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A New York jury has ruled that Donald Trump must pay $83.3 million to E. Jean Carroll, a writer he was found to have defamed by denying her allegation of sexual assault.

 Trump immediately described the verdict, with his usual contempt for punctuation, as a “Biden Directed Witch Hunt”. In other words, the trial and the verdict were politically motivated.

I wish it were as simple as that. If the jury of seven men and two women had found for the plaintiff simply because it abhorred the defendant’s politics, that would represent a gross travesty of justice. A fair jury should judge the facts put before it, not politics.

However, unless that practice became endemic, one could only deplore that particular miscarriage of justice, without extrapolating to a much wider cultural and civilisational malaise. Yet my fear, nay near-certainty, is that the jury genuinely believed Trump was guilty. If that’s so, then one is justified in pondering a civilisational collapse, not just a flawed justice system.

Anyway, even if the judge had had a political grudge against Trump, which is probable, it wouldn’t have been an easy matter to appeal to the jurors’ sense of political rectitude. Especially if Trump’s defence had done its job during the selection.  

Granted, New York City is as likely to vote for the KKK Grand Wizard as for any Republican candidate, never mind one as unapologetically divisive as Trump. Yet even in that thoroughly ‘liberal’ city it should be possible to find nine people who aren’t obsessed with Leftie zealotry.

Trump’s problem had to be the one I touched on the other day. People have been so thoroughly brainwashed that they automatically assume anyone accused of any sex crime is guilty as charged.

Had they gone strictly by the evidence of the case, they would have found for the defendant in, appropriately, a New York minute – expressing into the bargain their disbelief that so flimsy a case had been brought to court in the first place.

According to Miss Carroll, Trump had persistently defamed her by calling her a liar. I don’t get this.

If he didn’t bring her veracity into question, that would be tantamount to admitting rape. Had Trump done so, he would have faced a criminal trial, not a civil one. And he would have been sentenced to a prison term that, considering his age, would have meant life without parole.

Trump would have been a madman not to call Miss Carroll a liar, although I’m sure he must have used rather intemperate language in doing so. Old Donald isn’t exactly known for subtlety and refinement.

This was another case of a retrospective rape the claimant suddenly recalled years after the event. Thirty years ago, to be exact, was when Miss Carroll ran into Trump at an upmarket department store.

According to her, they had briefly met once before; according to Trump, they hadn’t. That’s a moot point: either way, they were total strangers. Even if she is right, Trump can be forgiven for having forgotten the single encounter. I for one can’t remember everyone I met 30 years ago, and Trump’s circle of contacts is wider than mine by orders of magnitude.

Having bumped into the woman he barely knew if at all, Trump nevertheless asked her to help him choose lingerie for a girl. He then picked up a see-through body suit and asked Carroll to model it for him.

That’s a rather forward request, and Trump was presumptuous in making it. Too mild a term? Fine, call him ill-mannered, lascivious or vulgar. But what do you call an educated woman in her late forties who agrees to model see-through underwear for a stranger?

She claims they then went to the fitting room, where Trump pounced and had his wicked way with her. Miss Carroll says she tried to fight Trump off, but in vain. That makes Trump a champion-calibre rapist, for nothing short of such qualification would have enabled him to do the dirty in a cramped fitting room, while keeping his victim silent throughout.

Had she cried out “rape!”, there would have been dozens of people on the typically crowded floor to come to her rescue: sales clerks, store detectives, other customers. Yet Miss Carroll withstood her ordeal in stoical silence, which she then kept for decades.

Why wait so long? It has to be hard to rape a woman without leaving physical evidence, DNA or some other. Presenting such evidence to the police immediately after the fact would have strengthened Miss Carroll’s case no end.

However, she waited 25 years before first crying out in 2019. Usually this sort of thing happens when an alleged rape is perpetrated by a man of modest means who goes on to make a fortune in the ensuing decades. The victim then sees the chance of a lifetime and grabs it, suing her supposed assailant for zillions and typically settling for millions.

Yet Trump was already rich 30 years ago, perhaps even much richer than he is now. So why did she have to wait until his seventies and her eighties to bring her lawsuit? There are so many possibilities, I’m not even going to speculate.

Perhaps Miss Carroll has fallen on hard times in her dotage and urgently needs a cash infusion. Or else she may indeed be politically motivated. Or she has got to hate Trump more over the years. Or… well, I did say I wasn’t going to speculate.

When I first wrote about this case almost a year ago, this is what I said: “If Miss Carroll indeed suffered that crime, my commiserations. Moreover, I wouldn’t put it past Trump to do something like that.”

However, “Whatever we may think about Trump, I do hope American justice has enough residual sanity left to dismiss this case with the contempt it deserves. And if it doesn’t, that’ll be proof positive it’s no longer sane.”

That proof has now been served. American – and not just American – justice isn’t sane when it comes to crimes arousing woke indignation.

That means any woman can get rich by making false accusations (or unprovable ones, which legally should amount to the same thing) against any man rich enough to pay the exorbitant damages. Judges and juries will helpfully comply lest they may be accused of crimes against woke humanity.

In this case, politics may or may not have been a factor. If they had been, that’s something I’d be inclined to see as the lesser evil.

The organisers of the Australian Open, one of the four Grand Slam tennis tournaments, are heaving a great sigh of relief even as we speak.

To their delight, Alexander Zverev of Germany has lost his semi-final match today. They were hoping he’d lose earlier, but this later exit will have to do to be going on with. As long as he isn’t feted as the champion.

Why are they so anti-Zverev? Is it because they hate Germans, which is his nationality? Or Russians, which is his ethnicity? No, neither of those. Nevertheless, throughout the tournament there sounded increasingly shrill demands that Zverev not be allowed to play at all.

Now, when people object to Russian citizens playing international sports, one can understand. Russia is after all waging a criminal, aggressive war in the heart of Europe. Moreover, the Russians have a long history of using sport successes for propaganda purposes.

Hence I’d welcome imposing a total boycott on Russian performers in either sports or arts. However, no sensible person would demand a similar injunction against a chap born in Hamburg, just because he happens to be Russian genetically.

To the Aussies’ credit, they don’t stoop to such racism. Their problem with Zverev is different. You see, he is currently under indictment for abusing his former girlfriend. However, the court date is set for May, so the player hasn’t yet been tried and found guilty.

Australia is ruled by some version of the English common law, and hence the country’s population must be familiar with the ancient concept of the presumption of innocence. Moreover, I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that even Western nations playing in the lower legal leagues, those governed by Justinian or Napoleonic codes, tend to wait for the verdict before demonising the accused.

So why not wait until May to decide what to do with Zverev? If he is found guilty, drum him out of tennis, throw him under the bus, have him drawn and quartered. Or else agree that to forgive is divine and let him ply his trade, after perhaps some sort of suspension. But do wait in any case: the chap is innocent until proven guilty. Isn’t he?

This is where the ‘but’ in the title above comes from. Or perhaps ‘that depends’, if you’d rather. For the presumption of innocence works in some crime categories, but not in others.

Not that the letter of the law has changed. It hasn’t. But in all Western countries there now exists a parallel legal system: mob rule. And not just any old mob, but specifically one out to override the law of the land and enforce in its place the interlacing system of pernicious fads collectively known as wokery.

The woke mob doesn’t object to holding a thief, a burglar, even a murderer innocent until proven guilty. Those felons commit crimes only against individual victims, which is regrettable but variously tolerable. By contrast, anyone transgressing against one of the cherished woke fads strikes against the whole ethos.

This kind of pecking order is nothing new. In fact, it’s a ghastly parody of Judaeo-Christian morality. There the first four of the Ten Commandments, prioritised in the descending order of importance, proscribe lapses in worship. Injunctions against murder, theft, perjury and so forth are further down the list.

However, the Decalogue came from a good and loving God who knew that people stigmatised by original sin needed a constant reminder of what it meant to be good. The commandments of wokery, on the other hand, come not from those who love but from those who hate.

They have no real virtue to signal, so they come up with alternative commandments underpinning their parallel ethos, one they hope will swallow up the real, traditional one they detest. You don’t need me to remind you of which fake virtues make up the new canon. Suffice it to say that feminism is right up there.

A sinner against feminist diktats isn’t innocent until proven guilty. He is guilty the moment he is charged, and the standards of required proof range from loose to non-existent.

If the constitutionally instituted bodies balk at following that logic, then punishment can be meted out by the expedients that come naturally to crazed mobs. Prime among them is the attempt to destroy the defendant’s life and career by launching a shrill campaign in every available medium.

That’s exactly what has happened to Zverev. If he were charged with beating up an elderly passer-by within an inch of his life, he would stand accused of a crime against both that individual and the law designed to protect individuals. The presumption of innocence is part of that law, and it’s a cornerstone of Western justice. Since Australians are Western (and I shan’t entertain any denials of that fact), I’m sure they’d have no problem with Zverev playing in Melbourne before his trial date.

But the Australian woke mob, just like its equivalents throughout the world, lives by different justice. Crippling a passer-by is unfortunate, but judgement can be deferred. However, slapping a girlfriend or a wife demands summary justice – the putative crime has been committed not against one woman, but against womankind, the minority group believed to have been oppressed throughout history.

It’s pointless arguing that women haven’t always been oppressed, and neither are they a minority. That’s like trying to persuade a Muslim that there is a god other than Allah, and Mohammed isn’t his prophet. We aren’t talking historical evidence, arithmetic or physical facts here. We are talking what’s believed to be higher, metaphysical truth to which only the initiated are privy.

Thankfully, the Australian Open organisers didn’t go along with woke demands. They waited until Zverev lost his semi-final to send him back to Germany – as the rest of us will wait for the court verdict. They have, however, tried not to make any fuss about Zverev’s tennis throughout the tournament, limiting their press releases to the bare minimum.

I wonder how they reconcile their coyness with what’s going on in another country practising the English common law, the US. There a man currently under several separate indictments is competing not just in a tennis tournament, but in the presidential race. Not only is he allowed to compete but, if early indications are anything to go by, he will probably win. Oh well, different strokes for different folks, as Americans say.

…the more you beat them, the better they’ll be,” says the English proverb going back to at least the 17^th century.

Here’s a more contemporary contribution to the same genre: “What do you tell a woman who has two black eyes? Nothing. She has already been told twice.”

Exculpating advance notice: finding this joke funny doesn’t in itself constitute an endorsement of the practice alluded to. I certainly find it abhorrent – yet also useful as a gauge of the level of civilisation in society.

I hope saying this doesn’t brand me as a militant feminist, but the more civilised a man, the less likely he is to beat his wife. Civilisation is after all a cognate of civility, the ability to settle conflicts without resorting to violence.

Any lack of it is a triumph of the beast lurking in a man’s breast. Much as I may fume about this or that woke academic, he is less prone to give his wife a black eye than your average football fan, especially one holding a season ticket.

Extrapolating from individuals to populations, the more widespread wife-beating is, the more savage is the society. I haven’t seen any sociological studies to that effect, but, as far as wild guesses go, this one strikes me as plausible.

It’s in this context that you may appreciate the ingenious marketing trick deployed by a make-up shop in Kazakhstan. It has created a video teaching women how to use proper cosmetics “if your husband beats you”. The video was instantly watched by 1.6 million women, which testifies to the magnitude of the problem (the Kazakhstan population is about nine million).

Now, I have a cursory familiarity with Kazakhstan because my uncle used to run the Almaty opera and ballet theatre there. Neither my personal impressions nor especially his stories testify to a cosmically high level of civilisation in that country.

Nevertheless, the video surprised me, and not because I found it incredible that so many Kazakh men treat their wives like dogs or walnut trees. What caught me unawares was the women’s reaction to that abuse.

The shop proprietor dubbed as the talking (and bruised) head in the video. “If you’ve developed a bruise like I have,” goes her helpful advice, “let’s just get a good eye cream, a base, and a high coverage foundation.” But then comes a mea culpa that strikes me as a non sequitur: “I mean, it’s not his fault – it’s mine.”

She then signs off by referring to herself as a “happy wife and loving mother”. Also a forgiving, self-deprecating soul, if I may add.

Kazakh legislators propose laws reinforcing this take on dual responsibility for domestic violence. One member of the ruling party has put forth a bill saying that, if a man is sentenced to 15 days of administrative arrest for wife-beating, his wife should get the same sentence for “provoking” the incident.

I wonder what the Kazakh is for “it hurts me more than it hurts you”, but whatever it is, Kazakh men should learn to say it, thereby bridging the gap between their civilisation and ours. At the moment, the gap is rather wide, as I’m sure you’ll agree. Even if some English brutes beat their wives, I doubt the women blame themselves for provoking such treatment.

Both the Kazakhs and the Russians bear the stigmata, ethnic and civilisational, of the Mongol invasion. The ethnic aspect is more pronounced among the Kazakhs, but the European appearance of most Russians doesn’t cancel the nation’s indebtedness to the Golden Horde.

This is especially apparent in the country’s politics, a classic example of Asian tribal totalitarianism with a good measure of Byzantine Caesarism adding a quasi-Christian touch. Scratch a German, Adenauer used to say, and you’ll find a Slav. Well, scratch a Russian, and you’ll find a Mongol.

The Mongols left as much of a civilisational imprint on the Russian nation as they did on the Kazakhs. That’s why wife-beating is as widespread in Russia as it is in Kazakhstan, and always has been. Russian women may not be as ready as their Kazakh sisters to take the blame for their men’s brutality, but they do tend to accept it with stoicism, treating the odd black eye as a force majeure, a bit like bad weather.

In A Writer’s Diary Dostoyevsky describes in terrifying detail the characteristic savagery of a peasant taking a belt or a stick to his trussed-up wife, lashing at her, ignoring her pleas for mercy until, pounded to a bloody pulp, she stops pleading or moving – only to come to the next morning and, moaning every step of the way, stagger out to work in the field. However, according to the writer, this in no way contradicted the brute’s inner spirituality, so superior to Western materialistic legalism.

This is a matter of taste, but I’d take materialistic legalism over spirituality any day, if the latter manifests itself as unrestrained savagery. Anyway, people who know the Russians are seldom surprised at any acts of unspeakable cruelty they commit, such as the way they’ve been waging war on the Ukraine.

That’s why I find the Germanic separation of culture and civilisation so useful. The former is only a subset of the latter, and cultural excellence may well coexist with civilisational backwardness. The Russians are (or rather used to be, in the 1825 to 1925 century) easily one of the world’s most cultured nations – and one of the least civilised.

This is something to keep in mind when trying to understand their behaviour. And something tells me that before long such understanding will be at a premium.  

Guidance for museums issued by an Arts Council charity provide yet another argument for a massive cull of every bearer of a liberal arts degree.

(Those with degrees in English should be exempt, especially one elderly chap cursed with a life-long devotion to arts and humanities.)

The Collection Trust, funded by the Exchequer, has issued the Inclusive Terminology Glossary, instructing museum curators that Israel only has herself to blame for being on the receiving end of Hamas’s righteous wrath.

Yes, conceded the guide, we should rebuke Hamas for its excesses. However, it “remains important to recognise the anti-colonial, freedom-fighting motivation of any attacks against a settler colonial state.”

And let’s not be wanton in bandying the term ‘terrorist’ about: “In modern history, we have seen the ‘terrorist’ label applied to those who have fought against colonialism, oppression and apartheid, perhaps most notoriously Nelson Mandela, winner of the Nobel Peace prize.”

Quite apart from their subversive wokery, the authors of the Glossary share with their ‘liberal’ brethren a well-honed knack for committing several rhetorical fallacies in one sentence.

One such is petitio principii, ‘begging the question’ in English. (By the way, some people use ‘it begs the question’ to mean ‘it raises the question’. This is a lexical felony, but I’ll let you decide on the commensurate punishment.) It describes an argument in which the premises assume the conclusion without supporting it.

In this case, the premise is that no winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and certainly not Nelson Mandela, can possibly be a terrorist. Now, another winner of that accolade was Yasser Arafat, whose terrorist credentials are seldom denied even by his friends.

As to St Nelson, officially canonised in the atheist anti-Western church – but of course he was a terrorist, and a Marxist one to boot. The African National Congress, led by Mandela until his 1963 trial and after his 1990 release, was a Marxist terrorist organisation committed to the violent overthrow of the apartheid government.

In that undertaking the ANC was assisted by the Soviets and their satellites, mainly Cuban and East German. It was after all committed to armed struggle, and the arms had to come from somewhere. Nor was it just arms.

East German Stasi helped the ANC to set up ‘Quatro’, the detention centre across the border in Angola. There dozens of anti-Marxists were tortured and murdered.

In the same spirit of international cooperation the ANC also received assistance from our own dear IRA. In an arrangement allegedly negotiated by Gerry Adams himself, the IRA sent its bomb-making experts to train aspiring ANC murderers, which greatly improved their efficiency.

However, the ANC didn’t just adopt foreign techniques. Some indigenous touches were added, such as the widespread practice of ‘necklacing’, whereby an old tyre was filled with petrol, put around a dissident’s neck and set alight.

In the view of our liberal intelligentsia, any motivation consonant with their own ideology justifies mass murder and torture, which is fair enough – we are all entitled to our prejudices. But in the distant past, anyone wishing to impose his prejudices on other people had to come equipped with sound arguments.

No such need these day: utter shibboleths like “fighting against colonialism, oppression and apartheid”, and everybody is supposed to spring up and salute. All is forgiven, all is justified – all is praised.

Our museums used to be curated by great connoisseurs and historians of art like Kenneth Clark (d. 1983), who got to run the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford at 27 and Britain’s National Gallery at 30. Today’s curators need no such credentials. Their intellectual equipment makes do with professed hatred of colonialism, racism, homophobia and so on, all the way down the list.

Paintings at most exhibitions come with commentary by art scholars who offer no insights into the art on show. Instead, viewers are told, say, that Hogarth, an 18^th century artist, was mainly concerned about  “the entrenchment of racist, sexist and xenophobic stereotypes.” However, he had to be careful about his criticism because of “…his wealthy patrons many of whom benefited from a culture based on colonial exploitation.”

No doubt visitors to such exhibitions will feel that their appreciation of art has been broadened and deepened. Another, likelier, possibility is that they walk out more ignorant than they were on the way in.

And this is before we even consider the moral decrepitude of describing Israel as a “settler colonial state”. I doubt those ‘experts’ have read Exodus, but they must have heard what it was about. If so, they must know that Jews have been living on that land for over 3,000 years and, unlike any other group I can think of, throughout that time they have worshiped the same God and spoken the same language.

At the very least, that should give those Glossary authors pause to think and realise that the issue of settlement is far from being as clear-cut as they seem to believe. What is clear-cut is the monstrosity of Hamas and what it did on 7 October.

Using iffy (actually ignorant and malevolent) politics as justification for disembowelling babies is itself monstrous. Someone must have placed a magnet next to those chaps’ moral compass to make it go haywire.

Their problem with Israel isn’t that it’s a “colonial settler state”, but that it’s a Western country fighting rearguard action against horrific third-world barbarism. That makes Israel their enemy, daring to defend itself against their fellow West-haters.

It’s sickening to think that my taxes pay for this outrage. Perhaps culling every bearer of a liberal arts degree is a little excessive. But defunding them would be just – let them signal their virtue at their own expense. Oh well, that’s enough wishful thinking for one day. I’m now going to go and reread Exodus.

Yesterday marked the centenary since Lenin’s death, and I think not only Russia but the world at large should celebrate the demise of that ghoul.

But of course, the Russians celebrate Lenin’s life, not just his death (from syphilis). His mummy still adorns Red Square, and people still queue up to pay homage, although nowhere near in the numbers I remember from my childhood.

The Russians tend to reserve their special affection for the bloodiest of their tyrants. This is called respect for traditional values, a quality mandated by today’s fascist government.

The milestones on the path of their historical worship are Ivan IV (the Terrible), Peter I (the Great), Lenin, Stalin and – if the Russians know what’s good for them – Putin. Vlad himself feels he belongs in that company, and I think he is right, although not necessarily in the way he means.

His predecessors are now portrayed as stern, sometimes cruel rulers who nevertheless devoted their lives to making Russia great. Yes, they committed a few unfortunate excesses, but the net result of their reigns was undeniably positive.

My take on history is different. All those men were (Putin still is) blood-thirsty tyrants who anchored Russia, securely and eternally, in the morass of unrestrained savagery. Now I’m sure you know enough about Lenin and Stalin not to take issue with this view. But what about Putin’s other two predecessors?

Ivan ruled Russia from 1547 until his death in 1584. This contemporary of Elizabeth I began his reign by opening large-scale hostilities against his own people, whose devotion he doubted.

First he struck out in the north-westerly direction, systematically sacking every Russian town in his path. Klin and Tver in particular suffered the most hideous outrages.

Apart from having all the more prominent citizens murdered, Ivan’s oprichniks robbed everyone else and, as a final touch later to be duplicated by Lenin and Stalin, either confiscated or destroyed their stores of grain. This stratagem worked to perfection in the way of a delayed-action bomb: those spared the oprichniks’ axes would succumb to starvation during the winter.

It was early in the campaign that the tsar’s strategy of plunder and murder was refined. After capturing Tver, the oprichniks first robbed and murdered all the clergy from the bishop down. Two days later, they robbed all other denizens of their possessions, trashed every house, looted what appealed to them and burned everything else.

Finally, the oprichniks burst through the streets, murdering everyone they could see or seize: young and old, men and women, children and even pets. This they repeated in their subsequent conquests: there were 1,500 people murdered in Torzhok alone, and it was a small town.

In January 1570 the tsar captured Novgorod. This pro-Western Hanseatic city with parliamentary traditions had long been a burr under Ivan’s blanket, and finally he had had enough. The three-prong punitive strategy had already been tested, so the tsar knew what he was doing. First the place had to be decapitated by the destruction of its elites. Second, it had to be robbed of any means of sustenance. The knowledge was immediately put into practice: the first two prongs stabbed home with a most satisfying effect.

By way of a warm-up, all Novgorod monks were clubbed to death. Then Ivan summoned the city’s aristocracy and business elite, the boyars and the merchants, accompanied by their wives and children. They were all tortured ‘unimaginably’, as a contemporary described it. Many were burnt by a diabolical chemical compound personally developed by the talented tsar, who had an aptitude for science as well as for aesthetics. Those men who were still alive were then drowned in the Volkhov river, followed by their wives who were tied to their babies and pushed under the ice.

The third prong went in when Ivan ordered that every house and shop be cleared of all possessions and food. These were then destroyed, along with every grain silo, all domestic fowl and cattle. So on top of the 60,000 killed directly, whose corpses were swelling the Volkhov, the denizens of the whole region had to suffer horrendous famines and epidemics. Cannibalism was rife; corpses were dug out of their graves and devoured – and Lenin and Stalin were still long in coming.

Another epic hero, Peter, is credited with having “chopped a window into Europe”, in the words Pushkin attributed to the tsar. Now a window, as opposed to a door, is used by two types of people: burglars and Peeping Toms. One could argue that it was in those two capacities that Russia has been dealing with Europe ever since.

As to Peter’s reign, there is little I can add to the sketch expertly drawn by Russia’s greatest writer, Leo Tolstoy:

“The most staggering and the most familiar horrors of Russian history closest to us began with Peter I.

“For a quarter of a century that crazed, drink-sodden animal rotting from syphilis murdered, executed, buried people alive, imprisoned his wives, wenched, buggered, boozed, amused himself by beheading people, blasphemed, drove around with a cross made out of wooden male organs and copies of the Gospel, glorified Christ with a crate of vodka, demeaned faith, crowned his slut and his male lover, executed his son and died of syphilis – and people don’t just forget his crimes but extol the greatness of this monster and erect endless statues of him.”

Peter beggared whole provinces and reduced their population to starvation by his insane drive to build the city named St Petersburg after his patron saint. Some 300,000 perished erecting those pretty bridges and sumptuous palaces on a swamp.

The rest of the country was exhausted by the incessant wars Peter fought against all and sundry. Now he is mainly remembered for his victory at Poltava against Charles XII of Sweden, but Peter’s other campaigns were less successful and many were outright disasters.

He is also hailed as the founder of the Russian navy, although during his lifetime and for at least a century thereafter the country lacked a blue-water navy in the fullest sense of the word. The actual ships Peter had built at a tremendous cost in lives didn’t outlive him: their wooden hulls either rotted away or were crushed by ice in the northern ports.

I can’t think offhand of a single Western country that venerates its mass murderers with the same gusto. Yesterday, for example, red flags were flying all over Moscow, when those Lenin worshippers indulged their nostalgia for another monster.

I’d rather see the blue-and-yellow flags of a country heroically defending herself against Russian invaders. But anyone unfurling one of those in Russia will be killed by today’s heir to the long line of ghoulish rulers.

You shouldn’t be bracing yourself for yet another horror story about ‘our planet’ being shallow-fried, or else about water levels rising to swallow women and children.

The 3,000 victims have only lost their jobs, not yet their lives. And the culprit isn’t non-existent global warming but the swindle that uses it for nefarious purposes.

One such purpose seems to be downgrading, ideally destroying, domestic industry, leaving us at the strategic mercy of foreign suppliers who aren’t always our friends. In that spirit, Tata Steel has announced that 2,800 jobs will be lost at its Port Talbot plant over the next 18 months, with another 300 to go soon thereafter.

By putting 3,000 men on the street Tata Steel hopes to save ‘our planet’ from looming disaster. You see, its blast furnaces and coke ovens emit too much carbon dioxide for Greta Thunberg’s taste. Hence they must be replaced with an electric arc furnace, which reduces emissions to the planet-saving levels.

The new furnace is set to cost £1.25 billion, with the government chipping in to the tune of £500 million. Rishi Sunak is happy to contribute half a billion quid of our money, plus however much it will take to provide for another 3,000 unemployed. That was to be expected. Being woke seems to be not only an ironclad requirement for our politicians, but increasingly the sole qualification they must possess.

Yet Mr Sunak has gone beyond such a limited job description by also displaying an enviable knack for demagoguery. You know how shops pass spending for saving? You must have seen hundreds of ads saying: “Now you can save £150…” by spending £2,000, is the unspoken refrain.

Well, our Rishi-washy PM used the same logic to justify this blow to 3,000 families: “The alternative, by the way, was it, the entire plant, will be closed and all 8,000 jobs will be lost, but the Government worked with the company. The company is investing more money in order to safeguard thousands of jobs, and that’s something that the UK Government has done.”

You see, this isn’t about dumping 3,000 jobs. It’s about saving the remaining 5,000. Well done, Rishi. The former adman in me applauds, while the present commentator boos.

There is a distinct possibility that, by trying to achieve net zero emissions in heavy industry, we’ll end up with net zero heavy industry. Meanwhile, what are those 3,000 men going to do (I’m assuming most of them are men)?

They probably had the benefit of the low end of our generally abysmal public education. Hence they won’t be able to retrain as systems analysts or financial advisers in a hurry, if at all. My guess is that most of them won’t be able to feed their families without some assistance from the public purse.

I’m sure that, as they go to the social for their meagre cheque every week, they’ll feel happy that ‘our planet’ is out of imminent danger. That’s more than one can say for their country.

Britain is on her way to becoming the only major economy unable to produce its own steel. Juxtaposing this fact with the daily expert predictions of an approaching war with Russia, one gets the picture of a country at a huge strategic disadvantage.

We’ll have to depend on outside suppliers, mainly China, the world’s biggest steel producer. Such outsourcing is unlikely to benefit ‘our planet’ because the Chinese aren’t unduly bothered about carbon emissions. They are more interested in the strategic and economic advantages of producing enough steel for both domestic needs and export. ‘Our planet’ can take care of itself as far as they are concerned.

Our insane drive for net zero will lead to any number of disasters, but the damage done to heavy industry is among the worst ones. Wind farms and solar panels may keep an average semi-detached house going, but believing they can fuel steel plants, auto works, ship building and chemical plants is cloud cuckoo land.

Since our need for the products of heavy industry is only ever going to increase, more and more manufacturing will be outsourced to variously tyrannical countries seeing us as existential enemies. Such supplies could be cut off at a moment’s notice, with predictable dire results.

We are probably beggaring ourselves and definitely exposing ourselves strategically to comply with stupid demands based on slapdash, not to say larcenous, science. ‘Our planet’ has always had periods of warmer or colder climate, and it has been warmer than now for 85 per cent of the earth’s existence.

The global warming swindle is just another prong in a sustained attack on our civilisation, specifically in this case on how it has made itself so uniformly prosperous. The same people who march against nuclear energy or for Muslim terrorism also scream about ‘our planet’ being killed by greedy capitalists (if you don’t believe me, read some of Greta Thunberg’s harangues).

Our politicians obediently sit up and listen lest they may be accused of being insufficiently woke. The media, predominantly staffed with marginally better educated Gretas, go along with alacrity. The combined efforts of government and media spivs produce torrents of propaganda drowning the few voices of reason, which are muffled with ease.

People like the 3,000 Port Talbot workers fall immediate victims; the rest of us will follow in due course. See you on the bread line – if I don’t see you in the foxholes first.

William of Ockham, he of the razor fame, was one of Europe’s – which is to say the world’s – most important medieval thinkers.

He was born in 1285 or thereabouts in, as the name suggests, Ockham. I’ve always known this trivial fact, and I must have driven past the Ockham exit off the A3 hundreds of times. Yet bizarrely it never occurred to me that William came from that very same unremarkable Surrey village.

Somehow, Surrey isn’t associated in my mind with a centre of scholastic thought. Paris, yes. Bologna, perhaps. Canterbury and Oxford, fine, if we wish to be patriotic. But Surrey is a place where footballers live, not scholastic and nominalist philosophers of the High Middle Ages.

However, once I finally put William and Ockham together, I felt the urge to drive to that village, not just zip past the road sign pointing in its direction. I don’t know what I expected to see. Some sort of homage, I suppose. A statue perhaps. A plaque, definitely. Or maybe a square named after the pride of Ockham.

Anyway, I can tell you exactly what I did find: nothing. Not a single reference of any kind to – I’m taking a stab in the dark here – probably the only great man to have come from Ockham. William didn’t even rate a lousy plaque.

He isn’t the only one. We don’t tend to honour our cultural figures the way the French honour theirs. In Britain, such plaudits are more likely to go to aristocrats than to writers, painters and composers.

Granted, there are several streets around the Tate Gallery named after English painters. But I can’t think offhand of a single street, close or square named after William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons, Henry Purcell or for that matter John Donne, Christopher Marlowe or Samuel Richardson.

Chesterton once wrote an essay comparing the street names in London’s central Charing Cross area and Paris. He pointed out that the side streets running into the Strand are all named after noblemen, whereas few Paris streets are.

The duke of Norfolk was thus honoured twice, in the streets bearing his title, Norfolk, and his family name, Arundel. As to George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, his lover James I was so smitten with the handsome lad that he had six streets named after him: George, Villiers, The, Duke, Of, Buckingham.

As to the Dukes of Grosvenor, they own much of central London, which fact is immortalised in at least a dozen place names I can think of, and there must be more.

To be fair, the French used not to be so different in that respect. It’s just that they had that little fracas in 1789, which played havoc with the names of streets and squares. Thus Place Louis XV had to become Place de la Révolution, and so it remained until Louis-Philippe decided to split the difference and called it Place de la Concorde.

And the stately Place Royale, which is still adorned with the equestrian statue of Louis XIII, had to suffer the indignity of being renamed Place des Vosges, after the first province that supported the revolutionary army with its taxes.

Now many Paris streets bear the names of Bonaparte and his multiple battles, although no Rue Waterloo springs to mind. Also commemorated in this fashion are salient dates in the political calendar, such as the 14 July, 25 August or 4 September. And of course uncountable streets and squares are named after great cultural figures.

And it’s not just Paris either. A couple of week ago we spent a night in Rouen, one of our favourite places in France. That’s of course where Flaubert comes from, and the city doesn’t let you forget that fact for a second. Probably not everything in Rouen is named after the writer, but one can easily get that impression.

The city centre has kept much of its beautiful old architecture, and one can just see Madame Bovary doing the dirty in the back of a carriage trundling along the cobbled streets. Or perhaps Penelope is right and it’s just my dirty mind.

You can see that sort of thing throughout France. Close to us are two villages, Toucy and Saint-Sauveur. The former is the birthplace of the lexicographer Larousse, and his statue proudly sits in the town square, whereas a local pâtisserie is known for its Larousse cake.

The other village is native to the strictly mediocre writer Colette. Except don’t you dare call her – or any other French writer – mediocre when talking to the French. As far as they are concerned, all their writers fall into the range between brilliant and universal genius.

If you dare describe any French writer, including that giftless girlish scribbler Colette, as anything outside that range, even your French friends will snap your head off, a fate that almost befell me on numerous occasions (I’m seldom reticent in expressing my cultural judgements). And of course her native village has a huge Colette museum, which I’ve never visited in the 23 years that we’ve been in the area.

Drive a couple of miles down the road from us on the way to Auxerre and you’ll cross a Rue Debussy in the back of beyond. And the centre of Auxerre lavishly commemorates Marie Noël, a poetess I’m man enough to admit I had never heard of until we moved into the area.

And the point? Well, it’s fairly obvious. Culture, in its narrow meaning of high culture, clearly plays a greater role in France than in Britain. Even minor figures like Marie Noël are honoured in the way our giants like William of Ockham aren’t.

That doesn’t mean French culture is greater than ours – it isn’t. However, culture has a stronger adhesive power in French history, gluing together the nation’s past and present. If English place names reflect at least a millennium of political continuity, the country’s salient contribution to Western civilisation, the French tend to buttress their society with their cultural ethos.

You understand I’m talking about general tendencies emerging out of numerous exceptions. But the tendencies are discernible, and they help to understand two great countries so similar in many respects, yet also so different in spite of their proximity.

Things we see help us understand things we don’t see. And understanding two of the most important parts of our civilisation will help us understand the whole thing better. Such understanding is worth having, I think.

It’s not about religion. It’s not about the economy. It’s not about territorial disputes. It’s not even about national interests.

The on-going world war is all about a clash between good and evil. Or, to be more specific, between relative good, as represented by the West, and absolute evil, as represented by China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and their proxies.

Any doubts on that score should have been dispelled by Houthi spokesman Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, who promised that Russian and Chinese ships would be guaranteed safe passage through the Red Sea.

Since the Houthi pirates style themselves as Muslim fundamentalists, one would think China and Russia would be the last countries to rate such preferential treatment. After all, they are the only countries guilty of genocide against Muslims in the past few decades.

I’m using the word ‘genocide’ advisedly, to mean something different from any old mass murder. The UN defines that crime as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. Both Russia and China are guilty of just that, in spades, and Muslims figure prominently among their victims.

After the Second World War, the Soviets deported most of the Muslim population of the North Caucasus and Crimea. Half of them never made it back, and many of those who did, or rather their children and grandchildren, were murdered en masse during the two Chechen Wars in the 1990s and early 2000s.

The Russians conducted those wars along genocidal lines, with the clear intention of reducing the Chechen population as much as possible. I could entertain you for hours with the horror stories I heard and witnessed when visiting the refugee camps on the Chechnya-Dagestan border in 1995, but let’s just say that the Russians largely succeeded in their gruesome task. Hundreds of thousands of Chechens (Muslims!) perished, many of them killed with singular, mindless cruelty simply for their ethnicity.

Not to be outdone, the Chinese set out to exterminate the Uyghurs, a Muslim group living in the north-western region of Xinjiang. During the past decade, the Chinese government has imprisoned more than a million Uyghurs in so-called re-education camps.

That didactic effort included such educational tools as torture, forced labour, suppression of religious practices, forced sterilisation and also forced abortions and contraception. Some 16,000 mosques were razed or damaged as part of the lesson. The UN report described the persecution of the Uyghurs as genocide and crimes against humanity, but those pious Houthis don’t seem to mind the plight of their Muslim brothers.

They only feel religious solidarity when the Israelis try to defend themselves against acts like the one committed by Hamas on 7 October, when more Jews were killed in a single day than at any time since the Holocaust. In other words, the Houthis are driven not by love of their fellow Muslims but by hatred of Jews. That is to say by evil.

Hatred of Jews dovetails neatly into the global crusade against the West currently under way. The Ukraine and Israel, along with the Western countries that support them, find themselves on the receiving end of various terrorist activities, from outright war conducted by terrorist means to old-fashioned piracy. And there are strong indications that all such hostile actions are coordinated under the general umbrella of war on the West.

The West’s only chance of survival is to close ranks, acknowledge what is happening and start acting accordingly. Cowardly vacillation, something that seems to come naturally to our governments, is a sure recipe for war, not for peace.

Specifically on the subject of Red Sea terrorism, everyone knows the Houthis are merely Iran’s proxies. Hence the countermeasures must be directed not just against those bandits and their bases in Yemen, but also against those who send them out to damage the West.

Iran must be made to understand that crimes against the West will have dire consequences for its own regime. To make sure that message is properly understood, punitive raids must be launched not just against Yemen and the Houthis, but against Iran.

Downgrading its ability to produce nuclear weapons should be the first and most important task, especially since many reports say Iran is close to getting its first bomb. A massive hit on Iran’s infrastructure should do it, and the West still has a window of opportunity to deliver that. But that window will close the moment the mullahs start brandishing nuclear devices as a blackmail weapon.

No such direct action is necessary against Russia. All we have to do is start supplying the Ukrainians with the weapons they need, and they’ll be happy to do it for us. Yet instead the West is suffocating even the meagre military aid currently reaching the Ukraine.

Western intelligence has to be dumping heaps of data on ministerial desks showing that the fear of escalation currently paralysing the West is guaranteed to produce escalation. And yet our governments refuse to acknowledge the obvious: the Ukraine and Israel are only the first victims of a world war gathering momentum, and it’s the West that’s the ultimate target.

Instead, NATO governments are trying to twist Israel’s arm to accept a ceasefire and, eventually, the “two-state solution”, meaning suicide. No doubt the Ukrainian government is under a similar pressure to negotiate away their birthright, giving the Russians the pause they need to regroup, rearm and remobilise.

By granting Russia and China safe passage through the Red Sea, and denying it to the US and Britain, the Houthis have drawn the battle lines with undeniable clarity. We should thank them for their honesty and heed the warning.

We know we are their enemy, while China and Russia (and of course Iran) are their friends. In this context, that word means accomplices. We should follow Vegetius’s advice and, because we want peace, prepare for war.    

World wars are so called because they aren’t fought one on one. Hence it’s not necessarily the stronger army that wins, but the stronger alliance.

That means that the ability to recruit and mobilise one’s allies is at least as important as the ability to recruit and mobilise one’s own population. Just look at the Second World War.

Stalin entered it as Hitler’s ally by attacking Poland on 17 September, 1939. He then grabbed the three Baltic republics, along with large portions of Poland, Romania and Finland.

Yet the alliance with Hitler was unreliable, which point was made on 22 June, 1941, when Germany attacked the Soviet Union. Each side had to seek new allies, and Stalin did so immeasurably better.

Coming to his defence was the British Empire with all her colonies, and in those days the Empire still packed a mighty punch. Britain had already been fighting the Nazis for two years, and the Germans had to commit massive resources, including some 60 per cent of the Luftwaffe, to protecting their western flank.

Above all, the vast bulk of America rose behind Stalin, throwing his way a practically unlimited supply of armaments and strategic materials – this even before America took an active part in the hostilities. Later, after victory had been won, Stalin frankly admitted that, without the Lend-Lease supplies, the Soviet Union would have lost the war.

Britain too did her best to provide a steady flow of supplies to her eastern ally, in addition to fighting the Nazis at sea, on the ground and in the air. Throughout, Allied air raids were reducing German cities to rubble and German war factories to small workshops.

And what about Hitler’s allies? They were way more trouble than they were worth. Japan and Italy were happy to form the Axis with the Nazis, but it could be argued that they did them more harm than good.

Resisting Hitler’s entreaties, Japan refused to attack the Soviet Union from the rear, which enabled Stalin to throw his Far Eastern divisions into the battle of Moscow, where the Soviets finally stopped the Nazi blitzkrieg. Had the Japanese invaded the Russian Far East, the war would have ended in 1941.

Instead, on 7 December, 1941, they launched a raid on Pearl Harbour, which instantly got the US into the war and made Hitler’s position strategically untenable. Until then, the US had had to supply Britain and Russia surreptitiously, and it wasn’t a far-gone conclusion that she’d be able to overcome the isolationist pressures at home and enter the war without Japan’s invitation.

The other member of the Axis, Italy, fought the war in North Africa so ineptly that the Germans had to commit significant resources to that region. And in general, the memoirs of every German general I’ve read state that the net effect of Italy’s involvement was negative: it took the Nazis more effort to reinforce Italian troops than it would have taken to fight on their own.

I’m citing this little history primer not out of general interest, but to turn history into what it’s supposed to be: a teacher. The past always provides a valuable lesson, and the present ignores it at its peril.

The world currently stands on the threshold of a world war. In fact, one could argue persuasively that the threshold has already been crossed, and the Third World War has already begun. We may not realise this, but then we were similarly blind on 1 September, 1939. No one saw the war between Germany and Poland as the first act of a world war. The conflict was seen as strictly local.

The other day German intelligence leaked a scenario for the Third World War to begin. You are welcome to read about it on your own: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12966377/Germanys-fears-Putin-start-WW3-justified-Vladimir-unthinkable-feels-NATO-unprepared-Former-commander-forces-Europe-warns-Berlins-secret-plans-tackle-Russian-attack-revealed.html

My subject today is the critical importance of sturdy alliances in any world war. The stronger they are, the greater the possibility of victory – this should be taken as read.

Even as we speak, Russia is attacking the Ukraine with Iranian Shaheed drones and North Korean shells and missiles. Both countries are stepping up their production of armaments for Russia and busily expanding their industrial base.

China is acting behind the scenes, with no one quite sure how much of anything she supplies to Russia. What is in absolutely no doubt is that China is Russia’s ally and not ours. Xi is merely waiting for a propitious moment to come out into the open.

Meanwhile, he is gearing up for an invasion of Taiwan, which could well be coordinated with a declaration of unequivocal alliance with Russia and Iran. America, and NATO in general, would be spread gossamer thin in that case.

At the same time Iran is ratcheting up its proxy war against the West’s allies in the Middle East and Asia, not just Israel but also Pakistan. There is every indication that the four evil powers, Russia, China, North Korea and Iran, act in concert, trying to form a cohesive, fully committed alliance.

Should they win the Third World War, the West would be plunged into a Dark Age for centuries. The evil powers would provide a tangible proof of how fragile are the things that we’ve been taking for granted. Prosperity, civil liberties, the rule of law, social tranquillity would all become fond memories within days.

Our enemies have the will, determination and commitment to defeat the West and destroy the world as we know it. Do they have the means?

Provided we can match their will, determination and commitment, no, I don’t think so. The combined resources of the West should be sufficient for us to emerge victorious in any such confrontation, and not just because of the technological advantage we possess. When sufficiently motivated, free people are much better fighters than slaves, which has been demonstrated throughout history.

But note the conditional clause at the beginning of the previous paragraph. That is a vital proviso, more important than the relative numerical strength or the number of planes, tanks and missiles. Can the West match the will and cohesion of its enemies?

One is justified to have doubts on that score. The West is currently fighting two proxy wars against evil powers, one in the Ukraine, the other in the Middle East. And in both cases, one can detect a certain amount of fatigue and erosion of will.

The West has been drip-feeding supplies to the Ukraine, enough to keep Ukrainians fighting and dying for their freedom and ours, but not enough to enable them to win. Western support for Israel is also waning, with each dead Arab and each pro-Hamas demonstration in Western capitals.

Western allies, even NATO members, clearly don’t see eye to eye on defence policy. Their wishy-washy leaders make all the right pronouncements, but do less and less. Should Trump find himself in the White House, Le Pen in the Élysée Palace and Starmer at 10 Downing Street, any kind of Western alliance against evil will become a figure of speech, not a matter of fact.

The ancestors of today’s Western politicians knew they had to hang together not to hang separately. This knowledge seems to be extinct now, and I dearly hope I am wrong.

In 2015 Paula Vennells listed her recreational activities as 1) cycling, 2) skiing and 3) attending church.

Call me a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary, but I’ve never thought of attending church as recreation, although it’s hard to argue that cycling and skiing don’t qualify as such.

Yet Mrs Vennells clearly knows something I don’t, which is why 10 years before she listed Christian worship as entertainment she had become an Anglican priest. I wonder if she cycled to the altar or attempted to juggle the chalice and the Bible.

She even made the short list of candidates to replace Richard Chartres as Bishop of London, with Archbishop Welby giving her a glowing character reference. That was a godawful misjudgement if I ever saw one.

But I shouldn’t be beastly to Mrs Vennells. I should be grateful instead, for she confirmed one of my heartfelt convictions: any woman seeking Holy Orders is up to no good.

Any such woman invokes a purely secular fad, and a perverse one to boot, to defy scriptural authority and 2,000 years of church tradition. Both have chiselled in stone the rule that apostolic ministry is the business of men.

Contrary to what hysterical advocates of female priesthood claim, this doesn’t mean women should play no role in church life. No Christian would ever suggest anything like that – the examples of hundreds of great woman saints, starting with the Mother of God, speak for themselves.

It was women who, when the male disciples cowered out of sight, had the courage to witness the Crucifixion; women who attended Christ’s burial; women who found his tomb empty – women who kept the Christian tradition alive by running convents, monasteries, schools; women who inspired the Crusades, women who were martyred for Christian proselytism.

Women’s contribution to Christianity is equal to men’s, but that doesn’t mean women should be priests. Any woman who insists she has a right to ministry has little knowledge of Christian tradition and no respect for it. What she does respect and enforce is woke diktats, in this case feminism.

And any woke person is ipso facto wicked, which failing has to reveal itself somehow in any activity such a person undertakes. This is my a priori conviction, and so far it hasn’t been refuted. Mrs Vennells certainly hasn’t done so.

For in parallel with serving God and various corporations, she served the public as the chief executive of the Post Office from 2012 to 2019. According to Mrs Vennells, she brought to bear on the job her values that came “from the glory of God”, thereby establishing continuity between her two vocations. But let me tell you: if she served God the same way she served the Post Office, there must be much weeping and gnashing of teeth up there (or is it down there?).

The Post Office used the Horizon accounting system developed by a company owned by Fujitsu, and one would think we have enough domestic expertise to screw up royally. That’s what happened at the Post Office, where malfunctioning software led to over 900 sub-postmasters being prosecuted for theft, false accounting and fraud.

Now, English sub-postmasters tend to be local worthies of a certain age, meaning that they still preserve such outdated qualities as self-respect (not to be confused with self-esteem) and a sense of honour. Being falsely accused of heinous crimes must have hit them especially hard.

Hundreds ended up broken, bankrupt or in prison, with four among those convicted committing suicide and 33 dying before justice was done. However, Mrs Vennells ignored numerous warnings about Horizon and even dismissed an independent report showing that the system was faulty.

As far as she was concerned, the Post Office could do no wrong, not on her watch. She defended corporate honour with nothing short of Christian steadfastness, however misapplied it was in that case.

When the convictions began to be overturned (many, by the way, are still pending), all hell broke loose. Mrs Vennells had to give back her CBE, and there is a distinct possibility she may also have to give back the £4.5 million she earned by her selfless commitment to the postal cause.

She also said she was “truly sorry for the devastation caused to the sub-postmasters and their families, whose lives were torn apart by being wrongly accused and wrongly prosecuted as a result of the Horizon system.” Also as a result of Mrs Vennells insisting against all evidence that there was nothing wrong with the system, but she left that minor point out.

“When we mess up, which we do every day,” she added, “my faith tells me that I can be forgiven, that shortfalls are a perfectly human thing to do and that I can always start again.”

Well, my faith says she should call it a day before she does more damage. She should also be unfrocked, but rest assured I mean this strictly in the clerical sense. Still, as I mentioned before, I’m grateful to Mrs Vennells for vindicating my cherished belief about female clergy. I’m sure she’s good at cycling and skiing though.