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“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.     

Facts first. An unidentified BBC presenter, a household name, has paid a teenager of unspecified sex large sums for explicit selfies.

That fair exchange went on for three years, starting when the teenager was 17. The age of consent in Britain is 16, but any person under 18 is covered by the Protection of Children Act 1978. Thus a 17-year-old can marry but is still considered a child for such photographic purposes.

Two months ago, the model’s family complained to the BBC, asking the Corporation to tell the presenter to stop those payments, which by then had totalled £35,000. Apparently, the recipient used his modelling fees to buy crack to which he had become addicted.

(As I’ve mentioned, the teenager’s sex hasn’t been disclosed. Nevertheless, I’m using the masculine personal pronouns for two reasons.

First, grammatical tradition has it that, when the sex is unknown, “a man embraces a woman”, and I won’t go back on it for any half-witted woke reasons. Second, taking a stab in the dark, I suspect the teenager was a boy, on the general assumption that pornographic images of girls are more widely available, less controversial and therefore cheaper. Third, it’s the BBC, isn’t it?)

Yet the BBC waited several weeks before first taking the presenter off the air and then suspending him. That doesn’t even begin to describe his troubles if he is found guilty.

The Metropolitan Police have got into the act, and those chaps play for keeps when such allegations are made. They don’t even bother investigating burglaries and muggings, but give them something naughty, especially with woke implications, and they go all out.

The wayward presenter must be quaking in his Church’s: violating the aforementioned Act is punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Yet if the TV star is also found guilty under the Child Pornography Act, the potential sentence is up to 14 years.

Since the BBC is at this stage protecting the transgressor’s privacy, correctly in my view, speculations are rife about his identity. So rife, in fact, that several presenters have felt called upon to scream “It ain’t me, gov” publicly, or words to that effect.

Meanwhile, I think this case is God’s way of telling the BBC it’s paying its presenters way too much. Shelling out £35,000 for a few dirty pictures, of the kind that supposedly can be downloaded for free, suggests that the sum is but pocket change for the presenter.

So it must be. For example, Gary Lineker is on £1.35 million a year, and that’s after he has taken a pay cut. No wonder he was one of the presenters hastily disclaiming guilt in this scandal.

Now, I don’t think it’s anybody’s business how much a company pays to how many of its employees. This case, however, is different because the BBC is funded by the Exchequer, which is to say by the public – us. That justifies nosiness on my part: after all, a few pennies of that £35,000 came from me.

What’s worse is the hypocrisy of it all, on everyone’s part: the BBC, the newspaper accounts of the scandal, the government, the public.

The whole affair is tawdry, sleazy, immoral, and you can continue this thesaurus of synonymous adjectives on your own. But the pitch of the outcry is as ludicrous as the nature of it is insincere.

First, the same government, acting in the name of the same public and with the approval of most of the same newspapers, concocts a school curriculum designed to sexualise children from kindergarten onwards.

Elementary school teachers use cucumbers to illustrate the proper use of condoms, children are taught that sex with boys/girls/others is perfectly healthy and normal even before one’s teens, various techniques for making it more enjoyable are discussed and illustrated.

Little girls are encouraged to practise sartorial standards traditionally favoured by ladies of easy virtue, little boys are brainwashed to think it’s perfectly normal for them to want to become little girls. Unchaperoned children can visit any website where they watch things that can make even a grown man blush.

Pictures of naked bodies, intertwined or otherwise, are everywhere. The kind of publications that used to be wrapped in cellophane for newsagents to put on the highest shelf are now claiming pride of shelf-place.

By the time a child is 17 nothing is off-limits, few things have been left untried. And then a demigod (the status of any TV star) comes round, offering untold riches for a few selfies the teenager would happily shoot for free. Why not take the money? Neither his school nor (I’m guessing) his family has built any moral barriers in the way of such a transaction.

Thus any pervert, such as the unspecified BBC presenter, has perfectly primed hunting grounds for his exploits. And considering his employer, he has to be a man of the left who doesn’t set much store by traditional morality and probity.

His moral guidance has to come not from Exodus or St Matthew but from Ernest Hemingway: “If it feels good, it’s moral.” So fine, his tastes may be slightly eccentric. But he feels good, the model doesn’t mind, no one gets hurt. So what’s the problem?

I could easily answer that question, but not in a way that a typical BBC presenter can understand. However, whatever the real problem is, it won’t be solved by nailing that pervert to the wall. That doesn’t mean he should be spared: aesthetic balance demands that he be eviscerated, figuratively speaking.

I just wish we were spared hypocritical pronouncements, phony gasps and rolled eyes. We reap what we sow and we get what we should expect – what we deserve.  

There has been much brouhaha lately about banks closing the accounts of some customers. Each time that happens, there is much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, with the wronged customers seeking – and invariably getting – public support for their plight.

The usual allegation is that banks are plugging into the cancel culture of woke modernity, ditching customers whose political views are out of synch with the majority opinion at the BBC and the Guardian.

Nothing would surprise me nowadays, and those poor victims may well be right. However, I suspect the real explanation is probably different.

I don’t think banks can be so selective as to deny custom to potential clients on purely political grounds. If they practised such an exclusion policy consistently, they wouldn’t stay afloat for long.

Assuming for the sake of argument that most board members at major banks have Tory leanings, could they afford to turn away leftish pop stars, footballers, mega-rich actors and indeed BBC presenters? They would be tossing aside millions in assets, something that the board would find hard to explain to the shareholders.

I have a hunch that one possible reason for closing an account is the suspicion that the money was acquired in dubious ways and may be used for dubious purposes. That gives rise to the concern that the potential blow to the bank’s reputation may negate any gain generated by the account.

For example, if a bank were gaining notoriety as a money laundry for the mob, it would be well-advised to get rid of the iffy accounts. I’m sure most bankers would agree, and not for any moral reasons either.

Their rationale would be based on dispassionate, hardnosed calculations, an activity at which British bankers excel. As an American friend, himself a banker, once told me, his British colleagues would “foreclose on their starving mothers if the bottom line demanded it”.

Two test cases have caught my eye, those involving Nigel Farage and ‘Countess’ Alexandra Tolstoy.

(I put her title in quotes because I consider it of limited validity. Russia never had primogeniture, meaning that all the children of, say, a count would also be counts even when their father was still alive. Thus, if a 70-year-old count had five children, and each of them were as fertile, one title would produce 31 counts within just three generations.)

When Coutts, England’s most exclusive bank, cancelled Nigel Farage’s account, he screamed bloody murder, and Mr Farage knows how to turn the volume up to its highest setting. He had been cancelled, he shouted, because of his uncompromising campaign for Brexit.

That doesn’t quite ring true. After all, 52 per cent of the British voted for Brexit, and many of them weren’t shy about expressing their views publicly. Some of my friends were UKIP members, and one even its leader for a spell. None of them has had his banking privileges withdrawn.

Coutts originally ascribed its decision to Mr Farage’s receiving some £500,000 in fees for his regular appearances on Russia Today, Putin’s propaganda channel. Farage and his representatives vigorously protested: that £500,000 represented his total income that year, with only £5,000 or so coming from RT. That’s all right then.

Yet numbers shouldn’t affect the principle: someone who steals £10 is as much of a thief as someone who steals £100. You might say that getting a fee from RT isn’t the same as theft, and I’d agree. It isn’t. It’s much worse.

Any appearance on a propaganda channel will serve the purposes of propaganda, for otherwise there would be no appearance. RT was using Farage as one of the syringes injecting its fascist poison into the West’s bloodstream.

Farage worked hard for his money even outside RT’s good offices. In 2014 he named Putin as the world leader he most admired.

While expressing token disapproval of the annexation of the Crimea, Farage declared it was really the EU’s fault. That pernicious organisation had “blood on its hands” for encouraging rebellion in the Ukraine. “If you poke the Russian bear with a stick he will respond,” was how Farage explained that prelude to the current war.

That was the official Kremlin line, with Farage and the leader he most admired singing it in unison. Since even then Putin didn’t bother to conceal his all-consuming hatred of the West, brandishing his nuclear shiv regularly, Farage was in effect an enemy agent – morally, if not quite legally.

I’m sure – and so probably is Coutts – that Farage still holds the same views, even if he is less vociferous in expressing them. That may legitimately make Coutts concerned that its client’s money partly came from a criminal setup and might conceivably be used to further its cause.

That strikes me as a good enough reason to reject Farage’s business, but the bank has since changed its tune. Mr Farage, it explained, falls under the threshold of £1 million in investible income every Coutts customer must have.

If I were him, I’d call their bluff by continuing to appear on RT until my account reached the required level. Scratch that: there isn’t enough money in the world to make me do Putin’s bidding. A few appearances on the BBC were bad enough, but I’d never stoop any lower.

The other test case involves Miss ‘Countess’ Tolstoy, whose account at NatWest has recently been closed. Her family is also in cahoots with Putin, which I had a chance of discovering first-hand a few years ago.

Miss Tolstoy’s brother kept pestering me with e-mailed diatribes each time I described Putin’s regime as the kleptofascist abomination it is. I’m sure he got his cue from his father, Nikolai, whose books on Second World War history I greatly respect.

That’s more than I can say for his person, certainly since the 1812 Ball I ill-advisedly attended years ago. That important event in London’s social calendar was organised by old Russian émigrés, most of whom, like Nikolai Tolstoy, were born and bred in Britain.

Presiding over the festivities, he announced with pride the presence of the Russian ambassador, “Our ambassador, ladies and gentlemen!” I demonstratively walked out, unable to contain the emetic reaction.

Later, his objectionable son accused me of treason: “If you don’t like your country, why don’t you go back and make it better” he demanded angrily. I could have explained to him that I left Russia long before he was born, don’t consider it my country (never did, actually) and, unlike the Tolstoys, don’t hold dual citizenship (I do, in fact, but the other one is US, not Russian).

However, realising that no such effort would have the slightest effect, I simple broke through my, admittedly thin, civilised veneer and told the idiot to perform a ballistically improbable act on himself.

Now his sister is in the news, and her links with Putin’s Russia are even more intimate. NatWest has declared her a PEP (politically exposed person), meaning a potential embarrassment.

For many years Miss Tolstoy lived with Sergei Pugachev, by whom she bore three children. Pugachev was widely described as an ‘oligarch’ and ‘Putin’s banker’, terms one could use interchangeably with ‘gangster’ and ‘money launderer’.

Her paramour was under investigation in Britain, but violated a court order by skipping the country in 2015. Miss Tolstoy claims she isn’t in contact with the fugitive and receives no support from him for herself and her children. I find that unlikely and, more important, evidently so does NatWest.

Miss Tolstoy demanded an explanation and received an unequivocal reply: “We’re not obliged to enter into any discussion or provide a reason for our decision. We’ve reviewed our rationale behind the decision and, unfortunately, this remains unchanged. We therefore won’t be meeting with you or discussing this further.”

Quite right too. A bank or any other business can refuse to serve anyone it chooses.

We expect banks to exercise that right selectively and rarely, and so they do. My contention is that in these two cases, they acted not only legally but also correctly. But I’m sure not everyone will agree.

What do you call a man who doesn’t believe in God? An atheist. And what do you call a priest who doesn’t believe in God, doesn’t understand basic theology, but upholds every woke fad going? The Archbishop of York.

One has to arrive at this melancholy conclusion every time the Most Rev Stephen Cottrell, the second most senior Anglican prelate, opens his mouth in public.

This time His Grace delivered himself on the Lord’s Prayer, whose wording he considers problematic. I’m sure the originator of that text must apply the same adjective to His Grace.

The eloquent way he explains the nature of the problem brings to mind the great preachers of the past, from St Paul onwards. The famous pagan orators, such as Demosthenes and Cicero, also rate a mention as worthy precursors. But judge for yourself:

“I know the word ‘father’ is problematic for those whose experience of earthly fathers has been destructive and abusive and for all of us who have laboured rather too much from an oppressively patriarchal grip on life — then those of us who say this prayer together, whether we like it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not, even if we determinedly face away from each other only turning round in order to put a knife in the back of the person standing behind us, are sisters and brothers, family members, the household of God.”

Let me see if I get this right. Even though we’d dearly love to stab one another (incidentally, that feat would be easier to accomplish on a person standing in front of us), we are all sisters and brothers, members of the same family in the household of God. Yet people are siblings by virtue of sharing two parents, or at least one. In every language I am familiar with, parents are identified as ‘father’ and ‘mother’.

So God has to be either one or the other, and his son seems to have settled the issue by referring to God as Father and telling believers to start their daily prayer with “Our Father, which art in heaven…”.

One would think that even in our gender-fluid times any priest has a professional obligation to accept Jesus Christ as something of an authority on such matters. Where is the problem then?

It’s true that many earthly fathers take a rather lackadaisical view of parental duties. And yes, their offspring may have unpleasant associations with the concept of fatherhood.

However, I’d suggest it’s the pastoral duty of any priest, never mind a prelate, to explain to Kevin what’s what. God the Father, Kev, shouldn’t be equated with your Dad, who shagged your Mum, did a runner, and turns up only every couple of years to shag your Mum again, nick her social cheque, and then use you and her in lieu of a football or a punching bag.

God the Father isn’t that kind of bloke. In fact, Kev, God isn’t a bloke at all – he is God. He is called Father because he created us all and guides us lovingly through life, the way your Dad doesn’t.

I wouldn’t take Kevin into the thicket of recondite theology, but the Archbishop should understand, and be able to explain, why the first hypostasis of the Holy Trinity is called Father. This is how I tried to do so in an earlier piece:

“Judaeo-Christian God made the world as a free act of absolute creation, that is out of nothing (ab nihilo).

“The human father imitates this act by initiating conception. Though both he and the woman are essential to it, the man, by impregnating the woman, is the active agent; the woman, by being impregnated, is the passive one.

“Thus, referring to God as ‘he’ is a sound metaphor. But it’s also a sound analogy, for a father embodies what theologians call the ‘principle’ of procreation.

“Because a man procreates outside his own body, he stands outside and above his creation in the sense in which a woman doesn’t. She conceives and gestates the child inside her body, and in that sense the child is a part of her, even though the man also contributes his DNA.

“Symbolically the couple imitates the act of divine creation. The man is both transcendent (standing outside and above his creation) and immanent (present within it). The woman, on the other hand, is only immanent.

“The reason theologians insist on referring, both metaphorically and analogously, to God as father is that his transcendence is a more important property than his immanence.”

Kevin’s feelings about his Dad don’t come into this at all – they belong in a totally different spiritual and physical realm. Kevin’s plight is awful, but a priest isn’t above all a social worker, and nor is Jesus Christ a Shadow Home Secretary.

However, there’s something Kevin may not know, but a priest should. Orphanages were among the first institutions created by the early Christians acting in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Such institutions, along with those for the care of the old and infirm, widows, lepers and cripples rapidly spread already during Constantine’s reign. In fact, the emperor Julian the Apostate, who had switched from Arian Christianity back to his beloved paganism, reluctantly praised the ‘Galileans’ for looking after the weak and needy, “not only theirs, but ours as well,” so much better than the pagans did.

The church was thus willing to provide not only spiritual solace for children like Kevin but also tangible support, shelter, food and education. That was an attempt to ensure that children who lost their fathers would never remain fatherless.

The ‘problem’ highlighted by His Grace is new to me. So new, in fact, that one begins to suspect many of today’s Anglicans are actively looking for ways of taking Christ out of Christianity. The older problem, that of God’s pronouns, hasn’t gone away though.

In fact, the Church of England is about to switch to ‘non-gendered’ pronouns in honour of a fad that’s not only secular but aggressively atheist. Thus, the Rev Christina Rees said the Archbishop “has put his finger on an issue that’s a really live issue for Christians and has been for many years”.

I’m sure that’s “a really live issue for Christians” like her, those whose mission in life seems to be vulgarising Christianity into extinction. I’ll refrain from enlarging on my view of female priesthood, other than saying I regard it as an abomination.

But whatever one’s views on clerical ladies may be, any person with a modicum of taste would abhor the way the Rev Christina bemoans that: “It’s the way it’s been set for so long and so we’re stuck. And because Jesus called God ‘Daddy’, we think we have to call God ‘Daddy’.”

Alas, I am incapable of reading the Scripture in its original languages, but in no translation I’ve ever seen does Jesus refer to God as ‘Daddy’, ‘Dad’, ‘Pop’, ‘Pa’ or any such familiar term. The Rev Christina obviously wants to kill two birds with one stone.

First, she is out to reconfirm her woke credentials by insisting on a ‘non-gendered’ God. Second, she is trying to imply her special intimacy with God, with whom she seems to be on more familiar terms than even Jesus was.

In fact, she succeeds only in parading her staggering ignorance, irreverence and – I’m sure – crypto-atheism. She is such a strong living argument against female priesthood that I consider the case closed.

His Grace, however, isn’t a woman. Hence he must be a strong living argument against something else — I’ll let you decide what.

No, I didn’t think so. But suppose you had, and the question in the title is put to you by the disembodied voice of a phone pollster.

Now, you know you’ve just dismembered your neighbour and dumped him piecemeal into rubbish skips. So how do you answer that question? Yes or no? You realise that if you say ‘yes’, the pollster will probably forget all about confidentiality, call the police, and you’ll be in for a long stretch at His Majesty’s pleasure.

Hence you suppress whatever impulse you might have to come clean and say something like “Of course, I haven’t. Who do you think I am?”

Does this hypothetical scenario make psychological sense? It does? Good. Now you understand where the 80 per cent support for Putin comes from in Russia.

Even the meekest opposition to the Special Military Operation (SMO, otherwise known as Russia’s aggressive war on the Ukraine) is punishable by draconian prison terms, never less than five years and sometimes as long as 25. Each time such a sentence is passed, all Russian media publicise the verdict widely and incessantly, pour encourager les autres.

Suddenly, out of the blue, the phone rings, and a Russian citizen living his life in fear of putting a foot wrong is asked to answer these four questions (the questionnaire is recent and real, not imaginary).

1. Do you support Vladimir Putin’s domestic and foreign policies?

2. Do you consider Putin’s decision to start the SMO to be correct?

3. Do you support the SMO?

4. Do you consider the negative information about the Russian army to be true?  

Suppose for the sake of argument that our respondent 1) detests Putin’s policies, foreign and domestic, 2) considers the decision to start the SMO to be criminal, 3) emphatically doesn’t support the SMO and 4) believes all negative information about the Russian army to be true.

How likely is he to respond in that vein? Knowing that he may well spend the rest of his life in prison? Oh, I’m sure some intrepid individuals still speak their mind – I remember doing so myself, in my Soviet youth. But such people were in the minority then, and they are in the minority now.

In fact, in my day that minority was smaller than it seems to be now: if statistics are to be believed, 20 per cent of the Russians reply ‘no’ to some such questions. Given the circumstances, that’s a respectable number.

Those people would rather risk their liberty than strike the Faustian deal with the devil. And their liberty isn’t the worst risk they take.

Putin’s fascist thugs are just as likely to dispense with the casuistic shenanigans of quasi-legal proceedings and settle political or business scores the old-fashioned way: with guns, crowbars, poison or a simple push out of the window.

Dozens of journalists and opposition politicians have suffered that fate in recent months. And the number of top Russian businessmen falling out of windows makes one wonder about the structural safety of Russian residential architecture.

Just a few days ago, Kristina Baikova, vice president of a major bank, plunged to her death from her flat window in Moscow – and she is far from the only one. There is a veritable epidemic of defenestration afflicting Russian executives, especially in the oil industry and banking, practically the only money-making parts of the Russian economy.

‘Unexplained’ deaths of healthy, vigorous executives in their 30s and 40s are also rife. These are typically described as suicide, with those upwardly mobile youngsters either poisoning themselves with exotic compounds or beating themselves to death with aforementioned crowbars.

The political situation inside Russia can only be properly understood in the right context: that of fascist Italy or Nazi Germany. And Russia’s business climate evokes fond recollections of Chicago during Prohibition.

Hannah Arendt’s phrase, the banality of evil, was meant to describe the Nazi Holocaust. However, it deserves a wider application. In Putin’s Russia, evil has become the norm, part of the daily routine that is as likely to cause ennui as outrage.

People used to think of evil acts as one-off incidents and even try to find rational explanations for them.

Razing the capital of Chechnya, Grozny, whose population was 80 per cent Russian? Oh well, there’s a war on. Things happen, even very nasty things.

Attack on Georgia? That’s unpleasant, but those Georgians must have asked for it.

Journalists murdered by the dozen? Shame, that. But perhaps they weren’t murdered after all, or else the guilty parties were jealous spouses or jilted lovers (the FSB put forth this last explanation when Paul Klebnikov, the American editor of the Russian Forbes, was machinegunned by two people in the centre of Moscow – jealous husbands tool up well in Russia, and they bring friends along).

However, as such crimes multiplied, the people’s nerve endings began to atrophy. The self-preservation instinct kicked in, and personal survival became the order of the day. Along with the hope that the outer limit of evil has already been reached.

Yes, Putin grabbed the Crimea. But surely he won’t move into mainland Ukraine. Oh, he has, hasn’t he? At least he won’t bomb civilians in their houses, hospitals and schools. Well, never mind that. Surely he won’t blow up the Kakhovka dam? That would destroy one of the best agricultural areas in Europe, not to mention the ensuing ecological disaster. He did? You don’t say. But that’s it – he won’t blow up the nuclear power station at Zaporozhe. That would be ten times worse than Chernobyl… but then the radiation wouldn’t reach me.

At least we still have enough food, and nobody has bombed our apartment block. People getting murdered and imprisoned for no good reason? Perhaps. But as long as I keep my head down, I’ll be all right…

And then the phone rings. A man with a velvety voice wonders if you wouldn’t mind answering a few yes or no questions…