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Dave Cameron is worried about the possibility of Israel committing war crimes. I am worried about Dave Cameron.

You see, Dave is one of those Mock Tories Lewis Carroll inexplicably left out of his Wonderland. In fact, the Conservative party is the only major one in which he clearly doesn’t belong.

The most advanced of electron microscopes wouldn’t be able to detect a difference between him and Tony Blair, to name one Labour idol. In fact, when Dave was PM he changed a lifelong habit and for once told the truth by describing himself as the “heir to Blair”. What he thought to be self-praise any real Tory saw as self-laceration.

As PM, Dave busily cultivated a trade romance with China, an activity he profitably continued in private life by lobbying for Chinese interests. He also got weak-kneed at the very mention of the EU, which he loved with a passion.

Alas, love, as we know, is blind. Dave tried to cement Britain’s membership in that pernicious organisation for life by calling a referendum. He was sure he’d get the result he wanted, but the British public gave him a brutal reality check.

Dave promptly tossed his toys out of the pram and resigned, ready to pursue his Chinese millions, albeit denominated in more civilised currencies. As a parting shot, he cited his success in pushing homomarriage through Parliament as the crowning achievement of his tenure.

Now this Mock Tory is back as foreign secretary, and his appointment would be sufficient proof of Rishi Sunak’s incompetence even in the absence of other proofs, which are many.

Having acquired another Great Office of State, Dave immediately began to campaign for a Chinese-backed infrastructure project without missing a beat. Absence from government has clearly made his heart grow even fonder of communist dictatorships.

From the lofty height of his new position, Lord Cameron, as he now is, has treated the grateful public to some penetrating insights into warfare in general and Gaza in particular. “Am I worried that Israel has taken action that might be in breach of international law because this particular premise has been bombed or whatever?” he asked himself. “Yes, of course I’m worried about that.”

So is Greta Thunberg, Jeremy Corbyn and every other Leftie in His Creation. They aren’t worried when Muslim fanatics act on their clearly stated intent to murder every Israeli (that’s for starters, before going on to kill all other Jews while they are at it). At best the Lefties express perfunctory regrets when Israel suffers yet another satanic assault. It’s only when Israel begins to strike back that they become genuinely worried.

Dave then criticised Israel for her laxity in providing humanitarian aid for Gaza, demanding in no uncertain terms that the water supply to some parts of Gaza be reconnected. Israel, said Dave, should “do a lot more” to avert a famine. The number of humanitarian lorries let through should increase from 100 to 500 a day, he added.

And anyway, explained Dave, Israel wouldn’t be able to defeat Hamas’s “ideology” by violence. He omitted to mention what else that ideology could be defeated by, obviously believing that went without saying.

A sensible, grown-up dialogue over lunch at a better Pall Mall club is a proven way for a nation to settle its differences with excitable chaps who eviscerate babies and rape women they’ve just murdered. Offer some arguments straight from the copybook of the Oxford debating society, and Bakr is your uncle.

Now Dave’s educational credentials, acquired at Eton and Oxford, trump my Moscow university any day. Hence he must be able to do something I can’t: cite an example of a nation fighting for its life that works hard to provide aid for the barbarians baying for its blood.

For example, how concerned was the RAF Bomber Command about protecting German civilians during the big war? In my ignorance, I believe those Lancasters were dropping blockbusters and incendiary bombs on Hamburg, Berlin and Dresden. But Dave must know that in fact the RAF battle cry was “Humanitarian aid away!” And down came food containers raining on hungry Germans.

Contrary to my misapprehension, Dave must know that the Allies began to look after German civilians not just after the war but also during it. No? Wrong example? Fine. I’ll keep an open mind, waiting for Lord Cameron to provide historical justification for his demand that Israel cater to the needs of Hamas murderers and their fans in the Gaza civilian population, which is to say the whole of the Gaza civilian population.

Last night, heirs to RAF and US Air Force bomber pilots struck Houthi targets in Yemen, including its densely populated capital Saana. Turkey immediately accused the West of causing a “bloodbath” and – are you ready for this? – Russia was indignant about the West “violating international law”.

From what I’ve heard Dave Cameron wasn’t opposed to the bombing of the Houthis. After all, they threatened the trading routes so dear to the heart of every Westerner. But I wonder if he managed to detect a parallel between his “worries” about Israel’s treatment of Gaza murderers and the condemnation of the West’s violation of international law issued by Erdogan and Putin.

The former was involved in genocidal peccadilloes against the Kurds, while the latter is murdering Ukrainian civilians every day. Neither atrocity, especially Putin’s, was in any way provoked, and even tangentially referring to international law would be both pointless and tactless.

Israel, on the other hand, is responding to one of the worst attacks on her civilians she has ever suffered. And yet our Mock Tory has the gall to accuse her of breaking international law and demand that she look after the enemy civilians – after 1,200 of her own civilians were massacred with characteristic Muslim savagery.

“Quod licet iovi, non licet bovi,” Dave would probably say in the Latin he learned at his expensive schools. I wish he had also learned something else.

I’ve just read the transcript of the interview US House Speaker Mike Johnson gave CBS the other day.

One of the items under discussion was the aid package for the Ukraine that had been held up in Congress. In common with other Republicans, Mr Johnson insisted on linking that subject with others, mainly illegal immigration across the Mexican border, but also the Gargantuan size of the national debt.

Much of what Mr Johnson said rang true; other things rang alarm bells. Some of his logic stood firmly on its two legs; some other was distinctly lame. But judge for yourself.

“We must secure the U.S. border before we secure anyone else’s,” said Mr Johnson, and any political scientist would give him top marks for understanding the prime responsibility of any government.

A national government must serve its own nation first, before it helps any other. That much is true, or rather a truism. And like any other truism, it should go without saying because saying it invites all sorts of questions and qualifiers.

First, a general statement. Helping other nations can be an essential part of serving one’s own. FDR’s famous metaphor about the garden hose you lend your neighbour whose house is on fire made that point well. If you refuse to share your garden hose, the fire will consume your own house sooner or later – hence, explained FDR, the Lend Lease.

I see a clear similarity between the current situation in Eastern Europe and the Second World War, but I am not sure Mr Johnson does. He seems to treat aid for the Ukraine as merely a matter of moral duty, rather than also one of national security. Yet sending armaments to the Ukraine is better than sending American soldiers to fight overseas, which will have to happen if Putin steps over the body of the Ukraine to pounce on NATO countries.

The second point is more specific. Saying that the US must secure her southern border before helping the Ukraine to repel Russian aggression is tantamount to not helping the Ukraine.

I’ve been watching the situation on the Mexican border for 50 years, the first 10, when I lived in Houston, in close proximity to it. The US has had 10 presidents during this period, and each one crossed his heart and promised to solve the problem once and for all. That each one has failed suggests that either the problem can’t be solved at all or at least that it can’t be solved quickly.

Even President Trump, Mr Johnson’s hero, took a long view of the problem. But a long view is a luxury the Ukraine can’t afford – and neither, I’m convinced, can the West. It’s reasonably clear that Mr Johnson doesn’t share this conviction.

That’s one linkage that lacks the logical rigour one should expect from high-ranking officials. Here’s another: “We have 34 trillion dollars in federal debt,” said Mr Johnson. “This is a very serious matter, to send money to Ukraine to assist them in their conflict, we effectively have to borrow it from somewhere else.”

The factual part of that statement is unassailable. The US federal debt indeed stands at $34 trillion, and it’s not just a serious matter but potentially a lethal one.

During the 2008 crisis, largely precipitated by huge public and private indebtedness, that figure was a ‘mere’ $10 trillion. That it has more than tripled in the intervening 15 years testifies to ill-advised – one is tempted to say ‘criminal’ – fiscal promiscuity.

The US can get away with such carefree spending because the debt is denominated in dollars, the world’s reserve currency. My imagination isn’t vivid enough to picture the calamity that would ensue should the dollar lose that status. The cost of servicing that debt alone would put paid to the American and generally Western economy.

However, what does it have to do with the Ukraine? Most aid to it should come in armaments, not cold cash. Some of those armaments, such as many Abrams battle tanks, not only already exist but are close to decommission. Shipping them over to the Ukraine would entail no financial hardship.

Ditto, previous-generation warplanes being replaced by the US Air Force. These can be a game changer in the war, and yet the US not only doesn’t supply them to the Ukraine, but uses licensing laws to ban other countries from doing so.

So yes, the US federal debt is a very serious matter. However, citing it as a reason for not helping the Ukraine is a non sequitur.   

Especially since it contradicts Mr Johnson’s next statement: “I’ve always said Vladimir Putin needed to be defeated. I’ve never changed my position.”

Everything else he said makes perfect sense. The US must help the Ukraine, that’s a given. “And so what we’re saying is, let’s do this in a rational manner,” said Mr Johnson, touching a sensitive chord in my soul.

Helping a country at war in a rational manner involves a clear understanding of a) the desired outcome and b) the means necessary to achieve it. The Biden administration has no such understanding, which Mr Johnson pointed out in trenchant fashion:

“Of course, we stand for freedom, that’s what the United States is about. But we need accountability for the people who are funding that. The White House has not been forthcoming with those answers. I have begged them in writing, publicly, privately in every way to give us those answers and they have not done it. And so without those answers, it’s very difficult for us to get the necessary funding to do what must be done to stop Vladimir Putin.”

Hear, hear. Joe Biden and his merry men have not issued a single unequivocal statement on the strategy they pursue in the Ukraine. “Not letting Putin win” is about as far as they’ve gone. What does it mean, specifically?

Not letting Putin turn the Ukraine into a province of Russia? Not letting him perpetuate the occupation of Ukrainian territory? Not letting him bomb the Ukraine flat? Like Mr Johnson, I’m desperate to know what Biden’s strategy is. Like him, I fear such questions will never be answered. For the only sensible answer is that not letting Putin win means making sure the Ukraine does.

Joe Biden should be awarded the VC, except that in his case these initials will stand for Vacillation and Cowardice. Add to this ignorance and intellectual vacuity, and you’ll get a fair representation of Joe Biden’s entire political career lasting half a century – this even before senile dementia set in.

Fair enough, when things go smoothly, a country doesn’t need a strong leader. In fact, one could argue it will be better off with a passive nonentity who does nothing of note. A boat inexorably sailing to its proper destination mustn’t be rocked. However, the presence of a nonentity at the helm during a stormy period can be fatal.

The three problems highlighted by Mike Johnson, runaway debt, illegal immigration and the Ukraine, shouldn’t be linked in his illogical manner. But they are all stress points, and they can all be potentially destructive.

Having Joe Biden in the White House at such a time puts at risk not just the Ukraine, but the West in general. I wonder if Mr Johnson realises that Putin’s aggression endangers us all. Probably not: he seems weak on making logical connections.

The title is an oblique, possibly blasphemous reference to Matthew 19:14: “Suffer little children… to come unto me.” Alas, these days they are more likely to flock to an unholy destination.

When children of all ages, from cradle to grave, shill for faddish causes, there is no point looking for the pearl of good sense or a sound idea in the dung heap of effluvia. There is none.

All such causes are numerators to the common denominator: destructive, passionate hatred of our civilisation. And this passion isn’t something that can be adequately expressed in political terms, certainly not the binary ones of Left and Right.

Theological terms may work better, such as possession by the evil spirit, but this system of thought is too archaic for modern tastes. Nor can it be described as truly exhaustive.

Hence, in the absence of a comprehensive study of the root causes, let’s leave them aside and concentrate on a few empirical observations.

First, all faddish discontents have the same nihilistic cause, but one camouflaged by slogans ostensibly having nothing to do with it. Second, adherence to that nihilistic cause is and always has been infantile.

However, mental and moral infantilism is no longer the prerogative of children. It’s a disease affecting all ages at an ever-increasing rate.

The apocryphal adage attributed to Churchill says something to the effect that youngsters who aren’t lefties have no heart, while adults who still are lefties have no brain. Though the attribution is false, the saying rings true – or rather used to.

We’ve all known teenagers who champion all sorts of vogue causes with hormonal enthusiasm and then grow up to acquire jobs, families, mortgages – and conservative ideas. Yet the reverse of that progression is becoming more and more widespread.

Many young, intuitive conservatives – and I could cite the examples of several I know – steadily move leftwards as they grow older, thereby relapsing into intellectual and emotional childhood. The whole world seems to be becoming infantile, and in such a world it’s infants who are kings.

This explains Greta Thunberg’s obscene rise to prominence. This hysterical, mentally backward dropout has acquired a global following, with her admirers including monarchs, presidents and prime ministers. That makes her not just an evil child worthy of contempt, but also a phenomenon worthy of study.

Every time I type her first name, AutoCorrect changes it to ‘Great’, and in a way she is just that. Greta is great at proving many of my pet theories, including those I’ve touched on above.

Just look at the attached photograph. Greta and her accomplice are holding up placards calling for seemingly unconnected outcomes.

Greta, whose stock in trade is supposed to be saving our planet from the depredations of capitalism, demands that we support Hamas terrorism. Her accomplice links the two causes even better, in a way that elicits the admiration of the former adman in me.

She makes the text (copy, in advertising parlance) and the picture (visual, as we call it) complement each other synergistically. The statement of “Climate justice now!” is illustrated with Palestinian images. Any creative director, present or, like me, former would approve.

Now, it would be pointless looking for a rational link between the noble causes of helping Hamas to destroy Israel and preventing capitalism from destroying ‘our planet’. A link does exist, but in order to find it we have to backtrack from the face value of the messages.

Support for Hamas, climate fanaticism, campaigns against nuclear energy and for lowering the voting age to prepubescent levels, calls for wholesale nationalisation and against private medicine or education, militant feminism, struggle for homosexual and transgender rights that are actually wrongs, calls for cancelling conservatives, demands for rewriting history books to depict our whole history as nothing but racial violence – these aren’t unrelated causes.

They are all pursuit of the same cause: hatred of the West and a craving for its destruction. They are all weapons in the arsenal of evil, and it’s evil that unites them all.

Therein lies the great danger. For all those nihilistic malcontents are indeed united in pursuit of the common cause. Their adversaries, on the other hand, those I like to call PLUs (People Like Us) show nothing like the same unity.

We don’t seem to realise, or at least accept, that our opposition comes not from this or that group of loudmouthed zealots but from sheer, unadulterated evil. Most of us aren’t even conditioned to think in such categories.

As a result, we protest against this or that outrage, establishing our credentials as anti-anti-Westerners. Yet by doing so we cede the terminological high ground to our enemies. We speak their language by tagging the prefix ‘anti-’ to their harangues. Our own clear statement of what we are for, not just against, is mute if at all enunciated.

Yet the opposite of absolute evil is absolute good, not professed attachment to free enterprise, fossil fuels or, for that matter, Israel and the Ukraine. To the West’s credit, it used to know the only possible source of absolute good. To the West’s discredit, it has forgotten that knowledge.

The 19^th century satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin quipped that: “Russian powers-that-be must keep the people in a state of constant bewilderment.” Replace ‘Russian’ with ‘today’s’, and our situation is the same. We look in constant bewilderment at the workings of modernity and either wince or mock or utter why-oh-why tirades.

That’s all we can do for we’ve lost not just the power of our convictions but the convictions themselves. That leaves the field to evil children of all ages who are growing more and more insufferable.

You know the problem of a short blanket. If you pull it up to your chin, your feet get cold. If you pull it down to your feet, your shoulders freeze.

US-made Patriot systems are such a short blanket protecting Ukrainian civilians. To be sure, the Ukraine has received various air defense systems from NATO, from portable Stinger and short-range SAM systems like the German Gepard to sophisticated long-range systems like the French SAMP/T. However, only the Patriot is designed to intercept ballistic missiles.

The Russians are stepping up the production of their more advanced missiles, such as the Kinzhal (Dagger). In addition, North Korea eagerly recirculates her own Russian-made missiles back to Russia. Tell me who your friends are… and all that.  

But the Ukraine only has two Patriot batteries and, when they are deployed to protect Kiev, Kharkov and other major cities are denuded – and vice versa. One way or the other thousands die.

Since the protective blanket is too short to stretch over the whole country, how can the problem be solved?

One obvious suggestion would be to supply more Patriot batteries (and missiles for them) to the Ukraine. That would make the blanket long enough to save civilians, who are the prime target of Russian bandit raids. Yet the US, ably led by that great strategist Joe Biden, has come up with another solution: remove the blanket altogether.

White House and Pentagon officials have warned that the US will soon be unable to keep the Ukraine’s Patriot batteries supplied with missiles. You see, at two to four million a pop, the Patriot rockets aren’t cheap, and the sainted American taxpayer can no longer bear such a burden.

This is a specious argument if I’ve ever heard one. If you believe it, then you must also believe that the United States beggared herself when she became “the arsenal of democracy” (and of Stalin’s evil, it has to be said) during the Second World War.

Overall, the US spent some four trillion in today’s dollars on that war effort, and in 1945 defence spending accounted for 40 per cent of the country’s GDP. Did America go broke as a result? Quite the opposite. The vast expansion of the industrial base created millions of jobs, an economic boom and the kind of prosperity not seen before or since.

By placing defence contracts with private concerns, the government in essence pumps money from the less effective sector (public) to the more effective one (private). The money doesn’t leave the country – it just makes her better off.

Nor is it just the Patriot. One detects a general slackening of will when it comes to supporting the Ukraine against the onslaught of the fascist evil threatening us all.

At its base lies a distinct deficit of knowledge and understanding, much of it promoted by the dense smokescreen laid by Russian propagandists, trolls and ‘useful idiots’. They are busily indoctrinating the West that it has no dog in this fight, and that a Russian victory would be the lesser evil than her defeat.

Unfortunately, even Western friends of the Ukraine seem unable to delve into the situation as deeply as it requires. One such is Lt Col Stuart Crawford, military analyst for The Express.

Col Crawford knows infinitely more than I do about the mechanics of warfare, and his heart is clearly in the right place. It’s on the basis of such assets that he tries to analyse the situation. Alas, he falls a bit short.

He states correctly that: “President Zelensky… will not rest until there is a restoration of Ukrainian territorial integrity at the pre-2014 status quo.” However, “as the war drags on this may be more of an opening gambit for future negotiations,” rather than the realistic objective.

Incidentally, a gambit is an oft-misused chess term. It denotes not just any old opening, but one involving a sacrifice. If Col Crawford is using the term correctly, he seems to imply that the Ukraine will have to sacrifice some of her territory for “peace through negotiations – which is how nearly all wars end”.

The colonel then states correctly that: “If Ukraine falls then NATO will have to take on Putin and Russia directly at some point in the future. Better for both the Alliance and Ukraine that the matter is settled via the current conflict, surely?”

Absolutely. So far so good – Col Crawford should get a hotline to the White House and explain to Joe Biden what’s what. But then he undoes much of his good work with one paragraph:

“I have said before, despite public protests otherwise, that Crimea being returned to Ukraine might just be the catalyst for Zelensky to agree to come to the negotiating table. We need to supply him and Ukraine with what they need to bring this about.”

Hear, hear, is my reaction to the second sentence. If the Ukraine is fighting for not only her own freedom but also ours, then it’s our moral and strategic duty to give her the tools to do the job. But the first sentence shows a lamentable misreading of the situation.

The assumption seems to be that it’s Zelensky’s recalcitrance that prevents a negotiated end to the slaughter. “Nobody… want[s] the war to drag on,” writes Col. Crawford. That’s not true: Putin does.

The war legitimises his criminal regime in the eyes of his brainwashed population. His survival, not only political but also physical, hinges on victory – or at least on something that can be presented as such.

On 24 February, 2022, Russian victory was defined as “the demilitarisation and denazification of the Ukraine”, meaning smashing the Ukraine’s sovereignty to bits and reincorporating her into the Stalinist empire Putin aims to recreate.

That the “Russian hordes have been stopped in their tracks and have even been repelled here and there” (in Col Crawford’s apt phrase) constitutes the frustration of Putin’s war objectives, which is another way of saying defeat. And defeat is something he can’t countenance if he wants to live for a while longer.

That’s why the Russians have been redefining their war aims, in response to the changing situation on the frontline. The definitions remain rather hazy, but the leitmotif never changes: victory at all costs.

Ideally, that would mean the revival of the original objective of enslaving the Ukraine. Barring that, it has to be the Ukraine relinquishing chunks of her territory in exchange for Putin magnanimously agreeing to stop firing, catch his breath, rearm, remobilise and come back in force a couple of years later.

Nothing short of that would bring Putin to the negotiating table because anything short of that would put him six feet under. Exactly what parts of the Ukraine he’d insist on keeping is open to discussion. But one absolutely non-negotiable part is the Crimea.

Under no circumstances whatsoever would Russia let go of the Crimea unless made to do so by an irresistible force. To reclaim the Crimea, the Ukraine would have to win a crushing overall victory over Russia, an outcome that Col Crawford correctly states doesn’t seem likely in the absence of all-out Western support.

Such an outcome wouldn’t be “just the catalyst for Zelensky to agree to come to the negotiating table”. It would be Zelensky dictating his terms of Russia’s surrender. That would spell the end of Putin, probably followed by the inauguration of another evil regime (anyone dismissing that probability must have played truant when Russian history was taught).

All this goes to show that no palliatives are possible in this conflict. Either “Russian hordes are stopped in their tracks” for real, ideally for good, or Russian fascism succeeds in destroying the post-Hitler world order built on millions of corpses.

Putin can’t afford the defeat of Russia; the West can’t afford the defeat of the Ukraine. The problem is that the former knows it and the latter doesn’t.

The security blanket covering the Ukraine is getting shorter and, if this trends continues, all of the country will turn into frozen wasteland. Neither you nor I nor Col Crawford wants to see that happen.

In case you’ve been living on a faraway planet, DEI stands for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, a triad distinctly different from the Trinity.

This encapsulation of wokery is officially defined as organisational frameworks seeking to promote “the fair treatment and full participation of all people”, particularly those “who have historically been underrepresented or subject to discrimination on the basis of identity or disability.”

If you are fluent in modern, you know that ‘fair’ actually means ‘unfair’. In this context it stands for the preferential, which is to say unfair, treatment of anyone able to claim a minority or victimhood status, no matter how tenuous or ancient. In Britain this sort of thing is otherwise called ‘positive discrimination’; in America, it’s ‘affirmative action’. Everywhere it’s an outrage.

And everywhere it’s jolly expensive. The global DEI market, that is the cost of ramming that perversion down our collective throat, is projected to hit $17.2 billion within three years, half of it in the US. That’s the price tag we can see. The less visible cost is paid by social balance, tranquillity, freedom and indeed justice (when it’s modified with the adjective ‘social’, it means ‘injustice’).

Yesterday I wrote about one product of the DEI craze, Claudine Gay, who, in the absence of any appreciable scholarship, climbed to the top rung of the academic ladder on the strength of her race and adroit wielding of DEI platitudes.

In fact, about half of all sizeable US universities apply DEI criteria to their tenure standards. The more ‘progressive’ universities put such criteria before all others. For example, in 2018-2019 my son’s alma mater, Berkeley, rejected three-quarters of applicants for faculty positions in the life sciences exclusively on the basis of their diversity tests.

Since DEI is an aggressive ideology, its proponents feel justified to use it as an offensive weapon against traditional Western polity and civility. For example, freedom of speech, that constitutional cornerstone of the Western edifice, is routinely crushed in the name of DEI.

Speakers who dissent, or are even suspected of being capable of dissenting, are cancelled all over the West. Professors who suggest, however meekly, that it’s only men who have penises lose their jobs. Those who, like Thomas Sowell, prove figures in hand that no racial discrimination in the workplace exists, get death threats.

My own modest experience is similar. When I dared suggest in a Mail article a dozen years ago that religious groups should be allowed to put their own rebuttal posters on buses after homosexual activists had done so, I received countless death threats. (Boris Johnson, London mayor at the time, ruled in favour of the homosexual activists.)

Threats kept coming for a long time because PinkNews had helpfully published my photograph and contact details. Someone even recorded a YouTube song about me, which upset me because of its sloppy rhyming: my surname doesn’t naturally rhyme with the colloquial word for female genitalia.

In all Western countries freedom of speech means freedom of woke speech only, which constitutional aberration is increasingly enforced by policing based on a burgeoning corpus of laws. The devastating damage to our culture is hard to estimate, but it’s not just culture that suffers.

Rather than promoting unity and cohesion, DEI drives a wedge between classes, sexes and races. Thus, like all revolutions, it produces results that are diametrically opposite to the proclaimed desiderata.

Indeed, DEI is the slogan on the banners of a sweeping cultural revolution and, like all revolutions, it is perpetrated by the educated classes in the name of the downtrodden. Also like all revolutions, it uses bien pensant populist phraseology to mask its primary destructive animus.

This is often directed against the very groups supposed to be the beneficiaries of the revolution. I myself have worked with many intelligent, talented blacks, women and black women who resented suggestions that they got ahead in life because of their race or sex. Their white male co-workers refused to give them credit for their superior achievement, instead looking at them askance and exchanging sly whispering comments.

That didn’t foster unity and goodwill in the workplace, let me tell you that. The effect was as deleterious as that of hirings and promotions unmerited by achievement, which, to their discredit, members of the supposedly oppressed groups never turned down.

The net result of DEI that I observed personally – and I haven’t seen the inside of an office for 20 years – was heightened tensions and a lower productivity. And no one in either group took the DEI jargon seriously.

That was in the advertising industry, which traditionally tends to be on the ‘liberal’ side. If you look at other, more conservative, industries, such as oil, motor or finance, there DEI is even less welcome and more destructive.

Vox populi isn’t vox DEI no matter how hard purveyors of that disgrace work to indoctrinate the populace, no matter how insistently they try to equate DEI falsehoods with virtue. These are more like a vice crushing our civilisation with its jaws.  

Following the resignation of Claudine Gay earlier this week, the job is vacant, waiting for a qualified candidate to step forward.

If you want to try your luck, there are certain criteria you’ll have to meet, and I’ll give you a clue: academic attainment is strictly optional.

Prof. Gay, for example, rose to her lofty heights without having published a single book. In over 20 years of academic toil, she published a mere 11 articles – about half the output regarded as the absolute minimum for any academic post.

However, apparently any publication in such fields as Black studies (unlike ‘white’, ‘Black’ must always be capitalised, and, if you don’t know this, you won’t get the job), counts as ten in any traditional academic discipline. Applying that multiplier gets Prof. Gay up to a respectable five a year, which should signpost your path to the summit. Just read up on Black participation in US politics and how it attests to institutional racism.

If you feel that even such a modest effort is beyond you, don’t despair. Why should you ruin your eyesight by reading and writing if many a lesser light has done so before you? Just copy their work, which Prof. Gay has done on over 40 occasions, about four per article, and you may be in line for a $900,000 a year professorship (which, unlike her administrative post, she gets to keep).

What you do have to demonstrate is unwavering commitment to the ideology of diversity and inclusion, of which Prof. Gay is both a practitioner and a beneficiary. The demands of that ideology don’t seem unduly stringent: when asked whether advocating the genocide of Jews would contravene Harvard’s code of conduct, Prof. Gay replied that this depended on the context.

In other words, if you wish to promote another Holocaust, all you have to do is find an appropriate context for doing so. For example, any attempt by Israel to defend herself is definitely conducive to such self-expression, as amply demonstrated by Prof. Gay’s alma mater and other campuses around the world.

Since I left the US some 35 years ago, I’ve only been catching glimpses of American academic life, but that has been enough to compare it unfavourably to my Moscow University, circa 1970.

Yes, we were immersed in the sewage of Marxist twaddle and had to regurgitate it by rote to pass our exams. But at least we were able to cleanse ourselves of the putrid stench by mocking all that nonsense in private, swapping ribald jokes about everything we were supposed to hold dear. Professing commitment to communism could get a student on the good side of the local Party committee, but it would turn him into a pariah at student get-togethers.

Even at our lectures, we could drive our professors to distraction by posing questions that Marxism couldn’t answer (“Please, sir, how does dialectical materialism explain human thought?”). However, the woke ideology pervading American (and other) universities allows no such latitude.

I’ve spent the past few days in the company of two American professors, both erudite, clever, witty – and (brace yourself) conservative, even though they ply their trade in the humanities.

The rarae aves have fed me on a steady diet of horror stories about academic life at US universities. For example, the slightest deviation from the critical race theory would blackball the dissident from any academic post in eternity.

When I lectured in Moscow in 1970-1972, I could permit myself the odd smirk or joke that left my students in no doubt where I stood politically, which was a million miles away from the received ideology. An American (or any Western) professor of, say, sociology can do no such thing.

If he as much as hints that, say, different races are differently able in different fields or that some divergencies between men and women are physiological rather than environmental, he’ll be out on his ear faster than you can say ‘politically incorrect’. To make sure professors stay on the straight and narrow, they have to take courses in diversity or at least fill in questionnaires testing their ideological purity.

Much has changed since 1987, when Allan Bloom published his seminal work The Closing of the American Mind, in which he predicted some of today’s mayhem. In the past, he wrote, he had seen his task in disabusing students of their misguided prejudices. His current students, however, had no prejudices – other than hatred of any prejudice.

Yet Edmund Burke correctly identified prejudice, which is to say intuitive a priori knowledge, as a key beacon lighting up any sound mind. It places thought within a certain discipline. That has a liberating effect, for any lack of discipline turns freedom into anarchy, replacing creation with destruction.

Relativism reigned, wrote Bloom: every view was deemed as good as any other, no intellectual hierarchies existed, the students’ minds were so open that their brains had fallen out. Now, Prof. Bloom is no longer with us, so he can’t testify that the problem has been fixed. Today’s students have a full complement of prejudices, and they’ll defend them with their lives or, to be more exact, their professors’ jobs.

Students deny professors any right to point out logical inconsistencies or factual errors in their arguments. You have your truth, prof, I have mine, and it’s as good as yours – or possibly better for being more up to date. And if you disagree, I’ll report you to your ‘chair’ (the word ‘chairman’ has been expurgated from the academic lexicon: taking our cue from the Brothers Grimm, we now have animate pieces of furniture).

The very concept of absolute truth has ended up in what the godfather of Marxist post-modernity, Trotsky, described as the rubbish bin of history. Landing on top of it with a deafening thud were academic freedom, capacity for analytical thought, commitment to following irrefutable facts and sound ratiocination wherever they would lead.

It would be too obvious to point out (but I’ll do it anyway) that, when academic freedom goes down, it drags every other freedom with it. Those students who police their professors with the hysterical zeal of Mao’s Red Guards not only vote but, in a few years, will affect how the silent majority will vote.

Ideological neo-Marxist extremism is already rending America asunder, with the rest of the West following closely in her footsteps. Another mighty push may suffice to plunge the country into the morass of unadulterated tyranny, and modern history serves up numerous examples of universities begetting cannibalistic despotism. Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge were all Sorbonne graduates, not illiterate peasants.

The situation is dire and, if you want to know how dire, read The Guardian’s comment on Prof. Gay’s resignation. It was helpfully provided by the American hack Moira Donegan, and one would have thought we have enough homegrown vegetables of this type:

“Her resignation is merely the latest episode in the rightwing’s assault on education – a project that has increased in its virulence and success in recent years, but which has been decades in the making. Republicans hate education, and they have demonstrated this hate in both their policymaking and in the public theatre of their cultural grievance.”

If Republicans indeed hate the kind of education Prof. Gay provides, I say more power to the Republicans. But I’m afraid Miss Donegan gives them too much credit; the problem goes well beyond mere interparty squabbles. It’s not political but civilisational, and that’s a hell of a note to start the year on.

Evil is on the march, I wrote the other day, and the West should pool its physical, mental and moral resources to survive.

It therefore warms my cockles that the Western alliance is currently led by men who have the vision to identify the nature of the threat and the courage to engage it head on. I mean Jens Stoltenberg, NATO Secretary General, and Joe Biden, US President.

Mr Stoltenberg cast a panoramic eye over the military conflicts unfolding around the world and unerringly spotted their common cause: global warming. Or, to be more exact, he blamed global warming on the military conflicts.

It’s such calamitous squabbling, he explained, that undermines “our capability to combat climate change because resources that we should have used to combat climate change are spent on our protecting our security with our military forces.”

Not only that, but to his great chagrin the warring parties exacerbate the problem by stubbornly refusing to use only environment-friendly weaponry: “If you look at big battle tanks and the big battleships and fighter jets, they are very advanced and great in many ways, but they’re not very environmentally friendly. They pollute a lot, so we need to get down the emissions.”

It’s good to see that the leader of the Western military alliance is capable of not only identifying the most urgent challenges, but also of coming up with ingenious solutions. Just think how greatly our Typhoon fighter could be improved if powered by a small, tasteful wind turbine.

At present, it carries almost five tonnes of criminal, planet-destroying fuel. A small wind turbine would be a fraction of that weight, which would free up the capacity to carry over four tonnes of vital supplies, such as food parcels for the starving children on the ground.

Of course, there is always the danger that, if there is no wind, the Typhoon pilot would have to perform the manoeuvre known as a “deadstick landing”, one with no propulsive power available. Since the plane may well crash, some may see that as a downside, but it’s overshadowed by the great advantage of saving the planet.

And nothing, repeat nothing, can be more important than that. Joe Biden, Mr Stoltenberg’s de facto boss put it in a nutshell: “The only existential threat humanity faces even more frightening than a nuclear war is global warming.”

Now, for as long as I – and Mr Biden – have been around, and that’s very long indeed, we’ve been indoctrinated to think that an all-out nuclear war would wipe out all biological, including human, life on the planet. Moreover, it could do so in a matter of days.

If global warming presents an even greater “existential threat”, then that disaster must be able to achieve the same gruesome outcome within hours, possibly even minutes. If that’s what Mr Biden thinks, he must have access to classified data inaccessible even to Greta Thunberg.

Hence anybody who doesn’t wish to see ‘our planet’ evaporate must campaign for the summary elimination of “big battle tanks and the big battleships and fighter jets” if, as seems likely, we are unable to convert them to environmentally responsible power.

Like most aggressors presenting an existential threat to mankind, global warming works in insidious ways. It disguises its evil intent by pretending to be its opposite. Thus, the winter of 2012 was the coldest Russia had experienced in over 70 years, and China in over 30. That could have fooled lesser men than Messrs Biden and Stoltenberg, but thank God they remained as vigilant as ever.

Oh well, enough sarcasm so close to the year’s end. Let’s just say that Mr Stoltenberg must be complimented for identifying the link between the West’s defence capability and its campaign to save ‘our planet’. Except he did so with what the Russians call “the precision of the other way around” (s tochnostyu naoborot, for my Russophone readers).

It’s channelling monstrously vast resources into responding to the woke, non-existent, anti-scientific threat that weakens the West’s ability to face up properly to evil variously originating in Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and so on, all the way down the list.

When the leaders of NATO and by far its strongest member, the US, talk utter drivel instead of issuing stern commands to the military, we should all be afraid, very afraid. This is the real existential threat we are facing, for it’s not evil tyrants who destroy civilisations. It’s the overlapping of evil tyrants on one side with weak, imbecilic leaders on the other.

However, I can’t leave you with the thought of just such an overlap occurring at the moment. Instead, I’d rather lighten up your mood with a festive exchange recently overheard:

“Hello, I’m Nigel and I’m an alcoholic. I drink whisky.”

“Hello, I’m John and I’m an alcoholic. I drink tequila.”

“Hello, I’m Dan and I’m an alcoholic. I drink vodka.”

“Hello, I’m Kevin and I’m a bartender. Coming right up.”

Happy New Year to everyone!

“Right you are, guv. You fancy Krug Non-Vintage or Taitinger Blanc de Blanc?”

That was a picture that flashed through my mind when I found out that henceforth champagne would be sold in pints in Britain.

The picture included fragments of a Kings’ Head somewhere up country, a weathered mahogany bar, porcelain pump handles exhibiting various champagne brands, customers complaining the landlord gives them nothing but foam (“I’ll come for the rest later, mate.). The madcap vision lasted a few seconds before hard reality barged in.

No landlord in Britain will be able to pull a pint of Krug, not yet anyway. It’s just that champagne will now be sold in pint bottles, just like in the old days. Perfect for two people at lunch or for one thirsty gentleman at dinner. (For the benefit of my overseas readers, the imperial pint is 20 ounces, not 16 as in some of our former colonies.)

The conservative in me rejoiced. As Peter Hitchens correctly observed, the metric system was imposed on Europe by victorious revolutionaries, which in itself is sufficient reason to reject it. Yet Mr Hitchens has a knack for being annoying even when saying unobjectionable things.

In this case, he appealed not just to tradition but also to the intrinsic superiority of traditional measurement units. An inch, he wrote, is based on the length of a thumb, and a foot on the length of, well, a foot. That no doubt is historically true. Yet my thumb is much longer than an inch, and my foot (Size 9) is shorter than a foot. Then again, traditional measures go so far back that human anatomy might have changed since then.

Then came the annoying bit: Hitchens seldom misses an opportunity to remind readers of his first-hand experience of Russia where he spent a few months in the 90s. There, he said, food was often sold by the polkilo, which is basically a pound. Having thus established his bona fides as a Russian expert, he’ll doubtless explain in the next article that we shouldn’t support the Ukraine because the Ukraine and Russia are essentially the same, especially Russia.

According to him, polkilo means that even metric countries gravitate towards English measures. This is ignorant nonsense. Polkilo means half a kilo, 500 grams, more than a pound, which is 454 grams. The measure is clearly metric, and in fact Russians think in grams and kilos, not pounds. A shopper would routinely ask for 400 grams of sausage or 300 grams of cheese (provided those items were available).

Vodka was sold in half-litre bottles, affectionately called pollitra, or quarter-litre ones, known as chekushka. However, hardened drinkers referred to that kind of pollitra as polkilo, replacing the pedantic liquid measure with the colloquial hard one. Perhaps that’s what Hitchens had in mind when going on shopping expeditions, in which case re-spect, to quote Ali G.

Sorry for this bit of arcana, but I had to set the record straight. My own feelings about the two systems are mixed, as are my experiences of them.

Until I left Russia at 25, I had lived, thought and breathed in the metric system. In the subsequent 15 years, I had to reorient my mind towards American measures, and metric units dropped into the background.

I measured distances in feet and miles, temperature in Fahrenheit, length in inches and feet, liquid in ounces, pints and gallons, my burgeoning weight in pounds. After a few years, whenever someone mentioned a metric unit, I had to do a quick mental conversion.

Then came 35 years, almost 36 now, in England, and my weight got to be measured in stones, rather than pounds, which somehow made me sound almost svelte. After all, 15 sounds much less than 210, even if it isn’t.

Pounds and gallons got bigger in England, but miles remained the same, although weights and liquid measures again became metric. That made it next to impossible for me to judge a car’s economy. Specs talked about so many litres per 100 kilometres, and my mathematical ability doesn’t quite stretch to converting that into good old mpg.

In all honesty, I can’t say which system is better. Each has its pluses and minuses. For example, a millimetre is cumbersome to express in fractions of an inch. On the other hand, Fahrenheit is more precise than Celsius.

Yet it’s not all about face value. As a conservative, I welcome every attempt to keep modernity at bay, especially revolutionary modernity.

When an English greengrocer was notoriously arrested for selling bananas in pounds, I thought that bow towards the EU was evil. To this day, when I shop for food I ask for a pound of this or that. This often elicits the moronic question: “In weight?”. A pound in money buys nothing these days, doesn’t everyone know this?

Getting rid of metric measurements would have the huge symbolic significance of shaking the dust of the EU off our feet, which has to be good. Yet I can’t get rid of the gnawing suspicion that, when it comes to putting champagne in pint bottles, the motives aren’t so much conservative as pecuniary.

I’m willing to bet that a pint bottle will cost as much as the current 750 ml one. The British pint is 568 ml, which means we’ll be paying almost a third more for our glass of champagne. I’m not sure my commitment to conservative memorabilia outweighs the difference.

Then again, I buy my champagne direct from French producers, which means my commitment to conservatism won’t cost me anything in this case. I’m wiping my brow even as we speak.

The short answer is next to nothing, and it’s about time we realised that. I’m using the personal pronoun ‘we’ in the broad sense of Western civilisation in general, not just any of its specific members.

Now brace yourself for a few blindingly obvious truisms, for no original thought is required to assess the current situation. Everything is plain for everyone to see, except for those who won’t see.  

Our civilisation seems to have forgotten the old maxim: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” The saying is usually attributed to Edmund Burke, though he never said it. But the thought rings true.

Or rather it’s a truism. Any schoolboy who doesn’t play truant when history is taught should know that great civilisations don’t perish due to muscular atrophy, certainly not for that reason alone. The principal cause of their demise is invariably the erosion of will.

When that happens, muscular brawn becomes helpless. And make no mistake about it: the West still has the physical wherewithal to defend itself. The old “two-power standard” still holds good on the civilisational level. (The expression originally comes from the Naval Defence Act of 1889, which called for the Royal Navy to be at least as strong as the world’s next two largest navies combined.)

But no matter how strong cowardly, sybaritic civilisations appear on paper, they’ll eventually succumb to wild-eyed fanatics with hatred in their hearts and no fear of death.

Just look at the world today, as 2023 is drawing to a close. Evil is on the march all over the globe, and nowhere is the West putting up resolute resistance.

North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has ordered his country’s military to accelerate war preparations, including getting the nuclear weapons ready. What’s the hurry? I don’t know, but I’m desperate to believe that our intelligence services do. Yet our governments are doing their favourite thing: nothing, other than expressing their deep concern.

Israel, a Western oasis in the middle of a barbarian desert, is desperately fighting for its existence, with Iran inciting packs of her proxies to pounce. This is an indisputable binary case of good against evil – but not as far as the West is concerned.

Israel’s response to Hamas’s satanic raid is drawing more and more criticism from the Western media and increasingly imperative demands to desist from Western governments. Erdogan, the leader of a NATO country, has publicly stated that Netanyahu is no better than Hitler – and NATO does nothing to bring him to heel.

What it does do is tell Israel to defend herself only half-heartedly, ideally not at all. Whatever she does, she mustn’t kill her enemies on pain of Western displeasure, possibly sanctions.

At the same time, another Shiite puppet of Iran, Houthi (otherwise known as Ansar Allah) has used its pirates practically to shut navigation through the Suez Canal. This affects the West’s economic interests directly, and its strategic interests over the long run.

Operating through its proxies, Iran threatens a blockade of the Mediterranean. To that end the ayatollahs are also supplying long-range weapons to the Polisario Front, a nationalist socialist group in Morocco setting its sights on Gibraltar.

The US Navy has two carrier groups in the region, which is more than enough power to squash the Shiite threat to the Mediterranean basin once and for all. And yet that naval Leviathan does nothing other than fire a few reluctant salvos here and there.

Both Iran and North Korea are supplying armaments to Putin’s fascist regime, thus repaying Russia’s earlier help with arming the two evil powers to the teeth. Iran-made Shahed drones are murdering Ukrainian civilians, while Russian cannon are firing North Korean shells.

The three evil powers are doing all they can to entrench, and in due course to expand, a mighty fascist presence in the heart of Europe, right on NATO’s borders. Do you think the West is doing all it can to resist them? Don’t answer this; we’ve had enough truisms for one day.

Orban, the leader of another NATO country, is openly trying to block the EU’s assistance to the Ukraine, a country heroically fighting evil on her own. And even the leaders of the countries that do assist the Ukraine are making every effort not to do more than is necessary merely to keep her afloat.

Millions of people had to die to stop the previous full-scale attempt at a fascist domination of Europe. This time not a single Western soldier has to go into battle. All it takes is giving the Ukrainians the tools to do the job – but it’s not the job that the West clearly wants to see done.  

The Western media are hysterically agitating for negotiated peace both in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Allow me to translate: given today’s situation, ‘negotiated peace’ means the surrender of both the Ukraine and Israel. That in turn means the surrender of the West and the triumph of evil.

I lay no claim to uncanny perspicacity here: this is yet another truism, and everyone knows it is just that. Yet the West feigns ignorance, pretending to believe that this is yet another “quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing”.

The West is increasingly reluctant to see Putin’s war as a clash between good and evil. One reads more and more articles arguing that, since both sides are equally bad, we shouldn’t favour one over the other. This isn’t a dearth of knowledge for our pundits know exactly what’s what. It’s a collapse of will.

The appeasing phrase quoted above had consequences that ought to have taught the West a lesson. It didn’t. All the West learned is how to paraphrase the same sentiment with nothing short of lexical adroitness.

But enough despair. The season calls for statements of hope, and mine is that the West will come to its senses. Dum spiro spero, as Cicero used to say. He must have been fond of truisms too.

The future of the Free World, or at least its Leader, the US, is in safe hands. In a startling coup of investigative brilliance, the FBI has identified the principal source of terrorist threat in the country.

You may think that it’s mostly Muslims who fly big planes into tall buildings, blow up public transport, randomly mow down pedestrians and drive SUVs through crowds.

That only shows how antediluvian your notions are, and I’m man enough to admit mine aren’t any more up to date. To my shame, I too thought that the stock battle cry of a terrorist was most likely to be ‘Allahu Akbar!’.

Well, let me tell you, you have another think coming, and so do I. For the real terrorists aren’t necessarily going to scream Allahu Akbar as they explode their suicide vests. They are at least as likely to shout Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum.

I owe this insight to an FBI investigation, and I’m pleased the Bureau displays utmost vigilance in protecting the Free World from heinous crimes. The target of the investigation was conservative Catholics in general, and especially those who prefer Latin to vernacular as their liturgical language.

Members of this group, according to an internal memo, could be identified by the rosary beads they carry. That made me consider the logistic problem of putting enough explosive inside the beads to cause serious damage. The task looked impossible, but with my characteristic humility I had to admit my pyrotechnic expertise was limited.

The Bureau’s office in Richmond, VA, took the lead, mounting spying operations on RTCs (Radical-Traditionalist Catholics, in its nomenclature). Once the group was assigned its own initials, one knew the investigation was in full swing.

Agents were sent out to spy on Catholics as they were worshipping in their churches. The spies’ task was to report on any suspicious activities and also to recruit snitches within the congregations.

The memo circulated within the Richmond field office accused such Catholics of “adherence to anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ and white supremacist ideology.” It especially highlighted Catholic hostility to “abortion rights.”

A few months later the country got tangible proof of the insidious activities of the RTCs. By the looks of it, they must have penetrated the US Supreme Court, coercing it to overthrow Roe vs Wade and deal a blow to ‘abortion rights’.

Moreover, that decision brought into question the very idea that a woman has a natural right to abortion. If that’s not crypto-terrorism, I don’t know what is, and I’m sure an RTC trace will eventually be uncovered.

Now, it’s only one man’s experience, but I have several champions of the Latin Mass among my friends (that’s hardly surprising because I’m one such myself; birds of a feather and all that). True enough, on the issue of abortion they share the terrorist views of the US Supreme Court, although none of them has ever been tempted to toss a fire bomb into an abortion clinic.

They also oppose unlimited immigration of cultural aliens, but one would be hard-pressed to detect a particular Catholic bias in that stand. Nor has a single one of them ever advocated solving the migrant problem by terrorist means.

There isn’t a single anti-Semite in the lot, and their attitude to LGBTQ is circumscribed by the ecumenical Christian dictum of “love the sinner, hate the sin”. None of them is a white supremacist; in fact, some of them aren’t even wholly white.

I have to stipulate that none of the RTCs I know personally is an American, and certainly not a Virginian. Making allowances for national variances and also for the limited nature of one’s own experience, I’m prepared to believe that the group that so excited the passions of Richmond’s Feds includes some nasty people who dislike Jews, immigrants and ethnic minorities.

Yet when I lived in the States, I met many people who felt that way, and not a single one of them was a Catholic. Most of them were atheists, and some belonged to various Protestant sects. However, the FBI would quickly run out of agents if it decided to investigate all atheists and Protestants as potential terrorists, even if it only limited the search to those guilty of hostile barroom invective.

If those Catholics who defy the recommendation (not an order) of the Second Vatican Council and insist on celebrating the traditional Latin Mass have one thing in common, it’s not propensity for terrorism. They are all conservatives.

Since conservatism is a character trait rather than an ideology, it affects every aspect of behaviour and convictions. Five gets you ten – nay, ten thousand – that a man conservative in his religion is also conservative in his politics, social views and even tastes in art.

Could it be that conservatism as such is seen by American security services as potential terrorism? When all is said and done, agencies like the CIA or the FBI are instruments of government policy. That turns into a potential target for investigation any group opposed to most things the US government is doing.

Since US government policies are mostly anti-conservative (the US is by no means unique in that respect), all conservative groups are automatically suspect. And conservative Catholics especially so.

Historically, the anti-Catholic bias has been strong in America. After all, the country was first settled by Protestant dissenters who hated apostolic confessions, especially Catholicism. That hostility seeped into politics: Catholic worship was illegal in 11 of the first 13 American colonies, and Catholic proselytism was punishable by death.

The Founders, with one or two exceptions, detested Catholicism. There was only one Catholic among the 56 signatories to the Declaration of Independence, and there have been only two Catholics among the 45 US presidents, with neither, especially Joe Biden, known for his piety.

I wouldn’t be surprised if anti-Catholic sentiments, overlapping with anti-conservative ones, played a role in the FBI investigation. Yet, to the country’s credit, when the news of it broke last year, a scandal ensued.

Christopher A. Wren, FBI Director, was dragged over the coals of the House Judiciary Committee, and he put it all down to excessive local zeal. It was “a single product by a single field office,” he explained. However, new evidence shows that traditional Catholics were targeted across the whole of the United States.

To emphasise the ideological constituent of the campaign, The Atlantic magazine, your quintessential ‘liberal’ publication, published an article whose title reflects characteristic liberal moderation: How the Rosary Became an Extremist Symbol. The article was tastefully illustrated with bullet holes forming the shape of a rosary.

I’ll leave my American readers to decide how all this tallies with the First Amendment. Myself, I’m just amazed that even our atheist world continues to play the religious card. I suppose ancestral resentments are too good a weapon to discard in the all-out war on conservatism.