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“There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so,” said Hamlet, a victim of two pandemic blights: relativism and solipsism. Both eventually led to the belief that no absolutes exist outside each man’s own perception of the world.

When applied to matters philosophical, religious, cultural and generally civilisational, relativism is deadly. Yet when applied to politics, it’s essential. A government that obtusely refuses to budge on political principles may be as harmful as one that has no principles at all.

The same policies may be good or bad depending on the situation and the rationale behind them. Tariffs are a case in point.

They are fool’s gold when introduced for purely economic reasons, as a way of making the economy stronger. The opposite effect is much more likely.

Modern economies are driven by markets, and markets are ultimately driven by consumers. Since tariffs raise the price of imports, and economic autarkies no longer exist, consumers suffer and markets rebel.

President Trump finds this out every time he goes crazy on tariffs: markets just won’t wear it, and it’s impossible to disfranchise them in a market economy. Each time this happens, Trump backs down, as he did yesterday, magnanimously allowing the EU an extra month to relocate its export manufacturing stateside.

Chances are, come 1 July, he’ll back down again. Hitting America’s best allies with 50 per cent tariffs on top of those that exist already is bound to elicit retaliation in kind, and no one ever wins a trade war. Everyone loses, every economy comes out the poorer.

Yet politics doesn’t, or at least shouldn’t, live by economy alone. Sometimes economic suffering may be justified, and has to be endured, by strategic necessity, in which case economic first principles must be set aside for a while.

Hence tariffs can have an important role to play in the drama of geopolitical strategy. They can reward good behaviour, punish misbehaviour and discourage future lapses in conduct. That’s why I have to praise senators Lindsey Graham, a Republican and Trump’s golf chum, and Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat.

Appalled by the continuing slaughter of Ukrainian civilians, they introduced legislation to hit with crippling secondary sanctions countries keeping Putin’s economy afloat. These include a 500 per cent tariff on any country that buys Russian oil, gas, uranium and other products, and I hope Xi is listening. He’ll have to choose between being Putin’s friend and America’s trading partner, a choice that can only go one way, as things stand at the moment.

Apparently, at least 70 senators support the bill, which means they can override a possible presidential veto. The situation in the lower House is less clear-cut, and there Trump could expect to kill the bill by vetoing it.

But will he veto it? Since, contrary to what Bertie Russell thought, the past is the only reliable predictor of the future, one has to fear he will.

Trump has said many times that sanctioning Russia could cause Putin to walk away from peace talks, which argument is defeated by a simple question: What peace talks? Those in which Putin has been expertly giving Trump the run-around, stringing him along while continuing his murderous war?

One hates to accuse a president of the United States of bad will, but it’s hard to explain this president’s actions and statements in any other way. For example, when Trump introduced sweeping tariffs in the first days of his White House tenancy, he exempted Russia – but not his European allies and nor, tellingly, the Ukraine.

However, barring NATO’s direct military involvement, the only way for the West to stop the fascist onslaught on Europe is to cut off the economic lifeline of Putin’s regime. The senators seem to realise this, but the statement Trump issued yesterday, after the largest aerial attack on Kiev in this war so far, makes one doubt he does.

“I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him,” wrote Trump. “He has gone absolutely CRAZY!.. Missiles and drones are being shot into Cities in Ukraine, for no reason whatsoever.” 

Putin hasn’t gone “absolutely CRAZY”. He has always been absolutely EVIL, which has never prevented Trump from having “a very good relationship” with him, too good for some tastes. Yet the notion of evil doesn’t sit comfortably with the modern idea of progress, with the world supposedly going from strength to moral strength.

It’s more natural for today’s lot to ascribe evil acts to emotional instability rather than an immanent flaw in human nature revealing itself as savage brutality in extremis. Yet chaps like Stalin or Hitler weren’t mad – they were rational and consistent evil-doers. So is Putin.

In his very next sentence Trump contradicted himself. Putin, he wrote, “wants ALL of Ukraine, not just a piece of it”. That’s reason enough, wouldn’t you say? Massive morale-sapping attacks on civilians are the stock in trade of modern wars.

Using this tactic isn’t a symptom of madness. It’s a result of cold-blooded calculation.

Americans didn’t nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki because of the cities’ military importance, did they? Without passing judgement one way or the other, that was done to save American lives that would have been lost in trying to take the Japanese islands one by one.

Whether Putin is crazy or evil or both, surely his intention of swallowing “ALL of Ukraine” ought to be thwarted, if only because it’ll be much costlier to stop the Russian juggernaut once it rolls over the Ukraine and beyond. So can we expect the president to endorse the bill? Not so fast.

Because Trump then offset his opprobrium of Putin by displaying ill-advised even-handedness. Contrary to all incontrovertible evidence, the president likes to insist that both Putin and Zelensky are equally culpable in igniting the war, especially Zelensky.

Thus, he wrote, “Likewise, President Zelenskyy is doing his Country no favors by talking the way he does. Everything out of his mouth causes problems, I don’t like it, and it better stop.”

President Zelensky is trying to rally his country in its heroic effort to resist the invader who “wants ALL of Ukraine, not just a piece of it”. Hence Trump’s statement is yet another variation on the same theme: there’s nothing to choose between Putin and Zelensky. The former is guilty of attacking, the latter of not capitulating (having first provoked Putin, there Trump also echoes the Kremlin dictator).

One suspects that Trump’s real problem with Zelensky isn’t “everything out of his mouth”, but everything that isn’t: sufficiently ardent gluteal obeisance to the Donald. And the scenic route to his heart has to start from that point of departure, which non-negotiable condition Zelensky hasn’t fully grasped.

I hope that the emerging bipartisan support for the Graham-Blumenthal bill will hammer some sense into Trump, on this issue at least. Whether or not it does, it’s good to see that some people in DC see this war for what it is: a barbarian assault on the West, not just the Ukraine.

Behavioural similarities between Don Trump and Don Corleone are increasingly hard to ignore, although some differences still persist.

For one thing, people were only expected to kiss Don Corleone’s hand. Then Don Trump is a loudmouthed bully who speaks in a language of insults and threats, whereas Don Corleone spoke softly but carried a big lupara.

Then again, Don Corleone made people an offer they couldn’t refuse, whereas Don Trump, for all his deal artistry, often makes them an offer they can’t possibly accept (or, due to his use of the English language, even understand).

Such as his current offer to destroy European exports with 50 per cent tariffs unless those smelly American-hating foreigners move their production stateside by 1 June. Now, I don’t know if Don Trump has ever visited a factory but, if he has, he must know it takes longer than a week for a manufacturing facility to up sticks and move across the ocean lock, stock and barrel.

Even without the benefit of first-hand experience, Don Trump must realise that what he is demanding is an impossibility. Hence his ultimatum isn’t so much an opening move in a negotiation as a blackmailing ploy.

“Okay, EU,” he seems to be saying, “you can’t do that, I guess. But what can you do for me, to wet my whistle? Gotta be something big or your exports will sleep with the fishes.”

EU Trade Commissioner Sefcovic replied the only way he could: “EU-US trade is unmatched and must be guided by mutual respect, not threats. We stand ready to defend our interests.”

That means both sides are going to the mattresses, you put our exports into a hospital, we’ll put yours into a morgue. As always, it’s the foot soldiers, in this case consumers, who’ll bear the brunt of hostilities. The cost of at least some of those tariffs will be passed on to them, but that’s not the only casualty they’ll suffer.

Markets all over the world have again headed south, as they always do when Don Trump starts blackmailing other countries. This means people are taking yet another hit on their savings, investments and pensions. Don Trump’s mafioso tactics will affect at least two-thirds of all Americans, which is roughly the proportion of the population involved in securities markets.

Add to this the long-suffering bond markets, and the picture gets even darker. Every time Don Trump practises his art of a blackmailing deal, investors get out of US government bonds. As a result, the US has to pay higher interest rates on her sovereign debt, and the country has already lost her top AAA credit rating.

Another similarity between Don Trump and Don Corleone is that both put the family above all else, although the latter’s understanding of the word went beyond just his next of kin. Both relied on their sons as the most trusted lieutenants.

Don Trump’s sons, Don Jr and Eric, are busily cultivating the fields he has ploughed. They are striking billion-dollar deals all over the Middle East, with office towers, hotels, golf courses and other facilities to be built – with the host countries picking up much of the costs.

Jared Kushner, married to Don Trump’s daughter Ivanka, has built a $5.5 billion empire (emirate?), mostly in the Middle East. He has thus done considerably better than Don Corleone’s son-in-law did (remember your Godfather?), and he has even managed to break through his partners’ zoological anti-Semitism. You Sheik mine, I’ll Sheik yours, is the order of the day, and never mind parochial animosity.

All those camel drivers know to stay on Don Trump’s good side. This they’ve proved over the past couple of weeks.

Don Trump visited that part of the world recently, and a most productive visit it was too, for the US possibly and in the distant future, for his family definitely and straight away. His sons were getting writer’s cramp signing all those deals on his behalf, and the Don himself got his whistle wetted to the tune of a $400-million jumbo jet, appointed in his favourite style, early King Farouk.

His regime in Israel had to be shunted aside, much to its capo’s indignation. But that capo has only himself to blame: where are his billion-dollar tokens of appreciation for Don Trump? Where is his rispetto?

Whenever Don Trump has to deal with foreigners, he acts in the Don Corleone mode. Bully those who can be bullied, pacify those who are too strong to bully, betray those he sees as insignificant, be comfortable only with his fellow mafiosi, even those hostile in the past. They speak the same language, go after the same quarry, and they don’t have the silly scruples of civilians.

Well, I think this metaphor has expanded to its outer limit. The trouble with President Trump is precisely that his fiefdom isn’t a mafia family, but a great Western country that’s the linchpin of the world order that emerged out of the Second World War.

Trump’s corrupt bungling leaves that world order in a maelstrom of chaos reigning in every walk of life: economy, defence, diplomacy, alliances. Under his aegis, America is rapidly running out of friends – his demonizing the country’s friends and allies as its enemies is turning out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If the world doesn’t end up in an economic meltdown and a war of all against all, it’ll be in spite of Trump’s efforts, not thanks to them. This leaves only a few questions to ask, which is what I’ll do even though I don’t propose to have the answers.

One: How did a man like that ever end up as president of the United States?

Two: If he was the better option in two elections (and he was), what does it say about the current state of democracy in America and elsewhere?

Three: How can he continue to get away with corruption on such an epic scale? The MAGA lot made a huge brouhaha about the corruption of the Biden family, but his son Hunter only used his father’s position to help himself to the odd million or two. With Trump’s family, the scale is greater by orders of magnitude, and yet the word ‘impeachment’ hasn’t yet crossed anyone’s lips.

Four: is there any way of stopping Trump before he plunges the world into an unmitigated disaster, economic, military or both?

Five: and this one is ever so slightly facetious. Can Don Trump do the Brooklyn-Italian accent? As a native New Yorker, he should be able to without much trouble. That would be true to style.

“How could anyone possibly object to sexual-suppression chemicals being given to convicted sex offenders?” This question is rhetorical to Judith Woods who asks it in a Telegraph article.

Anticipating that some such naysayers are still on the prowl out there, she then preempts their ridiculous objections:

“Now, I am quite sure there are Dear Readers out there crossing their legs who are also really very cross at my upbeat tone. I will, of course, be accused by various chaps of sexism for my attitude towards emasculation. To them I say this: any woman, which is to say the vast majority, who has been sexually assaulted will have a very different perspective on the sanctity of a man’s genitalia.”

This last statement is as irrelevant as we’ve learned to expect from our columnists, especially – and I know I’m about to commit a crime of misogyny even though it’s not meant as such – those as young and pretty as Miss Woods.

I have no doubt that such victims would be happy to cut off their offenders’ genitalia with a dull butter knife. I’m equally sure that the nearest relations of a murder victim would gladly see the killer flailed alive. This certainty, however, falls short of an argument any reasonably intelligent person would recognise as such.

This whole subject has come up because Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood is rolling out a voluntary pilot scheme for the voluntary chemical castration of sex offenders in 20 prisons. Should the scheme prove a success, it’ll become mandatory.

Now Miss Mahmood describes herself as a “devout Muslim”, meaning, inter alia, that for her the notion of mutilating criminals rests on a sound scriptural foundation. Yet those of us brought up in a different tradition may indeed object to this scheme, even at the risk of incurring Miss Woods’s scorn.

Some objections are based on our moral and legal tradition, meaning they will be dismissed out of hand. But for old times’ sake, punishment may deprive a criminal of his liberty or even life, but it must not deprive him of his dignity because doing so offends the Western concept of humanity.

We should no more castrate rapists than we should cut off thieves’ hands, a common practice in some cultures. Such punishment doubtless prevents re-offending, but this train of thought will be derailed on its slippery slope. What about criminals convicted of GBH (grievous bodily harm)? Should they have their limbs amputated, those used in the commission of the crime?

We don’t do such things and neither should we castrate sex offenders, chemically or surgically. If their crime is serious enough and there is a palpable danger of recidivism, they should stay in prison for ever.

Some obvious objections to the scheme are less abstract. To begin with, the concept of a sexual offence has lately shown most remarkable elasticity. Thus, in 1900, there were merely 24 prisoners serving time for sexual offences in Britain. Today they account for 21 per cent of our prison population, or about 20,000 in absolute numbers.

Discounting the possibility that over the past century British men have developed such uncontrollable libido that they force themselves into women on an industrial scale, one has to believe that these days a sexual offence is defined rather more broadly.

Miss Woods hints at a possible outer limit of this definition by writing: “A shocking number of men joke about sexual depravity.”

I can confess to this from personal experience for I too have committed this verbal indiscretion, and more than once. Miss Woods doesn’t say that repeat offenders like me should be arrested, but the general tenor of her article suggests she’d welcome such an outcome.

At present, however, she is talking specifically about rape, not an unfortunate attempt at humour. And that crime is according to her more pandemic than Covid: “Every one of my girlfriends will openly say they know someone who has been raped (for a troubling number that “someone” is themselves)…”. [It should be ‘she’, not ‘they’, but I did tell you the author is young, meaning undereducated.]

So that’s where she got the idea that a “vast majority” of women have fallen prey to sex offences. What’s a vast majority anyway? Almost every one? Pull the other one.

Far be it from me to accuse Miss Woods of dishonesty, but my experience is different, and so is Penelope’s. We don’t get around as much as Miss Woods probably does, but then we are much older. Hence it’s a fair assumption that between us we’ve known as many women as she has – yet only one of them was a rape victim.

I have, on the other hand, had an academic colleague who was sentenced to five years for having consensual sex with a girl a few months short of her 18^th birthday, which was the age of consent in Russia at the time. I’ve also read of many cases in more civilised countries when men had rape charges thrown out, but not before they had served time in prison.

According to the law that evidently didn’t exist in 1900, if a man doesn’t stop as requested at any moment during even a consensual sex act, he is a rapist. I don’t want to shock you with salacious details, but sometimes a man can’t stop in mid-stroke even if he wants to. No matter: off to the pokey with him.

Patting a woman’s rump or planting an unwanted kiss on her lips would nowadays be classified as a sex crime, not just a show of boorish manners. I don’t know if such offenders get custodial sentences but, if they still don’t, rest assured they soon will. I rather think castration would be a tad too severe in such cases, don’t you?

Miss Woods does have concerns, “primarily about the way this treatment has been linked to the early release of prisoners in order to free up spaces in our overcrowded jails. The idea that simply taking medication would allow serious sex offenders to walk free early and spend less time behind bars is absolutely unacceptable.”

For once I agree: it is indeed unacceptable. But what’s the point of chemical castration otherwise? To prevent a rapist from forcing himself on his fellow inmates? Warders? Prison doctors? Visiting lawyers? And why would a prisoner agree to chemical castration if he is staying in prison anyway? It’s that deficit of logic again.

Miss Woods herself states throughout her article that the purpose of this barbaric idea is to prevent an ex-con from raping a swath through womankind once he has been released. If her purpose was to confuse me, she has succeeded.

Chemical castration involves administering two drugs, a serotonin inhibitor, to prevent a chap from thinking dirty thoughts, and a testosterone suppressor, to prevent him from acting on such thoughts. Here my confusion deepens.

The feminist line, that leitmotif of chick-lit and, by the looks of it, also chick-punditry, is that rape has nothing to do with sex, not in any primary sense at any rate. It has all to do with hatred of women accompanied by a desire to dominate and abuse them violently.

I’ve always struggled with that line, thinking that, if such were the case, it would be easier and far less messy simply to beat a woman up. A few quick punches, 10 seconds max, job done – another woman has been dominated and violently abused. Why go through the rigamarole of… well, you know the time-consuming steps involved in rape.

But if this line doesn’t work for me, it clearly works for feminists like Miss Woods. So how would that problem be solved by suppressing a criminal’s libido? He’d simply choose another way of expressing his misogyny, all the way up to murder. He isn’t after instant sexual gratification, is he now?

The next step would be turning an offender into a vegetable with frontal lobotomy, pace One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. That procedure would certainly deter re-offending but, I repeat, we don’t, or at least shouldn’t, do such things in England. And if we start doing them, it won’t be England any longer.

Contrary to the common misconception, the Duke of Wellington never said “The battle of Waterloo was won in the playing fields of Eton”, although he might have uttered some words vaguely to that effect.

What he definitely did say was, “It is quite impossible for me or any other man to command a British Army under the existing system. We have in the service the scum of the earth as common soldiers.”

Arthur Wellesley, not yet the Duke of Wellington, expressed that uncomplimentary view of his men in 1813, after they had gone on a rampage of looting following the Battle of Vitoria in the Basque Country.

The “existing system” he was referring to was conscripting into the armed forces mainly the uncouth lower classes who easily gave way to their savage instincts. One has to believe, however, that an army made up exclusively of Old Etonians would have been rather outnumbered in the Peninsular War.

‘The scum of the earth’, on the other hand, did rather well in Iberia and even better two years later in Flanders, where they routed Napoleon, if with some help from their Prussian friends. It’s true though that there is a pent-up feral streak running through swaths of the British lower classes, something not always easy to keep in check.

It takes a war to channel such savagery into useful conduits, but we haven’t had a real one for a while. So the pressure builds and builds, until it finds an outlet and bursts out.

To illustrate that tendency, over the past few days some 80,000 heirs to Wellington’s men went on their own rampage in Spain, again choosing the Basque Country as their arena. This time though it wasn’t Vitoria but Bilbao, where two English teams, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur were contesting the final of the Europa League.

I don’t know what bright spark came up with the idea of two English sides squaring off in Spain. The site was chosen well in advance, but surely there has to be enough sensibility in the system to allow for an ad hoc change of venue.

Be that as it may, the arithmetic worked against the organisers. The seating capacity of the Bilbao stadium is just over 50,000. Supporters of each team were allocated 12,000 seats, 24,000 in total. Even assuming that the locals boycotted the event, and only English fans bought up all the remaining seats, that still left at least 30,000 chaps at a loose end in Bilbao.

Why did they travel at all then? If they were going to watch the game on television in some smoky Bilbao bar, they could have stayed at home, watched the match on a big screen down the pub, drunk their 15 pints and still come out ahead compared to the cost of travel.

Intrepid bar owners in Bilbao, aware of the unquenchable thirst of English visitors, slyly doubled the price of beer, correctly assuming that the chaps would drink their fill anyway. What happened then makes me repeat the earlier question. What did they travel for?

Since it was more comfortable, less bothersome and much cheaper to watch the match at home, many of the football supporters clearly didn’t descend on Bilbao to support football. They went there in search of an outlet for all that pent-up ferocity that appalled Wellington at Vitoria, but served him well at Waterloo.

They found what they came for. Thousands of yobs whacked out of their minds (pissed as farts, in their own idiom) went on an orgy of vandalism, violence and general mayhem. Café furniture was thrown, traffic lights were destroyed, the lower storeys of balconied houses were stormed as if they were some medieval fortresses.

Police eventually ordered bars in the area to close at around midnight, earlier than usual, but by then our countrymen had already been drinking for almost 12 hours, enough time to prime themselves for the Battle of Bilbao.

Reports say that none of the locals were killed, but they were all thoroughly disgusted. When interviewed, they swore they had never seen so many people so drunk and so disorderly. The implied comparison is damning, for Spaniards are neither shrinking violets nor especially abstemious.

Their own working-class men are sturdy hombres, but they seem not to have the savage lurking in their breast and looking for every chance to bust out. Makes you proud to be British, doesn’t it?

At the time the Iron Duke made his cruel assessment of the working classes, they were quite different from today’s lot. The nastier elements among them were controlled, at least at peacetime, by no-nonsense law enforcement; and their natural instincts were mitigated by the church, which almost a third of them attended regularly at that time.

That proportion is now a third of that at best, close to zero at worst, and I’m sure it’s negligible among those who elevate their football team to a quasi-divine status. And as for our law enforcement, the less said about it, the better. A herd of yobs on a stampede through the city centre mainly go unpunished – provided they abuse everyone equally, regardless of race.

Too many incidents like that, and English teams may again be banned from European competition, as they were in 1985-1990. Yet the First Law of Thermodynamics says that energy can’t be destroyed, only altered. Should that ban happen, the feral energy of our hoi polloi will be splashing out in our own cities even more than now.

Meanwhile, one regularly sees ‘No English’ signs in bar and restaurant windows all over Europe, and it’s not just football fans who inspire such preemptive practices. English stag parties and increasingly hen ones are known for their talent at reducing a civilised establishment to a credible replica of Hitler’s bunker after an Allied raid.

There are any number of measures one could propose to curtail the more savage impulses of our masses, but suggesting them would be a waste of time. Changes to our education, general culture, law enforcement, social mores would have to be more sweeping than any government would ever even contemplate.

Perhaps what we need is another war, for our lads to terrorise enemies rather than the good citizens of foreign and domestic cities. I’m sure Putin will oblige if we ask him nicely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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