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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.   

In 1971 National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger embarked on a secret mission. So secret that even America’s closest allies hadn’t been informed of it.

He ended his tour of Asia in Pakistan, where it was announced Kissinger was to spend a few days relaxing in the mountains. Instead he was whisked away to a military airfield, whence a Pakistani plane flew him to China.

There Kissinger spent three days negotiating with Mao’s second-in-command, Zhou Enlai. This had every characteristic of a cloak and dagger story: the cloak of secrecy shrouded the mission, and the dagger was plunged into the back of Taiwan, America’s loyal ally.

At that time the US had no diplomatic relations with China, relegating Mao’s cannibalistic regime to international wilderness. Its legitimacy wasn’t recognised; it was Taiwan that was America’s diplomatic partner. And it was Taiwan that, as the Republic of China, held a permanent seat in the UN Security Council.

By contrast, America’s relations with Mao’s China had been frankly hostile until then. In the early 1950s the two countries found themselves on opposite sides in the sanguinary Korean war, producing hundreds of thousands of Chinese casualties and tens of thousands of American ones.

However, America wasn’t the only power China was at daggers drawn with. Mao and Soviet leaders didn’t see eye to eye on ideology, and none so hostile as divergent exponents of the same creed. Following the 1969 Sino-Soviet split, the two countries had a series of border clashes.

The most serious one occurred at Damansky Island on the Ussuri River, when Chinese soldiers ambushed Soviet border guards. The Soviets responded with missile barrages and managed to hold on to the island. Since then, the two communist giants had been on the brink of war, possibly a nuclear one, a situation Kissinger saw as an opportunity.

Actually, America didn’t need China to defeat the Soviet Union in any war, cold or otherwise. The US and her NATO allies had a prohibitive strategic advantage over the Soviets, and both sides knew it. However, it took moral strength and determination to press that advantage home, and those commodities were in short supply throughout the West. Hence having a billion Chinese allies threatening Russia from the east seemed like a painless alternative to taking a principled stance.

Kissinger’s task was to convince Zhou that China should ally herself with America, with each acting as the jaw of a vice crushing the Soviet strength to fight the Cold War – or for that matter a hot one of the nuclear variety that the Soviets had been threatening to unleash on China.

Zhou was amenable; he too craved normal relations with the United States. Zhou was ready to treat America as a friend, but Confucius say friends must help one another. He wanted his new American friend to recognise the People’s Republic as the only legitimate China. No problem, Zhou. Kissinger thought it was a peachy idea.

The two sides set up a summit meeting between Nixon and Mao, and in February 1972 Nixon arrived in Peking. After his conference with Mao, the rapprochement went full speed ahead. Taiwan was kicked off her seat in the Security Council, with the People’s Republic squeezing her own bulk in. She was recognised as the only legal representative of China, with Taiwan’s status becoming rather loosely defined.

The United States was now fully committed to drawing China into her orbit. But magnets were required, of the economic kind. China’s economy was a shambles following all those Cultural Revolutions and Great Leaps forward. However, if China was the Augean Stables, America, inspired by Kissinger’s realpolitik, was ready to play Hercules.

China received instant and unlimited access to Western capital and technologies. Those few technologies that the West preferred to keep for itself were stolen by China’s industrial espionage. Nobody minded too much – the Soviet Union was being neutralised.

Within a few decades China managed to blend those Western gifts with her own industrious, cheap, semi-enslaved labour force to become the West’s manufacturing base. That turned China into an economic giant and, more to the point, a military one.

Some of the internal reins got loosened, and China began to mass-produce not only assorted trinkets but also billionaires. The traditional thinking – if it merits such a lofty term – was that, once a communist country got a taste of Western consumerism and free enterprise, it would stop being communist, first de facto, then de jure.

That belief is another aspect of what I call totalitarian economism, a false theory bringing together such supposed antipodes as Marxists and libertarians. The two groups have joined forces to create a fake picture of a life mostly driven by economic concerns.

They simply have to shorten the distance between humans and animals. The latter, after all, also have their lives circumscribed by a pursuit of food and shelter. What totalitarian economists created was a more sophisticated human version of the same thing: foie gras instead of bananas or cud, Lake Como villas instead of lairs and dens.

Since the so-called Left and Right are in agreement, differing only in the type of materialism they favour, who’s going to argue? No one. The forged picture of life has been certified as original, and never mind the facts. Ideology has spoken.

Yet facts refuse to go away. For example, if you look at the two on-going wars, in the Ukraine and Gaza, the two aggressors, Russia and Hamas, knew beforehand that their actions would hurt their economic interests no end. Yet they went ahead because they aren’t simians but humans. Evil humans, but humans nonetheless.

And human beings, while still preferring to live in comfort, are mostly driven by non-material concerns. These could be honour, wounded pride, ideology, religion, love, hate, nationalism, internationalism – all those things, good or bad, that ought to remind our totalitarian economists that man does not live by bread alone.

China has vindicated my iconoclasm by building up a mammoth economy, but without changing her communist, which is to say evil, spots. The periphery of the system has changed, but the core remains the same. China is still a communist country bent on world domination – and she now has the means to make attempts towards that end.

At some point, Americans began to get an inkling of this, but the economic benefits they derived from the giant pool of cheap yet qualified Chinese labour put blinkers on their eyes. However, the sinister shadow China’s bulk was casting on the world, and specifically on American interests, has forced some of the blinkers to be pushed aside.

Three consecutive American presidents have been fighting back, if half-heartedly. Joe Biden has publicly declared China to be the main global challenge (that’s the modern for ‘threat’) and introduced a packet of sanctions. But that’s like trying to push toothpaste back into the tube, if you’ll pardon the cliché.

And the paste was originally squeezed out by Henry Kissinger, the feted maestro of realpolitik. China is now waiting for the propitious moment to claim the prize she was implicitly promised: Taiwan. That’s creating another flashpoint, eminently capable of flaring up into a global war, and the first nuclear bomb falling down should have Kissinger’s name on it.

Now imagine that the US policy towards China in the early 1970s was set by a less Machiavellian politician, a firm believer in first principles. Such a politician would never have made it easy for China to build up her economic and military brawn. Rather than playing footsies with the communists, he would have declared that he considered their ideology evil and saw his task in containing it.

China, while still remaining a formidable threat because of her sheer mass, would never have developed on her own the economic and technological wherewithal to challenge the West in earnest. The world would today be a safer place, and America’s position in the world much stronger.

Henry Kissinger had many admirable qualities, and quite a few not so admirable ones. That’s why what he himself saw as his greatest coup many others have got to see as a catastrophic and irreversible error. History has taught yet another lesson, but most pupils were playing truant as usual.

Concluding his speech at the Copout28… sorry, I mean Cop28, HM Charles III said: “The Earth does not belong to us, we belong to the Earth.”

Such statements are never queried, but I’d be curious how a man who holds meaningful conversations with his plants would respond to counterarguments. One such would invoke HM’s coronation, on 6 May 2023.

The King had to take an oath, which included his promise to uphold “the laws of God and the true profession of the gospel.” That was a noble undertaking, and an essential one.

For our kings are neither appointed nor elected. They are anointed, which surely strengthens their claim to legitimacy and places them above politics. Hence, when the laws of God come into conflict with quotidian political concerns (which is what Cop28 is all about), our monarch is duty-bound to put divine laws first.

Anyone who understands our constitution has to agree, whatever his own religious beliefs if any. For the issue is indeed constitutional, not confessional.

If so, then His Majesty flagrantly violated his sacred oath. For the laws of God specifically state that the Earth does belong to us and not the other way around.

Thus Psalms 115:116 are unequivocal on the subject: “The heaven, even the heavens, are the LORD’s: But the earth hath he given to the children of men.”

Genesis 1:28 expressed the same thought in different words: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

Such are “the laws of God” that the King has sworn to uphold. Instead he sank into a primitive form of heathen pantheism, which would be his privilege to do if he were a private individual. But he isn’t and it isn’t.

However, if King Charles continues to put hare-brained political fads before his constitutional obligations, he may well become a private individual before long, a citizen of the British republic.

Republican sentiments may be dormant at the moment, but if the King becomes a crowned version of Greta Thunberg, people may begin to question his legitimacy. Or perhaps invite Greta to become our woke queen – why settle for a copy when you can have the original?

The rest of the King’s speech was usual scaremongering demagoguery, complete with tear-jerking references to his grandchildren who will be “living with the consequences of what we did or didn’t do”, and heartfelt regrets that we aren’t destroying the economy fast enough to save the future generations.

His Majesty describes such destruction as “transformational action.” Perhaps that’s what his plants call it – the more advanced of them must be capable of producing the intellectual content of the King’s speech.

I especially liked his reference to “unprecedented floods”. Has HM heard of Noah’s Ark? If not, he should go back to the book that contains the laws of God he has sworn to uphold.

It’s widely, if perhaps erroneously, believed that the Kubrick character was based on Henry Kissinger, who died yesterday aged 100.

The film was made in 1964, before Kissinger held any official post in the US  government, but he was already known as foreign policy consultant to the high and mighty. He was also known for his elastic conscience enabling him to reshape his ideas and allegiances to fit the moment.

Kissinger called himself a master of  “constructive ambiguity”, and it’s in that spirit that I find myself reacting to his death. On the one hand, he was far and away the most brilliant State Secretary in my lifetime. On the other hand, well… let’s talk about the good hand first.

The obituaries describe Kissinger as a diplomat, which constitutes a demotion. A diplomat merely communicates his government’s foreign policy to foreign countries; he doesn’t formulate it. Kissinger did.

Throughout Nixon’s presidency and some of Ford’s, he sidelined the State Department, first to set the foreign policy and then to carry it out singlehandedly. In that Kissinger displayed a certain distrust of traditions, even some constitutional ones, but one could argue that his distrust wasn’t altogether misplaced.

That was a back-breaking load for one man to carry, but Kissinger’s back was up there with the strongest. One can imagine him at the 1815 Vienna Congress, rubbing shoulders or locking horns with the likes of Metternich, Talleyrand and Castlereagh. He was a figure of a similar calibre, and I can’t think offhand of too many post-Vienna statesmen fitting the same description.

Yet if a brilliant mind isn’t matched by a superlative character, it can keep firing blanks — those with a blinding flash and deafening noise, but blanks nonetheless. No one illustrates this simple observation as vividly as Henry Kissinger.

Granted, anyone involved in diplomatic wheeling and dealing will sometimes wheel into moral cul-de-sacs. It would be naïve to expect any statesman to avoid immorality completely. But immorality isn’t the same as amorality, and this is another point Kissinger illustrates.

He took pride in his mastery of realpolitik, sacrificing moral principles and intellectual convictions for the sake of achieving immediate practical results. In fact, he was so good at it that one could legitimately wonder if he genuinely had any moral principles or held any intellectual convictions.

While it would be silly to deny that realpolitik is an important tool of statecraft, it’s hard to ignore that it often leads to a divorce from reality for the sake of instant political gratification. It can’t be otherwise.

Global interlacing of well-nigh incompatible national interests creates such a jumble of variables that it may well be beyond any man or even any group to untangle. Hence it’s usually impossible to calculate the consequences of a foreign policy on a purely realpolitik basis.

What looks like solid reality today may well prove to be ephemeral tomorrow and its exact opposite the day after. Suddenly the amoral pragmatism of yesteryear stops looking pragmatic while still remaining amoral.

Conversely, what at first looks like foolhardy obtuseness based on nebulous principles (all principles are nebulous to the realpolitik set) may well produce the best practical results.

If you look at Kissinger’s greatest putative triumphs, détente with the Soviet Union, SALT 1, reconciliation with China, ending the Vietnam War, peace between Egypt and Israel, only the last one can in hindsight be judged as a qualified success.

Détente was negotiated at a time when the US had an overwhelming strategic superiority over the Soviet Union. A principled stance, later adopted by Ronald Reagan, could have made “the evil empire” come apart at the seams at least a decade earlier.

Instead, Kissinger’s policy of appeasement led to a massive transfer of capital and technologies to the Soviet Union, which enabled her almost to achieve military parity with NATO in the 1970s.

SALT 1 also contributed to that development. It was strictly an act of PR grandstanding because everyone, including Kissinger, knew the Soviets would cheat. The ‘real’ in realpolitik was effectively replaced with ‘virtual’. The US public had its fears of nuclear bombs allayed, while the Soviets surreptitiously kept stockpiling those bombs sky high under the cover of SALT.

China provided another reason for Kissinger to give himself a contortionist pat on the back. He secretly travelled there in 1971 to set up what was billed as a historic meeting between Nixon and Mao, followed by a thaw in the frosty relations between the two countries.

Kissinger’s idea was to use China as a counterbalance to Soviet power in the Cold War. To that end, the US created a communist monster now challenging her power all over the globe – this without forestalling the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which cost the US billions to reverse. Aggressive Muslim gangs, trained and armed by Americans, sprang up as a result, a problem still with us today.

In 1973 Kissinger negotiated the Paris Accords, which again everyone knew was delivering South Vietnam to the communists. People who always insist on ending wars ought to remember that surrender is a guaranteed way of doing so – even if it’s passed off as a diplomatic coup.

The Nobel Committee hastily awarded its Peace Prize to Kissinger and his Vietnamese counterpart Le Duc Tho. The latter had the decency to turn it down; he knew that what he had signed was America’s capitulation, not a peace treaty. No such compunctions for Kissinger, even though he knew it too. A year and a half later, South Vietnam was turned into a giant concentration camp.

Kissinger set out to emulate his idols, the stars of the Vienna Congress, who created a blueprint for lasting peace in Europe. But their compact lasted a century; his, only a fraction of that period, if that. However, I doubt the long-term failure of Kissinger’s short-term achievements made a dent in his vain self-regard. He knew he was a genius, and he didn’t care who else knew it.

Unsurprisingly, when a more principled Reagan administration took over, there was no place in it for Kissinger. And even a less confrontational George H.W. Bush left his talents unused. So did Bush’s intellectually challenged son, although he could have used any help he could get – especially since he and Kissinger agreed in their assessment of the new villain, Putin.

After Bush met Putin, he said:  “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. I was able to get a sense of his soul.” Congratulations to Dubya: he got a sense of something that didn’t exist.

Being an academic, rather than an oilman, Kissinger put a more intellectual spin on exactly the same assessment. He saw Putin as a character out of a Dostoyevsky novel, sharing all the same “contradictions and doubts about his people.” One suspects that, if Kissinger were in charge of the US foreign policy now, Kiev would already be a regional centre in the Russian Federation – while he would be collecting another Nobel Peace Prize.

A brilliant man, no doubt. But his character flaws prevented Henry Kissinger from becoming a great one. Still, I’ll miss him, the way one misses one’s youth with all its illusions.  

Noam Chomsky can’t boast the precision of a broken clock that, as we know, is right twice a day. Outside his day job, linguistics, he gets things right much less frequently.

But infrequently doesn’t mean never. And here I must yet again remind my conservative friends (and especially myself!) that ideas shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand just because they come from someone whose politics we dislike. Once an idea is enunciated, it breaks the umbilical connecting it to the enunciator and starts walking – or falling – on its own.

Thus, Chomsky wrote in 1968 that: “… the processes by which the human mind achieved its present stage of complexity and its particular form of innate organisation are a total mystery… It is perfectly safe to attribute this development to ‘natural selection’, so long as we realise that there is no substance to this assertion, that it amounts to nothing more than a belief that there is some naturalistic explanation for these phenomena.”

Here is an atheist scholar capable of thinking not only as an atheist but also as a scholar. This is a rare ability nowadays, when ideologies have replaced both ideas and ideals.

Chomsky brings to mind Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin’s contemporary and fellow evolutionist. In 1858, when Darwin was researching his “big species book”, Wallace beat him to the punch by publishing an article on natural selection produced by competition among and within species.

Darwin, who was obsessed with priority, immediately set his magnum opus aside, wrote a sketchy outline of the book and published it next year as On the Origin of Species. Later, in his preface to The Descent of Man, he wrote that his work on evolution was motivated by an urgent need to prove that God doesn’t exist. At work there was the mind of an ideologue, not a scientist.

Wallace, on the other hand, kept his atheism and his science in separate compartments. Thus, though he couched his disagreements with Darwin in polite terms, he presaged Chomsky by denying outright that natural selection could account for the complexity of the human brain.

“The human brain,” he wrote, was “a totally new factor in the history of life”. Hence he refused to “regard modern primitives as almost filling the gap between man and ape”. No missing links then, thank you very much.

Wallace saw that the evolutionary theory was too small to contain giants like Newton, Bach or Dante. Genius for music, mathematics, philosophy or art belonged in a different domain, “the unseen universe of Spirit”.

That Spirit, which he refused to call God, had, according to Wallace, taken matters in its own hands at least three times in history: “the creation of life from inorganic matter, the introduction of consciousness in the higher animals, and the generation of the higher mental faculties in man.”

Wallace also believed that natural selection was teleological, proceeding not chaotically but towards achieving a certain objective. It’s that “unseen universe of Spirit” again, for setting objectives isn’t what inanimate nature does for a living.

That’s the problem with ideological evolutionists. While denying that Christianity is true, which is legitimate, they also deny it’s true to life, which is disingenuous.

It’s astounding that, for all the amazing scientific progress in the subsequent two centuries, our understanding of the mind hasn’t advanced since the time of Darwin and Wallace. Yet anyone untouched by rabid ideology has to realise that, even though the brain is a physical entity, the mind isn’t.

It indeed functions in “the unseen universe of Spirit”, which removes it as an object of study from the domain of natural science and shifts it into the realm of metaphysics. It’s only in that realm that the mind can be explained soundly, if not necessarily to everyone’s satisfaction. That’s what Jacques Maritain meant when insisting that philosophy was superior to natural science, and theology was superior to philosophy.

Both metaphysical sciences are devoted to the study of first principles and primary causes, and man’s mind has to act as Exhibit 1 in any such investigation. Even those who deny it’s made in the image of God’s mind struggle to suggest what else it could possibly be made in the image of.

Still, the natural science of the brain shouldn’t be dismissed lightly. It has made some startling discoveries, the greatest of which is that the brain is indeed the centre of mental activity. This trivial fact, these days known even to children, escaped even the man with a valid claim to history’s greatest intellect, Aristotle.

Today we know that mental activity produces electrical pulses clearly visible on oscillograph displays. We also know, within limits, which sections of the brain are responsible for various mental processes. What scientists don’t know is what the mind is. That’s where philosophy comes in, lending a helping hand and emphasising the inanity of intellectual pygmies who insist that science and religion are incompatible.

Before modernity emerged fetidly victorious, important scientists of the past, from Copernicus to Maxwell, from Newton to Mandel, were believers who saw the symbiotic potential of fusing physics with metaphysics. Even half of today’s scientists agree that science and religion can complement each other. It is only for those ignorant of philosophy and incapable of ascending to its intellectual heights that they become incompatible.

The key word in Chomsky’s passage is “belief”. What we see here is opposition not between faith and science but between two faiths. One is based on God’s revelation given by methods both natural (through the possibility of perceiving much of his creation experimentally) and supernatural (through the Scripture and church tradition). The other is based on nothing but man’s own fanciful speculation. As such, it’s not so much faith as superstition.

Unable to believe that God could create something out of nothing, atheists have to believe that nothing could create everything. That represents a suspension of disbelief much greater than anything a believer has to enact.

Even scientists trying to use science to vindicate their atheism start from accepting the existence of rational natural laws. If they wish to be logical, then, while rejecting the existence of a rational law-giver, they are forced to ascribe rational behaviour to nature itself.

That’s the most primitive pantheism, discarded by all serious thinkers long before Christ. Strip such inanities bare of scientific cant, and they descend to the intellectual level of a prehistoric shaman.

A theocentric thinker will be able to explain next to everything that matters, while his anthropocentric counterpart will explain next to nothing. Above all, the theist will be able to get closer to an understanding of what makes us human.

Unlike other parts of nature, we don’t merely function according to the law of causality. Man’s future can’t be predetermined because man himself isn’t predetermined.

An animal, vegetable or mineral has no choice in its destiny. It can’t break out of the predetermined rut of its chemical or biochemical makeup. Man can do so because he possesses both the will and the ability to make free choices. In a world ruled by causality he seems to be an envoy from another world, one governed by freedom.

Two atheists born a century apart, Wallace and Chomsky, agree with all that, although neither would use the same language and especially not the G word. They also prove inadvertently that intelligent atheists must at times compromise their atheism or risk compromising their intelligence.  

As a staunch believer in progress, I’m happy to see that British sports fans are moving up in the world.

They used to brawl only at football matches in places like Millwall and Luton, pre-arranging punch-ups on their mobiles. That took an element of surprise out of the proceedings, emphasising yet again the organisational talents of our working classes.

Actually, referring to those hostilities as ‘punch-ups’ is doing them a disservice. For the warring parties didn’t just use their fists: razor blades, beer bottles, knuckledusters, sawn-off baseball bats would typically see the light of day too.

(British sports shops sell about 500,000 baseball bats a year, although no one plays baseball. People in this country play cricket, but our sports lovers have cottoned on to the relative ballistic advantages of round baseball bats over flat cricket ones. That does credit to their understanding of applied aerodynamics.)

Without meaning to demean football lovers in any way, their chosen sport has traditionally been seen as the joy of the working classes. Formula 1 racing, on the other hand, is a gentlemen’s sport. Hence brawling at a Grand Prix race proves upward mobility, a step up the social ladder.

It’s with a sense of frankly jingoistic pride that I’m pleased to report that British sports fans have demonstrated their dynamic potential by making that step, nay leap. Yesterday they kicked off a mass brawl at an Abu Dhabi Grand Prix party.

The exclusive party was held at the VIP terrace overlooking the track, which suggests that the attending Britons weren’t exactly paupers. A trip to Abu Dhabi including a Formula 1 race, a stay at the emirate’s prohibitively expensive hotels, and a place on the VIP terrace, has to run well into four figures.

And if money isn’t a class indicator, what is? Our well-healed countrymen proved their social ascendancy by getting drunk not on prole lager but on solidly middleclass prosecco. That refreshment offers the additional benefit of coming in a sturdy bottle that’s much less breakable than the flimsy containers of proletarian beverages.

All those factors came together when our upmarket Britons tore into one another, battering their fellow revellers with prosecco bottles used as either clubs or projectiles. They clambered over furniture to bust one another’s skulls, threw chairs and parasols, and in general enjoyed themselves in the manner for which British sports fans are so justly famous.

The musical accompaniment fit the occasion. It was provided by Kanye West’s song All of the Lights, in which the great artist refuted accusations of racial bias by singing: “How I’m anti-Semitic? I just fucked a Jewish bitch.”

Mr West was present at the race, but no claims of his taking part in the pugilistic festivities have so far been made. He was rubbing shoulders with other celebrities, such as Naomi Campbell, but it’s unclear whether they rated admission to the VIP terrace.

Lest you may think that Britons have all gone hoity-toity, football fans are still doing their best to uphold our country’s reputation. Yesterday they were involved in a regular battle in Paris, which, you must agree, is a classier place than either Millwall or Luton.

Newcastle United are to play PSG tonight, which is the return leg of their group match in the European Championship. Newcastle won the first leg both on the pitch and off. Those sturdy Geordies showed the outnumbered Frenchmen what was what, in the process teaching them the meaning of such essential English questions as “Whatcha lookin’ at?”, “You f’kin wha’, mate?” and “Want some?”

The answers were delivered last night by PSG ultras who attacked the pubs in which Newcastle fans were refreshing themselves with pints of Newkie Brown. The French must have learned how to do that from us, and it’s good to see that our cultural influence is spreading well beyond our shores. Flares and bottles were thrown, glass was smashed, and our French disciples tried to storm the ramparts defended by the British.

The Newcastle United Supporters Club posted: “Stay safe in Paris tonight. Stick together and look after each other.” That brought to mind the celebrated battle of Thermopylae, in which King Leonidas must have sent a similar message to his 300 Spartans, if without the benefit of electronic communications.

The PSG ultras had no problem finding the visiting Geordies because they had all been directed to the specially designated pubs. That’s where the fans flocked, vindicating Gilbert and Sullivan’s verse: “In spite of all temptations to belong to other nations, he remains an Englishman!”

There is no dearth of indigenous drinking establishments in Paris where one can relax with a kir or a glass of pink Sancerre. In fact, in the distant past that’s where visiting Britons went, forgoing their customary food and drink for what they saw as part of the travelling experience.

But then upward mobility kicked in, and Britons began to travel in numbers encouraging them to think of foreign lands as conquered countries. And conquerors don’t adapt to the mores of the vanquished – it’s the other way around.

Hence English and Irish pubs spread all over Paris, where our upwardly mobile tourists pour gallons of British beer down their gullets and act in the manner evoking the image of a dingy boozer in a bad part of, well, Millwall or Luton. (I’m not sure those places have good parts.)

While the fashion for football hooliganism might have started in Britain, things don’t stay parochial for long in our globalised world. Now such displays of primitive tribalism are also common in France, Holland, Germany, Spain, Italy and throughout Europe.

Other abominations, such as tattoos and facial metal, are spreading as fast, along with jungle music like rap. Last summer we were having lunch in the beautiful Burgundian town of Clamecy, when a group of youngsters ensconced themselves outside with a ghetto blaster (otherwise known as a ‘third world briefcase’) blaring rap – in French. Let me tell you, that’s a far cry from Edith Piaf and Charles Aznavour.

Over the past couple of centuries, the centre of cultural gravity has steadily shifted from the aristocracy to the middle classes to the proletariat and now to the lumpen underclass. I don’t know if cannibalism is the next stage but, if it is, count on me to keep you informed.

Speaking to a clerical audience in 1864, shortly after the publication of Darwin’s Origin, Benjamin Disraeli said: “What is the question now placed before society with a glib assurance the most astounding? The question is this – Is man an ape or an angel? My lord, I am on the side of the angels.”

The phrase has become proverbial, and even people who disagree with Disraeli’s rejection of Darwinism use it. I suspect they wouldn’t do so if they were aware of the original context, but Disraeli’s listeners, while also appreciating the spiffy phrase, had no problem with the context.

So they cheered, and I’m happy to join in, if belatedly and not without reservations. One such is that Disraeli got the antithesis wrong. The opposite of an angel is a demon, not an ape.

But true enough, man isn’t an ape. So Disraeli was half-right, which sets him apart favourably from today’s politicians who tend to be totally wrong on just about everything.

Though Disraeli was a Christian most of his life (he was baptised at 12), his main interest was politics, not theology. And even in those civilised times, politicians knew that a memorable adage was more effective than sound thought.

Disraeli’s quip is a case in point. It has made its way into the Thesaurus on the strength of its form, not substance.

In substance, I am always puzzled when people on either side of the religious divide insist that evolution is somehow incompatible with Genesis. It isn’t. In fact, it’s much more incompatible with disciplines other than theology, such as microbiology, palaeontology, cosmology, the physics of elementary particles, genetics, biochemistry and geology.

Darwinism only begins to contradict the Old Testament, along with the commonest of senses, when its fanatical and intellectually challenged champions repeat with Richard Dawkins that evolution “explains everything”.

Well, one thing it doesn’t explain is how things that evolve came to be before they started to evolve. After all, the word ‘evolution’ implies a gradual development of something that already exists.

Hence, before an ape began its inexorable evolution into a J.S. Bach, someone must have taken the trouble of creating it. Neither Darwin nor any of his followers come even close to explaining how that came about, for the simple reason that they can’t. Elementary logic won’t allow it.

That would be like insisting that J.S. Bach came into being as a result of his evolution from an embryo. The implication has to be that the embryo was created by parthenogenesis, without any meaningful contribution from Mr and Mrs Johann Ambrosius Bach.

Now, since God is omnipotent by definition, he could have created man ab nihilo and instantly, the way Genesis has it. Or he could have created an ape first, breathed a particle of his own essence into it and let it become man slowly, over thousands or millions of years.

At this point both atheists and Protestant sectarians join forces to insist on the literal reading of the Bible. Such misguided pedantry leads them to deny this second possibility I mentioned.

Genesis says nothing about millions or even thousands of years, they aver. It says God created man on the sixth day, thank you very much. So whether you believe (sectarians) or disbelieve (atheists), there goes that theory of theistic evolution.

Of the two groups, I prefer the atheists. They have a ready excuse for their crepuscular thinking on such subjects, as I have a ready excuse for my ignorance of, say, horticulture. The subject just doesn’t interest me.

Protestant sectarians, on the other hand, insist on being orthodox Christians, which insistence they belie by their most unfortunate scriptural literalism.

As Christians, they ought to know that, since God (again by definition) is outside time, our vocabulary of temporal durations doesn’t apply to him. Whoever wrote the Old Testament, or rather wrote it down, understood that. He was (they were?) communicating the story in the language of poetic imagery, metaphor and parable.

Yet he was indeed communicating it, and every communicator knows that he must use the language his audience will understand. Jesus Christ, for example, not only spoke to his audience in their own Aramaic, but he also copiously used references to the Hebrew scripture they all lived by. Even his words on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”, were a quotation from Psalm 22.

By the same token, the Genesis writer spoke of six days because he was confident that his audience would both relate to such terms and not take them literally. The genre of realistic novel didn’t yet exist, and the ancient Hebrews were broght up on metaphorical expression.

Overall, whether or not man started out as an ape, he was manifestly not an ape in 1864, although those who insisted he was ought to have been complimented on their capacity for uncompromising self-assessment. And anyone this side of Richard Dawkins will know that the difference between man and ape was that of kind, not of degree. (I’ll dismiss out of hand any attempt to refute this statement by producing photographs of Tommy Robinson at his most agitated.)

But the fact that man isn’t an ape doesn’t mean he is an angel. If he were, he’d be as likely to be a fallen angel as a rosy-cheeked cherub.

According to doctrine, both man and angels are created in the image of God, yet both are capable of sin. Angels sin less frequently than humans, which makes them superior beings. However, if man’s sins can be forgiven, angels’ sins cannot. That means that the tables will be turned on the Day of Judgement: the men whose sins have been forgiven will become superior to angels and able to judge them.

Disraeli was using the phrase not theologically but colloquially, but I’m not sure it works even at that level. The angels in his aphorism are perfect celestial beings, presumably free of sin. Juxtaposing them with apes, as he did, seems to suggest that, whereas angels are perfect human beings, apes are imperfect ones. Hence he was inadvertently vindicating something he had set out to debunk, Darwinism.

Don’t get me wrong: I like a snappy phrase as much as the next man and, after 30 years of writing ads, perhaps more than the next man. Yet outside advertising an aphorism can only act as an ornament of thought, not as its substitute.

Very few aphorisms can survive the kind of decortication to which I subjected Disraeli’s maxim. Realising this makes me dislike slogans of any kind, including those that are seemingly unobjectionable. That antipathy naturally leads to a distrust of modern politics that depends on slogans too much for my taste.

Disraeli was a master phrasemaker, and he could have made a bloody good copywriter. But then he was also a master politician, some will even say statesman. Today’s lot aren’t even good political mechanics, never mind statesmen. They all, however, hire speechwriters, some my former advertising colleagues experienced in producing soundbites that are as punchy as they are meaningless.

Now, do you think slogans like MAGA can withstand scrutiny? If so, I’ll be happy to prove you wrong some other time. Soon, if you insist.

Whenever I hear the word ‘Islamophobia’ used, I remember this literary dialogue:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”

No wonder my late mother-in-law insisted Alice contained all the philosophy anyone would ever need. In this case, Lewis Carroll sensed our civilisation was declining and he identified lexical laxity as a telling symptom of that downward slide.

Which is to be master is these days beyond doubt: precisely the groups facilitating the demise of the West. They wield the hammer, and it’s language that’s on the anvil, ready to be beaten into any shape, no matter how awful. The word ‘phobia’ is a case in point.

The dictionary defines it as “an uncontrollable, irrational, and lasting fear of” something or other. Hence, when Boris Johnson in his usual offhand manner describes Geert Wilders as an “Islamophobe”, one would be within one’s right to assume that Mr Wilders is scared of Islam and its practitioners irrationally and uncontrollably.

But that’s not what Mr Johnson means, is it? Flippantly louche he may be, but he is neither a fool nor an ignoramus. If he uses a word in any other than its true meaning, that’s simply to remind us “which is to be master”.

If Mr Wilders is scared of Muslims, his fear is about as rational as anything can be. Muslims make no secret of their intention to murder him, rendering it impossible for Mr Wilders to step out without burly armed bodyguards in attendance. And since he does appear in public as often as any politician must, Mr Wilders seems capable of controlling that fear very well indeed.

Johnson knows this as well as anybody. Hence he uses the word ‘Islamophobia’ in its Humpty Dumpty meaning of refusing to accept the woke fads mandated by our would-be masters. Thus ‘transphobia’ means opposition to any aspect of force-feeding society with the sub-culture of mental disorder. It doesn’t mean that any such opponent screams and runs away whenever he espies a bearded woman walking towards him.

And ‘Islamophobia’, as used by Johnson and his ilk, means a rebellion, however tacit or mild, against the sub-culture of ‘multicultural inclusivity’ our masters use as the sledgehammer to smash our real culture.

We are still allowed to find fault with Islamic terrorism, coyly termed ‘Islamist’ by our masters. The implication is that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with Islam, even if suicide bombers scream “Allahu akbar!” when pulling the cord. They are only guilty of scriptural literalism, taking the hundreds of Koranic verses calling for violence at face value.

That great Islamic scholar George W. Bush put that in a nutshell immediately after 9/11: “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.”

That Muslims started assaulting Christendom even before Mohammed’s death in 632 AD and have never stopped has nothing to do with Islam. It may suggest doctrinally hostile intent in English, but not in Humpty Dumpty. There it means peace.

This sustained history of violence has ebbed and flowed, flaring up today, abating tomorrow, only to splash out again the day after. The weapons have varied, from cold steel to missiles to – and this gets us back to Geert Wilders – what a jihad ideologue once described as “the womb of every Muslim woman”.

The much-maligned ‘displacement theory’ is based on calculations spinning out of that part of the female anatomy. A sustained growth in the Muslim population of Western countries will eventually turn them Islamic if unmatched, ideally outpaced, by a concomitant growth in the indigenous population. Whether such growth in the Muslim population comes from immigration or a high birth rate is immaterial.

While I find plenty wrong with the monomaniac exponents of this theory, I see nothing wrong with the theory itself. In fact, it brings back to memory the mathematical problem that tortured me as a schoolboy. It was about a swimming pool with two pipes, with water flowing in through one and out through the other. Depending on the flow rates, the old water could be completely replaced, and don’t ask me for any details.

In his novel Submission, Michel Houellebecq outlined a dystopic fantasy of a Muslim France. But the problem with modernity is two-fold: it both preempts satire and enables dystopic fantasies to come true. If mathematics still works, the danger does exist.

Nor is it just long term. A large minority of cultural aliens, not to say hostiles, can damage the host culture even if the minority is well-behaved and doesn’t threaten to become a majority. I don’t know enough about the demographic trends to make mathematical predictions, but anyone who thinks Muslim minorities are well-behaved needs to have his eyes, ears and indeed head examined.

That makes large-scale Islamic immigration a serious problem. Fearing Islam is thus both the prerogative and duty of anyone who wishes to hang on to whatever little is left of our civilisation. There’s nothing irrational about it.

In 2022, net migration to the UK reached a record-breaking figure of 745,000. Three-quarters of a million. In one year. And most of that migration was Islamic. The inflow pipe in that swimming pool is working overtime.

Yet I don’t blame Islam for this, even though I can’t see how anyone can take that patchwork quilt of a religion seriously. It is what it is, but the problem is that the West isn’t what it used to be. It is losing its nerve and self-confidence at the same rate and for the same reasons as Rome did during the period described by Gibbon.

Whatever the relative physical strength of Christendom and Islam during different periods of history, the former’s metaphysical strength was always going to allow it to triumph in the long run. It’s that metaphysical strength that the West has lost, just as Rome once lost it.

Like Rome, we’ve become so tolerant that we welcome and even enforce bogus equality among all creeds. Our own is long since lost, and we propose to counter religious fanaticism with beatific smiles and meaningless bien pensant phrases. By burying our own creed beneath the multi-culti pile, we are putting our civilisation six feet under.

The word ‘Islamophobia’, with its implicit glorification of multi-culti diversity and opprobrium of anyone finding anything wrong with it, is at least a good illustration and possibly even proof. Our own unique identity has become so diluted that it has lost its taste, flavour and strength.

A barbarian onslaught doesn’t cause this enfeeblement; it merely emphasises it. And any attempt to resist is doomed to failure unless the West recovers its erstwhile inner strength.

That doesn’t mean Islamic penetration shouldn’t be resisted – thank God for opiates relieving the agony of incurable cancer. But the disease remains just as deadly even if the patient has his senses befuddled.