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Congratulations to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on the birth of their son, our future king.

Few of us will live to see his reign, but all of us can pray that it’ll be a happy one, over a peaceful, prosperous realm. Meanwhile we can rejoice.

We should also congratulate ourselves – not only on someone who was born but also on something that wasn’t: yet another act of constitutional vandalism.

God has interfered to avoid another exercise in subversion by our Prime Spiv Dave. Having already shoved through Parliament the law abandoning royal male primogeniture, he was waiting for endorsement from other Commonwealth countries to make sure that the monarch’s first child, regardless of sex, would inherit the throne.

Dave improbably styles himself as a conservative, so he must be aware of the virtue of prudence. This was expressed epigrammatically in 1641 by Lucius Cary, 2^nd Viscount Falkland: “If it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.”

As a true-blue conservative Dave must repeat those words every morning, before screaming, “Sam, have you run my bloody bath?” Therefore he must believe that abandoning the succession law that has existed for over a millennium was necessary.

May one enquire as to the nature of this necessity? What is it about the law of primogeniture that has let the country down? How has it run foul of the constitution?

It hasn’t. What the law of succession has run foul of is the sole faith by which our spivocrats live: political expediency. In search of a few extra votes that would keep them in power they’re ready to trample over the constitution, sovereignty, religion – anything.

You see, primogeniture violates the politically correct tenet of ‘gender equality’ (‘sex equality’ would be correct linguistically but not politically). That’s why our true-blue Dave won’t be held back by historical considerations.

Male primogeniture predates political correctness by centuries, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is the next election, which Dave hopes to win by appealing to the intellectually and morally corrupted segment of the population.

It would be pointless trying to explain to him how cosmically wrong he is: he either wouldn’t understand or wouldn’t care. But those of us who do care must realise that the monarchy isn’t there to jump up and salute every time our spivs perch a newfangled piety on top of the totem pole.

In addition to their main duties, both the Church and the monarchy perform the vital function of linking the generations past, present and future.

Aware of this, the people of Britain and other European kingdoms have preserved their monarchies (with minor hiatuses here and there), even though they may have divested them of any real executive power.

However, they understand intuitively that dispensing with even the seemingly powerless monarchs would represent an irreplaceable loss. Unlike Walter Bagehot, they know that the monarchy is so much more than just “the decorative aspect” of the constitution.

As all those countries are now enthusiastically secular and ideologically democratic, few people there would be able to identify what it is that they would be reluctant to lose. If pressed, they would probably refer obliquely to ‘tradition’, without fully realising what it is.

Many would resent the thought that monarchies link their secular present with their Christian past, yet this is precisely what monarchies do. They are Christendom’s envoys to modernity, and even those people who would throw up their arms in horror at this suggestion will still hear vague, intuitive echoes in their souls.

Royal families remind them of the origin of their own families – kings and queens are their link to the past they ostensibly no longer cherish and to God in whom they ostensibly no longer believe.

This is whence they derive their sense of organic continuity, something they desperately, if often unwittingly, crave – and something that is denied to nations where monarchies no longer exist or have never existed.

They may not know exactly what they are missing, but rest assured that deep down they all know they are missing something vital, something they will not get from any secular creed – and certainly not from the nauseatingly puny cult of political correctness.

Just observe the intensity with which the royal birth was watched in the first two revolutionary republics of modernity, the USA and France. One can detect, among other things, a distinct longing for something not to be found in their own lands.

Dave and his jolly spivs don’t share such feelings. They long for nothing but power, their own and that of the new political class whose very existence is incompatible with England’s ancient constitution. So they yearn to destroy it.

The people of our country have proved to be either too indifferent or too weak to stop this act of constitutional vandalism, or many others like it. So thank God for His timely interference. It’s a boy!

 

In addition to his many sterling qualities, my friend Peter loves Mozart. So did Stalin and Beria, head of his secret police.

Yet in spite of this shared passion, never once have I heard Peter say anything nice about either chap. In fact, he loathes them and everything they stood for with the passion to be expected in any decent man.

For all her many fine qualities, my friend Daniele is a vegetarian. So were Hitler and Himmler, his head of the SS.

Yet in spite of this shared eating disorder, Daniele has never had anything nice to say about either villain. If asked I’m sure she’d express nothing short of revulsion for them.

This is natural. Both Peter and Daniele know that even as one swallow does not a summer make (or is it supper?), a single commendable commitment isn’t sufficient to chalk up either a despot or his state among the good things in life.

You’d think that all intelligent people would accept the general wisdom of this statement and apply it unfailingly to every particular situation. Well, if you think so you’re mistaken.

For recently I’ve met both in England and in France quite a few otherwise intelligent individuals who profess admiration for Putin’s Russia. Some have even converted to Russian Orthodoxy for that reason, or are contemplating such a step.

Why? Because they approve of Putin’s stand on ‘gay rights’. Shell-shocked by their own governments’ subversive slant towards homomarriage, they turn to Russia to find some residual sanity in the world.

The young editor of France’s only conservative magazine (which has once had my mug shot on the cover, I’ll have you know) told me at a party the other day that young French conservatives are confused.

They hate the rock into which France is calcifying so much that they don’t see Russia for the hard place that it is. “They like Putin because he hates gay rights,” said the editor. “So did bin Laden,” I replied. “Did they like him too?” “Well, they are confused,” admitted my young friend. “They don’t know where to turn.”

Our Home Secretary Theresa May is a professional politician. Therefore she has a weathervane’s certainty of exactly where to turn: wherever the wind is blowing.

That’s why she has decided not to hold a public inquiry into the 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London. Instead she has appointed Robert Owen, a senior judge, to conduct an inquest in camera.

Now at the time he was poisoned by polonium 210 Litvinenko, formerly Putin’s colleague in the KGB, was a British subject. His murder was the first ever case of nuclear terrorism, probably a harbinger of things to come.

There’s little doubt that the crime was committed by the Russians, in all probability by one specific Russian, another KGB veteran Andrei Lugovoi. In any case, anyone familiar with Russia’s decision-making process will know that such an action had to be ordered by Putin personally.

Lugovoi was promptly charged with murder but managed to get away to Moscow. Britain’s extradition request was dismissed out of hand and, to make double sure, Lugovoi was hastily elected to the Duma, where he now enjoys parliamentary immunity.

The exotic weapon that killed Litvinenko was unique, but this method of dealing with critics of Putin isn’t. At least 40 journalists and political activists have been murdered on Putin’s watch, many more maimed, tortured or imprisoned. Just a few days ago Alexei Navalny, Putin’s most vociferous critic, was sentenced to five years in prison on a trumped-up fraud charge.

Without splitting too many taxonomic hairs, a regime that handles dissidents in this manner is fascist. Add to this suppression of the free press, all-pervasive corruption and the dictatorial powers wielded by Putin, and the fascist glove begins to fit ever more snugly.  

In the relatively recent past, any foreign power murdering a British subject, especially in Britain, wouldn’t have been regarded as a friend of ours. Its refusal to extradite the culprit would have been seen as sufficient grounds for severing diplomatic relations at least.

So what did our Home Secretary write to Judge Owen? “An inquest managed and run by an independent coroner is more readily explainable to some of our foreign partners, and the integrity of the process more readily grasped, than an inquiry, which has the power to see government material potentially relevant to their interests, in secret.”

If you can decipher Mrs May’s convoluted prose, which “foreign partners” do you think she means? Italy? Norway? But neither is implicated in the murder. Putin’s Russia is, and it’s her delicate sensibilities that our Home Secretary wishes to spare.

“It is true that international relations have been a factor in the government’s decision making,” she admitted rather superfluously.

International relations were also a factor in 1938 when Neville Chamberlain waved that piece of paper in the air. We all know what happened next – as a direct consequence of the attempt to appease a fascist chieftain.

Dare one say it, but perhaps our politicians would be on firmer ground if they occasionally treated British justice and Christian morality as “factors in their decision making”. Then fewer people would be confused in general and about Putin in particular.

If such, in Mrs May’s estimation, are our cherished “partners”, one wonders what her definition of an enemy would be. Any real conservative, would be my guess.

The Leader of the Free World seems to forget at times that he’s no longer a community organiser or a civil rights lawyer in a bad part of Chicago.

He’s in his second term as president of the United States. In this capacity he’s sworn to uphold the interests of the whole nation, most of which is still white.

His comments on the Trayvon Martin case point at a conflict between his brain and his heart. The upper organ put him on the right track by making him say that “the jury has spoken” and leaving it at that.

However, the lower organ was restless. You see, Obama is black. Actually, saying that is being unfair to his white mother, who is implicitly discounted as an annoying irrelevance. It’s as if Obama père had produced little Barack Hussein by parthenogenesis.

Yet both the black community in America and the left half of the white one still appear to be living by Jim Crow laws. In the old days white racists in places like Alabama would hiss “a drop of tar, all nigger”. Though ‘liberal’ Americans eschew the ‘n’ word nowadays, they seem to live by the principles that inspired its formerly wide use.

That makes Barack Hussein unreservedly black, in most people’s minds probably, in his own definitely. Without in any way suggesting that his heart is black morally, it evidently is racially.

Thus last week Obama had to make two statements in addition to the commendable one that had come from his brain. In one he opined that if he had a son, the boy would look like Trayvon Martin. What, dead? Presumably, Barack Hussein didn’t mean that.

Then Obama made a surprise appearance in the White House press room to inform the furiously scribbling pundits that “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.”

When that eye-opening statement was communicated to the country, many sighed wistfully. Considering Obama’s record in office, the thought that he could have been shot in self-defence at age 16 wasn’t without appeal.

Obama’s head knew better than to question the jury verdict based on a long trial in which dozens of witnesses were heard, 250 pages of evidence were presented, and the defence made its case.

He probably also realises that to call for the case to be retried in the federal human-rights court would only lead to more violent riots all across the country. This is something professional blacks like Al Sharpton wish to see, but for a president to share such cravings would be going a bit too far.

But the president’s heart overrode his head, making him meet Sharpton halfway. “There are very few African-American men,” said the president, “who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happened to me – at least before I was a senator.” Connotation running riot; denotation fleeing in disarray.

Has he ever wondered why those locks click? Is it because of white America’s congenital Negrophobia? Is it because white Americans are ignorant of the facts of life? Or is it precisely because they do know them?

New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly certainly does. According to him, blacks and Hispanics commit 96 percent of all crimes in the city, with 98 percent of all gun assaults and muggings.

Fernando Mateo, himself both a black and a Hispanic, heads the New York taxicab union. According to him, “The God’s honest truth is that 99 percent of the people that are robbing, stealing, killing cab drivers are blacks and Hispanics.”

What about interracial crimes then? There’s no shortage of those, according to the FBI study for 2007, cited in Pat Buchanan’s book Suicide of a Superpower. Except that 433,934 such crimes were committed by blacks on whites – four times the number of those going the other way. Blacks also perpetrated 14,000 assaults on white women – with exactly zero committed by white men on black women.

That’s why, Mr President, those locks click on car doors when a black man walks down the street. Americans aren’t racist, at least not en masse. They’re just prudent. They know what to expect from a group in which 73 percent of all children are born on the wrong side of the blanket.

Obviously, the Leader of the Free World knows such facts – in his head. But his heart doesn’t want to know.

Mr Obama really ought to confine his thinking to his brain, rather than other parts of his anatomy. That way he’d make fewer people in America and elsewhere wish he had indeed suffered Trayvon Martin’s fate 35 years ago.

Much has been written about the burden placed on the fragile shoulders of our treasury by the huge influx of immigrants from alien cultures.

Coming from lands utterly corrupted by either Islam or communism, many of them can’t pay their way in a Western economy. Alas, nowadays Western economies are conditioned to open their coffers to those who shouldn’t have access to them.

Hence the ruinous public spending which is the primary cause of the current crisis. Hence also the rapidly declining quality of our legislators who now have a glorious opportunity to bribe their way to power.

All they have to do to make sure Paul will vote for them is rob Peter and transfer the loot Paul’s way. And this points at the gravest damage done by the immigration deluge. It isn’t financial. It’s moral.

Rather than adapting to our ways, all those Romanian or Bulgarian gypsies and especially Muslims from Asia or Africa want to impose their ways on us.

When their numbers reach a certain critical mass, the damage becomes incalculable. It’s noticeable in our schools, with many – in some places most – pupils unable to speak English properly. Our hospitals also suffer, what with many doctors’ qualifications not meeting civilised standards. The traditional practices of our founding religion are becoming offensive to millions, who have to be mollified and mollycoddled.

Perhaps even the greater damage is political. I’ve already mentioned that vast communities where few people are employed pave the way to Westminster for out-and-out spivs, and that’s bad enough. For it’s these spivs who make all those outrages possible, with the acquiescence of a largely inert populace.

But predominantly Muslim communities, whose number is mushrooming, also wash ashore at Westminster the flotsam of real creepy-crawlies. Such as David Ward, LibDem MP for Bradford East, where few Christians are to be found.

Every time I write about this creature, I feel the urge to run a damp cloth over the keyboard afterwards. For Ward is a virulent, zoological anti-Semite.

He isn’t the only one, it has to be said. This little idiosyncrasy is reasonably widespread, and even some outstanding people aren’t immune to it – Chesterton comes to mind, along with Belloc, Waugh, Kingsley Amis, perhaps even Shakespeare.

Closer to our time, one can think of a few anti-Semitic politicians, specifically within the ranks of the SDP, the predecessor of today’s LibDems. One gets the impression that perhaps they misunderstand the meaning of the word ‘liberal’ in their party name.

However, in the past such politicians this side of Oswald Mosley kept that charming trait to themselves, when addressing a wide audience at any rate. The creepy-crawly Ward doesn’t feel he has to. On the contrary, he knows that the more hatred towards Jews he evinces, the more he’ll appeal to his voters.

Hence he keeps talking about the ‘Jewish atrocities’ in Palestine, feigning dismay that “the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps, be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians… and continue to do so.”

When Ward first tweeted this drivel, he received a mild slap on the wrist from Nick Clegg, who threatened to withdraw the party whip. Ward offered a feeble apology, but only after stating that he and his party had ‘a difference of opinion.’

That happened in January, when he was also told to use ‘proportionate and precise language’ henceforth. The party bosses should have been careful what they wished for. Ward’s idea of ‘precise language’ would doubtless be saying that it’s a pity Hitler didn’t quite finish the job, leaving so much for the Muslims to mop up.

Two days ago he came close to such precision by tweeting more hateful nonsense: “At long last the Zionists are losing the battle – how long can the apartheid State of Israel last?”

If this ‘apartheid state’ ceases to exist, say after a military defeat, millions of Jews will be murdered on the spot, an outcome Ward would no doubt applaud. Such a heartfelt sentiment deserved a slap on the other wrist, and it promptly came.

Ward had the party whip suspended for two months – exactly the two months during which Parliament will be in recess anyway. According to the party bosses, his offence was again in using “disproportionate and imprecise language.”

This sort of thing, the letter explained, makes it hard for the party to criticise Israel, something it dearly wants to do, especially when it comes to “addressing the plight of the Palestinian people.”

Perhaps the party could do better by criticising not Israel but the crazed fanatics threatening to “push it into the sea.”

This isn’t to say that Israel is beyond criticism. In this world we’re blessed with neither ideal states nor perfect institutions, and Israel is far from being paradise on earth. However, it’s surrounded by hell on earth – and it’s this hell that Israel keeps at bay for all our sakes.

The State of Israel has been thrust in the role of vanguard in the West’s conflict with Islam. This conflict predates Israel by about 1,400 years, so it can hardly be blamed for instigating the hostilities.

According to Descartes, all knowledge comes either from intuition or from comparing two or more things, and this is one thing he got right.

So by all means the LibDems and the rest of us should criticise Israel, if such is our wish. But while doing so, do let’s compare it to every other state in the region, along with its profusion of terrorist gangs. If Descartes was right, then knowledge will emerge at the other end: Israel, for all its imperfections, is civilised, and the other lot aren’t.

Far be it from me to say that any criticism of Israel betokens anti-Semitism – as long as we agree that some definitely does. In his rants Ward uses ‘Israel’ as shorthand for world Jewry and ‘Zionists’ as simply another word for Jews, whom he hates viscerally.

The derisory punishment for voicing such sentiments brings into question his party’s stand on such issues. My guess is that no further chastisement is forthcoming: Nick will hate to lose one of his handful of remaining MPs. It goes without saying that political considerations trump all others.

It’s a truth acknowledged widely, if not exactly universally, that any country whose government includes posts like Culture Secretary is on its way to perdition.

Culture isn’t a legitimate concern of the state. Before any country even thought of putting cultural pursuits within the domain of government, such pursuits had yielded rather spectacular fruit.

Since that time the same orchard has been lying fallow. Methinks there’s a causal relationship there somewhere.

Culture Secretary Maria Miller tends to go out of her way to prove the validity of this point. Thus she attacked the BBC for the ‘sexist’ bias in its sports coverage.

It has to be said that, what with the BBC being a state broadcasting service, Mrs (Ms?) Miller is within her remit to pass judgment on its various prejudices.

Prime among those is its distinct leftwing bias, leading to the BBC’s laudable consistency in supporting every harebrained cause known to man: climate change, wind farms, homomarriage, Islamism, Muslim immigration, Labour and LibDem parties in every election – before long I’ll run out of fingers on both hands and then of toes on both feet.

Yet Mrs/Ms Miller has remained stoically silent on all of those. What caused her wrath was a few unchivalrous remarks sports presenter John Inverdale saw fit to make about Wimbledon singles champion Marion Bartoli.

Specifically, Mr Inverdale said, “I just wonder if her Dad did say to her when she was 12, 13, 14 maybe: ‘Listen, you are never going to be, you know, a looker. You are never going to be somebody like a Sharapova, you’re never going to be 5 feet 11, you’re never going to be somebody with long legs…’”

These remarks weren’t so much ‘sexist’ (whatever it means) as stupid and ignorant. Maria Sharapova, for example, isn’t 5’11’’ but 6’2”, though her legs are undeniably long. This is something a tennis commentator should know, and if he doesn’t he should refrain from comment.

Neither is it his business to pontificate at such length on the aesthetic aspect of Miss Bartoli’s appearance. This isn’t to say that no comment on her looks would be appropriate.

Compare, for example, Mr Inverdale’s remarks with what I wrote on the same subject at the same time: “…Marion Bartoli of France reproduces in her body the map shape of her native land. There’s something wrong when a professional athlete paid millions for her trade has a waist broader than her shoulders.”

My problem wasn’t with Miss Bartoli’s chances of winning a beauty contest but with women’s tennis in general. There’s indeed something wrong with a sport where many star performers clearly don’t have to train all that hard to win major competitions. And it’s scandalous that such people get the same prize money as their male counterparts, who not only spend twice as long on the court but also manifestly thrice as long working on their fitness.

The reason Miss Bartoli got paid £1.6 million for her victory is modern egalitarianism that demands equal pay even for unequal work. It would behove a Conservative minister to comment on this gross iniquity. Instead Mrs/Ms Miller chose to reinforce the same feminism that’s responsible for it.

Deputy PM Nick agreed, even though he magnanimously accepted that, “Of course it’s not the role of politicians to start second-guessing what every single journalist and every single reporter says, but of course we’ve got to be clear that what we don’t want is sexism in sport and we don’t want that reflected in the way it’s supported.”

God spare a country whose second-in-command so sorely lacks in rhetorical skill, knowledge of basic grammar and sense of style. The underlying philosophy, however, is even more problematic.

Both Nick and Mrs/Ms Miller are planning to boycott this year’s British Open which is to golf what Wimbledon is to tennis. Why? Because it’s going to be held at Scotland’s Muirfield club that doesn’t admit women.

Nick is aghast: “I was just dismayed and incredibly surprised to hear this still goes on in this day and age. I find it so out of step with everything else that’s happening in the rest of society.”

It is indeed. Everything else that’s happening in the rest of society includes things like homomarriage, which Nick finds admirable.

Yet he and his friend Dave Cameron, who’s equally angry, ought to remember that Murfield is a private club, which means it’s home to its members and their committee. Just as Nick or Dave would be within their right to deny admission into their homes to anyone they find unacceptable (say, a real conservative), so should Murfield be free to determine its own membership criteria.

Nick, incidentally, finds it hard to get his head around the concept of membership policy. For example he was incensed a couple of years ago when turned down for membership at my own Putney Lawn Tennis Club.

Nick, who lives a hundred yards from the club, wanted to circumvent our policy of play-ins designed to make sure that new members would be able to hold their own against established players. He obviously felt that he merited admission just because he was, well, Nick.

Our committee disabused him of this notion – and I do hope Muirfield defends its membership policy with the same steadfast vigour. Someone ought to tell this utterly objectionable lot where to get off.

This may be a solipsistic view of literature, but nowadays I only ever read books about myself.

You may think this would narrow my options down to zero: no book has so far been written specifically about me – not even my upcoming memoir How the Future Worked, which only pretends to be about me, but is in fact about Russia.

But I don’t mean this quite so literally. Rather I’m talking about books that touch a chord sounding whatever occupies me at the moment. Some such books may tell, some may show, but they all stimulate. A book may neither enlighten nor entertain, yet I’ll forgive the author – as long as he gets me thinking about things that matter. On this requirement I’ll never compromise.

Thus I don’t read many novels any longer: somehow they seem to be a thing of the past. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Austen and Dickens, Rabelais and Stendhal along with dozens of others still rate my admiration and gratitude. Yet they only rarely rate my time. As to new novels, they invariably get short shrift: a quick glance and back on the bookshop’s shelf they go: life’s too short.

Well life’s still too short, and it’s not getting any longer. But The Tragedy of Fidel Castro (River Grove Books) by the Portuguese writer João Cerqueira makes me wonder how much pleasure I’ve denied myself.

Good prose, regardless of its genre, may not always be realistic but it’s always real. Bad prose never is. Gulliver living in a land of talking horses, Georg Samsa turning into a monstrous vermin, Major Kovalev’s nose walking off his face ring true, while the naturalistically drawn characters of, say, Zola don’t.

We believe Swift, Kafka and Gogol not because they describe in minute detail the world we see around us. We believe them because they invite us into a world of their own creation, and their power of imagination and expression is such that we readily come in, shaking off our feet the dust of the world we’ve hitherto regarded as the only unassailable reality.

Placing Cerqueira into the same category as the triad I’ve mentioned would be issuing too much credit on too small an initial deposit. He needs to do much more to find himself in such exalted company. But there’s enough in his short and sharp Castro to suggest than one day he might.

For Cerqueira too swaps realism for reality, and he too creates an unreal reality that, on its own terms, rings true.

His preface lists the dramatis personae, including an unlikely mélange of Christ (who “has nothing to do with Jesus Christ, the son of God”), JFK (who “is someone other than an American president with the same initials”), God (who “does not represent God, creator of the world and men”), Fidel Castro (who “perhaps has some similarities with the revolutionary leader and dictator”) and Fatima (who “has no connection whatsoever with a particular site in Portugal”).

This lets us know from the beginning that we’re in good hands, and we let these hands guide us through a plot that’s utterly unrealistic and so much the more real for it.

The land of Castro and the land of JFK are about to go to murderous war, and Fatima appeals to God for help. The deity responds by talking his son Jesus (bearing no resemblance…) into interceding on His behalf.

Castro’s decision to invade “the land of JFK” comes from the same impulse that so many other tyrants share. They seek in foreign aggression a reprieve from domestic problems, especially when the natives become restless.

Fidel then wins the initial battles against JFK’s army but can’t win the war against the people’s certitudes. The JFKers are as reluctant to abandon their freewheeling ways as Castro’s own people are to accept that the revolutionaries’ practices are in accord with their ideals.

Faced with this seemingly unsolvable conundrum, Castro again follows the path trodden by other tyrants: he runs. Unlike others, however, whose chosen destination is typically some faraway haven made heavenly by purloined fortunes, Fidel flees to a monastery where his brain is wiped clean by amnesia.

Yet he retains enough visceral memory to start plotting against the friars. This brings back his physical memory as well, and he retakes command of his army. In the process he sells his soul to the Devil. Fidel’s payoff in this Faustian transaction again has something to do with memory, in this instance that of his people. In exchange for his soul he wants to be remembered as a hero, rather than the bloodthirsty despot that he is.

The divine protagonists set up the ultimate battle by sticking to the scenario they know best. Rather than leading a global war of mutual annihilation, JFK and Fidel stage a personal battle, starring the former as David and the latter as Goliath. Yet again David carries the day, and the weapon he launches is the all-familiar stone.

The ultimate winner is the author who manages to pull off the improbable feat of making this phantasmagorical plot believable – and an even more improbable one of producing satire that doesn’t strike one as redundant.

This is no mean accomplishment, for our modern world seems to be dead-set on outpacing any attempt to satirise it. Not only is reality stranger than fiction; it also has an unmatched if unwitting ability to satirise itself.

A sporting man, Cerqueira more or less eschews the land of Fidel as too easy a target. A quick sketch suffices, acting as a reminder of what most of us already know. Instead Cerqueira is at his most poignant when showing the spiritual emptiness of “the land of JFK” (bearing no resemblance… and all that).

What he sees in his sights, in other words, isn’t just modernity at its most violent but modernity as such. The battle between Fidel and JFK isn’t a clash between irreconcilable opposites – it’s one between cathode and anode, opposites that attract rather than repel each other.

In this sense, The Tragedy of Fidel Castro is my tragedy as well. It’s a book about me, about you, about all of us. All of us should read it.

 

According to mounting reports, Samantha Cameron affects Britain’s policy by using her hubby-wubby Dave as a conduit.

Perhaps it would be useful to remind the happy couple that she is neither elected nor qualified to act in that capacity. Dave, at least, meets one of these requirements.

In fact, it’s far from certain that she is intellectually superior to the creature tattooed on her ankle. After all, the dolphin’s intelligence has been established by extensive tests, and it has the demonstrable advantage of not having the likeness of Samantha tattooed on its fin.

By all accounts, it was Sam who pushed Dave towards his untenable positions on climate change, homomarriage and aid for variously unsavoury groups.

Specifically, she’s believed to have persuaded Dave that any attempt to protect marriage may lose him votes among groups that are hostile to the institution either ideologically or physiologically.

Now Sam has visited a few refugee camps in Syria and discovered that they don’t even remotely resemble the manor in which she grew up. That had a revelatory effect on Sam, similar to what Saul of Tarsus once experienced in the same region.

Upon return home she used her feminine wiles to push Dave towards supporting the very groups whose bellicosity had brought the camps into existence.

“As a mother,” she said, “it is horrifying to hear the harrowing stories from the children I met today. No child should ever experience what they have.” The grammar is questionable, but the sentiment is unassailable.

The trick, however, is to translate sentiment into policy, and this requires a certain set of qualities of which our sensitive mother is singularly bereft. So, for that matter, is Dave, but at least he is able to consult competent advisors.

Hence our senior military commanders told him in no uncertain terms that, unless he’s prepared to declare war on Syria, he should muzzle his wife. Put out or shut up, was the gist, although I’m sure the actual language was more refined.

And speaking of translating sentiment into policy, Sam isn’t the only one who has a problem in that area. His Holiness Pope Francis seems to find it hard too.

Last week the Pope visited Lampedusa, a tiny island off the coast of Sicily. The island is a popular destination for refugee ships sailing from Tunisia and Lybia. A couple of those have sunk along the way, with many escapees dying.

His Holiness delivered a stirring sermon on the subject of such fundamental Christian virtues as charity, compassion and solidarity.

He gave “a thought, too, to the dear Muslim immigrants that are beginning the fast of Ramadan” and accused the world of “globalised indifference” to their plight.

One wonders if all those prone Muslims being called to prayer by our Radio 4 reciprocate by giving a thought to the thousands of Christians robbed and murdered throughout the Islamic world. Then of course a true Christian doesn’t believe that there must be a tit for every tat.

As to such Christian virtues as compassion, are we also allowed to feel it for the 4,500 inhabitants of Lampedusa who’ve seen their bucolic little island turned into a giant refugee camp? The Lampedusans are, after all, communicants in the same Church of which Pope Francis is the leader. Surely His Holiness’s first job is to ‘give a thought’ to them, before going all multi-culti?

All Christians must pray for those persecuted, dying horrific deaths, driven out of their homes. The Pope is entirely within his remit to remind us sinners of compassion and charity – in fact, he can’t do so too often.

Similarly, any normal person visiting a refugee camp will be overwhelmed with pity and empathy. Having visited a Chechen refugee camp in 1995, I can testify to this from personal experience.

Yet the next question ought to be the one always asked at the end of political get-togethers: “So what are we going to do about it?”

Here both sentimental mothers and celibate prelates can find themselves on shaky grounds. For neither sentiment nor especially sentimentality is a reliable guide to policy making in the secular realm.

How does His Holiness see the policies required to overcome our “global indifference”? How are we supposed to prevent an exodus of desperate people risking their lives on the way to our welfare offices?

Two possibilities come to mind. One, driven by Christian compassion and charity, we extend a warm welcome to the entire population of Africa and the Middle East.

Within a year or two, the population of Europe would triple, making it indistinguishable from the lands of the refugees’ origin. Europe’s predominantly Muslim population would starve, and all our radio stations, not just the BBC, will be airing muezzins’ calls to prayer.

Assuming this isn’t the end His Holiness sees in his mind’s eye, one can think of only one alternative – that of repeating something John Quincy Adams said about America in his 1825 inauguration speech: “She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

Our thoughts and prayers should go to the Africans and Asians suffering poverty and oppression. Our policy should be to tell them that Europe has run out of even standing room. If they don’t like it where they are, they should do something about it – and joining our welfare rolls is no longer an available option.

We should also undertake not to provoke refugee-spinning conflicts in places like Syria – or stay out of them if they conflagrate spontaneously.

Perhaps Sam should seek an audience with His Holiness. They may have a most enjoyable chat – provided she remembers to wear opaque stockings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday France was celebrating the anniversary of one of the most catastrophic events in the history of Western civilisation: the French Revolution.

On that day, 224 years ago, the mob stormed the Bastille and liberated the seven prisoners held there. Not much of a triumph, one would think, but it’s the symbolic value that counts.

The mob, expertly egged on by bloodthirsty revolutionaries, was thereby liberated to do what the mob does best: murder, rob and destroy.

The downtrodden masses had shaken off the centuries of oppression by kings, aristocrats and the Church. Or at least that’s how they were encouraged to think of those centuries. Good people described them as Western civilisation, the greatest the world had ever known. Even better people referred to them as Christendom, thereby pinpointing the source of all that grandeur.

The difference of opinion predictably led to mass slaughter and destruction. About a million Frenchmen were massacred in the immediate aftermath, another two million in the subsequent wars.

As if to emphasise that it wasn’t just certain classes that were singled out for extermination but also the culture they had created, the mob went on to destroy man’s highest architectural achievements: Romanesque and Gothic buildings.

In the estimation of the prominent medievalist Régine Pernoud, over the next 100 years about 80 percent of such structures were razed and most of the others defaced.

In our neck of the Burgundian woods one can still admire countless Romanesque and Gothic churches, most of them empty, some slated for destruction but not yet destroyed. If that represents the remaining 20 percent of a great civilisation, imagine the marvel that was France with all 100 percent still intact.

One man’s marvel is another man’s target, and clearly the newly liberated mob had to hate such reminders of the glory of God. It wasn’t just the buildings to which they were taking their wrecking balls – it was to everything the buildings represented.

How any decent person can feel jubilant on 14 July escapes me. Yet there were fireworks in every village, with villagers getting drunk joyously, rather than just as a matter of daily routine.

Interestingly, the same class divisions that partly inspired the original mayhem are still extant. Thus there isn’t a single Frenchman among our friends, cultured people all, who shares in the spirit of celebration.

One chap told me at a party the other day he agreed with me entirely: there’s nothing to celebrate.

He then went on to describe himself as both a royalist and a Thomist – a most agreeable combination in my eyes. Not every one of our friends here is either a Thomist or a royalist, though many are at least one of those, but they all think of their revolution as a disgrace.

So one suspects they won’t be celebrating 4 August with any more enthusiasm than they displayed on 14 July. On that day all class privilege and titles of nobility were abolished in France, just as they had been in America a few years earlier.

The Americans still haven’t come to their senses, but the French have. Amazingly in a republic, all those Messieurs les Comptes and Mesdames les Baronnes we know wear their titles on their sleeves the way their British equivalents don’t – and we’re supposed to be a monarchy.

A psychologist might refer to this tendency as overcompensation, but whatever we call it France remains a much more hierarchical society than Britain. That may be why it remains marginally more civilised, although the gap is closing.

America, for which the advent of social egalitarianism coincided with the beginning of their civilisation rather than, as it did in France, its end, may have suffered less from her revolutionary upheaval – after all, she had much less to lose.

Consequently even civilised Americans, those who still haven’t moved to England or France, have their barbecues on 4 July, weather permitting.

That’s why I tend to be more reticent when talking to Americans about their revolution. This represent a triumph of self-restraint, for my feelings about the 4^th of July are the same as about the 14^th.

Remarkably, even Burke, who was right about everything else, was wrong about the relative merits of the two revolutions.

In general many, not just Burke, have argued that there were fundamental differences between the American and French revolutions, or indeed between the Anglo-American (‘Right-wing’) and the French (‘Left-wing’) Enlightenment.

I have never found the arguments to be as immediately persuasive as Coleridge did, to name one conservative scribe. Both the philosophical and religious sources of the putative two types of the Enlightenment were the same, owing much to the Reformation and its intellectual spawns Hobbes and Locke.

This debt was acknowledged as gratefully by Jefferson or Madison as by Montesquieu or Voltaire – Protestant deist Locke was admired in Catholic France more than in his own land.

Hysterical hatred of monarchy as the political manifestation of Christendom and of Trinitarian Christianity as its base; egalitarianism; deism; pluralism understood in a most mechanical sense, rampant statism – all these were shared equally by the philosophes of both the Old and the New Worlds.

If one lot arrived at their deism, in effect atheism, from a Catholic starting point and the other from a sectarian Protestant one, they all got there in the end.

Then they all converged in their keenly felt urge to wipe out Western civilisation, otherwise known as Christendom.

One can feel complacent about America, where this constituted not so much a desire to destroy as a refusal to create. France is a different matter, of course, and I do hope one day 14 July and 4 August will be declared national days of mourning.

Mind you, I am not holding my breath.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

US foreign policy probably isn’t designed to empower wild-eyed fanatics everywhere in the Middle East.

But one is hard-pressed to see what the Americans would be doing differently if it were.

First they destabilised the region by their unprovoked – and, what’s worse, foolhardy – attack on Iraq. The immediate result was plunging the country into sanguinary ethnic strife, which was something Saddam, monstrous as he was, managed to keep in check.

The long-term effect was a burst of energy experienced by every militant group in the Middle East, Sunni, Shiite or simply diabolical.

The Americans then felt they had to go into Afghanistan, allegedly to obliterate the terrorists’ strongholds there. At that point all hell broke loose, and whenever that happens it’s the devils who stand to benefit.

In this instance these weren’t the devils we knew – and knew how to handle. The beneficiaries of American meddling were the so-called Islamists, a term probably invented by the US State Department.

There’s no such thing. An ‘Islamist’ is just a consistent Muslim, someone who lives by the commandments of Islam.

Now that religion, with the civilisation it has produced, is our enemy, pure and simple. The more consistent a Muslim is, the greater danger he presents to us, both collectively and individually.

Therefore it’s in our interest to support the least consistent Muslim regimes, while isolating or trying to undermine those run by real, pious believers.

In practice this means supporting the most undemocratic regimes, for most Muslims, unlike most Christians and Jews, are active believers and practitioners of their creed. A democratic election is therefore likely to bring to power an Islamic regime – and this is exactly what happened in Iran, to cite one example.

As a rule, it’s the army that is the principal force for secularisation in Muslim lands. It wasn’t by popular uprisings that most secular or quasi-secular regimes have ever taken over. It was by military coups.

Turkey is a prime example. Atatürk secularised the country not by politicking but by brute force. And it was by that expedient that Turkey’s predominantly Islamic people have been made to keep their heads down ever since.

Then the West got into the act, this time spearheaded by the EU, with the Americans bringing up the rear. Turkey, they explained, is a European country – after all, as much as five percent of its territory is in Europe.

As we all know, every European country must belong to the EU, and Turkey is no exception. But the EU being a world-famous champion of democracy, it couldn’t possibly countenance the army exercising any serious power in any of its member states.

Since at the time Turkey unwisely wanted to join the EU, the army was shunted aside, and the country became sufficiently democratic to satisfy the refined tastes of the EU and the USA. As a result it predictably became ‘Islamist’. Which of course it had been all along at the grassroots – but, thanks be to Allah, not politically.

For Turkey, read Egypt, except that there the same process was provoked, encouraged and touted by the Americans (even the dialectical minds of EU chieftains couldn’t quite find a way of portraying Egypt as a European country).

The army ousted the royal family in 1952 and reinvented Egypt as a secular, if variously nasty, state. Actually, by Muslim standards, the governments of Sadat and Mubarak were as benign as they get.

They could stay that way because, as themselves military men, they could rely on the army to keep a lid on the predominantly Islamic inclinations of the populace.

This didn’t agree with the demands of America’s secular religion for which democracy is the principal tenet and the neocons the main proselytisers. The USA provoked the ‘Arab Spring’ with its democratic elections and the predictable result thereof.

The Muslim Brotherhood took over and immediately began to act in character. The transition was a bit too sharp for the people and they became restless.

The army then ousted Mohammed Morsi’s government, but the cat of Islamic fanaticism wouldn’t stay in the bag. The country has been brought to the brink of civil war.

Dozens of people have died in the ensuing violence. Last Monday alone more than 50 Morsi loyalists were killed in clashes with the army.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual leader, Mohammed Badie, and nine other senior figures were charged on Wednesday with inciting Monday’s carnage, which they probably had.

The Americans instantly began to shed crocodile tears over the violence and protest against the ‘arbitrary’ arrests of Muslim Brotherhood members. That apparently isn’t going to prevent them from supplying to Egypt a batch of F-16 fighter-bombers – business has to come first.

But the US administration has to decide whether the military takeover constitutes a coup. Alas, US law prohibits export of arms to any country whose elected leader is deposed by a military coup. This is one area in which I trust the Americans: they’ll find a way.

One just wishes they spared us sanctimonious pronouncements and fulsome regrets. If you instigate civil wars, chaps, people will die. A lot of people.

More Americans were killed in the 1861-1865 Civil War than in all the country’s other wars combined. The English Civil War of 1642-1651 killed a greater proportion of the population than the First World War. That war claimed fewer Russian lives even in absolute terms than the Civil War of 1918-1922.

The old saw about being careful what you wish for is being vindicated. Americans, Egyptians and, vicariously, the rest of us are finding this out the hard way.

Daniel Finkelstein, the Executive Editor of The Times, has it all figured out. If you don’t believe me, read his article It’s Unavoidable: We Need a Directly Elected PM.

First he diagnoses the problem: “The entire modern British constitution is based on a party system that is crumbling.”

Then he prescribes a treatment, drawing in Ed Miliband to provide a second opinion: “… Open primaries in which anyone can run and anyone registering an interest can vote. Ed Miliband suggested he would move towards such a system… Take the executive out of Parliament and have a directly elected prime minister.”

And the desired clinical outcome? “The monopoly of the executive over law-making would go, unable to survive the increased independence of legislators… And both Supreme Court judges and executive appointments could be made subject to some form of confirmation hearing.”

Sorted. The newly cured patient, otherwise known as our ancient constitution, will jump off its sick bed and rush out towards new worlds to conquer – with Miliband as the directly appointed prime minister, and Finkelstein as his chief ‘expert’.

(One of the advantages of the proposed system is that it will have “more outside experts drawn into government”, and who better to lead them than Finkelstein?)

I like it. This is a true and tried system. The only teeny-weeny problem is that so far it hasn’t been tried in Britain.

But hey, who says we can’t adopt what’s best in other systems? Certainly not Finkelstein. And certainly not me.

In fact, I’d like to offer a couple of embellishments to the Finkelstein-Miliband model, stealing their thunder.

To emphasise that our new prime minister will be directly elected, he should be called not prime minister but president. We already have a Supreme Court, so why not a president?

Then of course Parliament, now that the executive has been taken out of it, should change its name too. And the two chambers? Easy.

Rather than racking our brains for the appropriate names, we can use those we know work. The upper house should be called the Senate and the lower one the House of Representatives.

Parliament itself should now be called Congress, and it goes without saying that both its chambers will be elected.

Each of the 86 counties, regardless of their size, will elect two senators, making the Senate a body of 172. The counties’ representation in the lower house will be proportionate to their population, with the overall number of congressmen to be determined.

Oh yes, unless I forget, the counties should now be referred to as states – it’s much more progressive and will now also be more accurate.

The only downside of this project is that our army of the unemployed will have to grow, now to include the entire royal family. After all, nominally it is the monarch who is supposed to head the state, the role now to be assumed by President Miliband.

Not to worry. Her ex-Majesty could be appointed director of the new Ye Olde England museum, with the princes and princesses acting as tour guides. They could be made to wear Elizabethan costumes, say things like ‘thou art’ and be photographed with American tourists.

Since the country will no longer be a kingdom, its present name will have to change in line with the new constitution.

Again, rather than reinventing the wheel we can go with the name that has withstood the test of time, modifying it slightly for local colour: the United States of Anglia, the USA for short.

To avoid any possible confusion at UN meetings, the new USA should apply for the honour of being incorporated into the old one, perhaps as its 51^st state.

No, scratch that idea. That way Ed Miliband, Dan Finkelstein’s constitutional idol, would have to be called governor, not president. That’s not good enough.

So perhaps the new country ought to be named the USB (United States of Britain). Yes, that’ll work.

There, all our problems have been solved. Now we can confidently predict that we’ll be governed by a much better class of statesmen.

After all, the system on which the Miliband-Finkelstein proposal is based has placed at the helm such titans as Obama (directly elected! with primaries!) – preceded by Dubuya.

Who says we can’t throw up a comparable giant of intellect, character and morality (we already have one waiting in the wings: Ed Miliband, the constitutional philosopher)? Not me. In fact, I’m already throwing up.

What we need, Dan and Ed, isn’t to draw a new constitution but to respect the existing one. You know, the one American tourists say doesn’t exist because it’s not written down, like theirs.

In fact, a written constitution is like a nuptial agreement stipulating the frequency of sex: if you have to write it down, you might as well not bother.

Granted, a new state like the old USA may need a written document. But our state has been rather successful for over a millennium – with a constitution based on what Burke described as prescription, presumption and prejudice.

At its heart is the monarch whose power is limited but real, the elected House of Commons, whose power is real but limited, and the hereditary House of Lords that maintains the proper balance between the two.

It’s only after this constitution, easily the most successful one the world has ever known, was debauched by the moral and intellectual equivalents of Dan and Ed that it began to be operated by moral and intellectual pygmies.

The treatment proposed by Miliband and Finkelstein is poison, not medicine. Its only possible result would be euthanasia, not recovery.

We need a different remedy: a system that keeps the likes of Ed away from political power. And the likes of Dan away from what used to be a respectable newspaper.