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Hot summers, is it? Ignoramuses! Global warming deniers! Repeat after me: IT WAS A CLIMATE CRISIS! Our planet was on its way to extinction. And if you don’t believe me, ask Greta Thunberg. She’ll tell you.

It’s good to know that the Leader of the Free World is a polymath, whose interests and erudition extend even into such technical areas as medicine.

However, before punching the air with ebullient joy, we ought to track his foray into such areas to make sure he arrives at a legitimate destination. If he doesn’t, then rejoicing should be replaced with concern.

That, I’m afraid, is the case with Joe Biden’s recent speech on medical care, in which he made some statements that make it hard not to fear for the Free World of which Joe is the Leader.

The president tackled two branches of medicine of personal interest to him: oncology, because his son Beau died of brain cancer; and mental health because… well, you know.

Speaking on the first subject, Joe laudably insisted on reviving the American can-do spirit: “One of the things I’m always asked is, you know, why Americans have sort of lost faith for a while in being able to do big things.”

Such big things, for example, as curing cancer. “Why cancer? Because no one thinks we can, that’s why. And we can. We ended cancer as we know it,” Joe told his stunned audience.

The 19^th century Russian satirist Saltykov-Schedrin once quipped that: “The government’s task is to keep the populace in a state of permanent amazement.” Joe must have taken that prescription to heart.

The people in the audience were duly amazed. The mortality rates of some cancers may be going down, but an average of over 1,600 Americans still die of cancer every day. Their families must feel relieved to know that the Biden administration has expunged that ghastly disease once and for all.

I imagine Biden’s press secretaries have to work their fingers to the bone every time Joe offers one of his staggering insights. In this case, they must have gasped and taken the name of Our Lord in vain, possibly with the addition of obscenities.

Having got that off their chests, they replaced “ended” with “can end” in the version released to the press. But it was too late: video cameras had preserved Joe’s braggadocio for posterity.

Having taken care of oncology, Joe bravely attacked psychiatry. Specifically, he took exception to insurance companies that are reluctant to offer complete coverage for the treatment of mental problems. Joe then promised his administration would end this iniquity the way it had already ended cancer.

“We’re working to improve insurance coverage for mental health in America,” said Biden.

“And folks, you know, I don’t know what the difference between breaking your arm and having a mental breakdown is,” he added. “It’s health – there’s no distinction.”

As an aside, I always admire the mock-folksy tone American politicians feel called upon to adopt. They sound as if speaking not just in public but in a public bar – I’m surprised they don’t interrupt their press conferences to growl at a reporter: “Whatcha lookin’ at, pal?”

Getting back from the form to the substance, there’s one helluva lota distinction between a cracked bone and a cracked psyche, Joe. The former shows up on an X-ray, the latter doesn’t.

Thus diagnosing, or these days even defining, a mental disorder is seldom straightforward. For example, a man grieving for his dead wife may be considered mentally ill, whereas a man claiming to be a woman is seen as a perfectly sane individual exercising his right to identify as anything he wishes.

Conditions that in the past called for a talk with a friend over a couple of stiff drinks have now been medicalised. Lack of self-restraint and responsibility has been upgraded to ‘gambling addiction’ calling for medical interference. And as to the craven refusal to face the very mild symptoms of withdrawal from opiates, no amount of money thrown at it is too big.

Such rampant medicalisation makes mental conditions rather open-ended and therefore extremely expensive to treat. In fact, Americans spend over $200 billion a year on mental problems – more than they spend on heart disease, diabetes and indeed cancer.

Not only does the cost of treating mental conditions exceed any other, but it’s also growing faster – as it’s bound to do when the boundaries of the problem are being pushed wider and wider by the burgeoning weight of psychobabble.

I’m sure insurance companies wouldn’t quibble about covering legitimate psychiatric diseases, such as schizophrenia or dual-personality disorder. Yet one can understand their reluctance to shell out every time a self-indulgent housewife complains about being in a lousy mood lately.

Biden has in effect committed his administration to twisting insurers’ arm into going against their commercial interests. Such bossiness is to be expected on the part of any left-wing government, in America or anywhere else.

But insurance companies are still commercial concerns that have to answer to their shareholders. If new regulations force them to expose themselves to inordinate risks, they are bound to transfer their new costs to customers suffering from cancer, heart disease, diabetes and, well, broken bones.

Government expenditure will have to follow suit, which means higher taxes. American consumers of medical services will thus be hit with the double whammy of higher insurance premiums and greater taxation. I’m sure they won’t mind, secure in their serene knowledge that true equality has been achieved between mental and physical disorders.

Their plight saddens me, but not nearly as much as the future of the Free World. After all, Joe Biden, who clearly wasn’t compos mentis even before his first term, is running for a second one. And he may well win.

The Home Office data show that 213,279 police investigations into break-ins were closed last year without a suspect being identified.

That’s about 80 per cent of such crimes, which is bad enough. But even knowing the suspect doesn’t mean he’ll be arrested. If arrested, he won’t necessarily be tried. If tried, not necessarily convicted. If convicted, not necessarily imprisoned.

In fact, over 95 per cent of all burglaries in the UK don’t result in a conviction. And even if a burglar is convicted, he’ll usually serve only a derisory prison term, if that.

All this leads to the conclusion in the title. Add the qualifier ‘in effect’ to it, and the case becomes irrefutable.

The Lib Dems blame that appalling situation on the drop in neighbourhood policing teams and Police Community Support Officers. That lets them score political points off the Conservative Party, which is all they want.

Yet the causal relationship they’ve identified is as nonsensical as it’s indicative of the general level of political thinking in Britain (not that we are unique in that respect).

Years ago another leftie demagogue, Tony Blair, introduced the slogan “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”. As far as he was concerned, the main causes of crime were a) not enough money given away in social handouts and b) the evil “forces of conservatism”.

This reaches the area where idiocy overlaps with evil. Believing that crime is caused by poverty is idiotic. Blaming the nonexistent forces of conservatism is evil. Yet correctly identifying the causes of a social malaise is essential to any treatment of it – at least the lefties are capable of such truisms.

There are enough policemen in the UK, over 180,000 to be exact, to reduce the number of burglaries and increase the number of convictions. In fact, our armed forces are considerably smaller, and they are expected to fight hordes of heavily armed enemies, not a few tattooed thugs.

And more than enough freeloaders live off the state to disqualify low social expenditure as the prime culprit. In general, arithmetic is the wrong discipline to apply to the situation. It calls for philosophy or at least serious thought in general.

Why are our police forces so ineffective? After all, during the late Victorian era, there were three times fewer cops in Britain, and real (as opposed to relative) poverty was rife, yet burglaries were extremely rare even in the impoverished East End of London.

Many tectonic shifts, social, political, cultural and above all philosophical, have had to occur to deliver personal property to thugs sure of their immunity. This isn’t the place to identify them all, but some can be sketched.

The police aren’t even investigating most burglaries because their employer, the state, has communicated to them either explicitly or osmotically that they have more important things to worry about. And the state gets away with decriminalising burglary because it has succeeded in indoctrinating the population in a new ethos.

Cops everywhere and in any epoch won’t kill themselves trying to solve crimes they know won’t result in a conviction – they have to justify their funding like any other government employees. Since both the Crown Prosecution Office and the courts clearly don’t see burglary as the heinous crime it is, the cops won’t bother to hit the streets.

The civilisational shift I’ve mentioned earlier affects the very nature and concept of legality. Thus, jurists used to distinguish between malum in se and malum prohibitum, the former reflecting an immutable injunction against attacks on life, liberty and property; the latter encompassing transgressions like not wearing a seat belt.

It has always been understood that the two are in a morally hierarchical relationship. For example, stealing a man’s horse is a worse crime than parking it on a double yellow line, and killing one’s wife is more reprehensible than making love to her without permission.

But no malum is really in se; evil and good are meaningless in the absence of a detached moral arbiter whose rulings can sometimes be interpreted but never questioned.

Take that arbiter away, and we have erased the absolute line of demarcation, making moral distinctions relative, which is to say inoperative. Indeed, we find ourselves beyond good and evil, in a space where things are distorted to a point at which malum prohibitum can be punished more surely and often more severely than malum in se.

The statistics I cited above are a direct result. In, say, Victorian England, it was understood that an Englishman’s home was his castle and his personal property was inviolable. Burglars transgressed against both principles, which is why they were punished with a severity that makes today’s lot wince.

Their crimes struck not just at their specific victims but at the very foundations of society – and society responded with commensurate force. Our society today, however, rests on different foundations. The same laws against malum in se may still be on the books, but they’ve slipped way down the pecking order.

Just one little example: a woman I know quarrelled with her neighbour and in the heat of the argument called him a “poof”. The neighbour, who is twice her size, instantly called the police and identified himself as a victim of a hate crime.

The police responded with an alacrity they never display when a burglary is reported. They turned up within minutes, arrested the woman and kept her in detention for 24 hours until her expensive lawyers turned up.

Another example: a journalist I know received a night-time visit from the police after publishing an article in which she argued in favour of tougher restrictions on immigration. She got off with a warning that time, but how many burglaries were committed while the cops lectured her sanctimoniously?

The existence of stupid, unjust and superfluous laws and injunctions undermines the whole legal system. People may still fear the law but they don’t respect it any longer, and fear alone isn’t a sufficient deterrent.

Also, Britons have been systematically corrupted over several generations to believe that a transfer of money from those who earned it to those who didn’t occupies a high moral ground. Few have retained enough of their critical faculties to question the validity of the state extorting up to half of what they earn.

The state has used its awesome propaganda machine to convince people that their money isn’t truly theirs. It really belongs to the state that then “lets them keep” some of it for their families, to use Gordon Brown’s expression.

Faith in the sanctity of private property thus weakens, while the belief in social (which is to say redistributive) justice strengthens. Hence a burglar stops being a vicious criminal,  becoming instead a somewhat naughty colleague of the state.

He too redistributes wealth, of which he has less than most of his victims. That makes him the real victim, while the people who complain about being robbed come across as greedy whingers.

This isn’t exactly the current state of affairs, but it’s definitely an accelerating trend. The state, abetted by the social groups it can rely on to disseminate its message and prime the population, will punish swiftly and mercilessly any infringement of its own interests. But it will smile leniently on any crime committed against private property.

This reminds me of the USSR, as, alas, more and more things do. The Soviets developed the concept of ‘the socially close’ to describe criminals of proletarian or peasant descent.

This was explained by Anton Makarenko, manager of the first Soviet colony for juvenile delinquents. The underlying assumption was that, because they were ‘socially close’ to the state, young criminals, many of them murderers, were not beyond redemption. They ought to be rehabilitated, not punished.

“It is only the intelligentsia, children of the upper classes, priests and land owners who are beyond redemption,’ wrote Makarenko. While today’s Western bureaucrats are unlikely to have read this, they proceed from similar assumptions.

An illiterate criminal in no way jeopardises state power. Ergo, every law devised by the state will favour the criminal over the victim – and in fact the whole notion of criminality will be stood on its head.

Put some more strain on society (financial, medical, military), and the whole system of justice may collapse. God save us then – even though most people have been brainwashed to think he doesn’t exist.

If any of them are reading this: chaps, I love you dearly. You all have impeccable taste and discernment, as witnessed by the warm welcome you’ve extended to Penelope and me for over 20 years.

Your taste in matters artistic is also impeccable, most of the time. However, and I hope you don’t mind a good-natured generalisation, you tend to give a free pass to anything and anybody French.

Perhaps you only do so as a way of upholding your national honour when talking to foreigners like me. I don’t know, but I can only speak from my own foreign yet rather extensive experience.

Many a time have I almost had my head snapped off when opining that, say, Zola is a mediocre writer and Colette isn’t much of a writer at all, Erik Satie isn’t so much music as Musak (music d’ascenseur, as I imprudently put it) or that Renoir’s paintings belong on chocolate boxes, not in serious galleries.

Such passive-aggressive defensiveness is perfectly innocent and even laudable – I wish we felt as jealous about our culture as you do about yours. But even against that background I find the adulation of Jane Birkin, who died on 16 July, quite incomprehensible.

Thousands of Parisians came out to watch her funeral cortege, with the mourners looking genuinely aggrieved. One could get the impression that Miss Birkin’s demise impoverished French culture no end.

I do realise that most people would indeed become impoverished if they bought one of the Birkin handbags. These can cost upwards of £100,000, which is so steep that one would be tempted to think the price reflects the bag’s snob value more than any other.

On balance, I don’t think that paroxysm of collective sorrow was caused by the harrowing thought that henceforth Hermès may have to call their line of jumped-up carry-bags something else.

For Birkin was also known as an actress and singer, more of a celebrity really, if we use those job descriptions in their original meaning. Now, since she was as ethnically British as she was culturally French, I feel I can say what I think of Birkin as an artist without risking ostracism on the other side of the English [sic] Channel. I have a stock reply ready in case my French friends take exception: “She was English, so what’s your problem?”

Miss [sic] Birkin is best remembered for her 1969 hit Je t’aime… moi non plus, a duet sung with her then lover Serge Gainsbourg.

‘Sung’ is actually an overstatement, unless you think coital whispers can have a special mellifluous quality to them. The song’s two protagonists are, not to be too coy about it, shagging and, while on the job, exchanging hardcore running commentary and encouragements.

The title of the song is its first exchange: Je t’aime, whispers Jane (I love you) to which that cad Gainsbourg replies, Moi non plus (Me neither, whatever that means). That put-down doesn’t put him down, as it were.

He then compares his rampant libido to a vague irrésolue, meaning he is in two minds about climaxing. Je vais, je vais et je viens, continues Gainsbourg, “I’m going and coming at the same time”. That to me suggests the Nelson Rockefeller death, in flagrante delicto (in the saddle).

But Serge neither comes nor goes yet. In fact, lest his paramour may misunderstand, he specifies exactly where he’d like to come: Entre tes reins. That’s usually translated as ‘inside you’, but in fact the location is more specific than that (use your imagination).

Jane then waxes all poetic in good Gallic style: Tu es la vague, moi l’île nue, meaning Serge is the wave to Jane’s naked island. The metaphor strikes me as both strained and lame, even though it does convey relevant information: Jane isn’t wearing any clothes, following the recommendation of every reputable sex manual.

Serge then informs Jane that Je me retiens: he is holding back, with the implication that before long he won’t be able to.

Not a problem, as far as Jane is concerned: Tu vas, tu vas et tu viens: “You are going, you are going, and you are coming.” That strikes me as superfluous. If Serge is indeed coming, he doesn’t need Jane to tell him about it: trust me, when that happens, men tend to know it.

But in fact, Jane is telling him not to brag about his epic control: Go ahead et je te rejoins, and I’ll join you.

Then Jane, who clearly had mastered the French knack at doing to philosophy what Serge is doing to her, says in a sultry whisper that L’amour physique est sans issue – physical love is a dead end.

That being the case, Non, maintenant viens – now you can come. One has to assume Serge complies, although we are spared the sound accompaniment.

Don’t know about you, but I can’t escape the impression that artistic immortality is rather easy to come by in France. Just whisper a few sweet pornographic nothings, throw in some cracker-barrel philosophy and Bob est ton oncle, as they don’t say in France.

You are venerated in your lifetime, mourned by millions when you die and even have a £100,000 bag named after you. Let me tell you, moving to France at a young age was a smart move on Jane’s part.

Jane Birkin, RIP

Not in everything, I hasten to disclaim. Atheists can be perfectly intelligent, sometimes even brilliant, in any field unaffected by their atheism.

Yet the moment they try to argue against the existence of God, even otherwise bright people start sounding like petulant children at best, braindead fanatics at worst. And Yevgeny Ponasenkov, the brilliant Russian historian of Russia’s Napoleonic Wars certainly isn’t an exception.

The other day I mentioned his rant against Greta Thunberg and everything she stands for as a typical example of Russian intemperance that compromises even sound views. That’s not the only thing he is a typical example of. He is also living proof of the statement in the title above.

In the same article, I wrote: “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.”

A historian’s articles and interviews on various subjects are one thing; his day job is another. Since Ponasenkov is indeed a brilliant historian, I dipped into his magnum opus, his seminal monograph on the 1812 war, to see if it vindicates my point. I was richly rewarded.

Ponasenkov sets his stall early by explaining why all other historians are pygmies compared to him. You see, he is a materialist who understands Darwin’s theory of evolution. That is the only possible starting point for any scholarly foray into history.

This is arrant nonsense on every level. First, it’s a non sequitur – belief or disbelief in God has nothing to do with systematic study of history, one way or the other.

If a historian treats his subject as strictly a gradual unfolding of divine providence, he isn’t a historian. He may be a theologian or a philosopher, but those are different, if sometimes adjacent, fields. And a secular philosopher who drags his atheism into his field sows it with weeds, stunting the growth of his thought.

I still think that an atheist scholar in any field, especially the humanities, suffers from insurmountable limitations no matter how sound his thought and painstaking his research. But such limitations will show very far down the road, and there is still plenty of solid ground to cover before that point is reached.

Just as religion has no immediate impact on the study of history, neither does Darwin’s theory. Again, a historian who sees his subject as merely the biological evolution of Homo sapiens, may be many things (such as a propagandist, zealot or simply an idiot), but definitely not a historian.

And anyone who believes that Darwinism is incompatible with religious faith is simply wrong. God can create things either instantly or slowly – that’s why he is God.

I happen to regard Darwin’s theory as slipshod, politicised nonsense, at least as an overarching explanation of life. But that judgement is based on an assessment of purely scientific and intellectual arguments pro and con, not on my faith.

This is to say that Ponasenkov’s first shot across the bows of faith misses by a mile. He is an atheist who sees Darwin as gospel truth, but that has nothing to do with his subject. His remark is thus a propagandist diatribe I could charitably ascribe to his youthful exuberance (he was born in 1982).

Then he writes: “I cannot help mentioning that the most detailed and comprehensive answer to the question of why the findings of physicists, biologists, geologists, paleoneurologists do not confirm ancient mythology [that is, Judaeo-Christianity] was found and published in his 2006 monograph The God Delusion by the Oxford professor, great scientist Richard Dawkins.”

This is gibberish that doesn’t become a serious scholar and doesn’t belong in Ponasenkov’s important work. The God Delusion isn’t a monograph – it’s a vulgar and ignorant tract on a subject about which the author knows nothing but emotes a lot.

Neither is Dawkins a great scientist. He is merely the author of lamentably popular books that tickle all the naughty bits of modernity. “Darwin explains everything,” writes Dawkins, and no one capable of making that statement can be described as even an average thinker. Before things evolve, they have to be – and Darwin never even attempted to explain how biological organisms had come into being.

Ponasenkov matches Dawkins’s inanity with his own. Expecting the Bible to vindicate every finding of modern science is committing a category error. Natural science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God, that’s not what it’s for. But while we are on the subject, Genesis “explains everything” much more convincingly than Darwin does – as accepted even by many atheist scientists, some with Nobel Prizes to their name.

His ideologically fervent ignorance of subjects outside the scope of his monograph leads Ponasenkov astray even in his comments on history. Thus he quotes approvingly another fire-eating atheist who ascribes Russia’s troubles to her Byzantine religion.

According to her (and Ponasenkov), Byzantium had no redeeming qualities. That view is common to atheist intellectuals who proceed from a false syllogism: Byzantium was a Christian empire; Christianity is a lie; ergo, Byzantium was useless.

This is the actual quote: “Just think: a civilisation, heir to two of the greatest civilisations of antiquity, existed for several hundred years without leaving A-NY-THING after itself except architecture, some books for the illiterate, lives of saints, and fruitless religious debates.”

Books for the illiterate presumably include the works of John of Damascus, Pseudo-Dionysius, Maximus the Confessor, Michael Psellus and other great Byzantine theologians. That’s where that syllogism kicks in: they were all Christian writers, so they wrote “books for the illiterate”. The effort had to be in vain: illiterate people wouldn’t have been able to read their works, but Ponasenkov won’t be deterred by such small inconsistencies.

And “except architecture”? (Ponasenkov ignores great Byzantine iconography, without which Renaissance painting wouldn’t have been what it became.)

During that period of our – Christian, Mr Ponasenkov – civilisation, architecture was the principal and most poignant expression of the nascent culture. That role was later ceded to music, but dismissing Hagia Sophia, Basilica Cistern, Chora, Basilica of San Vitale and other sublime Byzantine structures as culturally and civilisationally inconsequential is, well, ignorant.

At a less sublime level, the Byzantines were also innovative military engineers. For example, having settled in Rus’, the Vikings sought to conquer Byzantium next, the bigger fish to fry.  However, that particular fish began to fight back by unsportingly using the unique chemical compound, probably petroleum-based, to which the Vikings referred as ‘Greek fire’.

That invention, along with the first hand grenades in history, also thwarted the Arab onslaught on Constantinople – while different Byzantine units communicated with one another through another invention, the beacon system.

Yes, God does punish atheism, and not only in the next life. In Ponasenkov’s case, that’s a shame because his book is an important study of Russian history. And Russia’s present is a child of her past, which makes history an essential applied science. Ponasenkov is right about that.

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.