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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 1604 Sir Edward Coke defined an Englishman’s home as his castle, a principle that became a common law.

It enshrined the people’s right to deny entry to their residences, adding a new aspect to a cardinal tenet of Western law: the inviolability of private property.

That idea was transplanted to the US, with the word ‘Englishman’ understandably replaced with ‘citizen’. In that case, it was a distinction without a difference.

Now, Sir Edward didn’t extend that principle to people’s cars, showing a lamentable deficit of foresight. The conveyance equivalent of his time was the horse, but I’m not sure whether he mentioned personal transport specifically.

Americans did, at least in Texas where I spent my first 10 years in the West. There the law said that neither a man’s house nor his horse could be repossessed. When automotive transport replaced the equine variety, the law held both house and car to be off-limits for bailiffs (unless the owner defaulted on the loan he used to buy the house or the car).

I don’t know whether the same principle is applied in Britain, but I’m sure it must be. Or rather it must have been before our government, both central and local, began to make serious inroads on private property.

In that regard I like to quote Gordon Brown who, when he was the chancellor, boasted that his government “let people keep more of their money”. You can only let people keep more of something that legitimately belongs to you, which made that braggadocio a clear statement of tyranny.

Since I heard that boastful claim, I’ve been watching for the signs of any state encroachments on property rights, and the state has been rewarding my vigilance with more and more outrages. The latest one came the other day.

A friend of mine who lives in Chelsea (the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, to give it its official name) parked her VW overnight in a legitimate spot, but with the rear wheels sticking out a couple of inches over the line. She was aware of this but thought it would take a particularly bloody-minded traffic warden to issue a parking ticket for such a minute transgression.

A ticket, by the way, is the mildest (and cheapest) punishment for a parking violation. Others are clamping or towing away, and that’s not something one wants to risk knowingly because it would cost £200 to get one’s car back.

Anyway, the next morning my friend found her car gone. Her first thought was that it had been stolen; the second that it had been towed away. What with London being the car theft capital of the world, the first possibility was more likely, but she called the RBKC council just in case.

Sure enough, she found the car had been stolen. But not by any intrepid thief. It had been stolen by the RBKC itself, and I don’t mean towed away.

A helpful clerk explained to my friend that sending a tow truck out every time someone was an inch outside a parking spot was jolly expensive. And sending a clamper only meant that the car would occupy its illegitimate inch for longer.

But not to worry, explained the disembodied voice on the phone. The RBKC had found a way of solving the problem without committing the public purse to unnecessary expense. They could now use our massive advances in electronic technology to unlock the car, start it and repark it somewhere else.

On hearing this I was so enraged I forgot to ask my friend what kind of fee the RBKC charged for telling her where she could find her car. After all, the council had committed the crime of both breaking and entering and car theft. Sir Edward Coke must be spinning like a top in his grave.

One’s car is an extension of one’s home, an observation Penelope and I made when driving from France to London the other day. Since no council official would be allowed into our house unless explicitly invited or bearing a search warrant, surely the same principle should extend to our car?

Now, I don’t know if this foray into car theft is strictly an RBKC initiative. I fear it’s rather a harbinger of things to come, the government’s demonstration that we have only partial sovereignty over our property.

Now, sovereignty is like pregnancy: you either have it or you haven’t, with no incremental stages in existence. Denying it to British subjects means stamping all the centuries of British political history into the dirt. It’s a clear statement that Britain is no longer Britain.

This is a grave matter, so grave that I’ve chosen to write about it today, rather than about the increasing threat of an all-out war in Europe, or about China replacing her dovish generals with hawkish ones in obvious preparation for an invasion of Taiwan.

The outside threat is real enough for me to believe that before long we’ll be asked to come to Britain’s defence. But there has to be a Britain left to defend – not just the “green and pleasant land”, but also the birthplace (fine, a birthplace if you insist) of constitutional politics, just laws and civil liberties. A place where an Englishman’s home is indeed his castle and not a place the government magnanimously allows him to occupy for the time being.

It mustn’t be a place where a council employee can break into a person’s car, start it, drive it anywhere he likes and perhaps rummage through the glove box in the hope of finding something interesting, incriminating or titillating. Such a Britain is no longer fully British, and I do hope the crime committed by the RBKC was a one off.  

Free speech is the bedrock of our civilisation – and the bane of tyrannies. Despots like Iran’s ayatollahs, North Korean communists and Russia’s ruling KGB dynasty shut their subjects up as a matter of course.

In Russia, for example, anyone voicing the mildest criticism of the on-going war, or even referring to it as such, rather than the mandated ‘special military operation’, goes down for double-digit spells in prison. Those are the lucky ones. The unlucky ones are poisoned, shot, defenestrated or otherwise disposed of. A fascist regime knows no constraints.

Such a regime has many hallmarks, but suppression of free speech is both prime and ubiquitous. Not all fascist regimes run gas ovens, but they all see free speech in their crosshairs. Yet that doesn’t mean that free countries do not or should not do so under any circumstances.

It’s axiomatic that a citizen’s liberty to spread enemy propaganda must be curtailed, especially while hostilities are in progress. Such situations turn propaganda into a weapon either wielded by a country or aimed at her heart. That propaganda of criminal causes is itself criminal has been made indisputable by any number of international bodies, from the Nuremberg Tribunal onwards.

Now, Russia’s war isn’t just criminal in itself, but it’s also conducted by criminal means. Russian troops started out as they meant to go on, by committing savage war crimes in Bucha and Mariupol. They perpetrate such crimes every day, and anyone facilitating their crimes becomes their accomplice.

This gets us to the case of Graham Phillips, the British journalist sanctioned by HMG for his tireless efforts to undermine the Ukraine’s struggle for her freedom by spreading incessant pro-Putin, which is to say pro-fascist, propaganda.

If the UK were officially at war with Russia, the case would be straightforward. Phillips would get a long prison sentence, unless the death penalty were reinstated. However, given Britain’s present legal status, our law has no provisions for such punishment.

That, however, doesn’t mean it has no provisions for any punishment. The Ukraine is our ally whom we help by every means possible, short of direct military involvement. We do so not only out of noble commitment to defending freedom wherever it’s under attack, but also because Russia has openly stated her intention to threaten NATO countries once she has finished the Ukraine off.

Britain, whose own security largely depends on NATO membership, thus has a vested interest in Putin’s defeat. Since all Western countries have come to the Ukraine’s aid, albeit with varying enthusiasm, Russia can’t win. Putin’s only hope is that the West’s commitment to the Ukraine’s cause attenuates and then disappears.

To that end, the world’s most elaborate propaganda machine has gone into high gear, spewing lies and above all trying to convince Westerners that the war is none of their concern, that they risk a nuclear confrontation for the sake of a country that’s no better than Russia and probably worse. All this is interspersed with a thinly veiled longing that we too should have a strong and decisive leader like Putin.

Phillips has been shilling for Russia since 2009. In 2013 he became a stringer for Pravda and RT, whose UK broadcasting licence was revoked in 2022 after Ofcom concluded the outlet was not “fit and proper” or a “responsible broadcaster”. A tool of the FSB disinformation department in other words.

As a Putin propagandist, Phillips routinely oversteps the boundaries of not only common decency, but also of international law. In 2016 he published a video in which he taunted a Ukrainian POW who had lost his sight and both his arms.

With the Russians’ blessing, Phillips also interviewed, or rather interrogated, a captured British soldier fighting in the Ukrainian army. The soldier, Aidin Aslin, wasn’t a willing participant – in fact, he was handcuffed throughout the interview.

That violated the terms of the Geneva Convention that bans coercive interrogation of POWs for propaganda purposes. Already at that time, plans were under way to charge Phillips with war crimes, which is a rare accolade for British journalists.

His masters rewarded Phillips’s loyal service as best they could (see the photo above). In 2015, the Russian Border Service, a branch of the FSB, gave him its aptly named ‘Border Brotherhood’ Medal. And he has also received several medals from the ‘People’s Republics’ of Donbas and Lugansk, essentially bandit lands run by Putin’s paramilitaries.

As a result, HMG imposed sanctions on him in 2022, making Phillips the first British subject to be added to the sanctions list. He launched an appeal, which a few days ago Justice Johnson rejected.

He stated that Phillips supported “the Russian war” by producing and publishing “propagandist video content which glorifies the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its atrocities, and promotes disinformation advanced by Russia as a justification for the invasion”. While the style of the ruling is suspect, the meaning is unmistakable: Phillips works for a foreign regime that explicitly regards Britain as its enemy and acts accordingly.

Now, Peter Hitchens has been faithfully supporting both Putin’s fascism and, consequently, Phillips for years. Hence it stands to reason that he has produced a diatribe aimed at Justice Johnson and his ruling.

Hitchens sees a valid difference between “a person who positively supports Russia’s propaganda war against Ukraine (for example by parroting Russia’s propaganda narrative), [and one who is] simply expressing an independent view which happens to align with Russia’s interests.”

The nuance escapes me, at least as far as its moral aspect is concerned. In Phillips’s case even the legal aspect is beyond doubt: as an employee of various Russian propaganda outlets, he is hardly an independent agent. Hitchens’s own reasons for regurgitating Kremlin propaganda are open to forensic doubts, an ambivalence he invariably exploits:

“Well, I regard my position on the Ukraine war as an entirely independent one. I never even read or listen to Russian propaganda on the matter. But I am, even so, almost daily accused on social media of ‘parroting’ Russian positions, and if someone like Liz Truss or Lord Cameron or James Cleverly decides, without any form of trial, to accuse me of such ‘parroting’, then I too could be sanctioned.”

And none too soon, may I add. For, while Phillips’s efforts enjoy only a small hardcore following, Hitchens’s weekly animadversions are read by millions. The damage he does to the cause of good fighting evil is thus much greater.

Whether he does so wittingly or unwittingly, as an independent journalist or a paid agent, is important legally but irrelevant morally. For Hitchens does parrot Russian positions, and with a word for word accuracy that makes one doubt a purely osmotic connection. However, doubts fall short of proof, in the absence of which legal prosecution is impossible. But sanctioning Hitchens on exactly the same grounds as sanctioning Phillips would be amply justified.

Incidentally, in the same article, Hitchens says we shouldn’t hit Houthi pirates until we have fixed all the potholes on our roads. “If we cultivated our own garden and ensured it was well-defended enough to keep enemies away, we would remain one of the most enviable nations on the planet,” is the geopolitical wisdom Hitchens vouchsafes to his audience.

“Our own garden” is so enviable partly because Britain has always been a seafaring nation dependent on its merchant marine for its prosperity. Thus an attack on key trading routes directly threatens Britain’s vital interests. Surely even Hitchens should see that?  

By joining the US to protect freedom of the seas, we don’t just “tail along behind the Americans”, in Hitchens’s phrase. We aid our key ally who yet again fights for our interests, not just its own.

Really, that hack abuses free speech every chance he gets. He is a weed threatening the very same garden for which he professes undying affection.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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