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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s but one step from irony to subversion.

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

A citizen is always guilty of something.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Know thy enemy” was wise advice issued by the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu some 2,500 years ago.

His book The Art of War was (for all I know still is) on the curricula of Russian military and KGB academies. I don’t know if their British counterparts are educated in that spirit, but it’s clear that even some of our best commentators aren’t.

Not to cut too fine a point, they know little about Russia and understand even less. Since they are in the business of forming public opinion, which affects policy in democracies, they cause untold harm.

Russia, after all, has been hostile to the West since before the country got its name. Ever since the Kievan Grand Duke Vladimir chose Byzantine rather than Western Christianity for his subjects in the 10^th century, what eventually became Russia has always treated the West with suspicion, enmity and contempt.

Various Russian rulers, from the grand dukes to the tsars, emperors, Party secretaries, and presidents, have been quite forthright about this. Unfortunately, however, the West has typically refused to take them at their word.

Whenever seminal changes occur in Russia, the West’s usual reaction is to heave a sigh of relief. Yes, Russia used to be our enemy. But now, thanks to [the new tsar, the new Party leader, glasnost, perestroika, the new president], she is our friend. After all, the Russians have always wanted to be like us.

They haven’t. They’ve always wanted to possess the material abundance of the West, while loathing the ethos that produced the riches. A mugger doesn’t want to be like the man he robs. He just wants the chap’s smartphone.

Failure to understand Russia is caused by the Westerners’ smug, philistine belief that those who aren’t like them desperately want to be. It’s also caused by plain ignorance, which becomes truly toxic when the Russians succeed yet again in tricking the West, a pastime they’ve elevated to virtuosic art.

Thus, when 30-odd years ago I and a few other chaps cursed with both a native and academic knowledge of Russia were screaming ourselves hoarse, trying to explain to a triumphant West that perestroika was an exercise in strategic deception, we were dismissed out of hand.

What happened in the early 90s, we were told, was the ultimate and irreversible victory of liberal democracy, not, as we so maliciously averred, merely a transfer of power from the Party to the KGB fused with organised crime. Many of those doubters have since told me I was right, but it’s too late.

The dominant line, expressed most idiotically by Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, encouraged Western governments to pour technology and finance into Russia. A decade later Russia regained her strength and became a frankly fascist country bristling with aggressive intent. A few more years, and she pounced.

This brings me to Charles Moore, who is indeed one of our best pundits – but only when he writes on the numerous subjects he knows something about. Russia, alas, isn’t one of them, but these days ignorance hardly deters anyone from expressing an opinion.

Lord Moore, as he then wasn’t, was one of the perestroika enthusiasts, although, being a cultured Englishman, he refrained from extreme pronouncements, Fukuyama-style. Since then he has come around to realising what kind of genie leapt out of the vodka bottle, largely due to the West’s acquiescence and assistance.

Yet, should another deceptive zigzag occur in Russian policy, Lord Moore is likely to fall for the next canard as easily as he fell for the previous one. It takes knowledge of Russia not to, and he doesn’t have it, even if his heart is now in the right place.

This is a harsh judgement, but I can prove it by citing his article in today’s Telegraph. Commenting on Putin’s order to rename the airport of Volgograd ‘Stalingrad International Airport’, Lord Moore writes:

“In 1925, Volgograd became Stalingrad for the first time, in honour of the Soviet Union’s then fairly new all-powerful dictator…

“In 1961, with Stalin eight years dead and his personality cult cancelled, Khrushchev’s Soviet government restored Volgograd to its original name.”

God bless him and us all, but the man does think Volgograd was the city’s original name. It wasn’t. It was Tsaritsyn, founded in 1589 and named after the nearby river Tsaritsa, a Volga tributary that no longer exists. ‘Tsar’ means, well, tsar, and ‘Tsaritsa’ stands for queen, the female equivalent.

Due to its strategic position on the Volga, Tsaritsyn often became a battlefield, coveted as it was by both Russia and her assorted adversaries, from rebellious peasants to the remnants of the Golden Horde. Closer to our time, the Battle of Tsaritsyn was the pivotal clash of the Civil War perpetrated by the Bolsheviks as a method of population control.

The Reds won that battle on the Volga, largely thanks to the presence of Stalin, Lenin’s viceroy in the region. It was because of his role in the victory that Tsaritsyn was renamed Stalingrad five years after the Civil War ended.

Actually, though Stalin had moved to the forefront of Soviet politics when Lenin died in 1924, he hadn’t yet become the “all-powerful dictator”. That ascent happened in 1927, as most historians agree and Lord Moore doesn’t know.

These are all elementary facts and anyone who doesn’t know them can be confidently predicted not to know much of anything else about Russia. Nor does he possess the educational or intuitive wherewithal to understand what’s happening there – and predict what’s likely to happen.

Therefore such a man shouldn’t write on this vital subject and, if he still chooses to do so, he shouldn’t be published in a reputable paper. But clearly they have no fact-checkers at the Telegraph who are any more knowledgeable on the subject than Lord Moore is.

Still, if good men like him stop writing about Russia, they’ll leave the field to the likes of Hitchens who are just as ignorant but, either for ideological or pecuniary reasons, insist on preaching the cause of Russian fascism.

So, Lord Moore, I take it all back. Please continue writing about Russia, but do take the trouble of checking your facts. Even such a primitive source of knowledge as Wikipedia is better than nothing.

P.S. In case you ever doubted it, woke lunacy is a progressive disease, double entendre intended. For the past several centuries, the request “All rise” has accompanied judges’ entry into courts. This is now to be replaced with an ‘inclusive’ “All rise, if able”.

It used to go without saying that defendants, lawyers and witnesses paralysed from the waist down would remain seated, with no one making much of a fuss about it. Now the need has arisen to create “a more welcoming environment” for them.

I’m beginning to believe we don’t deserve to survive. I wonder what Putin thinks about it.

Donald Trump yet again demonstrated his innate taste, further honed at Atlantic City casinos. To celebrate the forthcoming opening of the conclave assembled to appoint a new pontiff, Trump posted an AI photograph of himself as Pope.

Many commentators screamed ‘blasphemy’ and ‘mockery’, while the Republicans Against Trump website wrote: “Trump just posted a photo of himself as the pope. It’s full-on lunacy at this point.”

All those comments are correct. Trump’s idea of a joke is indeed blasphemous and mocking, and I too have wondered for quite a while whether the Donald is certifiable.

I’m no shrink, just a reasonably well-read layman, but to my eye Trump’s behaviour is increasingly bizarre. Most lamentable lack of self-awareness, huge mood swings, unrestrained narcissism, the tendency to mouth mutually exclusive things within days, sometimes hours, of one another – all these are symptoms of a personality disorder, and I’ll leave it for professionals to diagnose it accurately.

Whether or not he is going insane, Trump is still eminently capable of looking out for Number One, meaning himself and his family. As Dominic Lawson pointed out in yesterday’s article, the Trumps control a cryptocurrency business called World Liberty Financial.

He promotes it on Truth Social, a platform managed by Donald Jr. I don’t know whether the family takes advantage of the numerous possibilities for corruption the cryptocurrency offers, but the platform itself is quite lucrative.

Trump uses it, rather than official White House channels, to announce his changes of heart on tariffs, which are as regular as they are market-sensitive. Hence market traders feel they have to subscribe to the platform to stay half a step ahead. This boosts the family’s profits at the time when those same U-turns are beggaring millions of Americans.

Trump is also offering wealthy businessmen the pleasure of his company at a Mar-a-Lago dinner for a modest fee of up to $5 million. To quote Mr Lawson: “As one of Trump’s political opponents pointed out on the floor of the Senate, ‘If you were mayor of a medium-sized town and it was reported that you were selling meetings for, like, $200, you would be arrested’.”

But getting back to Trump’s witty photographic joke, the first word that came to my mind when I saw it this morning was neither ‘blasphemous’ nor ‘mocking’, although they do apply.

The picture was unspeakably vulgar, and it belongs in the encyclopaedia to illustrate the entry for Vulgarity, n. On second thoughts, any other snapshot of Trump would do as well, for vulgarity is the dominant trait of his personality.

However, when vulgarity has Christianity in its sights, it’s a deadly weapon, more so in my view than even blasphemy and mockery. It’s a steady imposition of vulgarity on Christian worship that’s largely responsible for Christianity’s demise as a dynamic social and cultural force.

As far as I’m concerned, Trump is no Christian, despite all his entreaties for God to bless America, which is de rigueur for any US politician. Britons tend to regard that sort of thing as tawdry, and I for one can’t imagine a British PM ending a speech with “God bless the United Kingdom”. If he tried, he’d be laughed out of Westminster.

Trump was raised as a Presbyterian, but back in 2020 declared himself to be non-denominational, whatever that means. Here I must admit to a weakness: for me, there exist two kinds of Christianity I readily recognise as such: Western Catholic and Eastern Orthodox.

On everything else, including all Protestant denominations, I agree with Hilaire Belloc who regarded them as heresies. Some of my friends, who are kinder than me, and perhaps also better Christians, talk about all those sectarians, denominational or otherwise, as ‘brothers in Christ’.

Yes, and Cain was Abel’s brother. Then, come to think of it, Arians, Gnostics, Chiliasts, Pelagians also believed in Christ, after a fashion. However, if their fashion had prevailed, Christianity would only be remembered, if at all, as an attempt to reform Judaism in the early days of the Roman Empire. Looking at what’s happening to Christianity today, it’s hard not to see Protestantism as the anteroom of atheism.

To paraphrase Wilde, all sects and heresies are vulgar, although the mainstream churches are doing their best to keep up. Just compare these two excerpts from Matthew 1:25, the first one from the King James Version, the second from the NRSV. Both talk about Mary, Joseph and the Virgin Birth.

KJV: “… and knew her not till she had brought forth her firstborn son.”

NRSV: “… but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son.”

What tone-deaf vulgarian thought that the new line was an improvement on the old one? How could any genuine believer introduce the ugly euphemistic locution ‘marital relations’ into a scriptural text?

If to Dostoyevsky beauty could save the world, vulgarity can destroy it. That’s why it pains me to see at the helm in the West’s most powerful nation a man whose salient traits Dominic Lawson describes, alliteratively, as “vanity, viciousness, venality and vulgarity”.

Oh well, as long as Trump doesn’t turn to translating the Bible in his retirement.

…but Nigel Farage may.

Following a Reform landslide in local elections and also its overturning an almost 17,000 Labour majority to gain the Runcorn seat in Parliament, everyone is mulling the possibility of a Reform government.

I doubt it’ll ever happen. Third parties tend not to carry the day in our first-past-the-post system, which on balance is a good thing. Proportional representation often makes countries ungovernable, and it tends to empower marginal parties too much.

People are saying that our essentially two-party system is broken, but it isn’t. What’s broken is the two parties, Labour and Tories. They seem to have set out to prove that it’s unnecessary to have to choose between subversive and incompetent. Britain can have both.

Labour and Tories are in broad agreement on everything guaranteed to turn Britain into a full-fledged Third World country. They only disagree on how quickly and comprehensively that worthy goal should be achieved.

Fanatical commitment to beggaring Britain with net zero, ideological reluctance to stem the influx of alien migration, unquenchable thirst for extorting people’s money in one form or another, totemistic worship of the NHS, wokery, enthusiastic endorsement of every perversion described in medical literature and some that aren’t, marshmallow softness on crime, eagerness to foment class war, wholehearted attempts to disarm Britain, clear preference for public over private sector, systematic replacement of education with indoctrination – it takes a magnifying glass, nay an electronic microscope, to detect the wafer-thin demarcation between the two parties.

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch makes some conservative-sounding noises, but she gives no indication how she plans to translate them into policy and, if ever elected, policy into action. Boris Johnson credits her with “the most original political mind” among the party leaders, but he is being too chivalrous, a failing he seldom displayed before.

Kemi doesn’t have an original political mind because one manifestation of such cerebral excellence is coming up with original political ideas. Yet I’ve never heard her enunciate any idea whose provenance can’t be traced back to some old and venerable source.

Partly this isn’t her fault: after 5,000 years of recorded history, there aren’t many political tricks that haven’t been either considered or tried. Even Margaret Thatcher, who was 100 times the politician Kemi Badenoch will ever be, didn’t have any original ideas.

She had the resolve and the guts to go back to some solid ideas of the past, such as returning some power to the private sector and reminding the people that sometimes they had to fend for themselves. Look up the books by Whig politicians, from Burke onwards, some of their contemporary economists, such as Smith, some Anglo-American conservative thinkers of the 20^th century, and there you’ll have Thatcherism, chapter and verse.

Boris Johnson, writing with his characteristic facile fluency, says the Reform landslide proves that underneath it all the English are naturally conservative. I don’t think it proves anything of the sort. It’s just that the people finally realised that, when they look for the lesser evil in one of the two parties, they end up choosing both evils.

This time they are angry, and their ire became so febrile that they were prepared to vote for any other than Labour and Tory candidates. Had a chap advocating the murder of every first-born boy been on the ballot, he could have won too.

Neither Badenoch nor her likely successor, Robert Jenrick, that walking advertisement for a crash diet regimen, is much of a political thinker, certainly not an original one. But they should have enough nous to realise that their way back to power is to reinvent the Tory Party. Following Chesterton’s advice, they must boldly discover what has been discovered before.

They must do their job, which, for politicians, means winning elections. They ought to realise that the people don’t want conservatism. They want something, anything, new, and if that happens to be conservatism, they’ll take it. The danger is that, should it prove to be fascism or communism, they might be equally receptive.

Yet at the moment their Pavlovian reaction to conservative noises seems to be sharp. Looking at Farage’s manifesto, Kemi-Robert-Boris must sense how those noises should be pitched.

In medical care, Reform advocates a version of the French system, with both private and public sectors chipping in. This will involve tax breaks for private treatment and insurance, tax exemption for front-line workers and so forth. That’s a good idea.

However, since the NHS has been elevated to a secular cult, every effort must be made to sell our gullible public the idea that it’s the same sainted NHS, except it’s no longer wholly funded by the state. Observing how avidly the electorate swallows any canard on offer, this may require a bit of legerdemain, but it can be done.

In the economy, Reform stands for reducing taxes across the board, which includes raising the income tax threshold to £20,000, thereby exempting six million people from paying income tax – so much for Reform only wanting to lower taxes for the rich. Inheritance levies, corporate taxes, stamp duty will also be reduced significantly: for example, abolishing inheritance tax for all estates under two million, as opposed to under £250,000 at present, would be a tremendous boost to families.

On environment, Reform stands for abandoning net zero, going nuclear again, resuming exploration in the North Sea and scrapping green energy subsidies. All good.

Unfortunately, the manifesto also includes the promise to nationalise utility companies, which has led some commentators to bemoan Farage’s shift to the Left. In fact, he hasn’t shifted in that direction, not indeed one inch from his visceral populism.

Britons are paying some of the highest energy bills in the world, and the promise to “stop consumers being ripped off” resonates with them. If a charismatic figure like Farage says that nationalising water and ‘lectric serves that purpose, they’ll believe him. At this point, they’d believe him even if he insisted that eviscerating Ed Miliband would lower their bills.

And so on, all the way down the list. In fact, Reform’s manifesto overlaps with Trump’s pronouncements so much that one could believe they are a cooperative effort. That wouldn’t be the first time in history: some of the same people took part in inspiring and even drafting Stalin’s Five-Year Plan, Hitler’s Four-Year version and Roosevelt’s New Deal.

With his finger never far from the public pulse, Farage has sensed that Trump is hardly the flavour of the month in Britain. Hence he has made some astute moves to distance himself from Mar-a-Lago, but the underlining kinship is unmistakable.

Both Trump and Farage are populist mavericks trying to outflank the two main parties. There is a crucial difference though: Trump has succeeded in getting to the top, and Farage so far hasn’t. Nor will he, unless he learns one crucial manoeuvre from Trump.

Unlike Farage, Trump didn’t try to blow up the two-party system by standing as an independent candidate. Instead he infiltrated the Republican Party and gradually turned it into his own bailiwick. Say what you will about the Donald, but he is a smart political operator.

Farage should be as smart to realise that third parties may at times make a splash in British politics, but ultimately they never win. His route to 10 Downing Street should start at 18 Smith Square, the Conservative Campaign Headquarters.

As the most charismatic and populist leader on the Right, Farage could easily do a Trump on the Tory Party which is ripe for the plucking. The Tories have an abysmal recent record, they are bereft of ideas and public support, and they certainly have no individuals with Farage’s astuteness, charisma and proven, if limited, record.

Several commentators have suggested the idea of a Tory-Reform merger, and the idea is sound: provided that the brand name comes from the Tories but the product from Farage. The popular idea of the Tories adopting Farage’s policies but without Farage will never work.

If they try to do that, “original thinkers” like Badenoch or Jenrick will inaugurate another generation of Labour government, making the demise of Britain irreversible. But, as leader of the (‘new’, ‘real’, ‘genuine’, ‘modern’ – take your pick) Conservative Party, Farage could push some of the Reform ideas through. As leader of Reform, he’ll for ever nibble at the outer edges of the political pie.

The bigger the Reform Party gets, the more amateur politicians are drawn into its ranks, the greater the subterranean pressures will be, the sooner the party will be blown apart by tectonic shifts. The only hope Britain has comes from the Tory Party – but purged of its non-Tory ideas and non-Tory personnel.

P.S. But Farage should take care not to get too close to Trump. He should remember what happened in Canada and Australia, where Left-wing candidates came from behind to defeat their Trumpist opponents.

If there existed a support group called Tattoophobes Anonymous, I’d have to join it. “I’m Alex, and I am a tattoophobe. While I respect tattooed people as human beings, I’m constitutionally incapable of looking at them.”

That creates a problem when I have to talk to tattooed sale assistants, which almost all of them are. They think I suffer from strabismus and look at me with compassion. Later they must tell their co-workers, “There was that old cross-eyed geezer again. Poor sod. He can’t even look you straight in the eye.”

The lower down the social scale you go, the greater the Tattoo Quotient (TQ) becomes. For example, if you arrange different sports in descending social order, you’ll probably find no tattooed polo-playing toffs. Middle-class tennis will probably have a TQ of about 10 per cent, up to 20 among the pros. And almost all professional football players are tattooed, footie being a working class sport.

My little phobia shouldn’t be misconstrued as contempt for the lower social orders. It’s nothing of the sort. Here’s an ironclad rule to which there are no known exceptions: people who despise the working classes are themselves despicable.

By and large, they come from the Islington-dwelling, Guardian-reading, Prosecco-quaffing, LibDem-voting classes who claim to speak French, but fail to pronounce the ‘s’ sound in coup de grâce and fleur-de-lis.

In plainer words, they are pretentious, snobbish twats, not to mention atheists whose milk of human kindness has gone rancid. No believer can possibly despise the lower classes, and neither can a genuinely educated person.

After all, education isn’t just accumulating information but what happens as a result, “what remains after you forget all you knew”, as Einstein put it. And what should remain is wisdom, kindness, style – and love. After all, the Christian spirit permeates Western culture so comprehensively that even educated non-Christians absorb that ethos.

This means that anyone professing contempt for the lower classes is never really educated. Even if he knows how to pronounce coup de grâce and fleur-de-lis properly, he is an ignoramus.

Having said that, while despising proles is indefensible, despising their tastes isn’t only permissible but indeed essential. Even that would be wrong if prole tastes weren’t imposed on the whole society. But they are, so it isn’t.

About 200 years ago some Frenchman coined the phrase nostalgie de la boue, literally ‘nostalgia for mud,’ meaning the attraction of low-life culture and experience. When that condition results from individual longing, it’s bad enough. But when it’s imposed on an indoctrinated society for ideological and commercial reasons, it’s calamitous.

The ideology involved is an echo of Marxism, with its hatred of anyone who doesn’t belong to the proletariat. Alas, even when people reject Marxist economics and Marxist savagery, they still can be sweet-talked into accepting that only the lower classes have virtue.

Many people who grew up in perfectly bourgeois families and went to decent schools feel latent shame and hence the need to fit in with those of a more fortunate, proletarian, nativity. Thus speaking estuarian English becomes ‘cool’, which has to be one of the most revolting words in the language.

The same goes for tattoos: the fashion started because intellectually challenged individuals wanted to attract attention, something they felt they could only do by emulating New Guinean natives. Now that so many people sport tattoos, they are no longer attention-grabbing. They are much worse: cool.

As for ‘music’, which unqualified term even conservative broadsheets apply to prole cacophony, with toff affectation demanding the modifier ‘classical’, the story is more involved. Unlike pop, real music demands a lifelong effort from the listener. One derives gratification, but it isn’t instant.

With a few minor exceptions, even people born with musical aptitude aren’t born with musical taste, meaning the ability not just to like music but to appreciate it. This has to be cultivated over many years, and it takes motivation to embark on such an arduous journey.

When I was little, most parents in our circle, even those who, like mine, had themselves never attended a concert in their lives, knew that music was important – because culture was. Not being able to appreciate (as distinct from merely to like) a Bach fugue or Beethoven sonata was seen as cultural illiteracy, not something they wanted for their offspring.

By and large, that motivation no longer exists, quite the opposite. As Allan Bloom wrote perceptively in The Closing of the American Mind, peer pressure and the whole cultural atmosphere push young people towards prole gyrations. In fact, he wrote, most of his students identified themselves by the pop group they not so much liked as idolised.

The soil thus primed, commercialism moves in. Since most people these days define music as electronic din, record companies drop recordings of real music.

And even conservative broadsheets sense they’ll sell more copies by covering the cultural heights scaled by groups with names like The Urinals, Devil’s Spawn or Evil Incarnate. (These names are imaginary. But, if by some chance the first one isn’t, and you happen to find yourself at their concert, make sure not to sit in the first two rows.)

Tattoos fall in the same category: they are badges of ideologised and commercialised proledom, savagery in traditional Western terms. Just as Prof. Bloom’s students identified themselves by their pop groups, so do today’s lot cover themselves head to toe with ink to make a cultural statement.

The statement is: we are proles and proud of it – even if we pull down a six-figure salary and have to cover our tattoos with suit and tie when going to work. Proledom isn’t about money or lack thereof. It’s about belonging to the ruling party, that of pagan, deracinated, dumbed-down modernity.

These melancholy thoughts have been inspired by most of our papers highlighting the news of the day: David Beckham’s 50^th birthday.

Everyone expected this ex-ball-kicker to be knighted on this momentous anniversary, but so far that accolade has escaped him. Not for long, I’m sure – another few years of Labour government, and Beckham will get at least a life peerage, if perhaps not the crown.

Now David is a nice enough man – or would be if he hadn’t covered every square inch of his body with disgusting tattoos. When he used to put in those right-footed crosses for Man Utd and England, I didn’t mind watching him in long TV shots. Now he tends to appear in close-ups, charming his British and American audiences with his tongue-tied platitudes.

They don’t mind the platitudes and they don’t mind the body ‘art’. This means I mind them.

How many places of interest does Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, have? Not many, would be my guess – three generations of Kims are certain to have replaced any worthwhile architecture with typical communist monstrosities.

However, the current leader, Kim Jong Un, has just ordered the construction of an interesting monument that should have created a worldwide outcry – but hasn’t. The planned obelisk will commemorate North Korean soldiers fighting for Putin against the Ukraine.

This is the first official acknowledgement that regular troops of a foreign country are deployed in the Ukraine. Until recently, Korean soldiers espied in the battlefield were described as Buryats, Yakuts or other Mongolic Siberians, on the assumption that no one would know the difference.

Then, after several Koreans had either deserted to the Ukrainians or been taken prisoner, outright denials began to ring hollow. However, both Putin and Kim refused either to confirm such information or dismiss it outright.  

Such subterfuge is no longer deemed necessary. The other day, the military committee of the Korean Workers’ Party (KWP) issued solemn praise of Korean soldiers who, “following the Leader’s orders, displayed mass heroism” killing Ukrainians.

North Korean troops were moved to Russia following last year’s agreement on a far-reaching strategic partnership. This is seen as a lucrative posting: those 10,000-12,000 soldiers are paid about $2,000 a month each, a king’s ransom by the standards of their starving country.

The agreement was worked out last autumn, when Putin and his foreign minister Lavrov met the North Korean foreign minister, while the Russian defence minister Belousov had a lengthy conference with his North Korean counterpart.

As a result, the Koreans promised to support their “Russian comrades”. Communism is dead, long live communism. And there I was, thinking that the Russians are no longer comrades but ladies and gentlemen.

These criminal comrades fighting side by side signify a new stage in the escalating aid from Kim to Putin. Until the deployment of an actual military contingent, North Korea had been bolstering Russian aggression with artillery shells, small-arms ammunition, self-propelled howitzers and missile systems. But eventually boots on the ground became necessary as well.

The North Korean troops include the ‘assault corps’, North Korean special forces. Though no better than average even by the modest standards of the Russian army, they’ve distinguished themselves by iron discipline and unquestioning obedience. I’m not surprised: they’ve been trained well. Any deficit of such qualities in North Korea constitutes a shortcut to a nameless grave.

The South Korean government is aghast about this “flagrant violation of international law, including the UN Charter. By acknowledging publicly the deployment, they mock the international community yet again.” The government of South Korea then demanded that Russia and North Korea stop their illicit military alliance that undermines “peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region and beyond, including Europe.”

Kim dismissed such protests as a perfidious yet feeble attempt to undermine “the sacred mission of strengthening the traditional friendship and unity between Korea and Russia.”

One has to assume that this cherished tradition goes back to 1937, when the Soviets perpetrated the genocide of Koreans living in Russia. Over 172,000 of them were transported 4,000 miles from Siberia to Central Asia under the pretext of “stemming the infiltration of Japanese spies into the Far East”. (Apparently, the Soviets regarded Koreans and Japanese as identical twins.)

As a result of that mass deportation, over 50,000 Koreans died of starvation and neglect, in the spirit of “traditional friendship and unity”. Moreover, when Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes in 1956, he didn’t list this genocide of Koreans among them. That little peccadillo was just par for the course, not even worth mentioning.

But hey, let bygones be bygones, shall we? Or, as the more robust Russian version of that proverb goes, “He who recalls the past, let his eye be poked out”. If Comrade Kim says the friendship and unity are sacred and traditional, so they are – and if you deny it… well, you know what will happen then.

The two evil regimes are joining forces to snuff out the light of freedom and civilisation that began to flicker in the Ukraine. These birds of a feather are red in beak and talon, and they are both aware of their profound kinship that goes beyond mutual strategic interests.

Just as the original Kim built his regime on the Stalin model, so is Putin steadily pushing Russia closer typologically to the totalitarian house that Kim Il-sung built. Yet what concerns me here isn’t this statement of the obvious, but the West’s reaction to the presence of foreign troops on Ukrainian battlefields.

When a Western leader, such as Macron, moots the remote possibility of sending a few NATO soldiers to the Ukraine, all hell breaks loose. No, Manny hastens to reassure the agitated world, not to kill Russians, God forbid. Just to act as a peace-keeping force, a sort of buffer keeping Russian dogs at bay – and still other presidents and prime ministers throw up their arms in horror.

We can’t do that! That would be provoking Putin and we all know he provokes easily, the sensitive soul that he is. When echoes of such shrieks reach Moscow, Putin or one of his henchmen helpfully remind the West that Russia has nuclear weapons. Push one button, and puff go the British Isles.

The erection of that obscene monument in Pyongyang is a perfect time to remind the Russians of another proverb: what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If those lovely allies Russia has can deploy troops on the battlefield, then the Ukraine’s allies are within their rights to do the same.

Except that there is a crucial difference. Russia’s totalitarian allies aren’t scared of helping her openly, while the Ukraine’s democratic allies are paralysed with fear whenever Putin looks at them askance. A trickle of weaponry, enough for the Ukraine to fight but not to win, is just about acceptable – and even that seems excessive to Vlad’s friend in DC. But sending troops over, now that would be an egregious provocation.

And it goes without saying that nothing Russia does can possibly provoke the West into a decisive response. We are thick-skinned that way. As a modern Russian classic wrote, “You can stand a foot in front of us and keep spitting into our snout for ten minutes, and we still won’t budge.”

For the same reason, our papers aren’t screaming in 50-point headlines about North Korean troops lending a helping hand to their fascist comrades. I bet they’d even stay silent if China sent, say, 100,000 troops to launch another assault on Kiev. We wouldn’t want to provoke either Putin or Xi.

What a sorry lot we are.

Their titles suggest that a Home Secretary looks after domestic affairs, a Foreign Secretary after international ones, and an Education Secretary after, well, education.

By the same token, Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Energy and Net Zero, must try to decarbonise Britain, by 2030 as he has promised. In fact, he pursues this subversive goal so zealously that one wishes someone would decarbonise Ed Miliband.

Even Tony Blair, who must have undergone woke conversion therapy, came out saying that Ed’s policy is “doomed to fail”. Forgive me for being so cynical, but I wonder if Tony had his Damascene experience because his company has close commercial ties with Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan, oil producers both. No, surely not.

Ed’s boss, Sir Keir Starmer, described Blair’s comments as “unhelpful”, but that’s because he is English. The Donald would convey the same opprobrium by saying that both Tony and his remarks suck out loud, emphasising yet again the endless lexical variety of the English language.

I fancy myself as a physiognomist, especially when trying to read the character of a person no longer in the first flush of youth. Age does leave biographical imprints on a face, and the greater the age, the more reliable those imprints are. On that basis, the briefest of looks at Ed Miliband, 55, will reveal his intellectual inadequacy.

And if you don’t believe me or, worse still, try to shove down my throat that old chestnut about judging a book by its cover, just compare two projects he pursues and tell me they aren’t the work of an idiot.

First, Ed sets out to cover every square inch of our green and pleasant land with solar panels, to make sure it becomes neither green nor pleasant. Most of those panels come from China, which, as a side benefit, adds muscle to the economic strength of a communist superpower.

Yet the strongest argument against this madness was delivered the other day by Spain and Portugal, which suffered the greatest blackout in European history. According to experts, the power cut was caused by the two countries’ growing reliance on net zero energy, meaning windmills and solar panels.

By the sound of it, Spain may beat Britain in the race to the net zero tape. At present, a mere six per cent of that country’s energy comes from gas. Most of the rest is generated by renewable sources that, alas, prove not to be as renewable as all that.

Unlike traditional energy systems, solar and wind lack the ability to keep running when a surge or power cut occurs. That inability makes it much harder to balance the grid.

After all, electricity grids are like markets: they require stability, meaning in their case a capacity to maintain electricity supply at a more or less constant level. Energy sources that depend on sunshine or wind can’t have that capacity by definition, and they also can’t store energy as effectively as traditional systems.

Moreover, even in the absence of catastrophic power cuts, solar and wind can’t sustain modern industry, especially steel and aluminium, and the growing appetite of cities to expand. This appetite is voracious, as any Londoner will confirm.

When driving to a neighbourhood for the first time in a few months, I usually can’t recognise its geometry: all the old landmarks are dwarfed by new construction, from office towers to upmarket flats. And each of those buildings is the flesh of concrete or brick on the skeleton of a steel frame.

How much steel does it take? Well, an average skyscraper requires up to 20 tonnes, and a tallish block of flats a third of that. If you look at the volume of construction in London alone, and other cities aren’t far behind, then add the amount of steel needed for other industries, you’ll believe the experts who insist that wind and solar can’t satisfy such a rapacious demand.

Hence blackouts will become more and more frequent, and HMG is already recommending that we stock up on cash to be able to buy food when card machines go zonk. That’s good advice, akin to a thug kindly telling you to stock up on plasters before he beats you up.

But let’s assume for the sake of argument that turning the British Isles into one giant solar panel can indeed take care of our energy needs. Then let’s assume further that the whole drive towards net zero rests on a sound scientific foundation, rather than an ideological swindle. Yes, you know a swindle is exactly what it is, but bear with me for a minute.

Making those wrong assumptions still doesn’t negate the self-evident fact that solar panels need sunshine to be effective, and the more energy we expect them to produce, the more sunshine they’ll need. Are you with me so far?

Good. Now we are into the oxymoron in the title. That word, as you know, denotes a proposition that combines two mutually exclusive terms. ‘Pious agnostic,’ ‘freedom-loving communist’, ‘young thinker’ and ‘charmer Starmer’ would be examples of that figure of speech.

Applying that understanding to the task in hand will help us appreciate the true idiocy of Ed’s other policy. Starting from the irrefutable observation that sunlight is warm, he reaches the conclusion that the sun throws a spanner in the wheels of his net zero project by causing global warming – or climate change, as it’s now coyly called.

That’s why, guided by his sure hand that seems to be unconnected to any semblance of a mind, HMG is about to embark on a £50 million programme investigating the possibility of blocking off sunlight. Field trials will include injecting aerosols into the atmosphere and brightening clouds to reflect sunshine.

The former bright idea will saturate the stratosphere with particles that reflect sunlight, preventing it from frying ‘our planet’ well-done. The latter involves ships spraying sea-salt particles into the sky to make low-lying clouds more reflective.

Such geoengineering reminds me of the Soviet Union, whose powers that be seriously considered diverting the course of the great Siberian rivers, thereby turning Siberia into a sort of Costa del Sol.

Scientists were screaming then that this would lead to catastrophic ecological consequences, and they are screaming roughly the same now. The Soviet government finally listened, but HMG, prodded by Miliband, is starting trials within weeks.

Now I’m going to ask you again to assume the impossible and agree that a) global warming isn’t a hoax and b) blocking off sunlight could save ‘our planet’.

Still, I can’t help noticing that this project is rather at odds with Ed’s other pet mania, that of densely covering the country with solar panels. See what I’m driving at? Actually, it’s a simple dialectical syllogism.

Thesis: solar panels, as we’ve established, require sunlight to do their job. Antithesis: since sunlight will be blocked off, they won’t be able to do their job. Synthesis: Ed’s two bright ideas are an oxymoron, and he is a moron. QED.

“Governments lie and get others to lie for them,” writes Peter Hitchens.

True. But at least others lie for their own governments. Hitchens, on the other hand, regurgitates lies emanating from Russia, our self-proclaimed enemy.

He brings to the task his affection for that “most conservative and Christian country in Europe”, woeful ignorance about it, and contempt for his readers, who he thinks will swallow any bilge he shoves down their throat.

This time around, he builds a rickety logical structure to insist that the West lives in a glass house and therefore shouldn’t throw stones at Putin. Didn’t NATO countries attack Serbia in 1999 and Iraq in 2003? And doesn’t Erdogan imprison dissidents without losing Turkey’s NATO membership?

It takes dialectical flexibility worthy of a circus contortionist to insist on those bases that the West and everyone in it have thus lost any right to oppose Putin. Hitchens here uses the trick of moral equivalence, favourite of Western Leftists. Hitchens must have learned it when he himself was one, well into his mature years. You know, Russia has the KGB, America has the CIA, what’s the difference?

Those two attacks were indeed ill-advised, although it takes quite a stretch to compare them to Russia’s starting the first major war in Europe since 1945. Nor is it valid to compare the two actions to each other: they pursued different objectives.

And yes, the West is more lenient to Erdogan than to Putin, but there exist sound strategic reasons for this. Kicking Turkey out of NATO, as Hitchens suggests, would weaken NATO’s southern flank and lay the Middle East open for Russian aggression… oops, sorry, I forgot. Russia, according to Messrs Hitchens and Putin, never commits aggression. She is always the victim of it.

For example, writes Hitchens, the 2008 Russo-Georgian War was started by Georgia, that mighty power hellbent on aggression. This is one of the most emetic lies concocted in the Kremlin and spread by our homegrown Putinista.

On general principle, only an ignoramus or an idiot would believe that Georgia would start a war with a country that has 40 times her population. She didn’t. But under her government, led by Mikhail Saakashvili, Georgia moved towards the West, just like the Ukraine did six years later.

Georgia began to develop civilised political and legal institutions, which Hitchens’s “conservative and Christian” idol couldn’t bear. In what was probably used as a rehearsal of the attack on the Ukraine, the Kremlin accused Georgia of committing “genocide” and an “aggression against South Ossetia”, run by Putin’s puppet government.

South Ossetian forces started shelling Georgian villages, in violation of the 1992 ceasefire agreement. When Georgians responded in kind, Russia launched a full-scale land, air and sea invasion, coyly called a “peace enforcement operation”, not a war. (The 2022 invasion of the Ukraine was similarly called a “special military operation”. Those conservative and Christian Russians don’t ever start wars.)

As a result, mighty Georgia outnumbered 40 to one was defeated, and a pro-Putin puppet government was installed. Any movement towards the West has been nipped in the bud, which is what those Georgian aggressors deserve, as far as Messrs Hitchens and Putin are concerned.

In general, Hitchens throws a fit whenever Putin’s puppets are either ousted or, as in Romania’s case, prevented from taking over. This is another item in his indictment of the West: “Calin Georgescu’s election was annulled by judges in December when he looked like winning the first round. And he has been banned from standing in the second round – all because he has the wrong kind of politics.”

Georgescu’s politics are indeed wrong: he is Putin’s agent who, if elected, would have turned Romania into Russia’s colony. Still, I am deeply touched, as I’m sure you are, by Hitchens’s devotion to democratic procedure, a commitment that abates somewhat when he writes about Russia, where every election for the past 30 years has been blatantly rigged.

Now, hypothetically, what if the polls in Germany showed that her next election would be won by a party campaigning under the slogan of Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer? And what if the Bundestag then disqualified it from standing? Would Hitchens still scream bloody murder in the name of democracy?

And then of course, NATO, including that “crime-blighted, decrepit, rubbish-strewn, rat-infested, broke Britain” provoked Putin into invading the Ukraine, and “seldom in history has a war been more provoked.”

You see, the West expanded NATO eastwards, although it had been begged by the “liberal, democratic politician Yegor Gaidar” to desist. Now, Gaidar was about as liberal and democratic as Julius Streicher was philo-Semitic.

The parallel isn’t random, for both were editors of their parties’ flagship journals, Der Stürmer for Streicher, Kommunist for Gaidar. One difference was that the former had no official status, while the latter was the official mouthpiece of the CPSU’s Central Committee.

Gaidar was a career party apparatchik whose tenure at Kommunist made him superior in rank to most Soviet ministers. He was a scion of a well-known NKVD-KGB family, with both his grandfather (who also wrote propaganda masquerading as children’s books) and father veterans of that sinister cabal. Gaidar continued the family tradition with distinction, rising to the position of prime minister in Yeltsyn’s government, one that begat Putin. Perfect liberal and democratic credentials, wouldn’t you say?

As for Putin having been provoked, my question is, How? Did he fear that such superpowers as Latvia and Estonia just might attack Russia? Or at least be used as beachheads for a NATO assault? If he thought that, he is suffering from paranoid delusions because no member of NATO would ever contemplate launching a first strike against a nuclear power.

You see, there’s provocation and provocation. A thug deliberately jostling you in the street and groping your wife may provoke a verbal or violent response. Then again, wearing three-piece pinstripes in an area inhabited by thugs may provoke a mugging. In the former case, the provocation was real. In the latter case, it was merely used as a pretext for thuggery.

The button for Russian aggression against both Georgia and the Ukraine was pushed in 2007 when Putin made what Hitchens calls his “dramatic speech in Munich”. Dramatic it was, just as Hitler’s maiden speech in the Reichstag was dramatic.

Putin described the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20^th century”, a calamity he made a transparent promise to remedy. Dramatic indeed.

Then came the ultimate provocation, and I must compliment Hitchens for the self-restraint he showed by refraining from describing it as a ‘putsch’ this once: “Ukraine’s elected president was lawlessly overthrown by a mob in 2014. Britain and the USA condoned this shameful event because they preferred the illegal rebels to the elected government. You just can’t do that and pretend to be the guardian of democracy.”

Oh yes, you can. Especially if you remember that many functional democracies were born like babies, covered in blood. American colonists lawlessly overthrew British rule, French revolutionaries set France on the road to democracy by lawlessly overthrowing the Bourbons, Romanian democracy was lawlessly announced with shots fired into Ceaușescu’s body.

“Ukraine’s elected president”, Yanukovych was a career criminal brought to power by Russian influence. He was Hitchens’s favourite type of Eastern European politician, a puppet at Putin’s beck and call.

Once he was overthrown – by popular uprising, not a “mob” – he was followed by two presidents, both winning the kind of free elections Russia has never had. But I’ve already mentioned that Hitchens’s delicate democratic sensibilities are offended whenever a Putin acolyte is ousted. He ends on a melodramatic note:  

“Demand proper debate. Demand the truth. Don’t be dragged into more stupidity, or we will end up with bomb craters as well as potholes.”

If modern history teaches anything, it’s that bomb craters are more likely to result from appeasement than from a resolute stand against evil. And as for debate, Hitchens is again being selective there.

When he wrote to me in 2018 saying that Russia had nothing to do with the attempt on the Skripals’ lives in Salisbury, I wrote back with an offer to debate him before any audience other than the Russian Embassy, where he was guaranteed a receptive audience. I haven’t heard from him since.

The British were a burr under Napoleon’s blanket in any number of ways. They continued to fight him when no one else did, but that wasn’t the worst thing.

So fine, that upstart Arthur Wellesley, as he then was, did give some of Napoleon’s generals a bloody nose in the Peninsular War. But the Duke of Wellington, as he became in consequence, had never defeated French troops led by Napoleon personally, not until Waterloo at any rate.

Anyway, come what may, Napoleon Bonaparte – l’Empereur! – could look after himself on the battlefield. He knew how to handle armed resistance with consummate mastery. What he had trouble with was mockery.

And that happened to be the weapon those dastardly British wielded with unrestrained savagery. Their papers made fun of him, coming up with all sorts of disrespectful nicknames, such as ‘Boney’ or, worse still, ‘Little Boney’ – and that was when they didn’t call him ‘Fleshy’, ‘Corsican Fiend’, ‘The Devil’s Favourite’ or ‘The Nightmare of Europe’.

But the worst of all were those two malicious caricaturists, James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson. They kept churning out pictorial putdowns of Napoleon by the dozen, each nastier than the other. How dared they!

Who did those islanders think they were? Utter philistines, petit bourgeois parvenus, a nation of… A nation of whom exactly? What would be the worst insult a Frenchman, especially one with aristocratic pretensions, could fling at the English? A nation of money-changers? No, that wasn’t strong enough. A nation of manufacturers? No, that could be misconstrued as a compliment.

Finally, the right moniker came to Napoleon. Une nation de boutiquiers! That was it. A nation of shopkeepers, that’s exactly what England was.

Napoleon might or might not have had a point. But I can reassure his spirit that the putdown no longer applies. England has stopped being a nation of shopkeepers. She has become a nation of shoplifters instead.

Over half a million offences were recorded by police in England and Wales last year, a 20 per cent increase on 2023. Yet the police forces admit that this is but the tip of an iceberg. They don’t know exactly how big the iceberg is, but they do know that retailers see no point in reporting most offences.

According to James Lowman, Chief Executive of the Association of Convenience Stores, “The volume of theft is still massively under-reported though: our own member survey revealed 6.2 million thefts recorded by convenience stores alone.”

Eighty per cent of retailers were thus robbed last year, with thefts cutting into their costs and therefore profits. Overall, store owners took a hit way in excess of two billion pounds, which may explain the number of ‘out of business’ signs on high-street shop windows.

Of the roughly half a million offences that were recorded by police, only 19 per cent resulted in a summons or prosecution, of which I am sure none led to a custodial sentence.  

This makes shoplifting de facto legal, presumably on the logic that, if something can’t be stopped, it must be accepted. But England, the perfide Albion of Napoleon’s nightmares, is less forthright about that than California is.

In that fanatically progressive state, stealing merchandise worth $950 or less is just a misdemeanour. That means police probably won’t bother to investigate, and if they do, prosecutors won’t bother to prosecute.

I don’t know whether such a cutoff point exists in Britain, but I do know that more and more retailers are locking up their merchandise, and not just high-value items. That too is a problem, and on many different levels.

First, this arrangement involves a major investment in refurbishing: those lock-up cases need to be installed, which necessitates changing the overall layout. It also takes time, money and hence a loss of revenue.

(I can testify to that from personal experience. Going across the street to our local Co-op for our customary Saturday-morning croissants, I found the shop closed, to be re-opened soon, as the sign on its window promised. As far as I know, they are installing those lock-up cases, so my croissant fiver had to go elsewhere.)

Then, a customer is no longer able just to pick up an item off the shelf. He has to look for an employee to unlock the case, which adds time to the shopping trip – quite a long time in Britain, especially if the employee doesn’t understand English, which many don’t.

That too ultimately leads to lost revenue because many customers, up to a third if statistics are to be believed, are too impatient to wait. They’d rather move on to a different retailer or forget about that purchase altogether.

Finally, locking up merchandise makes a travesty out of self-checkout, that triumph of technology and a thief’s dream. The idea behind that high-tech innovation was to cut down on store personnel, who could then smoothly move onto the welfare rolls. Now the same number of employees will have to roam the floor, keys in hand, helping irate customers get their hands on that six-pack of lager.

Little Boney would be gloating if he were still around. It took two centuries to turn a nation of shopkeepers into a nation of shoplifters, but two stock English questions crop up: Why oh why? and What are we going to do about it?

A good answer to the first question will prompt a good answer to the second. For people won’t respect the state’s laws if the state itself doesn’t.

And lack of such respect is precisely what the state signals by refusing to prosecute theft with the same certainty and severity it shows when prosecuting ‘hate crimes’, those of word and increasingly of thought.

When calling a shopkeeper a ‘Paki’ is seen as a worse crime than stealing his merchandise, the law is turned upside down (not that I condone racial insults, as I hope you understand). And when a criminal’s ‘underprivileged’ background is seen as a mitigating, often exculpating, circumstance, the signal becomes loud and clear: now you can.

Add to this a huge influx of migrants from countries where protection of property is seen as less fundamental than it used to be in Britain, and the reality behind shoplifting statistics comes into sharp focus.

Tony Blair came to power partly on the strength of his promise to be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”. But our progressive modernity can’t be tough on crime because it woefully misunderstands its causes, the principal of which is, well, our progressive modernity.

Denizens of Victorian England were impoverished and ‘underprivileged’ by our standards. And yet people in the East End of London, the land of Fagin and Bill Sykes so vividly described by Dickens, left their doors unlocked, knowing that their neighbours wouldn’t steal from them. And I doubt that shopkeepers had to keep their wares under lock and key.

Those Londoners were as certain about original sin and God’s judgement as they were about the anatomical differences between the two sexes. Courts and policemen shared that certainty. They knew good from evil, and they were prepared to punish wrongdoing because both state and society saw the same dichotomy as clearly.

This was the main source of respect for the law, and that source has run dry. Unless this situation changes, and I’m not holding my breath, shoplifters will continue to put shopkeepers out of business. And Napoleon’s spirit will have to reconsider his putdown of our nation.

We drove down to the medieval town of Rye in East Sussex yesterday.

Greeting us there were two wind-blown ensigns atop Rye’s 14^th century gateway: the red St George Cross of England and the blue-and-yellow flag of the Ukraine.

This suggests the Ukraine can count on Rye’s support, although the moral value of this backing rather exceeds any material assistance the town could offer. Still, moral support is better than none, which is the kind the Ukraine is getting from the Trump administration.

Describing the Mar-a-Lago stance on Russia’s aggression, former Defence Secretary Sir Grant Shapps didn’t pull any punches, calling it “sick”, “disgusting” and “revolting”. Moreover, he said he knows for a fact that Trump is “in cahoots” with Putin, and only the 30-year secrecy rule prevents Sir Grant from revealing the details of that relationship.

This is something I’ve been sure about for a long time, even though the 2019 Mueller investigation in the US didn’t yield an indictment. MAGA enthusiasts insist this proves Trump’s innocence, but it does nothing of the sort.

As the astronomer Carl Sagan once said in a different context, “absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence”. An indictment is only issued when a good chance exists of securing a conviction.

In an American or any other civilised court, that demands proof beyond reasonable doubt, which in turn calls for prima facie evidence. In this case, for example, that would be a document signed in Trump’s blood or perhaps a sound recording of Trump’s vow of service to the FSB. So far nothing along those lines has been uncovered, although Sir Grant hints that some such evidence may exist.

The standards of proof required for an educated guess are lower, while the room for inference is greater. Proceeding from the scriptural principle of “ye will know them by their fruits”, one has to notice that Trump’s words and deeds both point at a clear pro-Putin stance – as clear, that is, as American politics will allow.

Thus it’s indeed “sick”, “disgusting” and “revolting” that Trump consistently blames Zelensky for both starting the war and prolonging it. The other day Trump thundered that the Ukrainian president can either “have peace, or he can fight for another three years before losing the whole country”.

As Trump seems to see it, Zelensky is ghoulishly committed to “killing fields”, eschewing Trump’s idea of peace that essentially amounts to capitulation. Sir Grant is appalled, and I could sign my own name under every word he said:

“This is the leader of the free world, who is really coming out as nothing more than a swaggering bully, and choosing tyranny over democracy. This whole idea that in public, the President of the United States of America, the home of the free, defender of freedom and liberty, bullies a democratic leader into accepting an unjust peace, I find completely revolting.”

Essentially, Trump’s plan is for the Ukraine to cede 20 per cent of her territory, including the Crimea, to Russia, and to forswear any future NATO membership in exchange for, well, nothing. Trump is offering no security guarantees whatsoever, except Putin’s word, which Trump trusts implicitly.

No one, not even Trump, is as idiotic as that. Putin is a professional liar, a trade he acquired in the most sinister secret police the world has ever known. If Trump claims to take Putin at his word, he is dealing from the bottom of the pack – with all four aces going to the Kremlin.

Zelensky points out that his country’s constitution (not to mention international law) precludes ceding territory to an aggressor, which statement Trump finds inflammatory. What do constitutions have to do with anything?

He seems to regard as null and void any agreement he himself didn’t sign. One wonders where that leaves the American Constitution, not to mention the Ukrainian one.

For example, the US Constitution says that, except in an emergency situation, only Congress can impose tariffs. So what? An emergency situation is anything Trump says it is, and if he says so, the Constitution is given a wide berth. Why can’t Zelensky do the same to please Putin who, according to Trump, is a “good guy”?

And anyway, says Trump, “Zelensky is boasting that Ukraine will not legally recognise the occupation of Crimea… if he wants Crimea, why didn’t they fight for it 11 years ago when it was handed over to Russia without a shot being fired?”

Is that a serious question, Mr President? If it is, I can add ‘moronic’ to Sir Grant’s compendium of adjectives.

The Ukraine wasn’t ready to fight 11 years ago. Her army hadn’t yet received the requisite armaments and training, and she hadn’t yet achieved political stability following the ousting of the pro-Putin puppet government.

Now the Ukraine is battle-worthy, which she has proved by fighting a country with three times her population to a virtual standstill. The Ukraine is the West’s first line of defence against fascist aggression, but that’s not how Trump and his stooges see it.

They insist that it’s not only Putin but also Trump who is a “good guy” who magnanimously agrees to tackle the Ukraine’s problems out of the goodness of his heart. However, if the Ukrainians and their sartorially challenged president prove recalcitrant, America can just walk away. She has “other priorities”.

This view is both mendacious and immoral. Supporting the Ukraine is for the US not a matter of charitable good will but one of contractual obligations. Putting it in Trump’s terms, in 1994 the US, Britain and Russia signed a deal with the Ukraine, a deal otherwise known as the Budapest Memorandum.

The Ukraine undertook to relinquish her nuclear weapons, which she has done. In exchange, the other three signatories promised to guarantee the Ukraine’s territorial integrity, which they haven’t done. A deal’s a deal, isn’t that so, Mr Trump? This isn’t some shady property shenanigans we are talking about here, after all.

It’s likely that any cease-fire agreement will include the Crimea coming under Russian control de facto. But there exists a big difference between that and doing the same thing de jure, as Trump wants.

Giving a legal stamp of approval to criminal occupation would be tantamount to destroying the world order that has since 1945 more or less maintained peace in Europe. That peace, as Peter Hitchens accurately points out in yet another attempt to do Putin’s bidding, was far from perfect. It included almost half a century of Soviet enslavement of Eastern Europe, and the spirit of Yalta was rather malodorous.

But at least there was no major war in Europe for 77 years. Now there is and, given half the chance, Putin’s fascist regime will spread it over all of Europe, potentially the world.

And that Manchurian candidate in Mar-a-Lago is playing into Putin’s hand. If Trump is doing that because he is indeed bound by some secret arrangement with the Kremlin, he belongs in prison. If he is doing that because he genuinely believes he is thereby serving American interests, he belongs anywhere but in the White House.

But I have faith that the Ukrainians will prevail in the long run. With Rye in their corner, how can they lose?