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The other day Boris Johnson wrote a glowing panegyric for the ill-fated crew of the Titan submersible. The article was long, but its title cum lead paragraph really said everything Mr Johnson had to say on the matter:

“Lefties sneer. But those brave souls on the submarine died in a cause – pushing out the frontiers of human knowledge – that’s typically British and fills me with pride.”

This isn’t journalism. It’s an election leaflet that says nothing about the Titan catastrophe, while saying a lot about the route back to politics Johnson is charting for himself.

The salient points are instantly obvious: Johnson isn’t a leftie because lefties sneer at the tragedy and Johnson doesn’t. Neither is he a reactionary – he is all in favour of pushing back those proverbial frontiers. But he is a patriot, which is why he proudly if vicariously participates in any great feat accomplished by the British. In fact, accomplishing such feats is a typical trait of the British and, by association, Johnson. Ergo, vote for Johnson the next chance you get.

Now, I’m not a leftie either, but that’s not why I don’t sneer at Titan’s deaths. Actually, I’m not sure such sneering has a political dimension to it at all. This is about basic decency, not politics.

Yet at the same time I resent the implication that anyone who finds anything wrong with the Titan expedition is tarred with the leftie brush. I know it’s hard for a politician to see the world as anything other than partisan confrontations, but it’s possible for a man to disagree with Johnson and still remain conservative.

Moreover, I’d go so far as to suggest that disagreeing with Mr Johnson on most subjects, including this one, is an essential qualification for a conservative. One characteristic of that breed is the imperative to think before speaking or writing. Yet Mr Johnson treats that requirement with cold disregard.   

First, exploration that pushes out the frontiers of human knowledge isn’t typically British. It’s typically human, and I can prove it with just a list of names: Ericson, Columbus, Cabot, Vespucci, Magellan, Diaz, Marco Polo, Vasco de Gama, Amundsen, Nansen, Peary – to say nothing of Neil Armstrong.

None of them was British, though all of them were true explorers. Hamish Harding and his friends weren’t. They were adventurous tourists in pursuit of an adrenaline rush, which to me betokens a certain paucity of inner resources.

That’s not how Johnson sees them: “Hamish Harding and his fellows were trying to take a new step for humanity, to popularise undersea travel, to democratise the ocean floor.”

Considering that a seat on Titan cost the best part of £200,000, this democracy is more Athenian than British. If we want to designate those fellows with a Greek word, plutocracy comes to mind more readily.

They weren’t archaeologists, oceanographers or marine biologists. They were holiday-makers looking for exciting action, not a way to expand the boundaries of human knowledge. As to undersea travel, there is no need to popularise it – it’s already quite popular among certain groups, namely smugglers.

They have been using submarines for ages, for example to transport contraband to places like Panama and then on to North America. There aren’t too many eagle-eyed customs officers down below, which offers endless possibilities for pushing out the frontiers of human greed.

Other than that, I don’t see any obvious advantages to travelling undersea, especially since oversea traffic is never particularly heavy. One doesn’t see too many jams in the Atlantic.

As to travelling undersea in a craft like Titan, that undertaking smacked of a suicide mission. The submersible hadn’t been properly tested and certified, and some of its parts were off-the-shelf trinkets purchasable at any DIY store.

Some real experts had issued dire warnings, saying that Titan was unsafe. That didn’t deter those extreme tourists: mortal danger injects even more adrenaline into the bloodstream, which is the whole point.

Many years ago I saw a poster saying: “Noah’s Ark was built by an amateur. The Titanic was built by a professional.” Titan was built by professionals too, but those who were as lackadaisical about fine detail as the designers of the Titanic. But to make matters worse, Titan was crewed by amateurs, and not by real explorers.

They were reckless, but this is a particular type of recklessness. It’s a trademark of blasé men who have made a lot of money and don’t quite know how to extract maximum pleasure out of their wealth.

I’ve met many such self-made men, and the impression is they are never quite finished. That’s understandable: making a fortune in today’s world involves such single-minded focus of one’s mind and energy that there is nothing left to develop faculties like spirit, culture and intellect.

However, once the purpose of one’s life has been achieved, the adrenalin reservoir gets depleted and needs to be replenished. Rather than rejoicing about having plenty of time to enjoy spiritual and cultural pursuits, the nouveau-riche acutely senses a deep void.

He needs to do something with his time, and not just any old thing. He needs his adrenalin fix that making money used to provide, but spending it in any ordinary ways doesn’t. Hence he climbs Mount Everest, flies into space or dives 2.5 miles deep in a jerry-built craft.

Like an addict he needs ever greater doses of the drug – and like a real addict he doesn’t stop to think about the dangers involved. Getting that fix is all that matters.

Not being a leftie, I don’t think people should be prevented from harming themselves, provided they don’t harm anyone else. Nor do I begrudge them their wealth – on the contrary, I congratulate them for it. And when they kill themselves, I don’t sneer – I pray for their souls.

Yet neither do I admire them, nor feel pride if they happen to be British. In fact, I’d rather they were more careful about preserving God’s generous gift to us: life. And more devoted to cultivating the faculties of mind and spirit that are the greatest parts of that gift.

The crew of Titan, RIP

P.S. Here’s something else for Boris Johnson to be proud about: British cultural influence on the world. One sees all over France posters for the movement to abolish police. The movement is called 1312, and one has to be a particularly perverse collector of slang to figure out why.

The fact is that many British criminals have tattooed on their four knuckles the letters ACAB, which stands for All Cops Are Bastards. If you assign their alphabetical numbers to those letters, you get 1312.

That’s what I call cultural colonialism, and my French friends ought to be proud of their countrymen’s multilingual adroitness. One only wishes it were applied to a worthier end.

Historical parallels vindicate Euclid by never converging. Sometimes they also defy Euclid by almost converging. Hence Evgeniy Prigozhin comes close to being a composite image of the three gentlemen in the title.

Alaric, the king of the Visigoths, turned his Roman weapons against Rome and sacked it in 410 AD. His private army had been in the vanguard of the Roman forces defeating the Franks.

However, though Alaric’s casualties had run into many thousands, he had received little recognition from Rome. The disgruntled general then led his men in a march on Rome, effectively putting paid to the Roman Empire.

Lenin, whose claim to being the greatest modern villain has been undeservedly usurped by Stalin and Hitler, knew that the only way for him to seize and keep power in Russia was to wage war on the Russian people.

Capitalising on the demoralising effect of several frontline defeats, Lenin stated his aim as “transforming the imperialist war into a civil one”. He was as good as his word, plunging Russia into an internecine conflict that killed millions of people and turned the country into ruins. Russia then did a Phoenix and rose out of the ruins as history’s most evil regime, brushing aside even Nazi Germany’s claim to the same title.

In response to Lenin’s challenge, tsarist generals Alexeyev, Kornilov, Denikin and Admiral Kolchak rose in revolt. Denikin’s Volunteer Army, formed in the south, advanced on Moscow in 1919. The Whites took Rostov-on-Don and Voronezh, but then their thrust ran out of steam.

Do you detect the parallels? Like Alaric’s troops, Prigozhin’s Wagner Group of mercenaries have spearheaded Putin’s offensive, specifically the attack on Bakhmut. They suffered heavy casualties, but eventually claimed their Pyrrhic victory by taking that strategically irrelevant town.

Like the Romans, Putin and his people began to fear their mercenaries more than the actual enemies. They treated them with disrespect, which is never forgiven in criminal circles, the true alma mater of both Putin and especially Prigozhin. (The latter spent nine years in Soviet prisons, and not for political crimes either. His stock in trade was fraud and armed robbery.)

Prigozhin has been railing against the Russian high command for months, accusing Defence Minister Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Gerasimov of deliberately sabotaging his troops by denying them the necessary ammunition.

As Wagner losses mounted, his language was getting more and more obscene, and Russian is ideally suited for that form of self-expression. However, Prigozhin made sure he never aimed his rants specifically at Putin, whose servant and confidant he used to be.

Finally, some three weeks ago, Prigozhin delivered himself of a tirade that sounded as if he had thrown caution into the wind: “They [meaning the Russian generals] blindly follow Grandpa, and Grandpa is a total arsehole.”

‘Grandpa’ is a term opposition journalists use to describe Putin. Clearly, Prigozhin went too far and Putin had to respond.

Respond he did, by reminding his TV audience that private armies are unconstitutional, and we all know how pedantically Putin observes the constitution, chapter and verse. Hence, he continued, all Wagner fighters should disarm and sign contracts with the regular army.

That would have deprived Prigozhin of his power base, which explains why he categorically refused to comply. That insubordination couldn’t go unpunished, and Russian artillery and air force took some pot shots at Prigozhin’s men, killing a few.

The latter saw red and did a Lenin, effectively calling for transforming the wrong war against the Ukraine (not morally wrong, you understand, just wrongly pursued) into a right civil one.

This is what he actually said, and I haven’t seen a more or less complete translation of his remarks in any of our papers:

“They’ve tried to disband the Wagner Group, making it impossible for us to defend our homes… Today, having seen our unbending resolve, they delivered missile strikes at our rear camps. A great number of fighters, our comrades, perished. We’ll have to decide how to respond to that evil act. The next move is ours.”

Yesterday, Prigozhin made it clear what the next move was to be. His private army of 25,000 cutthroats advanced on Rostov-on-Don, took it without a shot and marched north to take Voronezh. This is eerily the same route as the one taken by Denikin’s Volunteer Army in 1919, which should please no end every proponent of the plus ça change concept of history. The ultimate destination is also the same: Moscow.

Those proponents may get further joy from Prigozhin’s statement this morning, again with echoes of the erstwhile Whites. Back in 1918 they had stated their intention to rid Russia of the Bolsheviks and then honour Russia’s wartime obligations to her allies, and Prigozhin’s statement vaguely reflected the same spirit:

“The evil personified by our military leaders must be stopped.” [Note that, though Prigozhin didn’t mention Putin by name, he is the commander-in-chief of the Russian forces, the ultimate military leader.] Those who resist us will be treated as a threat and eliminated immediately… I am asking everyone to remain calm, not to respond to provocation, stay at home and ideally not to go out along our route. After we have finished what we have started, we’ll return to the front to defend our Motherland [meaning to carry on the bandit raid on the Ukraine]… We’ll sort out those who kill Russian soldiers and go back to the frontline. Justice will have been restored in the army and then all over Russia…

“There are 25,000 of us, and we’re going to get to the bottom of the unlimited corruption in the country. Those 25,000 are the tactical reserve, and the strategic reserve is the whole army and the whole country. Everyone who wants to join us is welcome – it’s time we put an end to this outrage… This isn’t a military coup, it’s a justice march.”

There is every indication that Prigozhin’s entreaty is finding a good response. None of the troops and police forces in Rostov put up any resistance, and the city houses the headquarters of the whole Russian southern army.

As I write this, the Wagner troops are within a couple of hundred miles of Moscow, whose mayor has introduced emergency restrictions, including those on the movement of people and transport. Spot searches are being conducted all over the city.

Putin made his own televised address this morning, in which he described the events as exactly what Prigozhin said they weren’t, a military coup. Putin liberally bandied about various synonyms for treason and betrayal, and those were the words his interpreters used in English.

In one instance that wasn’t quite accurate though, for Putin used the word otstupnichestvo, which means apostasy. That introduced a sacral note to the proceedings, implicitly equating Putin’s resistance to Prigozhin with the Albigensian Crusade.

But enough of the historical parallels. Let’s try to understand what it all means. Call it a coup, call it a mutiny, call it anything you want, but the development is hugely important.

Prigozhin has no political or administrative body carrying his message to the masses (like the Whites, and yes, I know I promised no more history). His 25,000 fighters are better than anything the Russian army has, better trained, better motivated, more battle-hardened. But they are too greatly outnumbered to succeed on their own.

Assuming that Prigozhin genuinely wants to do what he says, his chances don’t look good – unless the largely demoralised regular soldiers begin to desert in droves and swell Wagner’s ranks. However, I find it hard to believe that there isn’t some Kremlin conspiracy supporting Prigozhin, secretly for the time being.

The war they started isn’t going well. It’s reasonably clear that, unless Russia goes nuclear, she will lose in the end. And the consequences of going nuclear will be awful probably and unpredictable definitely.

In any case, Putin’s regime in its present state is unlikely to survive any end to the war other than a resounding victory, and that’s not on the cards. This bodes badly for Putin personally: he probably won’t survive even physically, never mind politically. But what about the gangsters who surround him?

They have to be looking out for number one, and I assure you that’s not the good of the country. Their natural instinct has to be putting all the blame on Putin and exculpating themselves. They have to be looking for an alternative leader, and there have been some reports that Nikolai Patrushev, a career KGB/FSB officer and head of the Security Council, has been approached as the potential head of the provisional government (can’t get rid of historical allusions, can I?).

If that offer was indeed made, Patrushev turned it down. It’s quite possible that Prigozin’s ambitions reach as high as that, but he would lack international credibility. His Wagnerians have murdered too many people (some with sledgehammers), raped too many women, castrated too many men, looted too many households for Prigozhin to emerge as a knight in shining armour.

His role is probably that of the battering ram punching through the Kremlin wall and making it possible for others to rush through the breach. That’s accepting his coup on face value.

However, it’s also possible that the whole escapade has been designed by Putin to rally the population whose enthusiasm for the war is flagging. Prigozhin’s advance may enable Putin to introduce a state of emergency and declare a general mobilisation, for example.

The possibilities are numerous, and none of them is especially promising. If the conflict between Prigozhin and Putin is real, then the Ukrainian army will benefit. Its own offensive may accelerate, what with the aggressors fighting one another.

But even if real, the clash isn’t between good and evil but rather between two evils. Both Putin and Prigozhin are equally hideous and criminal, both are implacable enemies of the West. So will be any government formed by Putin’s hangers-on, and I can’t see any other valid candidates.

Still, there is a chance that this squabble may put an end to the massacre of the Ukraine, which has to be seen as a good outcome. But let’s not get our hopes up: Russia will remain a threat for any foreseeable future.

This won’t be a case of a good tsar replacing a bad one. The next Russian government will be a Stalin to Putin’s Lenin. Or else, a Hitler replaced by a government led by Goering and Himmler. Or… well, now is really the time to put an end to historical analogies. You get the picture.     

Our education is progressive, isn’t it? Of course it is, and I for one observe its progression with unflagging interest.

Each new step follows the previous one inexorably: from ineffectual to ideological to immoral to wicked to sinister to evil to downright satanic. The recent reports I’ve seen suggest that the satanic phase has already been reached, leaving me wondering what the next step will be. Human sacrifice?

As part of the compulsory RSE classes (Relationships and Sex Education), children, both boys and girls, are taught to masturbate and given masturbation as homework.

This invaluable tuition is graphically illustrated with line drawings of boys and girls engaging in that activity. Meanwhile, girls as young as 12 are told to seek amorous pleasure in vaginal, anal and oral sex.

Children are also offered a way out of a lexical conundrum I always find baffling: the difference between sex and gender. Gender to me has always been a purely grammatical category, but I can’t help noticing that the word has acquired new meanings. One of them overlaps with what I previously described as sex.

So, along with 9-year-old readers of a school textbook, I have gratefully learned that “gender is the state of being male or female socially or culturally” while “sex is the state of being male or female biologically”. The two may or may not coincide.

So defined, sex can be dismissed as an utter irrelevance. It’s gender that defines a person, and the definition is endlessly fluid.

Some people, explain our educators, are born in the wrong body. If that’s how they feel, they owe it themselves, and implicitly also to the good of society, to change their gender by publicly identifying as something else. At the same time they are encouraged to change their sex as well – which apparently is going to cost the state a pretty penny in legal settlements.

Over 1,000 families are launching a massive group lawsuit against the NHS for rushing children into taking puberty-blockers. The children sought that help because they were encouraged by their teachers to take charge of their own sexuality.

The other day I was doing a podcast on this very subject, and one of my listeners commented – correctly – that it should be up to the parents to take care of their children’s sex education. I readily agreed, but added that how things should be isn’t necessarily how they are.

In this case, parents are helpless to save their children from such satanic indoctrination. One mother, Clare Page, demanded to see the contents of the lessons taught to her 15-year-old daughter in her RSE classes.

The school refused, explaining that it was none of Mrs Page’s business – she is nothing but a mother after all. The irate woman sued, but the judge predictably found for the school.

Now, you might think this is a fight in which I have no dog: not only my son but also his children are way past school age. That is true, but, quite apart from my general abhorrence of any satanic practices, our progressive education has a direct effect on what I do.  

You see, I often rely on satire to make a point, but modernity conspires to knock that weapon out of my hands. It outpaces the most fecund satirical imagination, making it superfluous and irrelevant.

In this case, I’ve been known to suggest that, if children are encouraged to identify as anything they wish, why should it be limited to gender? Why can’t they identify as members of other species? After all, specism goes against the most sacred tenet of modernity, inclusion.

However, the beauty of modernity is that it can make the most dystopic, hyperbolic fantasy come true. Hence I wasn’t especially surprised to read that teachers are now encouraging pupils to identify as cats, horses or dinosaurs.

Such anthropomorphised animals (or bestiamorphised humans) are called ‘furries’, and they must be accepted on their own terms. When some pupils refuse to do so, all hell breaks loose. One 13-year-old girl, for example, was branded as “despicable” by her teacher for rejecting the idea that her classmate was now a cat because she identified as such.

One pupil at a state secondary school in Wales answers her teacher’s questions not in English but with “meow”. And no, she isn’t just speaking Welsh, and if that’s what you think I’ll have to report you to the Equalities Commission.

Two teenage pupils in East Sussex were ordered to stay behind in class after being nasty to their classmate who identifies as a cat. One of the girls secretly recorded their teacher reprimanding them for their reactionary intransigence and also for their view that gender is strictly binary. According to the teacher such views are “very sad” and “really despicable”.

The number of furries is growing, and the Safer Schools organisation has issued guidance on how to support children identifying as animals. The organisation’s website talks about the furry “community”, sometimes described as “fursonas”. Members of that community do something Safer Schools describes as “normal”.

William Golding managed to publish his Lord of the Flies in the nick of time. Today every self-respecting publisher would reject his manuscript as being too anodyne and oh-so-yesterday. Young people no longer have to act like animals. They can act as the animals they identify as being.

In Michigan, some parents took exception to their school district that allegedly provides lavatory litter boxes for pupils who identify as furries. The superintendent of the school district denied the rumour and called it “unconscionable”. He should change his tune sharpish if he wants to keep his job. Furries have the same rights as all other pupils who are all free to identify as anything they want – and have their lavatorial rights protected by law.

It’s not only my modest satirical abilities that modernity renders useless. Even Messrs Juvenal, Rabelais and Swift, giants of the genre, would find themselves unemployed in today’s West.

The question we need to ask is “Why?” Why have our schools stopped being educational facilities, becoming instead centres for satanic ideological indoctrination? Do our ‘educators’ genuinely think they thereby benefit their pupils, preparing them to face the vagaries of grown-up lives?

I might think that had I not seen it all before, in the Soviet Union. There school curricula, certainly in the humanities but also in the natural sciences, were designed to act as smithies of the new species, Soviet Man. The aim of education, if it existed at all, was subservient to the aim of indoctrination.

Thus, when I was 10, I was taught that “the atom was the smallest and further indivisible particle of matter”. My teachers knew – and even I did – that the Soviet Union was already making thousands of godawful bombs based on the fact that the atom was very much divisible. But that was neither here nor there: ideology trumped facts.

Our teachers don’t believe that girls can be boys (or furries) any more than Soviet teachers believed that (as one of them tried to convince me) the Berlin Wall had been built to keep at bay hordes of West Germans rushing towards the communist paradise of the DDR.

Their beliefs don’t matter, reality doesn’t matter, morality doesn’t matter, sanity doesn’t matter. Only the ideology does.

And any ideology can only ever be shoved down people’s throats by coercive means. In the Soviet Union they had prisons and concentration camps for those who dared to resist. In today’s West, we rely on reprimands, sackings and ostracism – for the time being.

When such vegetarian measures stop working, more carnivorous ones will come into play. They always do, sooner or later.

I describe the current obsession with deviant sexuality and insane identifications in our schools as satanic, a term some may find too emotionally charged. It isn’t. It strikes me as an accurate description.

But fine, I’ll settle for penile dementia with a touch of bestiality. Yes, that works.

I wrote about Nancy Mitford the other day, which reminded me of another bestseller she wrote, Noblesse Oblige (1956).

There she developed the concept first introduced by Prof. Alan Ross: U (as in ‘Upper Class’) and Non-U. Mitford described the tell-tale signs, mostly but not exclusively linguistic, by which one could identify different social classes.

The little book became a huge success, mainly because most people didn’t realise it was merely a tongue-in-cheek attempt to épater les bourgeois. That is a rather exclusive game, typically played only by two groups: the upper classes and, mostly, creative intelligentsia. Since Mitford straddled both groups, few could do it better.

Later, in 1983, Paul Fussell wrote an American equivalent, titled Class. His effort was more detailed and, interestingly, caused even more of a stir. Understandably so, for Americans have always found class to be a painful subject best avoided at all costs.

To that end they like to claim that social classes don’t really exist in the US and, if they do, no one pays any attention to the differences. Fussell exposed that myth for what it is: wishful thinking. In fact, he wrote, Americans are more sensitive than Britons to class distinctions – and the more acute their sensitivity, the more ‘prole’ (his word) they are.

Getting back to the firm ground of His Majesty’s realm, many of the distinguishing features highlighted by Nancy Mitford no longer apply. For example, she was appalled by the egalitarian familiarity of addressing strangers by their Christian names.

When I moved to Britain from the US in 1988, I dutifully observed her injunction, only to be told by older people to ditch the Mr and Mrs nonsense. For example, I had stubbornly insisted on addressing my mother-in-law – who couldn’t be called a prole by any stretch of the imagination – as ‘Mrs Blackie’ until she ordered me to call her Bridget.

(No such problems for my American son: he met my English family when he was 18 and instantly started addressing people four times his age by their Christian names – tempora do bloody well mutantur, don’t they?)

But that the tell-tell signs have changed doesn’t mean they no longer exist. Thus, a social chasm separates an Englishman who says ‘napkin’ from one who says ‘serviette’. And a discerning observer can instantly tell a man’s class from what he calls the largest room in his house. For the record, ‘front room’, ‘lounge’, ‘living room’ are far beneath ‘sitting room’ and ‘drawing room’.

There are hundreds of other such differentiators: an Englishman referring to the main meal of the day as ‘tea’ would be shunned by those who describe it as ‘dinner’ and especially by those who say ‘supper’. U people die, non-U ones pass on; the former are mad, the latter are mental; vegetables and puddings are U, greens and desserts (and especially sweets) aren’t; U people catch their reflection in the looking-glass, not in the mirror – and so on.

When I say hundreds, that’s exactly what I mean. That’s why anyone pretending to be upper- or upper-middle class is on a losing wicket. He is bound to slip up somewhere, causing his interlocutors to smile in a barely perceptible way.

In fact, making such an attempt is a sure sign of someone Paul Fussell calls a ‘prole’. Every upper- or upper-middle person I’ve met doesn’t give an infinitesimal damn about which class he appears to be. Such people are socially secure, which of course doesn’t mean they are indistinguishable from the lower classes.

The nuances of the English language are my life-long object of study, my love and my livelihood. That’s why Nancy Mitford’s and Fussell’s knock-about fun has always delighted me. Yet some class characteristics go far beyond the difference between a napkin and a serviette.

For me, the most important differentiator was mentioned by Oscar Wilde in one of his aphorisms: “A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone’s feelings unintentionally.” Or causes discomfort to other people, I’d be tempted to add.

In other words, a gentleman, whom Mitford would describe as a U, gauges his behaviour by the effect it has on other people. A real gentleman does so intuitively, without thinking; an aspiring one has to watch his step. But neither one is selfish at the expense of the people around him.

Now, much to my shame I don’t have a good eye for physical detail – I am to a large, though not infinite, extent oblivious to my material surroundings. But I have always been keenly interested in observing, and classifying, human behaviour.

Since I have been doing that for a depressingly long time, I can afford the luxury of taxonomic generalisation. With that proviso, I think I can dispel the myth of selfless, altruistic lower classes and the egoistic, disdainful ‘posh’ people (a little free tip: no one who says ‘posh’ is posh).

Getting on a crowded bus or going to a supermarket would give one sufficient grounds for stating exactly the opposite. You are much more likely to be jostled or pushed out of the way by a hoodie than by a tweedy gentleman. A manifestly lower class chap is more likely to obstruct a supermarket aisle with his trolley, blocking a gentleman’s path.

Old Britons say it hasn’t always been like that, and they may well be right. In fact, one detects a big difference in the conduct of lower-class Britons my age or older and their children. The former tend to be chirpy to the latter’s surly, well-mannered as opposed to rude and socially at ease rather than gauche.

The older people are just as likely to have their trouble cook their tea in the evening and serve it in front of the box in the lounge, but they’ll know to place their supermarket trolley along the aisle, not across it. Much as I love Nancy Mitford, and like Paul Fussell, that to me is more important than the odd unfortunate turn of phrase.

I could venture a guess about the reasons for that behavioural shift from one generation to the next, but that would take me beyond my subject today. Perhaps some other time.

President Joe Biden narrowly missed this year’s Honours List, which is most unfortunate.

His impassioned if belated expression of the royalist sentiment would certainly have earned him at least a knighthood, possibly a peerage.

Alas, Joe’s declaration of loyalty to the Crown came a few days after the honours had been announced. Now he’ll have to wait until next year, and all Britons should hope he’ll still be around, not only in this life but also in the White House.

After all, there is a distinct possibility Joe is harbouring plans to reverse those two and a half centuries of republican nonsense in America and bring the country back into the fold. At least that’s how I understand his statement, and I’ll look askance, possibly out of the window, at any other interpretation.

Judge for yourself. The other day Joe delivered a speech on gun control to a Connecticut audience. But at the end, instead of the customary “God bless America”, that crypto-royalist shouted: “God save the Queen, man!”.

The significance of that rousing finale escaped most observers, especially those vermin who insist that Joe isn’t qualified to be president because he is suffering from an onset of senile dementia. How little do those naysayers understand!

Joe has been our man in Washington all along – under deep cover. To mask his true role, he has been known to make anti-British pronouncements and even hint at his sympathy for the IRA cause (and I don’t mean Individual Retirement Accounts).

But behind the scenes Joe has been doing all he can to prepare America for a triumphant return to the British realm. His economic policies, for example, have been designed to make Americans so desperate that they’d be happy to become British again. (They’d be in for a letdown, but that’s a separate story.)

Those senility hounds smirk at Joe’s mentioning the Queen, rather than the King who is currently the monarch. “Queen Elizabeth is dead,” they sneer with smug QED smiles.

True. But who said Joe meant Her late Majesty? It’s a distinct possibility he shares my conviction that Princess Anne is the royal best qualified to sit on the throne. It’s pure conjecture on my part, but Joe may well demand that Anne replace her brother as a precondition of America re-joining the Commonwealth, né the British Empire.

The president’s speech was replete with hidden messages that went right by most so-called experts. For example, why do you suppose Joe chose to conclude his oration against the Second Amendment with the words from the British national anthem?

Don’t know? Well, I can tell you. Joe doesn’t want to see a “well regulated militia” bristling with rifle barrels all over America. Such bands may well be driven by their misguided patriotism to resist Joe’s plans for a peaceful transition to the auspices of the Crown.

With his subtlety and unerring ear for nuance, Joe slyly pandered to such jingoistic grassroots by ending his statement of allegiance with an indigenously American usage “man”. That was an implicit promise to safeguard and foster the American national identity even within the framework of a different constitution.  

Far be it from me to suggest that Joe underestimates the complexity of the task facing him in this noble undertaking. He hinted at his stark realism a few days later, in Philadelphia.

“We’ve got a fight on our hands,” he told the union audience. “My question to you is simple: Are you with me?” “Yes!” roared the union members, who must have been briefed in advance on the kind of fight Joe had in mind.

Did I say knighthood? No, Joe deserves to become a hereditary peer of the realm, passing his title on to Hunter when he shuffles off this mortal coil (Shakespearean references are now apposite when talking about Joe Biden). And ‘Lord Biden’ sounds so much better than ‘Sir Joe’.

Alas, such an accolade is impossible within the existing – antediluvian! – honours system in Britain. The best foreign nationals can hope for is honorary knighthood, and so far only three US presidents have received it: Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and George Bush (the elder).

However, if Joe is planning to alter the US Constitution so drastically, it’s only polite that we meet him halfway. Yes, nothing short of a hereditary peerage will do, along with the post of America’s Governor General or perhaps Viceroy.

Verily I say unto you, man, it’s Joe who knows exactly how to make America great again. His slogan should be MABA – and I’ll let you guess what the ‘B’ stands for.

When one of Nancy Mitford’s bestselling novels, The Pursuit of Love (1945), was reissued by Penguin a couple of years ago, it carried a trigger warning.

The book, Penguin warned, contained “prejudices that were common in British society” and that were “wrong then” and are “wrong today”. The warning is a typically sanctimonious woke perversion, but its idiocy stands out even against that backdrop.

That’s like warning that The Hunchback of Notre-Dame may be offensive and traumatic to vertebrally challenged persons.

One would be hard-pressed to name a single novel set in pre-woke times that doesn’t portray prejudices our lumpen intelligentsia now consider vile. Practically any Dickens novel, anyone? Gulliver’s Travels? Clarissa? Vanity Fair? Huckleberry Finn?

They all represent an artistic, usually satirical, sometimes caricatured, take on society with all its good points, but also its failings of mind, morality and character. Prejudices, both good and bad, often come in for rough treatment, and the understanding of which are good and which are bad changes from one era to another.

So why not put a blanket warning on every such novel, to the effect that it “may contain literature”? Or, in this case, “may contain Nancy Mitford”?

Her The Pursuit of Love (1945) and Love in a Cold Climate (1949) happen to be among my favourite novels, as distinct from those I consider the greatest. The greatest novels try to paint a picture of universality on a vast canvas, something that impressed me no end in my youth.

With age, I began to look for universality elsewhere, reading fiction mainly for style, wit and social observation. That’s where Nancy Mitford can hold her own against anyone, coming close to her lifelong friend Evelyn Waugh (the correspondence between them is among the best epistolary literature of the 20^th century).

The two novels I mentioned are autobiographical, with most characters being thinly disguised members of Mitford’s own family, one of the most aristocratic in Britain. She was the eldest of Baron Redesdale’s six daughters, and the two novels sketch the aristocratic interbellum life she knew intimately.

If Nancy’s talent brought her fame, two of her sisters, Diana and Unity, could only manage infamy. Diana married Oswald Mosley, the leader of British fascists. As Nazi sympathisers, in effect agents, she and her husband were interned for the duration of the Second World War.

Unity was even worse. She was Hitler’s friend, confidant and, according to some historians, lover. Throughout the ‘30s Unity was involved in active pro-Nazi propaganda, supporting Hitler’s regime in word and deed (I’ll spare you the salacious details). When Britain declared war on Germany, Unity shot herself in the head, but survived and lived as a vegetable until 1948.

Nancy is usually described as a mild socialist, which by the standards of her siblings (mostly either fascist or communist) is practically apolitical. Her novels certainly are. They are just trenchantly written and brilliantly observed pictures of the life she knew.

The Pursuit of Love, about which Penguin feels duty-bound to prewarn readers, is largely satirical, and most of the satire is aimed at the character of Uncle Matthew, based on Nancy’s father.

Uncle Matthew is introduced with a description of his chimney-piece, above which “hangs an entrenching tool, with which, in 1915, Uncle Matthew had whacked to death eight Germans one by one as they crawled out of a dug-out. It is still covered with blood and hairs, an object of fascination to us as children.”

Clearly, in common with many Englishmen of his age and class, Uncle Matthew was inclined towards Euroscepticism, which he proved throughout the narrative with his offhand references to ‘the Hun’, ‘frogs’, ‘dagos’, ‘wops’ and foreigners in general. They were collectively dismissed as ‘fiends’.

When the Second World War started, Uncle Matthew’s sister (loosely based on the socialite Idina Sackville) brought her Spanish lover into the family home. Uncle Matthew was aghast. “Can’t have too many dagos here,” he fumed.

However, it turned out that the Spaniard knew how to get around food shortages by procuring groceries and cooking delicious meals. That reconciled Uncle Matthew to the offensive presence of the ‘dago’.

Even this brief description shows that Nancy didn’t extol xenophobia – any more than Mark Twain extolled racism in his portrayal of Nigger Jim. Twain seethed at bigotry, Mitford only smiled at it in her understated English way, but the satirical effect is similar.

So what’s there to warn against? Denouncement of racism? Caricature of xenophobia? Penguin editors and our lumpen intelligentsia display the ideologised obtuseness of the Soviet sensors who made cultural life impossible. Soviet writers were sentenced to imprisonment for the acts their characters committed, the words they uttered.

The approach was purely formal: the author was culpable even if his own feelings about such characters were negative. The context didn’t matter; only the text did.

Yet let’s assume for the sake of argument that the author himself shared his protagonists’ failings. For example, neither Shakespeare nor Dickens can be described as Judeophiles, and both Gogol and Dostoyevsky were virulently anti-Semitic.

Some readers may wince when reading some of their passages, but surely they can form their own judgement without being told “look, moron…”? If I winced all the way through Atlas Shrugged, should I have been warned in advance about the novel being aesthetically inept and philosophically fascistic?

People talk about an encroachment by the nanny state, but the situation is actually more sinister than that. Some nannies may be quite peremptory, but most, I’m sure, genuinely think everything they do is for their charges’ benefit.

Our lumpen intelligentsia, on the other hand, are entirely self-serving. They work against, not for, the people about whom they profess so much love – and what’s worse is that they know it because the people tell them.

The Times recently polled its readers, asking “Should books containing prejudices carry trigger warnings?” A whopping 88 per cent answered ‘no’. Practically everyone, and one would think The Times aims at precisely the audience that should jump up and salute every manifestation of sanctimonious woke rubbish.

Like the Soviet ghouls of yesteryear, today’s ideologists are schizophrenically divorced from real life. They create a picture of virtual reality in their minds and enforce it by every means at their disposal, from massive propaganda to coercion.

The relative weight of the two is different in our ‘liberal’ democracies, but that’s only a difference of means, not ends. The desired end is exactly the same: replacing the actual reality of life with the virtual reality of ideology.

That effort usually starts modestly and then escalates by incremental steps. The destination is clear: banning, ideally burning, the books falling short of the fake morality concocted by modern ideologues. But that’s a race won by a slow and steady progression.

Some books, like The Pursuit of Love, carry idiotic warnings. Others, like those by Roald Dahl, are rewritten. Still others, like Huckleberry Finn, are taken out of libraries. That’s how tyrannies start: with short but gradually lengthening steps.

Unless they are stopped, blazing bonfires await at the end of the journey, immolating books and, in due course, their authors. Such is one of the lessons history teaches. Alas, we agree to play truant.  

Some commentators, including me, have written about a pandemic of ministerial dismissals that seem to be strangely biased.

Practically all the Tory ministers who lost their jobs in recent months, for whatever reason, were staunch Brexiteers. Among them are Suella Braverman, Priti Patel, Michael Gove, Nadhim Zahawi, Gavin Williamson, Dominic Raab – and of course Boris Johnson.

Different reasons were cited in each case, but the conspiracy theorist in me couldn’t help noticing a definite anti-Brexiteer slant. And now that the Privileges Committee has ruled that Boris Johnson “deliberately” misled Parliament about lockdown breaches, another one bites the dust.

Johnson claims he did that inadvertently, but the distinguished Committee members peeked into the wrongdoer’s brain and ascertained beyond any doubt that his transgression had been deliberate rather than merely inadvertent.

Frankly, I don’t know anyone who didn’t breach the lockdown at some point. Why, even such law-abiding people as I committed one or two such indiscretions. It’s true that not every one of us has lied to Parliament about it, but it’s the acme of hypocrisy to hold politicians to the apocryphal standards of honesty set by either George Washington or his cherry tree.

Every day politicians make promises they have no way, or intention, of keeping. That’s treated with boys-will-be-boys equanimity – par for the course, old boy, what? Accusing a politician of massaging the truth is like accusing a footballer of committing the odd foul, something impossible to avoid.

Nevertheless, the Committee spent 14 excruciating months investigating Johnson’s case as if it was serial murder. The clear, if unarticulated, intention was to get him for something, anything. Again, people like me suspected Brexit had something to do with that.

For Johnson not only voted for it, but he also campaigned for party leadership under the slogan of Let’s Get Brexit Done. And as prime minister that’s precisely what he achieved, bypassing or breaking through the sabotaging efforts by the civil service and most MPs.

Now those same people accuse him of undermining democracy – after they themselves took two years trying to subvert the biggest democratic vote in British history. Clearly, Johnson’s real crime was Brexit, not that unauthorised slice of cake he ate at a proscribed party.

I say ‘clearly’, but until the other day that had been merely conjecture – Johnson’s detractors wouldn’t come out and say it outright. So much more admirable is Lord Heseltine’s honesty.

For those of you too young to remember, or too foreign to know, in 1990 Heseltine led the coup that stuck a knife into Maggie Thatcher’s back. The conspirators desperately wanted Britain to join the EU by signing the Maastricht Treaty, but Mrs Thatcher, as she then was, declared it “a treaty too far”.

As Deputy Prime Minister, Heseltine then became the éminence grise of the cabinet, and greasy he doubtless was. It was Major’s signature that went on the Maastricht Treaty, but it was Heseltine who moved the PM’s hand.

Obviously, later he campaigned vigorously against Brexit and took the vote for it as a personal tragedy. Though he had retired from active politics, Lord Heseltine, as he had become, continued to lobby and conspire against leaving the EU, defying the will of the very demos in whose name Parliament is supposed to govern.

That made Johnson Heseltine’s enemy, definitely political and probably also personal. But unlike other Remainers who have finally succeeded in getting Johnson, Heseltine is forthright in explaining his reasons.

“I’m glad we finally got the bastard,” he told Sky News. “That’ll teach him how to side with the people against his colleagues. No one secures Britain’s sovereignty and gets away with it.”

Sorry, I’ve made it up. Or rather I’ve made up the letter of Heseltine’s remarks while accurately conveying their spirit. This is what he actually said:

“All of this, I’m sorry to distract slightly from the subject of the report – all of this is about lying in the most senior of public offices.

“And you can’t escape from the consequences of that on Brexit. Because we left the EU, one of the worst decisions, one of the most regrettable decisions, most economically damaging decisions of modern times, on the basis of lies of which Boris Johnson was the principal architect.

“It is a clarion call to begin the process of restoring our relationship with Europe. We are Europeans. We are a part of Europe. We are essential to their defence, we are dependent upon their home market. And there are no credible alternative ways in which to make a success of the British economy.”

Right, I get it. Because Johnson lied about that slice of cake in 2020, the British people voted for Brexit in 2016. Who can fault that logic? Oh well, many people, I suppose. But Heseltine’s honesty is beyond reproach: he owned up to the real reason for the Johnson witch-hunt.

As to Heseltine’s comments on Brexit, the poor chap is 90, so one can expect some symptoms of senility. On second thoughts, he was saying exactly the same things 30 years ago, and the onset of dementia usually happens later in life.

If Heseltine thinks Brexit damaged Britain economically, he hasn’t been reading the papers. In fact, the Eurozone is in recession, and the British economy isn’t. It’s not growing as briskly as we’d like, and our government of Heseltine’s philosophical kin is doing all it can to prevent real growth.

But we are still doing better than the Eurozone, which makes it hard to believe that the British economy would miraculously improve by joining it. Yet to his credit Lord Heseltine still remembers his geography. Britain is indeed a part of Europe, and we are indeed “essential to their defence”.

That’s why most Eurozone members and Britain are members of Nato, a military alliance designed to defend Europe against the likes of Putin. Does Lord Heseltine think Nato isn’t doing an especially good job? Perhaps. But it takes a singular lack of understanding to believe that a European army run by corrupt socialist bureaucrats would fare better.

He also shows the same legerdemain that’s typical of all Remainers. Heseltine uses the terms ‘Europe’ and ‘European Union’ as if they were synonymous. They aren’t.

Europe is a geographical, cultural and civilisational entity. The EU is a strictly political contrivance designed to make the rule of socialist bureaucrats absolute. It’s only to EU fanatics that being ‘a part of Europe’ is tantamount to being a part of a single European megastate.

People of Lord Heseltine’s age often suffer from single or double incontinence. I hope he has been spared that indignity, but he is clearly afflicted with logorrhoea, verbal incontinence. Then again, he never made much sense at 60 – so it’s hardly surprising he is mouthing gibberish at 90.

But let’s not be ageist about this. Even much younger Remainers are incapable of putting a cogent thought together, certainly not on that subject. The longing for ‘Europe’ is visceral, not intellectual. And make no mistake about it: if (make it when) Labour takes over, every effort will be made to drag Britain back into the EU, tail between her legs.

Every economic ill of the country will be blamed on Brexit – not on the staggering incompetence of our national governments and certainly, God forbid, on any systemic defects of liberal democracy. Our comprehensively educated public will swallow it, especially since this time one doesn’t detect many visible political figures ready to present the opposite view.

Why, even Nigel Farage is saying that “Brexit has failed”. Unlike Putin’s Russia that, according to Farage, had been a rip-roaring success until February last year.

A few years ago, Gen. Gerasimov, chief of the Russian General Staff, came up with the concept of hybrid warfare.

The idea was that of a two-prong offensive, crushing the enemy’s army with military force and his spirit with a flood of disinformation. Russia’s success in the former endeavour is rather understated, but the latter effort is gathering momentum all over the world, specifically in France.

The country’s Foreign Ministry has issued a report saying that the Russians are stepping up a massive offensive on public opinion.

To that end, they have cloned the web pages of many government departments and national media outlets. VIGNUM, France’s electronic counterintelligence service, has so far identified 355 domain names registered by the Russians and used to flood the web with fake news.

According to Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, this isn’t just private initiative: “Taking part in the campaign,” she said, “are Russian state structures devoted to spreading false information.”

She also mentions that her own bailiwick has been targeted since May, with Russian criminals uploading information that looks as if it came from France’s Foreign Ministry.

“The involvement of Russian embassies and cultural centres actively participating in widening this campaign, mainly through their accounts on social networks,” says the statement issued by the Foreign Ministry, “is a new twist in Russian hybrid strategy aimed at subverting democracy.”

Other organisations, both European and American, have also reported this large-scale operation, codenamed Doppelgänger. It has now entered its second, more sophisticated phase complete with various surreptitious tricks designed to bypass countermeasures.

The fake articles are laid out and typeset in the formats that look identical to the official websites of popular media, such as Le Parisien, Le Figaro and Le Monde. Also receiving the same treatment are the German publications Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Der Spiegel, Bild and Die Welt.

The trick the Russians use widely is called typosquatting, also known as URL hijacking and sting site, which is slightly modifying well-known website addresses. For example, lefigaro.fr may become lefigaro.ltd, a change easy to miss when surfing the net.

VIGNUM has been tracking that campaign since the start of Russia’s war on the Ukraine. Predictably, the thrust of that hybrid banditry is to discredit Western support for the country courageously fighting Russo-Nazi invaders.

The principal themes identified by VIGNUM are exactly the same as you can find in the weekly outpourings of a certain Mail on Sunday columnist:

The only way to stop horrendous bloodshed and destruction of property is for the two sides to settle their differences at a negotiating table.

In reality, that means the Ukraine should accept the status quo, ceding the invaded territories to Russia. This would enable Putin’s Nazis to catch their breath, rearm and resume their offensive with renewed vigour.

Continued Western support for the Ukraine may lead to a Third World War.

Official Russian spokesmen express this threat in the direct, usually obscene language of their disadvantaged childhoods. The typosquatters couch it in the understated mock-Western terms of genuine concern that any Mail On Sunday reader knows well.

The sanctions against Russia are ineffective. They affect mainly Western citizens, while the Russians hardly even notice them.

If that’s the case, one wonders why the Russians are wailing and gnashing their teeth each time the sanctions are tightened. Could it be because two-thirds of their population are on the brink of starvation? Or because, to use Saltykov-Shchedrin’s quip, all you can get for a rouble these days is a punch in the snout?

All Western states are virulently Russophobic.

That awful vice stays dormant most of the time and only ever rears its head when Russia pounces on her neighbours and threatens to annihilate the world with nuclear holocaust.

The Ukraine’s army is savage and her government officials are predominantly Nazi.

The words ‘teapot’ and ‘kettle’ spring to mind. After Bucha and Mariupol, it takes most refreshing effrontery for the Russians to accuse the Ukrainian army of barbaric savagery.

As to Nazism, I haven’t heard a single statement by a Ukrainian official claiming the racial superiority of Ukrainians, which entitles them to force their unmatched spirituality on others. For Russian officials and propagandists, from Putin down, this combination of Nazism and imperialism is standard fare.

The French special services say this massive effort is perfectly structured and coordinated. Under no circumstances can it be treated as isolated pinpricks by private individuals.

With all undue respect for Gen. Gerasimov, none of this is his invention. He is simply repackaging the old Bolshevik strategy in play since the early days of the Soviet Union.

It was to put that strategy in operation that the Bolsheviks created a global disinformation and espionage network called Comintern. Its bright star, the German communist Willi Münzenberg, turned Comintern into a Popular Front propaganda and disinformation empire, complete with its own newspapers, magazines, broadcast networks and film studios.

Paris intellectuals from the Left Bank were seduced en masse, as were similar groups in other Western countries. Once the war started, Münzenberg had outlived his usefulness and was unceremoniously bumped off in a French forest. But the toxins he and his masters injected into the West stayed in its bloodstream for decades – and they still haven’t been expunged.

Now the techniques developed by Popular Front operatives are profitably applied to subverting Western public opinion and turning it towards betraying the Ukraine.

The advances in electronic communications of which the West is so proud act as offensive weapons in the Russians’ hands. Yet it’s not all about URL hijacking and pretending to be Western media. Genuine Western publications can also be manipulated to the same end – as any reader of The Mail on Sunday can confirm.

If a pun is the lowest form of humour, then a pun on a person’s name is the lowest form of a pun. My only excuse is that sometimes I just can’t help myself.

In this case, my lapse into the lowest of the low was prompted by Sarah Vine, a Mail columnist with learning difficulties.

Miss Vine wrote an article about a woman sent to prison for aborting her foetus a couple of weeks before birth. (She, that woman, not Miss Vine, lied about the term of her pregnancy to get an abortion pill.)

The subject of abortion invites muddled, illogical thinking like few others, but Miss Vine, poor Michael Gove’s ex, has found a new depth possible to plumb. To begin with, she tries to find a balance where none exists.

“Abortion is a deeply complex issue,” she writes. It isn’t. It’s only made complex by modern barbarians. In fact, the issue is beautifully black or white. Either the foetus is a human being en route to becoming a person or it’s merely a part of a woman’s body.

If it’s the latter, then the woman can do to it whatever she likes. If it’s the former, then it should be protected like any human life. There is really no middle ground between these two postulates.

Miss Vine is aware of this dichotomy, but she applies her formidable intellect to finding a compromise that can’t exist.

“On the one hand it’s right that a woman should be able to control her fertility…” Right how? Morally? Philosophically? But never mind: “On the other, there must be limits. A foetus is not just a bit of extra tissue; it is a growing human and there comes a point where that human’s right to life becomes as inalienable as the mother’s.”

Then comes a sentence that, for me, should have ended the discussion right there: “Exactly when that turning point occurs is a debate that will likely never be resolved.”

Precisely. The only indisputable “turning point” is that of conception. Any other point is open to debate, and surely any doubt must be resolved in favour of protecting human life. You know, the sort of thing that’s supposed to be sacred?

Hence Miss Vine’s subsequent support for the 12-week limit is a logical non sequitur: “… morally I’m as comfortable with 12 weeks as I’ll be with any other limit.” As comfortable as with any other limit? Surely Miss Vine means she is more comfortable with 12 weeks than with any other limit? Don’t keep us guessing, love.

She then gets to the core of the argument: “But it seems to me that at the heart of this issue is the disagreement between those who like to frame abortion as purely a healthcare issue; and those who believe it’s a moral choice between right and wrong. Neither are strictly correct.”

This sitting on the fence may adversely affect Miss Vine’s own fertility. She really ought to come down before it does. Either abortion is free of moral considerations or it isn’t. A woman can’t be a little bit pregnant, and human life can’t almost exist. “Either/or”, as Kierkegaard would put it.

This isn’t to say there can be marginal cases, such as a high likelihood that a woman won’t survive childbirth. But for Miss Vine any case seems to be marginal.

Witness the fact that she chose the imprisoned woman as proof of how ambiguous the issue can be. Once again, the woman “eventually obtained an abortion pill by lying to a nurse practitioner who provided the drug remotely under the ‘pills by post’ scheme instituted during Covid, which allows medication to be supplied after a remote consultation for pregnancies of up to ten weeks.”

In fact, the woman was 32 to 34 weeks pregnant, which is to say about to give birth. “A heinous crime – or the actions of a troubled, desperate woman?” asks Miss Vine and then answers her own question: “The answer, I fear, is probably a bit of both.”

According to her, what made that woman “troubled and desperate” was that she kept two men on the go and hence was unsure which one was the father. Oh well, such uncertainty can drive anyone round the bend.

Since Miss Vine likes to dip into the troubled waters of morality, I wonder if she discerns a valid moral difference between aborting a child a week before birth and a week after. The latter is unquestionably infanticide. But can the former be just an action of “a troubled, desperate woman”?

In pronouncing the derisory custodial sentence of two years and four months, Mr Justice Pepperall implicitly agreed that the case wasn’t clear-cut. After all, the poor woman was “plagued by nightmares and flashbacks to her dead child’s face.”

SS executioners were also sometimes pursued by similar nightmares. Some even went mad recalling the ravines full of blood. That, incidentally, was one of the reasons the Nazis went to gas, thereby sparing the delicate sensibilities of the murderers. Should they have been exculpated then? Or given reduced sentences?

No wonder His Honour came under savage criticism. I would have treated the case as manslaughter punishable by life in prison… Sorry, it’s not his inordinate leniency that exposed Judge Pepperall to hysterical criticsm. It’s the fact that he passed down a custodial sentence at all.

He came under fire from all the predictable quarters: the Royal College of Midwives, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, assorted feminist and pro-abortion campaigners and some of our venerable MPs.

How dare he criminalise abortions at any point, even minutes before birth, tweeted Labour MP Stella Creasy: “No other healthcare procedure has such a status. No other patient group would be treated this way.”

Here Miss Creasy is guilty of committing a rhetorical fallacy known as petitio principii (begging the question): using the desired conclusion of an argument as its premise. The whole issue is that some of us argue, persuasively, that abortion isn’t a “healthcare procedure”.

Why, even Miss Vine detects possible nuances there. Hers is a different fallacy: argumentum ad temperantiam – belief that a compromise between two positions is always correct. Still, at least she acknowledges that two positions exist. That’s more than most other modern barbarians do.

So perhaps I’ve been too hard on Miss Vine. If we met socially, I’m sure we could get on just fine. I only wonder how someone so manifestly incapable of either moral or intellectual judgement finds herself a wide audience.

I experience an acute fit of schadenfreude whenever I observe a clash of perverse modern pieties. My position is strictly that of an outside observer – I have no dog in any such fight. One thing for sure: whichever side wins, decent people will be the losers.

This melancholy observation applies to the on-going Commons debate on changes to the Equality Act 2010 that would stop trans ‘women’ going into female-only lavatories, dressing rooms, hospital wards and prisons.

How would you argue against the current situation, where no such restrictions apply? I bet your argument won’t be that different from mine.

Allowing men, whatever they call themselves, into such spaces goes against basic decency, propriety and morality, not to mention taste. Also, as recent events have shown, any such ‘woman’ may well use ‘her’ penis as an offensive weapon, which endangers real women in places where they are particularly vulnerable.

I would go further than this, although I don’t necessarily expect to take many of you with me. My argument will draw on Genesis, a book that specifies exactly what the sexes are, male and female, and how many of them exist, two.

Then I’d enrage the more liberal of my readers by arguing that transsexuals should have no rights specific to them. The ‘rights of Englishmen’ apply to them, as they do to all of His Majesty’s subjects. However, that concept, dating from 1608, didn’t include as its constituent the right of people to change sex and make the change recognised in law.

Moving from high to low, my argument would then state that if some deranged individuals want to identify as members of a different sex or, for all I care, a different species, then by all means they should do so. But no such aberration should have a legal status.

I’d then probably add a touch of pragmatism by suggesting that, should transsexuality not be legally recognised, many more people would want to keep the sex they were born with. For example, if little children weren’t aware that they could choose their sex from a long menu of available options, that possibility wouldn’t even occur to most of them.

There’s nothing especially original or profound about that argument. What I’ve just stated is a basic conservative position, a modifier I use interchangeably with ‘decent’ and ‘intelligent’.

But decent and intelligent people can’t win such a debate, nor can they even join it. Our liberal democracy allows freedom of speech, but only provided said speech stays within the liberal-democratic mainstream.

This is remarkably similar to the Soviet Union, where one Marxist could only have argued that another one was insufficiently Marxist. Someone like me, who regarded every shade of Marxism as illiterate, sinister gibberish, didn’t have a say in the matter.

In a similar vein, it’s unthinkable that any public figure, especially one who wishes to remain as such, could make an argument I’ve put forth. If one wants to take exception to any modern perversion, it can only be done in the terms of another modern perversion, in this case feminism.

The conflict isn’t between vice and virtue, but between two different if related vices. Trans rights clash with women’s rights and, only if the latter win, will it be possible to keep men with a screw loose out of women’s lavatories.

The liberal-democratic ethos of rights is as unchallengeable in Britain (or anywhere in the West) as the Marxist ethos was in the Soviet Union. This is an axiom that all our politicians accept.

That’s why both our PM Rishi Sunak and his Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch support the proposed amendment from the feminist position, not that of common decency. While recognising ‘trans rights’ as an inviolable concept, they both believe that ‘biological sex’ should take priority over ‘legal sex’ where there exists a distinct danger of women being raped in public loos.

Let’s remark parenthetically that the very existence of an equalities ministry is a sure sign of tyranny, albeit of a liberal-democratic kind. Equality may be the overarching deity in whose name modernity was inaugurated and at whose altar it’s supposed to worship. Yet it has nothing to do with any discernible reality.

Contrary to what the American Declaration of Independence says, all men are manifestly created unequal in every intellectual, moral and physical faculty worth mentioning. When allowed to come into play, such differences are bound to create hierarchical arrangements affecting social, political, economic, cultural, intellectual and every other sphere of life.

This is a natural process that can only be suppressed by unnatural means. The state has to be empowered to file away the natural peaks, using oppressive laws as a giant rasp. Hence, skipping a few obvious intermediate steps, the equalities ministry could be more appropriately called the Ministry for Despotism.

The glossocratic language of rights is how liberal-democratic despotism puts its foot down. And all rights immediately become politicised, which effectively turns any group of claimants into a political party competing for power.

That doesn’t reflect any actual reality: few women I’ve ever met perceive themselves as card-carrying, fully paid-up members of a ‘community’, much less a political party. The same goes for members of any race – politicisation is shoved down their throats by liberal-democratic elites seeking tyrannical powers.

Yet actual reality has been disfranchised, going the way of common decency, basic logic and aesthetic taste. Virtual reality reigns supreme, and it has an army of impassioned glossocrats to fight its battles.

So yes, do let’s keep men, former or present, out of women’s-only spaces. But if invoking feminism is the only way to ensure such an outcome, then the argument can have no real winners. It will, however, have real losers: all of us, along with what’s left of our civilisation.