology, on a par with Marxism, Freudianism and other determinist travesties. As such, it’s impervious to any evidence, including that supplied by science, not to mention philosophy and plain common sense.

For example, not a shred of scientific evidence supports any evolution of man’s spirit – on the contrary, evidence proves that this faculty, which defines man, was created once and for all.

Thus a Pope pursuing the truth, rather than political ends, would phrase his statement differently. He’d say something along these lines:

“It’s unscientific and therefore ignorant to deny the presence of evolutionary elements in natural history. Yet it’s even more unscientific and ignorant to insist on their self-sufficiency. And, when it comes to man, evolution, even if true, explains so little of importance as to be irrelevant. Man stands as towering testimony to Creation and the glory of God.”

We these days can’t afford to pretend to be walking through a bucolic landscape to the accompaniment of gentle birdsong. We’re walking through a minefield to the accompaniment of deadly charges going off all over the place.

Treading carefully, which in this case means weighing the consequences of every word, is a matter of life or death, and not just metaphorically speaking.

When the Church stops being militant, it stops being triumphant, and militancy by definition precludes the urge not to offend secular sensibilities, which are growing more delicate by the minute.

The Pope said little wrong, semantically. But the overall tone of his remarks has encouraged atheists – and they never forgo their militancy – to ignore the denotation and respond to the connotation.

Hence, the mendacious nonsense in The Independent: “The Pope made comments which experts said put an end to the ‘pseudo theories’ of creationism and intelligent design that some argue were encouraged by his predecessor, Benedict XVI.”

Benedict XVI believed that the world was created by God, which was a job requirement for his post. Being also a thinker and philosopher, he mocked the trumped-up conflict between ‘creationism’ and evolution.

“The doctrine of evolution,” he wrote, “does not answer every query, especially the great philosophical question: where does everything come from? And how did everything start which ultimately led to man?”

Pope Benedict, along with other intelligent men, knows that, because such questions are metaphysical, they can only have metaphysical answers. If Pope Francis knows it too, one wishes he expressed himself with the kind of clarity that would preclude lying comments in the atheist press.

No one in his right mind would interpret the Pope’s remarks as disavowing Creation. But strident ideologues, such as the anonymous ‘experts’ mentioned in The Independent, do.

If Francis’s views on evolution sit more or less comfortably within Christian doctrine, his statement on crime and punishment I’m afraid doesn’t.

Specifically, His Holiness opposed in no uncertain terms not just the death penalty but also life imprisonment. This is his right as an individual, but not as the spiritual and institutional leader of Christians.

Even on a purely individual level, his rationale is puzzling: the media and politicians, said the Pope, advocate “violence and revenge, public and private, not only against those responsible for crimes, but also against those under suspicion, justified or not”.

Right. So media and politicians favour bumping people off merely on suspicion. Perhaps they do, or rather used to, in the Pope’s native land, but one doesn’t often hear an MP, congressman or even an Independent hack advocating any such thing.

Moreover, most Western countries have abandoned the death penalty even for convicted murderers, in my view ill-advisedly. Yet Catholic teaching doesn’t proscribe capital punishment, the Pope acknowledged.

That is God’s own truth, often expressed by Fathers of the Church. The Church’s view of the death penalty is inseparable from its view on death. A vicious criminal must be deprived of his life in earth, both to protect the still living and to render him to God’s judgement in afterlife.

Thus, for example, St Augustine: “It is in no way contrary to the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill’ to wage war at God’s bidding, or for the representatives of public authority to put criminals to death, according to the law, that is, the will of the most just reason.”

St Thomas Aquinas confirms: “Therefore if a man be dangerous and infectious to the community, on account of some sin, it is praiseworthy and healthful that he be killed in order to safeguard the common good, since ‘a little leaven corrupteth the whole lump’ (1 Cor. 5:6).”

It would have been more helpful had the Pope restated the Christian position on such matters, rather than giving credence to one springing from liberal, which is to say atheist, consensus.

Who was England’s culture minister at the time of Shakespeare, Sidney and Donne?

Austria’s, during the period demarcated by Haydn at one end and Brahms at the other, with Mozart and Beethoven in between?

Russia’s, from Pushkin and Gogol to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky?

Venice’s, from Bellini to Tintoretto, via Titian?

Tuscany’s, when Duccio and Piero della Francesca painted their masterpieces?

France’s, when Rabelais used fictional titans to satirise real pygmies?

No one, is the answer to all these questions, which only goes to show how backward people were before the advent of modernity.

These days most countries, emphatically including Britain, Austria, Italy, Russia and France, have placed their culture into the safe hands of government ministries.

These are led by officials whose whole lives must have prepared them for the arduous task of shaping their lands’ cultural output and pushing it up to new plateaus of greatness.

However, post hoc, ergo propter hoc being a rhetorical fallacy and all that, one is sorely tempted to detect an inverse relationship between a country’s culture and the presence of a minister at its helm.

Observing all those countries rapidly sliding into out-and-out barbarism, one may suggest, without much claim to logical rigour, that they’ve suffered their cultural demise not when they acquired culture ministers, but specifically because of it.

Such jaundiced speculations are going to become wider, thanks to France’s new culture minister Fleur ‘Flower’ Pellerin.

This pretty 41-year-old, usually photographed with a neckline plunging down to her navel, told a TV interviewer that she loved Patrick Modiano, the French novelist who earlier this month won the Nobel prize for literature.

Asked which of his novels had impressed her most, ‘Flower’ couldn’t name a single one.

When the interviewer expressed a mild surprise, the culture minister admitted “without the slightest difficulty” that, being a busy person, she had no time to read books.

Now allow me to provide a little local backdrop.

The French hold bookishness in much higher esteem than the British do. Their university graduates tend to be better-read than ours, or at least better at pretending they are.

Thus few people in Britain are scandalised when finding out that Tony Blair hasn’t read a serious book since his student days, if then. We don’t hold such illiteracy against our politicians – in fact it enhances their popular appeal.

The French tend to be different, and they also tend to be more overtly patriotic than we are. Hence every achievement, no matter how trivial, by a French citizen receives wide, not to say cloying, publicity – especially if said achievement confirms the sense of cultural superiority most Frenchmen share.

Add the two tendencies together, and you’ll see why Modiano’s name, along with the titles of all his books, has been splashed all over the French press with gallons of typographic paint.

Anyone who has as much as opened a French broadsheet over the last fortnight has Modiano coming out of his ears, and it’s as hard for a Frenchman, even a non-reading one, not to learn the titles of Modiano’s books as for an American not to know Kim Kardashian’s vital statistics (38-26.5-40, for the ignoramuses among you).

In other words, the lovely ‘Flower’ has no time not only for books but also for newspapers, at least those sections that don’t deal with the latest opinion polls.

The French are surprised, which is the only thing that surprises me. They simply don’t seem to understand the nature of modern government.

At first glance it appears that a culture minister who doesn’t read books is as incongruous as a pacifist defence minister or a finance minister who regards money as filthy lucre and the source of all evil.

The assumption is that someone put in charge of a government department ought to be familiar with the field under its aegis. This assumption is woefully wrong.

It’s no more necessary for a government bureaucrat to possess such knowledge than it was for the Nazi Gauleiter of the Ukraine Erich Koch to learn Ukrainian.

Koch represented an occupying power, and so, in a way, does a modern culture minister. Mlle Pellerin’s brief is not to return France to her former artistic glory but to use public funds to bend culture to the state’s egalitarian will.

Since things can only ever be equalised at the lowest common denominator, ignorance and cultural barbarism aren’t disqualifying characteristics for the post. They are practically job requirements.

A cultivated and refined culture minister might diverge funds to promote real art, as opposed to electronically enhanced flatulence, tasteless scribbles, unmade beds and pickled animals (I’m not sure what the French equivalents of those last two are, but I’m certain they exist).

That simply wouldn’t do. Before long schoolchildren would learn enough discernment to realise that not all tastes are equally valid or all judgements equally sound. When they grow up, they may even notice that yet another ‘leader’ is capable of jamming a dozen grammatical and logical solecisms into a short speech.

This would undermine the very foundations of modern politics, casting the state adrift like a rudderless ship. People would demand to be governed by public-spirited statesmen, not power-grabbing spivs, and where would we be then?

Summing up, Mlle Pellerin is perfect for her job, and I can only compliment my friend François Hollande on his keen, and widely publicised, eye for female beauty.