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Whatever Cesare Lombroso thought, physiognomy doesn’t work every time. I’ve seen bright people with stupid faces, and vice versa.

But the face of Dame Alison Rose, chief executive of the NatWest banking group that owns Coutts, can’t possibly belong to an intelligent person. Anyone in possession of such a face has to be a leftie apparatchik, and Dame Alison doesn’t disappoint.

Hers is the face of someone whose creative imagination is circumscribed by bureaucratic procedure and her ability to manipulate it nimbly. Such talents must be highly prized – they earned Dame Alison £5.2 million last year, not bad for a passionate champion of equality.

I’ve already written about Coutts’s ‘debanking’ Nigel Farage, but then I assumed that the bank hadn’t lied when saying Farage’s account was only closed because he wasn’t wealthy enough.

Alas, it was indeed a lie. Since then the bank’s 40-page dossier on Mr Farage has been published, making it clear that Coutts was driven by political, not commercial, considerations.

“The Committee did not think,” went the document, “continuing to bank NF was compatible with Coutts given his publicly-stated views that were at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation.”

The authors reluctantly admitted that all those articles in The Guardian claiming that Farage was a Kremlin stooge weren’t borne out by any facts. Personally, I wouldn’t have let Farage off so easily on that one, but the point is he wasn’t ‘debanked’ for that reason.

Why then? Essentially, because his political views are different from The Guardian’s and Dame Alison’s.

Her views, on the other hand, are in complete agreement with The Guardian’s, and in some areas even race ahead of them. When she was appointed, Dame Alison proudly described herself “a passionate supporter of diversity”.

She applied that passion to Pride last year, saying: “Our focus on diversity, equity and inclusion is integral to our purpose of championing the potential of people, families and businesses.” One account holder took exception to that sentiment and was promptly ‘debanked’ for his trouble.

Silly me, I used to think that a bank’s focus should be on maximising returns for its investors and shareholders. Obviously, I was wrong.

“And NatWest Group’s employee-led networks are playing a huge part in creating a truly inclusive culture at the bank.” That’s good to know.

And it’s even better to know that Dame Alison has the power of her convictions. For example, under her guidance and supervision, NatWest’s employees are encouraged to identify as men and women on different days.

To make it easier for them to do so, and also to avoid possible confusion, employees may wear double-sided lanyards to inform the world whether they are men or women today. Some work is clearly needed there to make the practice more inclusive: after all, the number of known sexes is close to a hundred. But the general direction is clear enough.

Lest you think it’s all about the naughty stuff, Dame Alison is equally committed to other fads as well. For example, shortly after her appointment she declared that: “tackling climate change would be a central pillar” of her mission. The bank then ended new loans for oil and gas extraction.

With that woke abomination at the helm, Nigel Farage never had a chance. However, much as I am concerned about his predicament, my own banking future worries me more.

For I too have an account at NatWest, which Penelope’s father started for her when she was a child and I piggybacked when we got married. I wonder if I should jump before I am pushed, for, reading the dossier’s list of Farage’s sins, I realise I’m guilty of each one.

He led the campaign for Brexit; I supported it with lectures and articles. Then again, 52 per cent of Britons voted for it, but since when do we have to go by majority opinion in this democracy?

Then Farage was described as “transphobic” because he retweeted comedian Ricky Gervais’s sketch about those horribly old-fashioned women “with a womb”. Mea culpa: I too found that sketch funny, although I’m not on Twitter.

Farage, according to the dossier, is in favour of Britain leaving the European Convention on Human Rights. He may remember, as I do, that England already had constitutional provisions for human rights at the time when the ancestors of today’s Brussels bureaucrats still copulated with small furry animals in the woods.

Farage, says the dossier, is “at best” seen as “xenophobic and pandering to racists, and at worst, he is seen as xenophobic and racist”. That’s the beauty of the passive voice: it lets nincompoops hide behind it.

Seen by whom? How many? Do any of them read any paper other than The Guardian? (The Independent doesn’t count.) Anyway, I’m sure some people with similar reading habits may see me that way too.

The fact is, Farage once compared the BLM movement with the Taliban, and the comparison strikes me as valid, mutatis mutandis. He is also opposed to uncontrolled, especially illegal, migration to the UK. If such views make him “xenophobic and racist”, then so am I – in the eyes of Dame Alison and her kindred spirits.

Then Farage is known to keep bad company, which is incompatible with the honour of having a Coutts account. He is friends with Donald Trump, despite the latter’s “locker room humour” with its feline references. Well, I’m no friend or supporter of Trump, but I’ve been known to crack the odd locker room joke myself.

And – are you ready for it? – Farage is also friends with Novak Djokovic, the tennis-playing anti-vaxxer. Now, I’m not an anti-vaxxer myself, but I’m friendly with several people who are. So put that black mark on me too.

All in all, functionally and stylistically, the dossier reads like the indictment at the trial of Adolph Eichmann. Except that he was indicted by a duly instituted court, not a bank.

Banks used to be commercial, not political establishments, but they evidently aren’t any longer. Everything is political in modernity, that’s one of its innate traits.

Speaking of politics, Andrew Neal has written a scathing article about this outrage, and written it well. One quibble though: he referred to Coutts’s action as “McCarthyism”.

He thereby used the hare-brained language favoured by the very people he so expertly criticises. Joe McCarthy might have overdone things a bit, but he pursued – in the face of overwhelming left-wing opposition – a worthy and noble goal: ridding American institutions of massive communist penetration.

The likes of Dame Alison are different. They overdo things too, but their goals are neither worthy nor noble. They are subversive and evil.

This gets me back to my earlier question: Should I close my NatWest account before that awful woman does it for me? Worth considering, that. But first I must be sure that other banks aren’t like that or even worse.

They may well be. The ideology of wokery is no longer just total. It has become totalitarian, and there is really nowhere to escape.  

Sometimes different freedoms clash, making one choose one or the other if no compromise is possible.

One’s individual choice is clear enough – and that’s perhaps the most essential freedom, deciding what’s more important to you. When the choice has to be collective, however, a previously clear line of thought begins to meander all over the place.

Thus, if someone says something I find offensive, I can tell him to shut up, imply he has an Oedipal relationship with his mother, or simply walk out. But what happens when a governmental or commercial institution offends me by word or deed?

More to the point, what if I offend it? I have little recourse against such institutions, but they can punish me in all sorts of ways, from legal to economic to social.

These questions have been prompted by the continuing saga of Nigel Farage and Coutts, the latter closing the account of the former.

I wrote a piece about it the other day, saying that banks have a right to close accounts without owing anyone an explanation. Any business, I wrote, can choose whom to serve and whom not to.

Many bars in the US display signs saying, “The management reserves the right to refuse service”. Quite right too: most bars are their owner’s private property, just as my house is mine. As I am within my rights to deny anybody access to my house, so does a bar keeper have a right to decide to let someone in or not.

In other words, his property rights supersede an individual’s right to drink at that bar. Good, now we’ve established some hierarchy of freedoms. More important, we’ve realised that such a hierarchy is essential to resolve inevitable clashes.

(This doesn’t fully apply to Coutts because it isn’t completely private. It belongs to the NatWest Group, almost 40 per cent of which is owned by the public – us. Any shareholder with that kind of stake would demand, and definitely get, an explanation from the management of how the business is run. The explanation Coutts has given since I wrote my piece made me wish we could do to its doors what it did to Farage’s account.)

What about an individual’s right to offend and to be offended? Putting it another way, what if your right to freedom of speech clashes with my right to freedom from speech? If the conflict is strictly private, it can be handled in private ways, from a reasoned argument to the possibilities I mentioned above to perhaps even fisticuffs.

Alas, few conflicts remain private in our politicised times. No one is believed to be strictly an individual – we are all supposed to be members of some community, dread word. Thus, if a homosexual takes exception to my mentioning Leviticus or Romans, I’m deemed to have offended not just him, but the whole community he represents.

Similarly, transsexuals, MeToo feminists, BLM and Just Stop Oil activists, and other such ‘communities’ scream bloody murder whenever they feel their right to freedom from speech has been infringed. Thus they demand that the state infringe my right to freedom of speech.

In those cases, the clash is easy to resolve in a just and sensible manner. This isn’t to say it will be resolved in a just and sensible manner, only that it would be easy to do so, given the will.

Freedom of speech is fundamental to our polity, civility, law, history, our whole way of life. Hence it occupies a higher rung on the hierarchical ladder and should supersede anyone’s right to feel offended, rightly or wrongly.

So far so good. Yet it can’t possibly mean that freedom of speech must not ever be curtailed in any way. In fact, it is, and always has been. Any kind of incitement to violence against any group is against the law in every country I know, for example.

Yet where do we draw the line? Let’s say a homosexual ‘community’ gets offended by something I write about it (not a hypothetical example) and claims that describing their practices as an aberration constitutes inciting violence against them.

Now, I’ve known troglodytes both in Russia and in the US who attacked homosexuals in the street. Some Houstonians I met back in the early 70s turned that into a weekly sporting event, which they called something that sounded like “kicking ice”. (It took me some time in Texas to adjust my ear to the local phonetic peculiarities.)

I considered them savages and didn’t mind letting them know what I thought. Still, I don’t subscribe to the liberal misconception that doing anything consensual is perfectly fine as long as innocent bystanders don’t get hurt. There exist certain absolute and objective moral dicta that can’t be cancelled out by such subjective factors as consent.

However, inasmuch as we no longer criminalise homosexuals, they do nothing illegal. They definitely do something immoral, but none of us is without sin.

Begrudgingly or otherwise, I have to respect their right to do whatever it is they do. But they – and society at large – must reciprocate by respecting my right to freedom of speech. If I find homosexuality wrong and teaching about it at schools abominable, I should be able to say so without risking repercussions.

If homosexuality is some sort of mental aberration, gender dysphoria is a mental illness. If you disagree, you’ll have to explain to me why a man claiming to be King Solomon is mad, and one claiming to be a woman isn’t. That would be a hard sell.

However, while no one insists that I take that putative Solomon at his word and ask him for sage advice, society does insist that I accept transsexuals with readiness and deference. It then denies my freedom of speech by mandating that I use a set of pronouns that violate grammar, taste, common sense and evidence before my eyes.

Again we see that same conflict. Transsexuals and their champions insist that their freedom from hearing the pronouns they find offensive trumps my freedom to use the pronouns I find appropriate.

Now, this is a special and extreme case. If we accept the obvious fact that transsexuals are somewhat insane, then this is a case of the lunatics not only running the asylum but having the license to turn the sane world into one.  

However, some clashes between freedoms are less straightforward than that. The American conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, who is a most sensible young man, recently fielded a leftie’s question with his customary rhetorical adroitness. Saying I find homosexuality wrong, he said, doesn’t mean I’m inciting violence against homosexuals unless I explicitly call for it.

As a lawyer himself, he should be familiar with the concept of reasonable inference. If a US presidential candidate (is there no end to that awful Kennedy clan?) says that the Covid virus was specially engineered to spare Jews, some people so disposed are bound to conclude that it was the Jews who engineered it to promote their knavish schemes.

Since the virus ended up killing seven million worldwide, those same people (in the biological sense only, you understand) may seek retaliation – this though Kennedy didn’t explicitly call for it. And if the media picked up his version and peddled it as fact, violence would almost certainly ensue.

So should Kennedy have been denied his freedom of speech? Probably. Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know, really. And I could think of many other situations where the same question and the same answer may arise.

In most cases, a conflict between freedom of speech and from it should be decided in favour of the former. But not in all cases, and the grey area may be rather wide in our relativist world.

Before we decide what kind of action should or shouldn’t be taken either to affirm or curtail freedom of speech, we have to settle the issue of right and wrong. That’s hard to do if it’s not only our genders that are supposed to be fluid, but also our notions of morality.

That issue was indeed settled in Exodus, Matthew and the book that contained them. That established absolute standards with an absolute certainty and authority. Both the certainty and the authority have now been replaced with petty relativities that change from one day to the next.

I maintain that no political virtue, such as freedom of speech, can have absolute value. Hence, in the absence of an authority sitting infinitely higher than any political institution, conflicts between different rights and freedoms will continue. And, if my reading of modernity is accurate, most of them will be resolved in favour of wrong and against right.

Some inquiries pretend to be yes or no questions, but are really traps. The one in the title is one such: replying either yes or no may lead to criminal prosecution.

“Are you a racist?” is slightly different because answering ‘no’ gets you in the clear. Yet, while this reply may be irreproachable legally or morally, it’s suspect intellectually.

The only proper response would be to answer that question with another: “How do you define racism?” If the answer is “believing that some races are innately superior to others”, then the negative reply to the original question is both moral and sound.

However, if your inquisitor says, “believing that there exist some racial differences beyond just skin pigmentation”, then any unbiased person has to admit to being a racist. I know I would.

Yet the Church of England bypasses such nit-picking in one bold move. The pupils at its primary schools are taught that all white people are racists because they live in perennially racist societies.

Since the tots wouldn’t relate to such scholarly terms as ‘critical race theory’, they are exposed to a visual teaching aid called a ‘pyramid of white supremacy’. In her excellent article, Catherine Pepinster, editor of The Tablet, describes it as poisonous, and one has to admire her restraint in not calling it something even worse. Words like ‘satanic’ and ‘evil’ pop into my mind more readily.

Going from the base to the tip, the pyramid starts with Indifference (“Politics doesn’t affect me”), then proceeds to Minimisation (“Not all white people are racists”), Veiled Racism (racist jokes, cultural appropriation), Discrimination (anti-immigration policies, racial profiling), Calls for Violence (KKK, burning crosses), Violence (lynching, hate crimes) and finally, sitting proudly at the top, Mass Murder.

Do you deny that your white skin gives you privileges? Have you ever uttered the entirety of the counting rhyme ‘Eeny, meeny, miny, moe’? Mimicked jive talk?

Well, then you are inexorably moving towards joining the Ku Klux Klan, burning a cross in front of your black neighbour’s house, then lynching him and eventually graduating to mass murder. And if you have no interest in politics or, God forbid, deny that all white people are racists, you are a lyncher and mass murderer in the making.

I presume that anyone reading this is an adult, a sensible one. Such people can dismiss that subversive pyramid out of hand and perhaps suggest its wielder shove it somewhere dark.

But primary school pupils (aged 7 to 11) don’t yet possess the critical faculties to dismiss the critical race theory for the evil bilge it is. They assume, writes Miss Pepinster, that everything they are taught is true, which may give their whole life what Americans call a bum steer.

Speaking of Americans, it’s hard not to notice a distinct Transatlantic slant to that geometrical construct. Let’s just say I haven’t met, nor even read about, many Britons joining the KKK, burning crosses and lynching.

It’s good to know that the C of E is acting in the ecumenical spirit encapsulated in Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Greek… for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” There is neither American nor British. True values are universal. That means, inter alia, that whatever perversions Americans come up with can be imported as they are, without changing a word.

“It staggers me,” writes Miss Pepinster, “that in British schools, this theory – completely unproven and highly controversial even in the United States – is being taught as fact.”

She then shows how contrary to Christian teaching that theory is, which strikes me as both true and redundant. Christians will regard this observation as self-evident, others as irrelevant. Indeed, one doesn’t have to go deeper into matters religious there than quoting St Paul’s commandment above and perhaps also those recorded by St Matthew.

The problem with teaching the critical race theory as fact, or at all, isn’t just that it contradicts Christianity, but that it contradicts history, logic and common sense – and does so for nefarious purposes. That ought to upset believer and atheist alike, anyone who doesn’t think children should be indoctrinated with pernicious lies.

The critical race theory is an intellectual heresy sharing its defining characteristics with heresies that are strictly religious. A heresy doesn’t necessarily preach something that is wrong. It simply assigns undue importance to one aspect at the expense of others, building a false theory on the basis of a single fact.

Thus, Arianism wasn’t wrong in insisting that Jesus was a man, nor was Docetism wrong in preaching he was God. Yet the former heresy denied Jesus’s divinity and the latter his physicality, which destroyed the balance later affirmed at Nicaea.

Keeping our feet firmly on the secular ground, all the things taught by the critical race theory have indeed happened in history. KKK marches, lynchings, cross-burnings, racial mass murder, the lot. Not so much in Britain, it has to be said, but let’s not wax parochial here.

However, building on the basis of that fact a comprehensive theory of history and human behaviour is an attempt to jump from the particular to the general, soaring over the necessary inductive steps in between. That is heresy at its most appalling.

Any school, and especially a church one, ought to tell children that both evil and good have permanent residence in man’s soul. Each person individually and any group collectively is free to choose one or the other. Sometimes they choose right, more often they choose wrong, and children must be taught how to tell the difference.

If they are properly taught, they’ll know that racial supremacism is wrong even if the term never comes up in discussion. But if that’s all they are taught about our civilisation, the only thing they’ll learn won’t be colour blindness. It will be hatred – perhaps not of other races, but of their parents, their neighbours and friends, of our whole civilisation.

That’s the point of the critical race theory. It’s not a scholarly hypothesis; it’s a recruitment drive. Its promulgators are seeking to conscript enough soldiers to create an army of fanatics ready to smash every tradition, every institution, every ideal going back to the pre-woke times.

That theory is a poisoned arrow in the quiver of modernity, but that receptacle holds other arrows as well. Whatever the declared aim of any modern secular heresy, be it Just Stop Oil, MeToo, BLM, LGBT or any such, they all have the same source, hatred, and the same target, Western civilisation.

“Drawing lines through our society and telling some children that they’ve been born on the wrong side, because of the colour of their skin, is wrong and must be resisted,” concludes Miss Pepinster.

She is right, of course. But I’m afraid a major cataclysm will have to occur before any such resistance can have a noticeable effect.

A reader, who happens to be a good friend of mine, took exception to the very idea that scientists may collude to promote the global warming fraud.

“When they are engaged in science they employ Scientific Method and don’t simply look for results which confirm their bias or provide ammunition for activism,” she writes.

That remark made me feel envious. There are still people out there who haven’t divested themselves of ideals, retaining a most touching faith in the goodness of man. And not just man in general, but specifically the group combining the intellectual integrity of Scientific Method (always with initial caps) with the moral rectitude of unbiased commitment to truth.

Alas, I have long since replaced my own erstwhile idealism with the dyed-in-the-wool cynicism of someone who has lived too long and seen too much. One thing I’ve seen too much of is blind faith in science and its practitioners.

My own, blasé, observation of scientists yields an image of a group as venal, craven and corrupt as most, and more so than some. This becomes especially noticeable when scientists are co-opted to promote scaremongering hysteria, otherwise known as good causes.

Every such good cause has a bad effect: increased state power, higher taxes and lamentable diminution of liberty. And it can be shown that the scientists involved suffer from an acute case of the 10-year itch:

In the 1960s, they claimed that all oil would be gone in 10 years. In the 1970s, that another Ice Age would arrive in 10 years. In the 1980s, that acid rain would destroy all crops in 10 years. In the 1990s, that the ozone layer would be gone in 10 years. In the 2000s, that the ice caps would melt in 10 years. Now they are claiming that, unless we ‘stop oil’ this instant, ‘our planet’ will fry in 10 years.

The demonstrable falsehood of all the previous claims has to create at least some incredulity about that last one and – much as it pains me to say so – about the integrity of the scientists touting it.

Not that we should lump all scientists together. Take any social or professional group, and some of its members will be better, cleverer and more moral than others. In fact, one of the dirty tricks employed by the activists in all the causes mentioned above is portraying all scientists as a uniform group.

Almost any phrase starting with “Scientists agree that…” will end up peddling a lie. Scientists don’t always – in fact, hardly ever – agree about anything. And many of them mock the current climate craze for the fraudulent politicking is.

For example, Dr John Clauser, one of the world’s leading authorities on quantum mechanics and winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize, called the “climate emergency” campaign “dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people”. Climate science, wrote Dr Clauser, has “metastasised into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience”.

As far back as 2009, the Australian climatologist Ian Plimer published Heaven and Earth, a seminal scientific study that doesn’t so much argue as prove that the whole global warming fad is fraudulent. And in 2014 Prof. Plimer published another book, Not for Greens, adding more recent research findings that all prove the same thing.

Nor is this a case of isolated cranks. Anyone who proclaims that a broad scientific consensus on this issue exists is telling a lie. Thus, back in 2008, 31,072 [sic] American scientists signed a petition rejecting the existence of a global warming crisis.

“No such consensus or settled science exists,” said Arthur Robinson, founder and president of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. “As indicated by the petition text and signatory list, a very large number of American scientists reject” the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming.

The petition should have made front-page news, but obviously didn’t. The bandwagon of ideological orthodoxy was gathering momentum, and no one could be allowed to stick crowbars into the spokes of its wheels.

It takes a combination of idealism and myopia not to notice that universities, those traditional depositories and smithies of scientific truth, have become not only as corrupt as many other modern institutions, but more so than most.

Most scientists would sell their next of kin for a grant, a tenure or a higher post. They’ll flock like lemmings to any source of such emoluments – and pounce like jackals on those fingered by the source.  

It was in the proverbial groves that the fascistic trees of ‘cancel culture’ have grown to luxuriant maturity. Not only students but also their professors join forces to cancel the appearance of any guest speaker guilty of ever having expressed any other than woke, left-wing ideas (I could cite the examples of some of my friends, whose invitations to appear at the Oxford Union were withdrawn).

Any professor holding any other than received views sees a redundancy notice constantly looming on the horizon. And it’s next to impossible for a conservative academic to get a post at a major university. Ask yourself how many conservative sociologists you know and weep.

If you think this only affects the humanities, think again. The American theoretical physicist Lee Smolin has written the book The Trouble with Physics, in which he criticises the string theory.

His scientific arguments take me out of my depth. However, what rings the alarm bells at a high decibel level is Dr Smolin’s comment that no physics department anywhere in the US will hire any opponent of that theory, no matter how sound his arguments and how extensive his research.

Similarly, no anthropology department will hire a scientist pointing out the gaping holes in Darwin’s theory. Any biology department will refuse to employ – and may well fire if he is already employed – any scientist who insists that the biological differences between men and women can’t be corrected by scalpel and syringe. And so on, ad nauseum.

It’s not just that individual universities are corrupt. What John Henry Newman called The Idea of a University has been turned upside down and dumped headlong into the quagmire of modernity.

That point was confirmed – as if it required any more confirmation – this morning by a Sky interview with the Tory (!) Education Minister, whose name escapes me. He too had a complaint about our universities, but his was different from mine.

The problem with our institutions of higher learning, sighed the minister, is that too many students take useless courses, such as philosophy, history or medieval literature. That reminded me of an old joke the minister doubtless knows but kept to himself to preserve the solemnity of his message: “What do you say to a philosophy graduate? ‘I’ll have fries with that’.”

All students, insisted this Tory (!), should only take courses that can lead to “good job offers”. In other words, rather than trying to correct any deficit in their natural intelligence, students should devote their lives to the artificial kind, or anything else that pays.

The good minister must suffer from cognitive dissonance: he is confounding a university with a technical college or a trade school. A youngster would have no shortage of “good job offers” if he studied plumbing or hardware maintenance, respectable occupations both. But neither has much to do with the idea of a university.

Intellectual and moral corruption doesn’t bypass the academy on the way to government offices. As a minimum, we should be on our guard whenever a claim of a universal scientific consensus is made for any faddish cause. No disclaimers or qualifiers are necessary: all such claims are false.

That, however, in no way diminishes my admiration of my friend’s idealism. We need people like that, those looking for the saintly among the profane. There ought to be a counterweight to old cynics like me.

“Time to accept Wimbledon’s women’s matches are superior to the men’s,” writes Alyson Rudd.

At first, that made me wonder if she had ever picked up a tennis racquet in her life. But then I realised it didn’t matter one way or the other. Her statement had nothing to do with tennis and everything to do with ideology.

The ideology says that anything men can do women can do better, or at least as well. That’s why they should be paid at least as much. And if the evidence before your eyes contradicts the ideology, then so much the worse for the evidence.

The evidence before the eyes of any player (and most tennis fans have struck a ball or two) says in no uncertain terms that professional men’s tennis is the acme of athletic attainment, whereas the women’s equivalent is – not to cut too fine a point – rubbish.

Not as far as Miss Rudd is concerned. “It does not matter that the women play the best of three sets and yet earn the same amount of prize money,” she writes.

Of course, it doesn’t, dear. Nothing does, when ideology speaks. However, before people untainted by ideological afflatus pass a view on any subject, they look at the facts.

Let’s say they believe as firmly as I do in the principle of equal pay for equal work. Then they notice that women tend to be paid somewhat less than men in the same positions. Is that unjust?

No, says Thomas Sowell. That great American economist and sociologist asked himself that question back in the 70s and then proceeded to analyse piles of relevant data. He came to the conclusion that even then, in the early stages of feminist hysteria, all other things being equal, women, if anything, got paid slightly more for the same jobs.

Yet, because of that italicised phrase, they ended up getting paid slightly less. Things that weren’t equal included years of uninterrupted experience, readiness to work long hours and on weekends, time taken off to look after children and so on.

Sowell proved, figures in hand, that feminists’ claims of discrimination were false and based on an ideology, not facts. Such findings have earned Prof. Sowell the soubriquet of ‘controversial’ and, if he were still active today, would get him ostracised, cancelled and possibly prosecuted.

His opponents tried to argue, wrongly, that a woman having the same job title as a man must always be presumed to be doing equal work. But the campaign for women’s equal prize money at tennis tournaments eschewed even such arguments.

Its champions, such as Miss Rudd, happily admit that what they want isn’t equal pay for equal work, but equal pay, full stop. “It doesn’t matter” that women spend half the time on court during their matches. Hence it doesn’t matter that their hourly pay is twice as high. The only thing that matters is the shrill ideology.

However, I wouldn’t quibble about that iniquity if the entertainment level of women’s tennis were indeed as high as Miss Rudd claims. But anyone who has ever swung a racquet knows it isn’t. In fact, comparatively speaking, women’s tennis is pathetic.

The only difference Miss Rudd acknowledges but says “it doesn’t matter” is that women’s “serves are not usually as fast”. That’s not the point.

Since physiological differences between men and women haven’t yet been declared null and void, we assume that men are, on average, bigger, stronger and speedier. Thus they hit the ball harder and get to it faster than women do.

Yet, by itself, this takes nothing away from the attractiveness of the women’s game. It’s even possible to suggest that slower serves can lead to longer and more entertaining rallies. But they don’t, not by the long chalk of the Centre Court’s lines.

“One reason the women have been superior this year is that the upsets have not been about players off form but about players reaching exceptionally high levels,” writes Miss Rudd.

That’s arrant nonsense. Most points in the women’s game end on stupid unforced errors, with the ladies unable to keep the ball in play with any consistency. If Miss Rudd enjoys watching players dump routine shots into the bottom of the net or ten feet out, that makes one of us.

I am writing a few hours before the men’s final, but the day after the women’s. So I’ve compared the stats from one of the men’s semis with those of the women’s final.

Carlos Alcaraz beat Daniil Medvedev in three sets. The two players had 36 unforced errors between them, 19 of them committed by the loser. In yesterday’s women’s final, the loser, Ons Jabeur, managed 50 (fifty!) in just two sets all by herself.

That’s two-and-a-half sets’ worth of unforced errors alone – from a top-ten player seeded sixth. And the nature of her unforced errors was different from Medvedev’s. He’d usually miss a shot trying to hit a hard shot close to the lines. By contrast, Jabeur simply couldn’t hit two basic rallying shots in a row.

Even more knowledgeable people than Miss Rudd ascribed that abject performance to nerves. If the implication is that women are more susceptible to that problem than men are, then let me look up the number of the Equalities Commission. As a concerned citizen, I must report those misogynists.

Yes, nerves were a part of it. But the much greater part was Miss Jabeur’s poor technique. Here I have to wax technical, and those who have no interest in tennis should skip the next couple of paragraphs.

Like the men, most of the women can hit hard and they can hit with topspin. But, like me and other club hacks, they can’t hit hard with topspin. Topspin’s trajectory lets the ball clear the net at a height of three or four feet (sometimes even higher), then dive into the court like a kingfisher going after its prey.

That gives the player a higher margin for error than a flat shot would – one such clearing the net at the same height would hit the back fence, not the baseline. Interestingly, the harder a topspin shot, the more spin it puts on the ball, and the more reliable it is.

Since most women pros hit the ball much flatter than the men, they commit many more unforced errors. That makes most of their matches dull to watch, if obviously not for Miss Rudd, who must draw extra inspiration from her ideological commitment.

However, there is no physiological reason for women to be unable to hit the ball with the same technique as the men, if with slightly less power. A professional player has his basic strokes so grooved that he can repeat them time and time again under any amount of pressure.

If women can’t do that, this means their strokes aren’t as grooved (nor as varied, by the way). That in turn means they don’t spend as much time on the practice courts, honing their craft. Add to this the three-set format of their matches, and you’ll see that, while the pay is equal, the work isn’t.

And that’s not all. Not a single player in the men’s draw looks grossly unfit. But many women do, although Jelena Ostapenko, whose photo I chose, is an extreme case. Again, making allowances for the physiologically higher fat content in a woman’s body, it’s still clear that many ladies shirk work not only on the practice courts but also in the gym.

Hence their getting equal prize money is a case of glaring injustice – and a triumph of ideology over facts. Miss Rudd’s ignorant comments fall into the same category.  

In today’s article about last week’s NATO summit at Vilnius, Boris Johnson demands that “the West end the mealy-mouthed procrastination and get Ukraine into NATO as fast as we can.”

Before I say anything else, I must mention that right from the start of the war Mr Johnson has been the most consistent and vociferous supporter of the Ukrainian cause among Western politicians.

When he was prime minister, he did all he could to supply up-to-date weapons to the Ukraine, and his personal contribution to denying Putin the blitzkrieg he sought was significant. Hence every Ukrainian and Russian supporter of the Ukraine’s cause I know (and I know quite a few) treats Mr Johnson as a demigod; President Zelensky has said many complimentary things about him and meant them.

However, Mr Johnson is a Western politician, meaning that he knows all the tricks of the trade and deploys them with the same élan as those mealy-mouthed procrastinators he so justly deplores.

Here I’d like to draw your attention to his phrase “as fast as we can”. One could drive the entire Ukrainian armour through a loophole this size. “As fast as we can” means whenever we feel like it, which may be next year, 10 years from now or in the next millennium.

Sensing that, later in the article Mr Johnson tries to narrow the loophole, but without quite succeeding:  

“All the Alliance needed to do was to set out a timetable – not for instant membership; that makes no sense as long as the war is live… All we needed was words to the effect that accession could begin as soon as the war was over, on the understanding that this could be as early as next year.”

Instant membership would mean NATO’s instant declaration of war on Russia – Article 5 of the NATO Charter is unequivocal in this respect. Yet every poll in every major NATO country I’ve seen shows that the public overwhelmingly opposes entering the war as combatants.

Many opponents of the Ukraine’s NATO membership use this information as an argument clincher. It isn’t, not by itself.

None of the NATO countries is run by direct, plebiscitarian democracy. All of them practise representative democracy, wherein people elect their representatives and trust them to govern in what they see as the country’s best interests.

In theory, if a politician’s intellect and conscience demand a certain course of action, he ought to pursue it even against recent poll numbers. That’s how it would be if our elected representatives were statesmen, rather than spivocratic vote canvassers. But they aren’t and it isn’t.

To the best of my knowledge, no Western politician this side of the Baltics is in favour of sending troops to the Ukraine, which is what “instant membership” would mean. Neither, incidentally, is Mr Johnson, for all his principled attachment to the Ukraine’s cause (“that makes no sense as long as the war is live…”).

If not now, when? Mr Johnson says exactly the same thing all those mealy-mouthed procrastinators said at Vilnius: “accession could begin as soon as the war was over, on the understanding that this could be as early as next year.” Or it could be in 10 years – all sorts of thing could be.

President Biden expressed himself more forthrightly: when a reporter asked him how long after the Ukraine’s victory that accession would begin, Mr Biden gave what seemed to be a precise reply: “Within 20 minutes”.

I see several problems with such seeming precision. The first problem is to define what exactly would constitute the Ukraine’s victory. Messrs Zelensky and Zaluzhny entering the Kremlin on the armour of a Ukrainian Leopard? That’s clearly not on the cards.

Driving the Russian forces back to the 1991 borders? That, as Mr Johnson correctly states, would be problematic without the Ukraine gaining air supremacy, or at least superiority. That means arming the country with Western warplanes, such as the F-16 multirole fighter.

Even so, Russia has the wherewithal to prolong the war indefinitely – and Putin will have a strong incentive to do just that. If he knows that the moment the Ukraine declares victory (however it’s defined) he’ll have NATO troops on his doorstep, he has a vested interest in keeping the war going – or even in using nuclear weapons.

Hence, in common with those mealy-mouthed procrastinators, Mr Johnson says all the right things that upon close examination turn out to mean next to nothing, if that much. But he did say a few things that were most commendable.

First, he wrote that: “NATO countries know – and constantly say – that the Ukrainians are fighting for all of us.” When it comes to politicians, ‘know’ and ‘constantly say’ are nearer to being opposite than the same, but that’s a minor quibble.

Yet Mr Johnson is right: the Ukraine’s cause is ours as well, and her defeat would also be ours. It would be a triumph of evil on the march, and the march might gain unstoppable momentum. At stake is whatever little is left of decency and legality in the conduct of foreign policy, two commodities protecting the world from calamitous holocaust.

I think that the best course of action would be for NATO to concentrate on giving the Ukraine the tools to do the job, while putting off all talk about NATO membership. It’s not just ships that can be sunk by loose lips, and the best way to stop Putin is to enable the Ukraine to do so. Tittle-tattle about membership, instant or otherwise, is counterproductive.

Mr Johnson is also right when saying that Putin’s aggression was completely unprovoked. Here he is at odds with his Mail colleague who repeats, in a monotonous and, one hopes, disinterested fashion, Putin’s lies about his having been provoked by NATO expansion.

But I agree with that Putin puppet: NATO was at fault, although not in the way Putin and his Western admirers claim. Mr Johnson puts it in a nutshell:

“When will we learn the lesson of the past 20 years of handling Putin? It is our very ambiguity, our vacillation, our sucking-and-blowing-at-once, which has prompted him to invade. As long as he thinks there is a chance that he can wrest Ukraine back into the orbit of Moscow – as long as he thinks he can recreate the Soviet Union – he will try.”

So he will, and I couldn’t agree more. And yes, it’s the West’s wishy-washy vacillation that allowed that monster to grow to maturity and emboldened him to pounce.

Yet that wasn’t the first time and it won’t be the last. History does teach valuable lessons, but we insist on playing truant.

Whenever I describe our culture as Christian, some people demur.

Don’t I know how low church attendance is? I do. And even many of those who occasionally go to church, don’t really believe in God? Yes, unfortunately. Have I seen many people crossing themselves lately? I haven’t, outside my church. Do I realise that we live in a secular society, and have done for at least a century, in reality much longer? I do realise.

So in what way is our culture Christian? In most ways that matter, is the answer to that.

Culture is like climate: one has to assess it over millennia to arrive at reliable conclusions about its essence. Taking a shorter look is guaranteed to distort the picture.

Some people display such myopia out of ignorance, others fake it for nefarious purposes. In either case, no true picture emerges.

I have answered yes to all the hypothetical questions posed above by my imaginary interlocutor. He is British or otherwise Western, meaning different from the people among whom I grew up.

In that place, Moscow, USSR, it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to ask such questions. That would have been like asking if I realised the sky was blue, the grass was green, and the flag was red. Some things went without saying.

Faith in God wasn’t exactly criminalised, but as near as damn. Membership in Protestant sects, such as Baptism or Pentecostalism, was in fact an imprisonable offence. But more traditional confessions could be practised – provided one had no expectation of a successful career or social acceptance.

Even genius wasn’t seen as a valid excuse. Thus Maria Yudina, one of the few pianists meriting that term, saw her career dwindle away to nothing for openly professing her Christian faith – this though even Stalin admired her playing.

Children were exposed to rabid atheist propaganda before they could even walk. Kindergarten teachers would demand the tots in their care repeat things like ‘there is no God’ in chorus; pictures of apes slowly evolving into proletarians were everywhere.

As children got older, their indoctrination became more complex, but its essence never changed. They were exposed to atheist propaganda every day of their lives, they were drowned in it, they inhaled it, drank it, ate it. It was everywhere, all the time. There was no God other than Marx, and Darwin was his prophet.

At the university, I had to take a compulsory course in Scientific Atheism – after the courses in Dialectical Materialism, Historical Materialism, Scientific Communism and Marxist Aesthetics.

By then I had learned not to rebel too openly against that blithering idiocy. But as a child I’d sometimes ask provocative questions, which my parents and teachers answered with panache and in elevated tones. I recall one conversation with my thoroughly atheistic father, which I don’t think was unique to us.

“Is there a God, Papa?” “Do. Not. Be. Stupid. Of course there bloody well isn’t.” But I wouldn’t let him get off scot-free.

“If there is no God, then who created man?” “Man originated from the ape. It’s called evolution, and there was this Englishman, Darwin by name, who proved it conclusively in his book The Origin of Species. You’ll read it when you grow up.” “And where did the ape come from?” “What?” “The ape, the one man originated from. Where did that come from?” “From another ape, you know, a lower order of ape.” “And where did that one come from?”

I’d thus lead Papa all the way down to the amoeba and make him resort to the rhetorical fallacy of telling me I’d find out all those things for myself when I grew up. He was right, I have, but not quite in the way he meant it.

This is a typical example of the kind of religious education Soviet children got. Yet another example shows how poorly it worked.

A couple I knew emigrated from Moscow at roughly the same time I did. Once they landed in New York, some charity put them up in a flat in a low-rent borough. Their son was seven at the time, and the matter of his schooling loomed large.

The couple took the boy to a local state school but were appalled by its demographics. Most children there looked as if they had taken an early start in a promising criminal career, and my friends felt not only their son’s education but even his life would be in jeopardy.

Since private education was out of the question, their thoughts turned to the yeshiva, the rabbinical Jewish school that didn’t charge fees but provided decent education and a more acceptable demography.

My friends were secular Jews, the only type I knew in Moscow, but decided to feign religiosity in this good cause. Little Misha had to go through an admission interview, and my friends spent several days coaching him how to answer the predictable awkward questions.

The first such question was asked straight away: “Do you believe in God?” Thanks to the extensive coaching sessions, Misha knew exactly how to answer: “Of course, I do.”

“Excellent,” smiled his examiners. “So how do you see God?” That was a question that even some theologians struggle with, but Misha had been trained to evade it. “I can’t really say. It’s a mystery, and I can’t answer your question in any detail.”

“Try anyway,” insisted his inquisitors. “Just say the first thing that comes to mind.”

“Fine, if you insist,” agreed Misha, who felt he had to extemporise. “There was this man, Jesus Christ. He was killed, then came back to life, went to heaven and became God.”

A long pause followed, with the examiners exchanging glances and then rolling their eyes. Nevertheless they decided to make allowances for the boy’s unfortunate upbringing and admitted him anyway.

Knowing his parents as I do, I assure you that words like God, Christ or Jesus never crossed their lips, other than as parts of casual cursing. And, since the family wasn’t especially literary, I’m sure Misha had never read, say, Dostoyevsky, and I don’t think he has since then either.

He couldn’t have got that snippet out of ambient air – it was thick with atheist harangues. And yet even in that ideologically, institutionally godless country, a child growing up in a secular – militantly atheistic, to be more exact – Jewish family somehow caught a whiff of Christian aroma wafting around.

Don’t ask me about the mechanisms of cultural transmission involved – I wouldn’t be able to answer. Yet clearly some mechanisms must have been activated, those designed, built and tuned over centuries.     

This reminds me of another story, one involving Sen. Strom Thurmond, who once said back in the ‘50s that Eisenhower was a communist (a popular theme in some circles at the time). “No, Ike is an anti-communist,” objected his colleague. “I don’t care what kind of communist he is,” replied the indomitable legislator.

By the same token, a man whose understanding of life revolves around his Christianity has much in common with someone who relies on anti-Christianity to that end. Both use Christianity as their frame of reference, and in that sense negation becomes affirmation.

I am beginning to wax Hegelian, which is God’s way of telling me I must put a full stop there. So I shall, but not before repeating that our culture is Christian whether we like it or not. And if some of us don’t like it, then they’d be well-advised to identify a viable alternative.

After a few futile attempts, they are bound to realise that here in the West our choice isn’t between a Christian culture and some other. It’s between a Christian culture and none.

I’ve transcribed and translated for your delectation a short interview with the flamboyant Russian historian Yevgeny Ponasenkov. He is sharing his frank – and absolutely correct – views about global warming in general and Greta Thunberg in particular.

Ponasenkov’s principal interest is Russia’s Napoleonic wars, about which he has written what many of his colleagues rate as the definitive monograph. But he readily enlarges on other subjects as well, maintaining a constant presence on YouTube.

Ponasenkov has been vociferous in his opposition to Putin’s war on the Ukraine, which has earned him the status of foreign agent from his grateful government. Typically, people receiving that accolade run for their lives, but Ponasenkov has stubbornly stayed in Moscow, refusing to keep his head down and his mouth shut.

I’m surprised he is still at large, especially since the Russian government also takes a dim view of his lifestyle, flaunting as it does what’s called ‘untraditional tendencies’ there. I wish Panasenkov best of luck and fear he is going to need it.

You’ll notice that he expresses himself with a forthrightness seldom heard from any public figure in Britain. Death to qualifiers, euphemisms, understatements and equivocations – Ponasenkov shoots from the lip and, though he often hits the bull’s eye, the accompanying noise of the blast may sound a bit too deafening to a British ear.

This is an oblique illustration to one of the points I made yesterday: the Russians, including those as brilliant as Ponasenkov, tend to eschew rhetorical nuances and conventions. That, I think, diminishes the effect of their statements – even when we happen to agree with them.

When we disagree, such shrill brashness of tone becomes unbearable, which Ponasenkov also proves whenever he delivers himself of views on religion.

That he is an atheist is to be expected, but that’s strictly his own business. However, when Ponasenkov argues in numerous interviews and articles that religion, especially Christianity, is the root of all evil in the world, he throws his scholarly integrity to the wind.

For example, he holds priests directly responsible not only for Putin’s bandit raid on the Ukraine, but even for the First World War, which strikes me as a hard case to make. But I did tell you Ponasenkov is flamboyant – he has a showman’s propensity to say things just for effect and shock value, not to mention self-promotion.

However, I am relieved to see he doesn’t blame any Christian denomination for the global warming fraud. He identifies the real culprits unerringly and attacks them with a combination of youthful exuberance and Russian savagery.

Here’s the word-for-word translation of that interview and, though I might take exception to Panasenkov’s tone, I agree with every word he says.

Q. Some people believe that global warming is a kind of conspiracy to extort money from taxpayers.

A. A hundred per cent. That’s exactly what it is. And as a historian I can tell you that everything that’s going on with the climate has been known for ever, for at least 3,000 years.

Back and forth, to and fro, long ice ages, short ice ages, warming periods, cooling periods… If you simply study history, not too remote, say the past couple of thousand years, you’ll know this is such old hat, such a banal story…

Everything has been said, all the books have been written, all the lectures have been delivered – it’s impossible to listen to that any longer.

Incidentally, that schizo runt, that degenerate Greta Thunberg, the retard, doesn’t write her tweets herself. She gets them from her criminal puppet masters, lefties. And recently that international criminal – yes, criminal, bandit – Greta removed the post in which she had predicted that 2023 would see the end of mankind due to global warming.

She has removed that because she isn’t held accountable for her words, she is a feral animal, idiot, degenerate and, to boot, an international criminal. A global warrant should be issued for her arrest. She extorts money, she blocks roads, she swindles millions of people – and in general, she is a sick runt.

Q. So you do consider this to be just a conspiracy to extort money?

A. A hundred per cent. We’re talking about a sect, or rather an organised gang of international crooks. There exist different kinds of crooks. Some rob banks with guns, some do so by computer hacking, but these are different.

A leftie government robs working people with taxes – lefties, socialists, communists take people’s money away. But then there are also those who may not be in government yet, but they’ve learned to manipulate society in such a way that they get money for grants, all sorts of projects, programmes and so on to spread the lie of global warming.

This is an international gang of organised criminals, there’s no other name for them. And that’s it. The issue was settled by historians and scientists centuries ago. Hence those criminals must be investigated, arrested and sent down. Every crime can be traced back to specific people, specific names. That’s what we should be doing.

Hear, hear. My sentiments exactly, if not necessarily my kind of words.

One of the happiest events and one of the saddest days of my life overlapped on 12 July, 1973. Exactly 50 years ago, and time does fly whether or not you’re having fun.

On that day I left for ever a country where I had never belonged – and not just because of its cannibalistic politics.

It’s fashionable now for youngsters to insist they were born in the wrong body. I’m not sure most of them mean it. But I’m absolutely certain I was born in the wrong country, among the wrong people.

I despised their unrestrained emotions, unstructured thought, overall disdain for the form of life and ignorance of its substance. Lest you accuse me of Russophobia, the most cutting remarks about the Russians’ formlessness were made by Nikolai Lossky, the Russian philosopher best known in the West.

According to Lossky, who was rather the opposite of a Russophobe, this disdain for form even penetrated the Russians’ gene pool, having produced many ill-defined, amorphous facial features so different, say, from the chiselled North European profile. Indeed, many Russians show a certain lack of straight lines in their faces. It is as if, having drawn a sketch of their features, God then went over it, smudging every line with his thumb.

Lossky’s observation may be too sweeping, but it’s certainly evident that the Russians’ amorphousness extends to the way they treat every public institution, from justice to religion.

Pavel Florensky, the polymath religious thinker murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1937, explained this aspect of the Russians in essentially the same way as Lossky did, if in slightly different words: “There is no sun in the Slavs, no transparency, no definition! Clarity and serenity are lacking… It seems to me that this is meaningfully related to their failure… to find the sublime in the here and now and not strain to seek it in the non-existent or the far-away.”

That’s how even those Slavophile thinkers saw their own people, and that’s how I saw them (with notable exceptions, as should go without saying). Russia, with her mores, emotions, language, was so alien to the way I thought and felt that I sometimes say I never had a single happy moment there.

That’s obviously an exaggeration, but whatever joyous moments there might have been were drowned and dissolved in days upon days, years upon years of sheer drudgery and seething resentment. Unlike many other dissidents I knew, I didn’t want to change Russia. I just wanted out.

Mercifully, the KGB saw things the same way and let me leave. That deliverance came from one of their departments, but the KGB is a Russian organisation and therefore bad at organisation. Six months after I left Moscow, a team from another department came to arrest me, and my poor father had to disappoint them by saying they had just missed me.

Never a day goes by that I don’t thank God for taking me out of that alien land and into a country – and language! – best suited to my mind, soul and temperament. Finding the right country is almost as important as finding the right woman, and I’m happy to have found both.

But that day, 12 July, 1973, was far from happy. I really can’t add much to the way I described it in my book How the Future Worked:

The scene featured a silent girl wearing a stark white blouse and a face to match, Mama who was weeping so much she couldn’t even say good-bye, and Papa whose face had suddenly acquired an uncharacteristic look of solemnity.

Mama was sobbing uncontrollably, I was holding her close, her tears mixing with mine, or maybe they were all hers, and I had just managed to hold mine in. Before the plane even took off I was desperately missing them all, and especially the little boy who at that time looked just like me and could already speak such beautiful Russian.

I was sure I’d never see any of them again, and was wondering whether their tangible suffering was worth my nebulous freedom. At that moment I was inclined to think it wasn’t and cursed my unfeeling selfishness. But subsequent events have somewhat vindicated self-interest as an acceptable motive for our behaviour.

The little boy soon came to America with his mother, forgot his beautiful Russian and replaced it with intentionally demotic English. He then stopped being a child who disapproved of me and became a grown-up bent on proving that Oscar Wilde was wrong when saying that children eventually forgive their parents.

The white-faced girl joined me in the States and in due course we got a divorce after 11 years of happy but mutually unsatisfying marriage. (I could explain this seeming paradox, but if you are married you understand anyway, and if you’re not you probably won’t believe the explanation.)

And, to the dismay of my wife Penelope, about 25 years ago Papa began to come every year for stays ranging from a few weeks to three months, until he died at 92. Penelope didn’t believe he came to visit his son. She maintained, not without prima facie evidence, that his sole purpose was to bug our friends with queries of how much money they made.

Only Mama didn’t manage to give the lie to some of my macabre premonitions. She died without ever seeing her only son again. That happened merely a year before the post-glasnost government could have allowed her to come for a visit. Surrounded by the dingy concrete of Sheremetyevo Airport that day, she must have sensed that the part of her life devoted to me – which is to say her life – was coming to an end. 

‘I’ll write, Mama, I promise I’ll write,’ I kept repeating, aware of how grossly inadequate those words were, not finding better words, knowing there weren’t any better words to find. ‘I promise I’ll write. It’ll be okay, Mama. It’ll be fine…’

It’ll be fine, Mama. I’m only leaving for ever.

A year ago almost to the day, the Russian sub Krasnodar fired a cruise missile that killed 27 civilians in the Ukrainian city of Vinnitsa.

The sub commander, Capt. Stanislav Rzhitsky, has since retired. He got a sinecure job in the council of the city after which his submarine was named and looked forward to a long life in mufti.

Yet, unlike people shot point-blank, old habits die hard. As befits a naval officer, Capt. Rzhitsky kept himself fit by going on obligatory morning jogs, rain or shine. And, as befits a modern naval officer, he kept abreast of recent advances in electronics.

Used as he was to daily routine, Capt. Rzhitsky never varied his running route and used a sophisticated American app to track his progress. That proved to be his undoing.

A hitman could prepare for his mission at leisure. By logging in on the same app, he knew exactly what route Capt. Rzhitsky would take and was able to reconnoitre it. He found a spot not covered by CCTV cameras and yesterday morning killed Rzhitsky with four 9mm bullets in the back. Happy anniversary of that missile launch, Stanislav!

One camera did manage to catch the assailant, producing a blurry image of a middle-aged man wearing a turquoise cap. That narrowed it down a lot. The Russian police are now looking for a middle-aged man who by now must have ditched his distinctive cap. Best of luck to them – such airtight identification is bound to bring the sword of justice down on the assassin’s head.

Different morals can be drawn from this incident, but the one springing to my mind on the spur of the moment involved jogging. You see, I have complex feelings about it, not all of them praise-worthy.

I’ve only ever attempted it once, almost 50 years ago, in Houston, Texas. As a competitive tennis player, I felt duty-bound to hone my fitness to razor sharpness. One had to be in pretty good shape to play in Houston’s infernal conditions, with the temperature seldom dropping below 95 degrees and humidity below 95 per cent.

One morning, I manfully ran a mile in some six minutes, which exertion both exhausted and bored me to such an extent that I’ve never tried it again since. Illogically, I began to resent joggers whom I both envied for their perseverance and despised for being only marginally less sanctimonious than cyclists (I told you my feelings were complex).

In that pre-Christian period of my life, I even harassed joggers, especially those who had Walkman earpieces grafted into their heads. If I espied one of them running along the road I was driving on, I’d shift into neutral, roll noiselessly behind him and simultaneously rev up the engine and hit the horn.

That way I dropped some of them into the gutter and made all of them rather irate. One chap even tried to chase me on foot, but he didn’t stand much of a chance against an 8-cylinder engine.

During the same pre-Christian period I experienced intense schadenfreude when Jim Fixx, the guru and populariser of that objectionable activity, keeled over in mid-stride and died at 52. Jogging kills, I thought then and again today, when reading about Capt. Rzhitsky’s demise.

That wasn’t the only thought though. One also has to consider the moral issues involved, such as one of criminal responsibility for carrying out criminal orders.

The so-called Nuremberg defence didn’t work at the eponymous trial in 1946, and it didn’t work for Eichmann in 1962. That established a legal precedent that applies to Russia’s bandit raid on the Ukraine.

Any military man who kills, rapes, tortures or robs civilians is criminally culpable even if he acts on specific orders from his superiors. Neither does the intent defence quite work.

If tried by due process, Capt. Rzhitsky would probably claim he didn’t mean to kill civilians (some of them children). The missile he fired was aimed at a military target, but veered off course or malfunctioned. So sorry and all that, but that unfortunate accident just couldn’t be helped.

If experts in rocketry and ballistics had subjected that claim to a painstaking forensic analysis, they might have agreed. That would have diminished the officer’s culpability, but it wouldn’t have expunged it.

One could argue persuasively that any participant in a collective war crime bears individual responsibility for any specific crimes committed. On that logic, Capt. Rzhitsky was guilty not only of his murder of 27 civilians, but also of all the massacres committed in Bucha and Melitopol, of every bombing of civilians – some of it deliberate, all of it indiscriminate – throughout the Ukraine, from Lvov to Kiev to Kharkov.

There is no doubt in my mind that Capt. Rzhitsky deserved punishment, probably of the capital variety. But is assassination the best way of administering it?

It’s not. It just happens to be the only way the Ukraine could get justice. It would be more civilised to put thousands of Russians in the dock, which is what happened to thousands of Germans at the end of the Second World War.

Yet for such due process to take place, Russia would have to be defeated and occupied, the way Germany was. Such an outcome, though eminently desirable, simply isn’t on the cards.

Just driving the Russians back to the 1991 borders would constitute a resounding victory for the Ukraine, sending all those war criminals running back into Russia, tail between the legs.

Once there, however, they’d never be extradited in a million years. Hence, assuming the assassination was commissioned by the Ukrainian secret services, their choice wasn’t between rough and legal justice. It was between rough justice and none.

I have no tears to shed for Capt. Rzhitsky – my lachrymose reservoir has been depleted by the pictures of murdered Ukrainian children and their grieving parents. Rzhitsky got what he deserved. He jogged his last.