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So wrote Julia Ioffe, a Russian-born American journalist. She explained her aversion to that greeting by adding: “It’s impolite and alienating to assume I follow your religion.”

It’s neither, actually. But it’s definitely idiotic to think that only Christians have something to celebrate at Christmas. Such insistence suggests that Miss Ioffe fails to follow not only our religion, but also our civilisation.

Or else her Princeton education didn’t teach her that Western civilisation owes Christianity so much as to owe it practically everything. Anyone, whatever his religion or none, who appreciates Western law, science, art, music or politics thereby celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ, if only indirectly.

Looking at our jurisprudence, for example, practically every core law we have can be traced back to Judaeo-Christian antecedents – and not just because their spirit was inhaled from the moral atmosphere of Exodus and Matthew.

When great medieval law-givers, such as Charlemagne or, later in the same century, Alfred the Great, began to compile legal codes, they lifted and incorporated whole tranches of canon law. Anyone who raises his right hand and promises to tell the truth must be aware of the origins of that practice, to name just one example of many.

Whenever we visit an art museum or a concert hall, we worship at the altar of Christian culture. Western painting, for example, started in the church, and one could argue persuasively that Western music has never really left it.

Like faith, music is not without, but within us, waiting to be released. In fact, one can say that music inhabits the same compartment of the soul as faith, and it comes alive by activating similar perceptive mechanisms. Because of that, a valid argument can be made that all Western music is implicitly Christian even if it is explicitly secular.

Franck’s chorale may have been written for the concert hall, yet anyone with a modicum of sensitivity will know it was animated by the same spirit as a Bach chorale written for the church. Fast-forward a couple of centuries, and a listener who can’t discern Christian inspiration in, say, Shostakovich’s quartets, should send his senses out for a tune-up.

(Miss Ioffe fancies herself a Russian expert, so I’m sure she must have heard those quartets or at least, more likely, heard of them.)

The only Western art form that at its best has remained in thrall to the art of Hellenic antiquity is sculpture. But Christian culture breathed a particle of its founder’s spirit into that form.

Anyone looking at the two Pietàs by Michelangelo, one in Rome, the other in Milan, will notice their Christian content before admiring their Hellenic outer shell. That, incidentally, is the proper sequence for appreciating any Western art. Unlike its Greek predecessor (and some of its modern offshoots), its starting point is ‘what’, not ‘how’.

In a different field, inchoate political structures of Europe took their cue from ecclesiastical politics, with their fusion of solidarity and subsidiarity. In the lay world that concept was translated into the idea of the central state keeping the few essential powers for itself, while devolving all the rest to the lowest sensible level.

Judging by the list of publications blessed by Miss Ioffe’s involvement, most of them respectable, which is to say ‘liberal’, she may be unfamiliar with that type of political structure or else contemptuous of it.

When the word ‘liberal’ was coined, it designated transferring a maximum amount of power from central state to local bodies, and from the latter to the individual. Today’s liberals, if you peek behind the fog of their bien pensant verbiage, preach exactly the opposite: statist centralism, empowering the central state at the expense of the individual. Yet all successful Western states followed the structural amalgam they inherited from the church.

Even Western natural science would have been impossible without the Judaeo-Christian cosmology and general understanding of the world. The starting assumption of any scientific quest is that the world is governed by rational and universal laws. The existence of such laws presupposes the original rational and universal law-giver. This makes the world knowable by human reason and experiment.

Today we take that for granted, as we do many seminal Christian contributions to our civilisation. Few of us stop to wonder why no other civilisations of past or present have produced anything even remotely resembling Western achievements. For example, I’m fairly certain Miss Ioffe doesn’t turn and toss at night, pursued by such conundrums. Yet if a question along such lines ever crosses her mind, I hope she won’t look for the answer in the works of her fellow Princetonian, Peter Singer.

In fact, judging by some of the things she has written, Miss Ioffe is a thoroughly modern young lady with only a tenuous link to what I’d describe as Western civilisation. That word is after all a cognate of civility, a concept that seems alien to Miss Ioffe.

To wit, when a rumour began to circulate that President-Elect Trump was planning to assign the East Wing of the White House to his daughter Ivanka, defying the tradition of its being the First Lady’s quarters, Miss Ioffe tweeted: “Either Trump is fucking his daughter or he’s shirking nepotism laws. Which is worse?”

Interesting question, that, and an even more interesting choice of words. No wonder the young lady absolves herself of any involvement with the religion that has produced our civilisation and, by inference, with the civilisation itself.

Yet I’m going to defy Miss Ioffe’s injunction and wish her a Merry Christmas, in the hope that one day she’ll start delving into such issues at greater depth. And yes, I get it, she isn’t a Christian.

During my requisite five minutes of Sky News at breakfast, a chap sputtering spittle at the camera lens voiced his displeasure with COP28.

That conference committed 200 countries to achieving net zero by 2050. That, as far as the spittle-sputterer was concerned, was nowhere near good enough. He didn’t beat about the bush: if we wait that long, he said, “our planet will fry”. The target year should be 2024, not 2050.

Penelope, who only ever watches that awful channel out of wifely solidarity, asked: “Where is the opposite point of view?” The question was rhetorical. She knows as well as I do exactly where the opposite point of view is: in the dustbin of history, to borrow Trotsky’s phrase.

Here we touch upon the key difference between ideas and ideologies. The former appear at the end of a rational weighing of facts and arguments pro and contra. Whoever produces an idea has to take into account the possibility that someone else may weigh the same facts and arguments and come up with a different balance.

A dispute may arise, and it can be solved by any number of means, ranging from gentle persuasion to physical violence. But a dispute is always possible and usually likely.

Not so with ideologies. An ideology is a secular superstition based on infra-rational urges, usually political at base. If an idea is formed in pursuit of truth, an ideology is formed in pursuit of power.

Thus an ideology can only be defeated either by suicide or by another ideology, not by reason and certainly not by facts. A rational argument against an irrational urge is an exercise in futility. Facts are helpless against phantoms.

Although any ideology is by definition secular, most invoke some legitimising metaphysical entity. The ideology of climate change comes from the notion of inexorable global warming, which in turn is vouchsafed to the initiated by the God of Science.

He is a wrathful and vengeful deity, smiting infidels and apostates with the thunder and lightning of ostracism. When the God of Science speaks, we must all prostrate ourselves before him and vow never to lose faith.

Of course tens of thousands of real scientists around the world refuse to pay obeisance to that particular deity on this particular point. They publish serious articles and books, with each sentence referenced to scores of research papers, proving that the whole idea of anthropogenic global warming is anti-scientific claptrap.

These publications show that the Earth has been warmer than it is now for 85 per cent of its known lifetime. That carbon emissions have a minuscule, negligible effect on the environment. That 95 per cent of climactic changes are caused by shifts in solar activity, with contributions from volcanos, oceans, earthquakes and a myriad other factors.

Those infidels talk about the Roman Warming Period, when, under Julius Caesar’s watchful eye, vineyards were blossoming in Scotland. They invoke the Medieval Warming Period, when grain crops flourished and the world population more than doubled as a result.

However, those spoilsports miss the point, and it takes a hysterical teenage girl with learning difficulties to set them straight. The point they miss is that global warming is produced by the evil of capitalism fostered by Western countries that are themselves innately evil.

And evil will triumph unless good men, women and others close ranks and meet it head on. Dialectically speaking, the antithesis of evil is good. Hence every method chosen to defeat evil is itself good. Now, it so happens that at the moment the putative, self-appointed forces of good are using the weapon of global warming to great effect.

With any luck, this weapon will slay the bogeyman of capitalism, with all its attendant democracies, parliamentarisms and civil liberties. This ideal shines so bright that it dims any possible opposition based on such trivia as solar activity or assorted Warming Periods.

Even mentioning such things is ridiculous: it’s committing a category error at its worst. The issue isn’t about scientific truth. It’s, to borrow Humpty Dumpty’s explanation, “which is to be master – that’s all”.

Unlike both Penelope and me, Sky News understands how the cookie crumbles and believes this is the only way to crumble it. Not a single crumb will be allowed to fall off the table; no alternative sustenance is allowed.

In the past, I used to rant and rave about this sort of thing, but these days I’m more likely to look for a reason to laugh. COP28 didn’t disappoint.

Don’t know about you, but I loved the pictures of Arab sheiks and sultans grinning ear to ear at the conclusion of the conference. Seldom does one see such a saintly display of disinterested virtue.

After all, their wealth, power, perhaps even physical survival wholly depend on oil revenues. Yet there they are, joyously signing away those cherished things by committing their countries to the elimination of all fossil fuels by 2050.

Call me a cynic, but I detect a hint at some future compliance problems. Just stop oil? Those chaps would be more likely to swap their thawbs for B&D PVC costumes at the next COP get-together.

Yet the God of Climate Change is like any other ideology. It demands loyal service, but it will be content with lip service. The adherents are mandated to issue the right protestations of devotion, not necessarily to act on them.

Those sheiks and sultans are smiling because they know how to subtract 2023 from 2050. They come up with 27 years, and that’s a lot of oil under the bridge, or under the counter if you’d rather. Allah’s wisdom says that those Western infidels will abandon their silly notions when they realise that penury beckons.

If by that time they have succeeded in destroying or at least degrading their own oil-producing capacity, they’ll crawl into those brocaded and tasselled tents, begging the sheiks and sultans for help and promising the earth in return. One hopes they’ll no longer be calling it “our planet”.  

That’s how many lives would have been saved in the UK had the NHS performed at the level of the top 10 countries.

Such was the conclusion of the study of 38 developed countries conducted by Imperial College London. The study ranked the countries on four key patient-safety indicators: maternal mortality, treatable mortality, adverse effects of medical treatment and neonatal disorders. 

Norway came in first, followed by Sweden and South Korea. Britain placed 21^st, behind such global powerhouses as Austria and Estonia. The only consolation is that the US finished 12 places below the UK, though I doubt those 17,356 families of NHS victims feel properly consoled.

Add to that number those who managed to survive the NHS’s tender mercies but came out with appalling and preventable disabilities, and the picture is painted in predominantly dark hues. I can’t say I am surprised.

One of the first things I heard when settling in the UK 36 years ago was: “We are proud of our NHS.” At that time, I had no personal experience of that service, but my antennae began to twitch.

The only other country I knew that broadcast such pride to the world was the Soviet Union, where medical care was on the par with the poorer African countries. A good friend of mine, a doctor himself, once said to me he’d rather have a serious operation in Zaire than in Russia, and he knew both countries well.

Yet the Soviets insisted their healthcare was wonderful because it was free. I can only repeat what William F. Buckley said on the subject when visiting the Soviet Union. The tour guide attached to him kept reciting that boastful mantra. Buckley, well-trained in sound economics, smiled his supercilious smile and said: “Nothing is free, child”.

What the guide should have said was that Soviet medical care was free at the point of delivery, which would have been more precise. Yet it’s unclear how that particular method of financing medical care could claim moral or any other ascendancy.

Because that was all it was: a method of financing. An appendectomy costs the same whether it’s the state paying for it or the patient. A sensible argument can be made that it’s likely to cost more if the funding comes from the state, if only because of the multiple layers of bureaucracy separating patient from scalpel.

Hence Soviet braggadocio had no basis to it, other than an ideological one. It enabled paid propagandists, like that tour guide, to claim that socialism was superior to capitalism because it was the state paying for medicine. Soviet hospitals, mainly acting as anterooms to the morgues, somewhat weakened the argument, but foreign visitors weren’t told that.

Having left the Soviet Union, I spent 15 years in the US where medical care was excellent at the time, although it wasn’t free at the point of delivery. Mostly it was financed by private insurance companies, with the state stepping in only when a patient had neither insurance cover nor any means of paying for treatment.

I was never in that position myself, but some of my friends were. I noticed that the care they received at municipal hospitals was incomparably better than anything the Soviet Union could offer, and every bit as good as what I received at private hospitals. They had the benefit of exactly the same doctors, the same equipment and the same drugs as did private patients, although they didn’t have private rooms and gourmet food.

What the US medical care conspicuously lacked was an ideological aspect. No one said he was proud of it, no one held it up as proof of capitalism’s superiority over socialism. When people got ill, they were treated, usually extremely well, and no one made a fuss about it.

Then I moved to Britain, and suddenly it was back to the USSR, mercifully in that aspect only. Educated people were telling me they were proud of their NHS. I had no data at my fingertips to argue in specifics but, relying on first principles, I couldn’t believe that a publicly funded Leviathan employing tons of deadwood (as all socialist enterprises do) could deliver anything to be proud about.

“What exactly are you proud of?” I’d ask, always receiving the same reply: our medical care is free. I’d come back with the Buckley retort, to the effect that nothing is free, only to be told that ‘free’ was a figure of speech. It stood for free at the point of delivery, which was almost as moral.

The musky odour of Soviet hospitals wafted in. So, when it came to medicine, the British were as ideological as the communists, and equally irrational. They were proud of having a healthcare financed in about the least efficient way known to man just because that method of financing was socialist.

Since then, I’ve seen, heard of and experienced many horror stories about infections acquired in our unhygienic hospitals killing patients (my beloved mother-in-law went that way), people waiting months or years even for operations classified as urgent, cancer death rates similar to those in the Third World.

What I haven’t seen is any lessening of the pride that indoctrinated Britons are mandated to feel about the NHS. Since that feeling is strictly ideological in nature, it’s impervious to facts, such as the current study showing exactly where British medicine ranks in the world.

I’ve been writing about the NHS for decades, and I’ve learned enough about it to continue paying exorbitant amounts I can ill-afford for private insurance. (Incidentally, those people most proud of the NHS campaign for the abolition of private medical care.) So the survey didn’t surprise me at all.

What did surprise me was the low ranking of the US and also of France, eight places below the UK. I haven’t encountered American medicine for 36 years, and it has clearly slipped precipitously during this time. My American friends have been telling me that for years, but I never quite believed them.

My experience of French medical care, both primary and secondary, is much more current, and I’ve always found it better than our NHS, if not quite as good as our private medicine. Just goes to show how inadequate personal experience is.

Yet the French and Americans have one thing in common: neither claims a high moral ground on the basis of their medicine. They may do so for other reasons, but not this one. This absence of ideological afflatus goes a long way towards putting their medical care in my good books.

These tomes are firmly shut to the NHS – as they were shut to Soviet medicine. Never mind the ideology, chaps, feel patient safety.

I knew it would come to that, but I’m still amazed it happened so soon. Enoch Burke, who taught history and German at a Church of Ireland school, has been sentenced to an indefinite prison term for refusing to refer to a ‘transitioning’ pupil as ‘they’, rather than ‘he’.

Mr Burke explained that, as an Evangelical Christian, he didn’t approve of ‘transitioning’ and refused to abide by its rules. One would think a church school would have little problem with such intransigence – after all Genesis recognises only two sexes, male and female. But thinking so would indicate ignorance of modernity, whether secular, ecclesiastic or any other.

Actually, one doesn’t have to be an Evangelical or any other kind of Christian to refuse to mangle the English language in such a totally cretinous, tasteless manner. Nor is it only the personal pronouns. What about the verbs linked to them? Should they be singular or plural? Doesn’t everybody wince, even writhe, in disgust or at least discomfort when hearing sentences like: “I bumped into Nigel yesterday, and they are fine?” Or should it be “they is fine?”

To be technical about it, Mr Burke, he of the great name, wasn’t thrown in prison merely for failing to acknowledge the grammatical nuances mandated by modernity. He was only summarily suspended, but continued to show up at the school’s staff room, saying he was there “to do his job”.

Eventually the school got a court order to keep him out, but he flouted the injunction, insisting it was unjust. It was only after Mr Burke persisted in his defiance that he was put in prison and told that’s where he’d stay until he agreed to comply with the court order. Since the teacher seems to be made of stern stuff, that could well mean life imprisonment.

According to Mr Burke’s supporters, “the whole country is behind him”, while his family insists he is being persecuted for his Christian beliefs. Legally speaking, that’s not quite true, but we are none of us sticklers for casuistic detail, are we?

Mr Burke was only sacked for his Christian beliefs. He was imprisoned for violating a court order. However, the events were set in train by his principled, self-sacrificial objection to woke insanity. But in a society of madmen, any sane person is a pariah to be isolated.

The row broke out last spring, when head mistress Niamh McShane sent an e-mail to the faculty informing them of the ‘transitioning’ student’s new name and pronouns. At the ensuing staff meeting, Mr Burke made an impassioned speech to the effect that, as a Christian, he was “opposed to transgenderism” and therefore wouldn’t comply.

He then begged Miss McShane to reconsider, which she refused to do, feeling she was firmly on the side of the woke angels. All hell broke loose, with the flame of nationwide scandal singeing not only Mr Burke but also his tormentor, who had to resign.

Every time I read stories like this, I am reminded of Cincinnatus C., the principal character of Nabokov’s novel Invitation to a Beheading. That dystopic work depicts a society where everybody is transparent, and only Cincinnatus is opaque. For that crime he is sentenced to death, so you might say that Mr Burke has got off easy.

But that’s the thin end of the wedge. As far as I know, Mr Burke is the first person to be sent to prison, if at one remove, for insisting on using the pronouns dictated by English grammar, not subversive woke fanatics. But I can confidently predict he won’t be the last.

Wokery is the worst kind of tyranny, the kind that strives to dictate not only what people do, but also what they say and ultimately what they think. That sort of thing is called totalitarianism, and it’s much worse than mere authoritarianism.

Authoritarian rulers may be proscriptive, but they aren’t prescriptive. Some of them may explain to the people in simple terms what they aren’t allowed to say on pain of punishment. But such tyrants stop short of telling people what they must say – or else.

The totalitarian tyranny of which I have first-hand experience, the Soviet Union, wasn’t like that. It insisted on everyone using the prescribed jargon, and the punishment for failure to do so was severe. Hence the Soviet Union was worse than even Nazi Germany, where anyone other than a Jew could get away with not saying ‘Heil Hitler’ – as long as he refrained from saying ‘Down with Hitler’.

The modern woke tyranny displays every feature of the Soviet brand, an analogy that many people object to quite strenuously. They say that fine, people are told not only what language they shouldn’t use, but also what language they must use. But we don’t have night-time arrests and concentration camps, do we now?

To which I always reply: “Not yet”. For any tyranny will always impose its diktats by violent methods if no others work. Enoch Burke’s case, the first swallow that makes a slammer, proves my point.

The title sounds both defeatist and wrong. It’s the former because the Ukrainians have stopped the Russian invasion in its tracks. It’s the latter because Israel is pounding HAMAS into the ground.

True, neither evil gang is winning the war fought with shells and bullets. But they are doing much better in the war fought with words and keyboards.

Gen. Gerasimov, Russia’s Chief of the General Staff, is unlikely to go down in history as a major military strategist. However, he is credited with conceiving the concept of ‘hybrid warfare’: combining military, propaganda, diplomatic, economic, cultural and other tactics to achieve strategic goals.

The idea isn’t new, but it has had to be thoroughly rehashed to accommodate modern information technology. That the Russians have done, adding a massive electronic effort to the traditional stratagems of creating spy networks and recruiting ‘useful idiots’. And in a display of characteristic Russian generosity, they have shared their knowhow with HAMAS and other similar setups.

The underlying intent is to exploit the inchoate sentiments already existing at Western grassroots. Russian propagandists realise that about two thirds of all Westerners occupy an inert and malleable middle ground, with the remaining third evenly divided between the right and left fringes.

Both are ideologically programmed to respond in a Pavlovian manner to any messages catering to their ideologies. Both, therefore, are gullible and recruitable. The recruitment may be carried out the old-fashioned way involving documents signed in blood or more subtly, with expert brainwashing.

The right fringe is made up of malcontents usually (and incorrectly) called conservatives, but who are in fact Right-wing radicals. They are dissatisfied with where their countries are going, and with good reason.

To take Britain as an example, her indigenous population is being diluted in an influx of alien immigration, her traditional values are being mocked, her whole history is being derided, her education doesn’t educate, her children are encouraged to change sex and so forth – the litany can go on for ever.

People inhabiting the Right fringe have a certain ideal society in their minds, and they increasingly realise their own governments don’t share those ideals and will do nothing to realise them. Hence they are desperate to find someone, anyone, who speaks the same language they do, whose every word tickles their nerve endings.

Putin’s government, made up almost entirely of KGB officers, knows all that. Those KGB operatives still remember the glorious days of the Soviet Union, when millions of Western Lefties were successfully fed the canard of a peace-loving, democratic Soviet Union where everyone is equal, no one is rich, and everything is free.

That pumped endorphins into millions of Western bloodstreams, creating a sense of well-being impervious to facts. Later the Lefties would say they didn’t know about mass executions, concentration camps, torture, murderous artificial famines and other hard Soviet realities. That’s a lie: of course, they knew. But what they knew couldn’t make inroads on what they felt: the ideal might have only existed in their minds, but it was none the less tangible for it, more real than reality.

Some, such as the American playwright Lillian Hellman, kept their Stalinist faith long after the Soviets themselves had described Stalin’s crimes in harrowing detail. However, the hard Stalinist Left later transformed into what’s mislabelled as liberalism, the softer version of the same thing.

Hence, starting from the 1970s and steadily accelerating over the next generation, Soviet propaganda began to express itself in the language of Western campus liberals. The stress was on racial equality, distributionism, Third World virtues, peace, love and respect all around. That set up the outburst of enthusiasm in the West greeting the transfer of power from the Party to the KGB, known as ‘the collapse of the Soviet Union’ and even – especially idiotic – as ‘the end of history’.

It took about 10 years for the KGB to progress from being the power behind the scenes to becoming the power, tout court. Russia, already thoroughly criminalised under Yeltsyn, became fascistic under Putin and his ruling KGB gang.

The intention was from the beginning to recreate the Soviet Union, by force if necessary. Since that aim was unlikely to find many allies on the Western Left, both the thrust and the target of propaganda had to change. Putin’s trolls started peddling ‘traditional values’ to Western malcontents on the Right.

Those people were fed the very verbal sustenance their own governments starved them of: traditional sexual morality, strong decisive government with a muscular leader at the helm, religiosity, a strong line on immigration and Islam – again, you can continue this litany on your own. Facts pointing at the bogus nature of all such claims and the real fascistic nature of Putin’s Russia have always been in the readily available public domain, but virtual reality has again trumped the actual kind.

Those eager to dupe themselves are easy to dupe. Hence the propaganda part of the hybrid went into overdrive with the beginning of Russia’s full-scale aggression against the Ukraine.

While a third of a million Russians were being butchered in human-wave attacks on Ukrainian positions, Russian trolls, agents of influence and useful idiots created a fake picture of the proceedings. The Right-wing malcontents all over the world liked what they saw.

The Ukrainian government was depicted as a corrupt regime with strong Nazi tendencies that came to power as a result of a ‘putsch’. That evocative word was chosen in preference to ‘coup’, ‘overthrow’ or, God forbid, ‘revolution’. The upshot was that the West shouldn’t spend billions trying to prop up that reincarnation of evil.

A thoughtful reader commented on my piece the other day by saying: “Most Republicans do not view aiding Ukraine as stopping facism, but as propping up a corrupt regime.” Exactly. And the prevalence of that view testifies to the success of Putin’s propaganda.

Of course, the Ukraine is corrupt. What do you expect after being ruled for almost 100 years by Soviet communism and Putin fascism? She is, however, nowhere near as corrupt as Russia, whose whole government is a fusion of secret police and organised crime.

The Ukrainian people finally became independent when they overthrew their Russian puppet government in 2014, and they have since made giant strides towards civilisation, with the Russians moving just as fast in the opposite direction. Witness the fact that – at wartime! – there exists widespread criticism of the Zelensky government, with Ukrainian media often openly disapproving of its conduct of the war.

Meanwhile in Russia, the KGB government is doling out draconian prison sentences for every whiff of criticism and even for referring to the war as just that, not by the prescribed term of a “special military operation”. Putin’s opponents are being routinely murdered not only in Russia, but all over the world, and Russian money laundromats continue to operate globally in spite of the sanctions.

All that is widely ignored, with ‘conservative’ Western papers happily lending their space to mendacious propaganda of Russian fascism, accompanied by references to Ukrainian ‘Nazis’. That’s why so many Westerners who consider themselves conservative are questioning the advisability of supporting the Ukraine. Russian propaganda there is boosted by the homespun fringe parties that are in Putin’s pocket ideologically and often financially.

The scale of the Russian propaganda effort far exceeds the 1930s achievements of Willi Munzenberg’s Popular Front machine, complete with its own papers, magazines and film studios. And the Russians’ HAMAS pupils are doing very well too.

The other day The Times featured this headline: “Mummy, are they going to bomb our house?” That’s tear-jerking demagoguery at its very best, and the adman in me can’t fail to identify the guiding hand behind such messages in all the ‘liberal’ media.

The original revulsion following the HAMAS raid was short-lived. At first, even the most ‘liberal’ (meaning anti-Western and pro-Third World) media shuddered at the stories of mass murders and savage rapes. Yet the underlying sense that HAMAS’s cause is just had been so cleverly planted into the ‘liberal’ psyche that, when the Israelis began to retaliate, the Arab savagery was quickly forgotten.

Coming to the fore were endless stories to the effect of “Yes, the Israelis have a right to defend themselves, but…” provided they don’t kill any Muslims. Such stories have been richly illustrated with pictures of destroyed Gaza buildings, killed or maimed ‘civilians’, crying children and so on.

The mindset required for such gross misrepresentations of reality didn’t appear by itself. Western ‘liberals’ may have been inclined in that direction, but that inclination has had to be lovingly cultivated and rewarded. And the Russians didn’t just train HAMAS and other terrorist gangs in the use of arms and explosives. They have also taught Third World radicals how to shill for their cause by pressing the right buttons in the Left psyche.

Neither the Russians nor certainly HAMAS is any good at any creative activity, and they aren’t even so good at war. But their two-prong propaganda effort is scoring notable successes all over the world, right, left and centre. The pen yet again is proving to be mightier than the sword, and the prospects for the triumph of the good appear to be bleak.

Next Tuesday, Parliament will vote on the government’s proposal to fly unwanted migrants to Rwanda. That country is seen as a sensible replacement for the three-star British hotels in which many migrants are currently housed.

Now Rwanda’s record on human rights shouldn’t make many asylum seekers see the country as exactly the kind of asylum they seek. Even assuming Rwanda has changed since the events depicted in the film alluded to in the title above, the memory is too fresh to be just a memory.

Hence, I suspect the government’s idea is an iceberg. The visible part is the desire to remove the overflow of boat people as far from Britain as geography and geopolitics will allow. What lies underneath the surface though is the possible deterrent effect on future seekers of British pastures green.

If today’s lot end up in Hotel Rwanda, rather than a three-star hotel in the Home Counties, the next generation may think twice about risking their lives in those cross-Channel dinghies. Oh well, best-laid plans and all that, but I can’t for the life of me see this solution as the best one possible.

Everything I read on the subject (or watch on Sky News between my two breakfast croissants) regales me with a plethora of fine legal points that take me so far out of my depth that I suspect the real purpose is to obfuscate, not to elucidate.

The previous attempt to put migrants on Rwanda-bound planes was blocked by the Supreme Court, a body shoved down Britain’s throat by Tony Blair, which by itself means its remit is mostly subversion. On general principle, any superfluous institution is ipso facto subversive, violating as it does the 17^th century principle that says: “If it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.”

The Supreme Court is superfluous because it at best duplicates and at worst usurps the judiciary function of the House of Lords. That House has managed to review British laws for centuries, but the problem with it, as seen by the Blair lot, was precisely that it was strictly British. That’s why our international socialists needed a bypass that could take them around parochial British interests. Enter the Supreme Court.

The principal function of this defective child of Tony Blair is to ensure compliance with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Thus the Supreme Court was supposed to be one of the chains binding Britain to the EU, effectively turning her into a province of a giant, unaccountable superstate.

One would think that Brexit ought to have put paid to the Supreme Court. After all, the British people, voting in greater numbers than they had ever voted for anything else, communicated their desire to hang on to their, which is to say parliamentary, sovereignty.

The natural thing to do would have been to go back to how things used to be when it was Parliament that governed the country, not the European Commission and its various offshoots. Yet as we know, the idea of getting Brexit done has been steadily undermined by unreconstructed Remainers who want to get Brexit done in.

They hang on to the anachronistic survivals of the EU, such as ECHR and consequently the Supreme Court. That usurping body was thus able to stop those Rwanda planes from taking off.

Now the government has come up with a devilishly casuistic way of bypassing the bypass to make sure all those migrants can fly to Africa. I can’t judge the legal nuances of the proposed legislation, but Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick evidently could.

That’s why he resigned in disgust, correctly stating, albeit in the jargon of political equivocation, that no satisfactory solution to the problem can be found for as long as Britain stays in ECHR. Though he didn’t write that, Britain has nothing to learn about human rights from any European body, considering that we’ve had documents codifying basic liberties for almost a millennium – and an exemplary record for centuries.

By contrast, one dominant member of the EU, France, has had 17 different constitutions since 1789 and long periods of a rather spotty record on human rights. As to the other dominant member, Germany, the less said about her the better.

Mr Jenrick obviously regards ECHR as the millstone pulling Britain down to the bottom of the EU swamp. A truly satisfactory solution to the migrants’ problem is impossible for as long as Britain has that weight around her neck.

No country is truly sovereign if it can’t control who is allowed to cross its borders, and in what kind of numbers. That realisation should be the starting point of any thinking on the subject.

The next logical step would be to introduce effective border controls guaranteed to work. In common with any practical measure, this one must start with clear thinking unsullied by extraneous concerns.

Legal asylum applications must be processed quickly and decisively. A certain number of people who can legitimately show that their lives would be in danger if they stayed in their native lands can be admitted.

Even that number has to be limited on purely arithmetic grounds: people who can make such a claim credible must number in at least tens of millions around the world. I doubt even Tony Blair would hospitably invite as many.

Yet HMG has been way too generous in its definition of legitimate asylum seekers. Thus 55 per cent of the Albanians who have requested that status got it – and Albania is about to join the EU. Not a single Albanian is in real need of asylum, although I’m sure many are in need of a higher standard of living.

As to the illegal migrants, the key to their treatment should come from the adjective, not the noun. ‘Illegal’ means they break the law, which makes them criminals, to be dealt with as such. One likes to think Britain hasn’t completely lost her wherewithal to combat criminality, although anyone walking through some areas of London may be forgiven for getting that impression.

We do still have the Royal Navy that has successfully defended Britain’s coastline from enemy fleets sent out by Philip II, Napoleon and Hitler. I realise we are no longer the naval power we used to be, but surely we still have the capacity of stopping a few dozen unarmed dinghies.

If we haven’t, the problem isn’t physical but metaphysical: the paralysis of will. If that’s the case, a few airliners here or there carrying several hundred illegals to Africa won’t offer even a viable solution.

That’s what the much-despised conservative wing of the Conservative Party are saying. They correctly prophesy that the government’s namby-pamby dithering on immigration could wipe the party out as a parliamentary force. Such right-minded Tories are likely to switch over to the Reform Party, heir to UKIP, thereby hastening the arrival of the doom they predict.

That will guarantee a Labour domination for a generation at least, with catastrophic consequences for the country. A meaningful step towards preventing that disaster would be giving the British people what they demanded in 2016: the reclaiming of parliamentary sovereignty.

That includes regaining control of the national borders – real control, that is. Not the fly-by-night palliatives amounting to little more than smoke and mirrors.

God Save the King will no longer be played at Bristol University’s graduation ceremonies. After some students complained it’s “old-fashioned”, “irrelevant” and “offensive to some”, the administration promptly complied.

Now, I don’t think Britons are any less patriotic than Americans, but they are certainly less demonstrative about it. Britons see hand-over-heart professions of loyalty as a bit embarrassing, some would say borderline vulgar. Nor does God Save the King get as much airing as The Star-Spangled Banner does in the US. And if our politicians shouted “God bless Great Britain” at the end of their speeches, they’d be laughed out of Westminster.

But less demonstrative doesn’t mean less real. In their own understated, quietly assured way the British people are as patriotic as anyone. Now, British academics are a different story, and it’s not a good read. (The same, incidentally, goes for American academics – many of them like nothing more than denigrating their own country.)

As far as university dons are concerned, the British have nothing to be proud of and much to be ashamed for. Our universities, whose mission is to forge a national intellectual elite out of the raw cerebral material of our youth, are busily churning out deracinated ignoramuses who insist on treating the entire British history as an uninterrupted sequence of evil deeds.

They wouldn’t be able to put forth anything resembling a sound argument in favour of that interpretation but, thanks to their teachers, they don’t have to. The grown-ups who run our universities insist on taking any idiocy springing from the students’ immature minds as gospel truth and a call to action.

That bothers me more than the understated patriotism of our academics. Dr Johnson did say “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”, though he didn’t mean that as a general statement. He was talking specifically about one man, William Pitt, whom Dr Johnson considered a scoundrel wearing his patriotism on his sleeve.

Even so, patriotism is rather low down on my list of virtues, although it does appear on that list. To exhaust the daily ration of quotations I allow myself, another great man, Edmund Burke, put it in a nutshell: “To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely”.

Burke didn’t object to patriotism as such, but he despised blind devotion along the lines of “my country, right or wrong”. (There, I’ve just exceeded my quota of borrowed phrases.) The greater the number of people who feel that way, the more likely the country will be to go wrong more often.

And if a country is an evil tyranny, like Russia, China or Iran, then it forfeits all claims to love and allegiance. However, I don’t think that even students of Bristol University would put Britain next to those states.

So the problem is not their lack of patriotism but their ideological idiocy, and one has to blame the university for not doing something about it. To wit, one student, who at 21 is still hovering on the edge of post-pubescence, explained: “The monarchy isn’t really relevant to my generation, so it wouldn’t be missed.”

First, God Save the King is the national anthem, and we have no other. Thus, if even a committed republican refuses to listen to it, he offends not just the monarchy but the whole nation.

Second, the UK is a constitutional monarchy that has evolved over many centuries. Hence saying that the monarchy isn’t relevant is tantamount to saying that the constitution isn’t relevant.

Does that student know that the monarchy is the crossroads where all constitutional paths converge? That, even with the worst of wills, it’s legally impossible to get rid of the king without plunging the country into anarchy at best, civil war at worst?

Thus, the monarchy isn’t just ‘relevant’ (whatever that means), but absolutely indispensable. That student would be well-advised to study English history between 1640 and 1660, to learn what happens when the monarch is removed.

Judging from her age, she is close to graduation. Now, her excuse is that, at 21, a person’s brain isn’t even wired properly. But what’s her professors’ excuse for not having taught that silly twit the fundamentals of her country’s history and constitution?

In fact, our academe is in the grips of paedocracy, which is a much greater social danger than the more popular word of the same root. If our universities are asylums, then students are the lunatics running them.

They wield the kind of power they are ill-equipped to wield, psychologically, intellectually and institutionally. Unlike the Chinese Hongweibings, the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution, our students can’t kill or maim their professors – yet. But they can silence and ‘cancel’ them. They can also force university administrations to go along with any subversive idiocy that crosses their underdeveloped minds.

Thus, the statue of Edward Colston was toppled in Bristol during a Black Lives Matter protest, with students of Bristol University marching in the front row of the rioters. Now they’ve forced the university to remove the dolphin (Colston’s emblem) from its logo.

Now, Colston was involved in the slave trade in the late 17^th, early 18^th centuries. That occupation wasn’t illegal in Britain at the time, although it was already widely regarded as immoral. On the plus side, however, Colston left his whole fortune to endow schools, universities and alms houses in Bristol.

Bristol University was incorporated by Royal Charter in 1909, long after the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in 1833, and almost 200 years after Colston’s death. But without the foundation he bequeathed to the city, the university would probably not even exist. In acknowledgement of that fact, the Colston dolphin has featured in the logo of the grateful institution ever since – before it came into conflict with the flaming conscience of the young dimwits.

I wonder if their conscience prevailed over their education or was informed by it. Looking at some of the university’s professors, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the latter.

Thus Harriet Bradley, Bristol University’s Emeritus Professor of sociology, was aghast when the premises were offered to the Jewish Labour Movement to hold its annual conference. In her tweet she called for “someone to blow up the venue”.

Now that sort of thing could be regarded in some quarters as incitement to terrorism, but I wondered what upset the good professor so much. At first, I thought she was averse to socialism, but then I found she used to be a Labour Councillor. So she was averse to something else, or rather some people else.

After a public outcry, the academic had her Honorary status withdrawn. But I wonder how much venom she had injected into her students’ brains – and how much more comes from her colleagues. Bucketfuls, would be my guess.

None of this would be worth mentioning if our ideologised, moron-spewing education were confined to a single rogue university. Alas, it isn’t. All this is indicative of the general dismal state of our universities. The groves of academe? The graves, more like it.

The on-going inquiry into the way Boris Johnson handled the Covid pandemic reinforces the conclusion in the title. Actually, not the inquiry as such, but the TV coverage of it.

This morning I again consumed my requisite five minutes of Sky News at breakfast and almost suffered catastrophic reflux. The croissant I was eating couldn’t force its way into my stomach, already filled to the brim with cloying on-screen sentimentality.

The announcer was interviewing a fiftyish woman with frizzy hair whose father had died of Covid, one of over 200,000 Britons suffering that fate. The statistics involved have been investigated from every possible angle, demographic, ethnographic, psychographic, cardiographic – even pornographic for all I know.

One breakdown that’s sorely missing is moral, which leaves us in the dark about the personalities of the deceased. However, judging by media coverage, such information would be superfluous. We already know that every victim had to be an upstanding individual adored by everyone he ever came in contact with, including fellow passengers on public transport.

Today’s bereaved interviewee said nothing to compromise that impression: her recollections of her late father were nothing short of gushing. To be fair, she had been encouraged by the interviewer who was dead-set on exploring the hell out of the human angle.

“Tell us about your father,” she invited with a compassionate half-smile.

Let me remind you that the segment was about the Covid inquiry, not the personality profile of the British population. Hence the only relevant reply would have been “He died of Covid”. I wish someone had reminded the interviewer of that salient fact. In the absence of such prompting, she popped that leading question, and it could only lead one way.

The bereaved woman proceeded to sketch a verbal portrait that would put some saints to shame. Her hallowed father was gentle, affectionate, kind, still hard-working in his early seventies. He loved nothing more than playing with his grandchildren, mowing his neighbours’ lawns, helping old ladies across the street – frankly, I don’t remember every detail. But you get the overall picture.

Since for old times’ sake I like to establish logical links, I tried to understand exactly what that information had to do with the topic in hand, the government’s handling or mishandling of the pandemic.

Let me see if I can detect the underlying assumption. If the deceased was a dyed-in-the-wool bastard who used his grandchildren for punching bags when he didn’t use them for sexual gratification, who poisoned his neighbours’ pets, drove a petrol car, cheated on his taxes and voted Leave, then he would have deserved dying, and Johnson would have no case to answer.

Is that it? No? Then what is? And why is it that whenever our media cover victims of anything, be it crime, war, epidemic or terrorism, each one has to be a picture of perfection? Why isn’t a single one ever a sorry excuse for a human being? Such reprobates do exist, don’t they? If so, they have to be statistically represented in any large sample, give or take a percentage point.

Staying in the realm of logic, one has to come to the conclusion that good-for-nothing reprobates never die. And since we happen to know that’s not the case, logic can’t possible apply here.

As to the inquiry itself, I can’t make heads or tails of it. Some people accuse Johnson of imposing the lockdown too early. Others say he imposed it too late. Some say the lockdown was too tight. Others say it was too lax. Still others say he shouldn’t have imposed it at all.

Poor Boris Johnson seems as confused as I am. He started out by stating how very sorry he was for all the tragic deaths, which didn’t go down well with the baying public. The building where Johnson lies stretched on the rack is permanently surrounded by crowds bearing placards.

They say “The dead can’t hear your apologies”, which is undeniably true. They also say all kinds of other things, such as asking Mr Johnson if he could bring daddy back. That question is consistent with this Christmas season, although one can’t easily imagine a British prime minister saying: “Arise and walk”.

One protester screamed “You are a murderer!” from the galleries, which accusation suggested malice aforethought on Mr Johnson’s part. Yet even his political detractors refrain from insisting he is part of a sinister conspiracy to depopulate Britain.

While this morning’s interviewee commendably didn’t couch her displeasure with Johnson in such uncompromising terms, she made it clear she held him personally responsible for her father’s demise. A man like that, she said, should never be allowed to hold any public office again.

The interviewer, an empathetic grimace permanently pasted onto her face, egged on the bereaved woman expertly, thanking her in the end for sharing her story of woe with the audience. The viewers, I among them, had to dine on the froth while being denied the meat of the issue.

In a way, that’s understandable because no one really knows what the meat is. I certainly don’t, which is why I’ve always expressed myself on the issue of Covid with uncharacteristic reticence.

When I criticise public officials for doing something wrong, I usually know – or at least think I know – how they should have done it right. In this case I don’t, which is why I sympathise with Mr Johnson.

He had no experience in handling pandemics. And whatever prior knowledge he had encouraged complacency. Things like swine flu or assorted Asian blights, for example, had caused a great outburst of scaremongering that later proved unjustified.

Even when the scale of the Covid pandemic became clearer, Johnson was flooded with contradictory advice.

Some experts insisted on introducing an immediate lockdown, others were arguing that doing so early, before the pandemic reached its peak, would lead to ‘behavioural fatigue’ and reduced public compliance at the time it was most needed. Others beseeched Johnson to consider the economic, social and educational consequences of a lockdown. Accepting a certain number of excess deaths, they were saying, was the lesser evil.

His political advisers, a breed not known for putting emotional sensitivity first, were calculating the electoral credit and debit of each possible decision, which caused the ire of today’s interviewee. All the politicians wanted, she said, was to cover their own… she didn’t utter the word on her mind and instead took a couple of seconds to find a nicer one, ‘interests’.

In effect, she accused politicians of being politicians, which is an irrefutable charge if I’ve ever heard one.

All in all, the programme did nothing to elucidate the issue for me. It left too many lingering questions unanswered. Such as, why did Covid selectively target only saintly men, leaving TV announcers intact?

And New Mexico. And Arizona. And California. The Ukraine hugs the entire 2,000 miles of the border separating the United States from Mexico.

That proximity isn’t geographical; it’s much closer than that. For the Republicans in Congress have made military assistance to the Ukraine contingent on the solidity of the US southern frontier.

As it is, that border has always been porous, and now more than ever. During the three years of Biden’s tenure, some 6.5 million illegal migrants have seeped through the barely guided threshold.

During his presidency, Trump, doubtless inspired by the shining example of the Berlin Wall, began to build a similar structure along the Mexican border. Yet even had the project been completed, I doubt creating a physical barrier would have solved the problem.

The Berlin Wall did succeed on its own evil terms, but, at merely 96 miles, it was less than one-tenth the length. More important, its ‘success’ depended on the vigilant border guards, numbering 47,000 at their peak.

Pro rata, that would mean 500,000 for the US-Mexico border, and I have a nice bridge to sell to anyone who believes any American president would ever be able to put together a force that size. Unless, of course, Mexico sends an army across the Rio Grande to reclaim the aforementioned states that used to be hers.

(The very first article I ever wrote for a local Texas paper almost 50 years ago dealt with that very problem. I interviewed the head of the Immigration Service, who informed me mournfully that the entire force guarding the border numbered 200 men working in two shifts. I don’t know how large it is now, but I bet it’s nowhere near 500,000.)

Nor is it just the numbers. Those East German guards had orders to shoot on sight, and they complied with alacrity. Some 140 people were killed trying to scale the Wall, and the score would have been run up much higher had the people not got the message early on.

Again, I doubt, in fact hope, that no American president can ever issue similar instructions, effective though they might be. Yet our residually decent Western states are still unprepared to pay the moral cost of such efficacy. So the problem seems hard to solve.

Still, at least Trump tried. The Biden administration hasn’t, and it even stopped the construction of the border wall. That has been driving the Republicans, well, up the wall. Their core support sees, not unreasonably, the issue of uncontrolled illegal immigration as an existential threat, whereas the Democrats see it as an opportunity to beef up their own electoral base.

That’s where the Ukraine comes in. The Democrats have been assisting the Ukraine almost without demur. The support has fallen far short of what the Ukraine needs to roll back the fascist threat to Europe, but it has been sufficient to stop it in its tracks, at least for a while.

However, even keeping the military assistance at the same subsistence level requires new appropriations, and it’s the Republicans who hold a slender majority in the House. If the Democrats’ support for the Ukraine can be described as half-hearted, the Republicans have committed even less of their cardiac capacity to that cause.

The party traditionally has a strong isolationist element, and the idea of saving billions in Taxpayers’ Money (always implicitly capitalised in America) during the run-up to the presidential election sounds like a winner. Yet at the same time, the Democrats have a majority in the Senate, and they can block another potential vote-getter for the Republicans, tightening up the controls on the Mexican border.

Since modern politics is nothing if not transactional, the Republicans offered the Democrats a deal: you commit funds to our border defences, and we’ll vote for Ukrainian appropriations. Not high enough to enable the Ukrainians to reclaim their stolen territories, but enough to keep them bleeding white for years in a war of attrition.

Such horse-trading strikes me as both immoral and ill-advised.

If in the 19^th century it was still possible for America to debate whether or not she wanted to be a world power, it now no longer is. Americans can echo Matteo Ricci’s intransigent stance: “Simus, ut sumus, aut non simus” (“We shall remain as we are or we shall not remain at all”). The status of the Leader of the Free World is like a merry-go-round spinning at full speed: jumping off may break your neck.

That leadership position entails confronting deadly threats to the existing world order wherever they arise. Such is the downside of that position, but there exist numerous benefits as well, both tangible economic and intangible moral. Sticking to the former, America’s losing that status may conceivably lead to the dollar no longer acting as the world’s reserve currency – with catastrophic consequences for the US (and generally Western) economy.

That the emergence of an emboldened, victorious fascist power in the middle of Europe would be detrimental to American interests is thus self-evident. If unprojected around the world, America’s power will begin to weaken and eventually atrophy.

Republican isolationists, going back to the America First Committee in the 1930s, have always had doubts on this, which saddens me. After all, I find such Republicans much more attractive than their antipodes, FDR’s New Dealers and their Democratic heirs. Yet, though it pains me to admit this, on that one issue Roosevelt showed the greater clarity of thought.

As to the morality involved, engaging in transactional toing and froing at a time when thousands of Ukrainians are dying to keep the fascist wolf away from NATO’s door strikes me as utterly decrepit. This is yet another instance when morality and pragmatism converge: if history teaches anything, it’s that stopping a juggernaut after it has gathered momentum is much costlier than preventing it from rolling in the first place.

If the Republicans persist, I’ll have to start hoping for a Democratic victory, and I thought such words would never cross my lips. At least the Democrats will be less likely to sell the Ukraine down the Rio Grande.   

Nowadays this sentence, with possible variations, represents a shortcut to a charge of hate crime. It could always have been construed as offensive, but now it can well be criminally offensive.

In the film Anger Management, the Adam Sandler character gets into an argument with the stewards on his flight. Finally, he cries out in exasperation: “What’s the matter with you people?”

It so happened that the steward immediately in front of him was black. He took the question as a racial slur, and Adam got into all sorts of trouble.

“You people” is a locution that violates several inviolable rules of woke etiquette. First, it lumps a large group of people into a generalised category, which is already bad, if not yet criminal. You see, we are all supposed to be unique individuals defying any group identity, except one we explicitly and proudly claim for ourselves.

Yet this phrase isn’t just any old generalisation. Its implications are almost always pejorative. The person on the receiving end is rebuked not just for his own failings, if any, but for carrying the stigma of belonging to an objectionable category.

Since according to modern mythology no category can be deemed ipso facto objectionable, except perhaps Tory voters, a faux pas has been committed. For that to reach the level of criminality, however, the maligned category has to be protected by the new-fangled code.

If it’s defined by gender, any sexual proclivity formerly regarded as perverse, race or ethnicity, then belonging to it can’t on pain of censure be regarded as anything other than a badge of honour. Since these days a hate crime is anything perceived as offensive by the person presumably hated, the transgressor may well have his collar felt.

But even barring that possibility, whoever uses that awful phrase is at least an insensitive boor, even if the existing law provides a loophole through which he can sneak to avoid criminal charges. Yet there is one target group that isn’t off limits for derogatory generalisation. Can you guess which one?

If you live in Britain, you’ll have no trouble identifying that defenceless group. These are people commonly known as ‘posh’, those who occupy one of the top rungs on the social ladder and don’t try to disguise that contemptible fact by adopting demotic accents and attitudes.

Such an attempt goes a long way towards exoneration even for such innately ‘posh’ people as Prince Harry. If his brother has taken his accent a notch down from his father’s (and the latter a notch down from his own mother’s), Harry has pushed his even further towards the bottom. He gets top marks for trying to overcome his unfortunate accident of birth, especially since his generally vulgar personality reinforces his phonetic persona.

Yet someone like Boris Johnson is unapologetically ‘posh’. He still enunciates his vowels the way one was supposed to at Eton and Oxford, his two educational smithies. That automatically puts him into the only group unprotected by woke aversion to generalisation.

I was reminded of that the other day, when catching about two minutes of a Sky chat show. The chat involved two editors, one of Politico, an on-line Leftie magazine, the other of Sky News itself, a Leftie TV channel.

The two gentlemen were discussing the upcoming legal inquiry into Boris Johnson’s handling of the Covid lockdowns. The inquest will be conducted by a barrister who bears the stigma of having gone to the same school and university as his mark. That gave the two journalists cause to sneer, in their own accents that fall into the lower reaches of the middle-class range.

“All those people know each other,” one of them said, with a dismissive wave of the hand. All of which people, exactly? The barrister involved is neither a journalist nor a politician, Mr Johnson’s two known occupations. He, on the other hand, has no legal background.

Hence “all those people” was a statement of class hatred or at least contempt or possibly envy. However, since the target class in question is rather high, the two chaps risked no opprobrium for openly mocking a whole category of people. Quite the opposite: they established their own credentials as card-carrying members of the downtrodden classes, those drawing six-figure salaries at woke media.

Now imagine Boris Johnson saying something similar about his detractors. What if he said publicly “All those people talk funny” or “All those people have no table manners” or, for that matter, “All those people” anything, provided the people in question weren’t ‘posh’?

He’d be kicked from pillar to post for being a snob, a toffee-nosed elitist, a Hooray Henry, or some such. If Johnson still harbours hopes of a political comeback, these would be nipped in the bud. A British politician can just about get away with sounding like him, but not with looking down on the phonetically disadvantaged.

Our stand-up comedians know that all they have to do to get a laugh is to put on a caricature version of an educated accent. Sounding the way BBC announcers sounded a generation ago makes one a figure of fun at best, a target for derision usually.

The British were first force-fed the concept of class war, then were armed and trained to make sure the wrong people won it. By wrong people I don’t mean those who speak with regional or lower-class accents. In fact, two of the most brilliant people I know carry a distinct geographic imprint on their pronunciation.

Of course, it helps if people from the same country have no difficulty understanding one another, a condition that’s not always met in Britain. To that end, some kind of received pronunciation, the same or not drastically different for all, is useful.

But those speaking in the general middle-class range or higher understand one another perfectly well. The problem is in imposing demotic, proletarian culture on society as a stratagem of destructive political crusade.

When people speaking in cultivated accents are held to ridicule for no other reason, and by the same people who worship at the altar of diversity, something sinister is under way. I have one thing to say to such ideologues: You people are all the same.