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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…

This article is a reply to a reader’s question, and it’s a good question indeed: “Why do you not consider conservatism to be an ideology?”

Yesterday I defined an ideology as a “politically aggressive secular creed springing from a corrupt, or corrupted, idea.” None of these features applies to conservatism, which I’ll try to show by looking at them one by one.

Conservatism isn’t always, and never merely, political. Political views may be part of a conservative outlook on life, but they never define it.

A conservative may have no interest in politics at all. In fact, I know quite a few conservatives who wince with disdain whenever politics comes up in conversation.

Conservatism is a character or temperament trait, one that predisposes a man to favour certain ideas, including political ones, over others. In extreme cases, a man’s character may even lead him to develop a philosophy of life.

But conservatives don’t have to be philosophers; few are. However, when exposed to various philosophies, all of them intuitively accept conservative ones and reject others.

The same character traits prevent a conservative from being aggressive in asserting his views. Show me a man ranting from a soapbox, and I’ll show you the opposite of a conservative – this irrespective of his pet subject. Moderation and good manners are more important to a conservative than self-assertion.

Neither can a conservative be ideologically secular. That doesn’t mean a conservative necessarily has to be a believer, although many are. What no conservative can ever be is an atheist, someone who vigorously denies God.

That would be tantamount to dismissing in one fell swoop not just Christianity, but our whole civilisation with its history, morality, aesthetics, culture, law – even political heritage. By definition, conservatives are out to conserve, not repudiate, our civilisation.

Hence a conservative may be an agnostic, but never an atheist. Though a conservative agnostic is denied the gift of faith, something he may or may not rue, he acknowledges our civilisational debt to Christianity and hence refrains from holding extreme views about it.

Another aspect of conservatism is that it isn’t a creed. It may be an intricately interlaced system of many creeds, but never a single one. Hence, unlike just about any ideology, conservatism can’t be defined with a slogan.

That puts it at a political disadvantage when it comes to rallying the masses by rabble rousing. As any adman will tell you, the masses don’t respond to complex, nuanced ideas. Give them liberté, égalité, fraternité, and they’ll jump up and salute. Try to explain to them that liberté and égalité are mutually exclusive, and their eyes will glaze over.

Even as conservatism isn’t based on a single belief, neither can it be reduced to a single idea. It’s more a matter of temperamental and intellectual predisposition that may or may not be encapsulated in specific ideas.

So far I have proceeded apophatically, by arguing what things conservatism is not. All those things can be described with one word: ideology. Having thus defined conservatism negatively, let’s try to define it positively by showing not what it isn’t but what it is.

Here it’s difficult to look beyond Edmund Burke, whose seminal book Reflections on the Revolution in France should (though never will) be required reading at every school.

The great Whig, who towards the end of his life abandoned Whiggery, reduced the complexity of the conservative temperament to one dominant feature: prudence, caution in advocating novelties.

Burke specifically talked about political prudence, not acting emotionally on the spur of the moment, thinking a thousand times before introducing one irreversible change. That doesn’t mean resistance to change as such. In fact, Burke wrote that: “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.”

Some change is thus both inevitable and desirable. But what are the guiding principles of introducing it?

In answering that question, Burke came as close as it’s possible to get to identifying the key beacons lighting up the conservative mind: prejudice, which is intuitive knowledge; prescription, which is truth passed on by previous generations; and presumption, which is inference from the common experience of mankind.

Burkean four Ps, Prudence, Prejudice, Prescription and Presumption, obviate the need for the other 25 letters to describe the conservative mind. Those four Ps manifestly have nothing to do with any ideology, in my definition or anyone else’s.

They can, however, act as the building blocks of ideas, including political ones. However, a political idea thus constructed mustn’t be allowed to degenerate into an ideology. If it does, it loses its conservative underpinnings to become something else, such as, say, libertarianism or even anarchism.

This can be illustrated by any number of examples. Free markets versus nationalised ones is an obvious one, closely related as it is to the issue of small versus big government.

Like everything else in our civilisation, this dichotomy can be traced back to a Christian idea, in this case that of individual responsibility for one’s own destiny. The notion of personal integrity and autonomy precludes meek submission to secular authority in matters beyond its just reach.

The same applies to the complex interaction between the state and the individual. The Christian believes his life is eternal. He also knows from history books that the life of a state is not: even extremely successful ones only ever lasted between 1,000 and 1,500 years.

Compared to eternity, this stretch seems tinier than a speck of dust would appear next to the universe. The individual will therefore perceive himself as more significant than the state and for that reason alone will never accept its tyranny.

Etched into a Christian’s soul is the innate conviction that he is transcendent but the state is transient. Hence in everything that matters he can only regard the state not as his master but as his servant.

If the state’s actions suggest that it is assuming the role of master, then the believer may either resist it or pretend to be going along to protect himself from persecution. But inwardly he will never acquiesce. 

Against that civilisational background, a conservative, even if he himself is an agnostic, will be a champion of free, as opposed to nationalised, markets.

First, he will know from empirical evidence that free markets make more people less poor. And the four Ps I mentioned earlier demand attaching a great value to empirical experience accumulated over history.

Second, and more important, a conservative also knows that nationalised markets make the central state so strong that it will inevitably start encroaching on areas beyond its natural remit, laying claims on individual integrity traditionally held sacrosanct.

That is an impeccably conservative attitude, one based on an idea, not an ideology. Yet when thinkers who aren’t themselves natural, intuitive conservatives get hold of that idea, they can drag it into the quagmire of ideology.

I’ve met many people who call themselves conservatives but who are, in fact, what I call ‘totalitarian economists’. They converge with Marxists in preaching the primacy of economics, the be all and end all of public virtue.

Nationalise the means of production, insist Marxists, and everything else will follow, universal bliss will arrive. Free up the markets, insist totalitarian economists, and everything else will follow, universal bliss will arrive. Like Orwell’s animals, both species reduce everything to a single issue. They just can’t agree on the number of legs.

That’s why I never regard ‘totalitarian economists’ like Mises, Hayek and Friedman – or especially their less brilliant followers – as fellow conservatives. They teeter on the verge beyond which an idea ends and an ideology begins. No room for conservatism there.

There we go, the surface of the non-ideological nature of conservatism thoroughly scratched. Delving deeper would require a different format, that of a weighty tome. Still, I must apologise to my reader by paraphrasing Mark Twain: “Sorry about such a long response – I didn’t have time to write a short one.”

P.S. For even a longer response, you may want to look up some of my books in which I talk about such subjects at greater, but still manageable, length, especially How the West Was Lost, The Crisis Behind Our Crisis and Democracy as a Neocon Trick.

My contention is that this is impossible. If it’s good, it’s not an ideology. And if it’s an ideology, it’s not good.

This is one of my recurrent themes, but what has made it recur today is an interview with some Tory health official I watched for a few minutes this morning.

Presenter Kay Burley queried the woman, whose name I didn’t catch, on the dire state of the NHS. Don’t we need fundamental changes? Of course, we do, agreed the woman, and you can count on the government to introduce them. She then took in Burley’s steely look and open mouth, and expertly pre-empted the inevitable question cum accusation.

Whatever we do, she hastened to reassure urbi et orbi, we remain staunchly committed to the sacred principle of ‘free at the point of delivery’. Yes, she admitted mournfully, people do pay for the NHS through their taxes, and they pay a lot. But while she has any breath left in her body, that will remain the only method of payment.

Considering that the woman herself looked in dire need of the services within her remit, the commitment didn’t look eternal, but she certainly meant it that way. Why?

Here comes the first litmus test to distinguish an ideology from its cognates, ‘idea’ and ‘ideal’.

‘Everyone must have equal access to medical care’ is an ideal. ‘Everyone should have equal access to medical care equal in every respect’ is an ideology. ‘Medical care must be free at the point of delivery’ is an ideology too. But it’s based on an idea: ‘a fully nationalised medical care is the best way of providing it.’

This is definitely an idea, but a wrong one. When I lived in that land of greedy, money-grubbing medics, the US, medical care, which I needed lamentably often, never cost me anywhere near the 12 per cent or so of my income the Exchequer extorts for that purpose.

Since the medical care provided by the NHS is grossly inadequate, in addition I have to pay exorbitant premiums for private medical insurance. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that perhaps full nationalisation isn’t the best way to keep Britons healthy.

Moreover, if Britons were asked whether they’d rather pay 12 per cent (or in my case considerably more) of their income for ‘free’ medical care or, say, half that proportion for the kind that isn’t free, I suspect most would choose the latter. But the question is never put to them.

I know this, the interviewee knows it, even conceivably Kay Burley knows it, although the impression she unfailingly conveys is that she knows nothing about anything. But the two ladies are constitutionally incapable of treating the NHS as just one of many ways to finance medical care.

Yet that’s exactly what it is, nothing less, and certainly nothing more. Hence it must be dispassionately weighed against other methods and found either superior or inferior. If it’s found to be inferior – and it’s worth noting that most other European countries refuse to have a fully nationalised health service – then it should be abandoned and replaced with something that works better.

That’s how we know that the NHS isn’t an idea but an ideology. It’s impervious to rational arguments and held to be off limits for any kind of comparative judgement.

The late Chancellor Nigel Lawson correctly defined the NHS as “the closest thing the English people have to a religion.” And a religion without God is what any ideology really is – and has been since the term first appeared.

It was coined in 1796 by the French Enlightenment thinker Antoine Destutt de Tracy. The reason no one had thought of the word earlier is simple: there had been no need for it.

New words appear to designate new concepts or phenomena. In this case, the phenomenon was a mass revolt against Western civilisation, otherwise known as Christendom. The concept was replacing God with secular virtue based on academic abstractions contrived by people like Tracy.

So it has remained to this day. Tracy defined ideology as a ‘science of ideas’, but the more accurate definition would be a ‘politically aggressive secular creed springing from a corrupt, or corrupted, idea.’

Most ideologies do start with an idea, and some ideas may not be so bad. Ending racial discrimination, for example, is a damn good idea. That being so, any decent person should welcome any sensible steps towards putting it into practice.

But when that idea acquires aspects of a politically aggressive cult, it stops being an idea and effectively loses all links, other than etymological ones, with that word. It becomes an ideology that isn’t subject to correction by reason or fact. Unlike an idea, an ideology cauterises people’s minds – at least the parts dealing with such issues.

Most people’s minds aren’t so easy to invalidate. Hence another hallmark of an ideology: it gains public acceptance not by its intrinsic truth, nor by rational persuasion, but by a massive brainwashing effort. That’s what it takes for otherwise (moderately) intelligent people to accept, say, the critical race theory as a valid representation of history.

My examples show two ideologies that became what they are by systematically corrupting originally good ideas: that all sick people should be treated, and that no race should be singled out for persecution.

Most ideologies, however, aren’t like that. They start out as corrupt and then reach out-and-out evil by a succession of incremental steps. Communism, Nazism and fascism spring to mind, with all their numerous offshoots.

These are considerably more carnivorous than the NHS or the critical race theory, which may make some people overlook the similarity among all ideologies, a crossroads where they all come together.

Whatever their declared aims, all ideologies are driven by hatred, the urge to repudiate the core founding tenets and practices of our civilisation. This is the overarching umbrella covering them all, sanguinary or seemingly pacific, those that scowl at you with bared fangs or greet you with a beatific smile.

That’s why a good ideology is a glaring oxymoron. Sort of like free medical care.  

Three items have caught my eye, each supporting the melancholy conclusion in the title. This, though in two of the cases a TV presenter was supposedly making an argument for the sane side.

One such presenter was Piers Morgan, interviewing a fellow journalist. His guest spends much of his time in France, where his dog Bella runs free among the vines. That puts her in danger, but mercifully an Austrian company provides a dog tracking service. The device attached to the collar lets the owner know where his pet is at all times, which is a good idea.

However, to paraphrase a well-known expression, no good idea goes unpunished. In this case, the punishment came as the Austrian company’s demand that all its tracking devices exhibit the rainbow badge of the on-going Gay Pride Month. Virtue-barking was supposed to augment virtue-signalling.

Morgan’s friend refused, and as a result the company cancelled his dog, or rather his subscription to the tracker. If you are a troglodyte homophobe, was the implicit message, may your dog croak, see if we care.

The owner protested, and miraculously the company relented. It ascribed the confrontation to an overzealous employee, reinstated the tracker and even gave the owner three months free by way of compensation. In his letter the company’s president explained that, much as he disagreed with the owner’s views, he wasn’t going to punish him for holding them.

A victory for sanity? Not so fast.

Discussing the event, Morgan and his friend proved that nowadays every such victory is illusory. It’s just another word for defeat.

Both Morgan and his guest did their utmost to reassure their audience that there isn’t even a particle of homophobia in their bodies. Some of their best friends are homosexuals and all that. And it went without saying that they loved and supported the idea of Gay Pride.

Their only objection was that it takes a whole month to celebrate such hubris. After all, we have only one day to glorify our veterans and just a handful to hail Jesus. Wouldn’t it be better to put Gay Pride somewhere between the two? Why give it a whole month?

The two also objected to being forced to display those rainbows. Nothing wrong with the symbol, but let us decide when and how to show it. Both agreed that demanding canine devotion to the rainbow-clad alphabet was ill-advised.

That’s it, argument lost. Because Morgan and his friend conceded the fundamentally perverse premise, while then arguing against its ineluctable consequences. That’s like giving a man dying from brain cancer a couple of aspirins for his headache.

I don’t know what either of them really thinks about this whole mess. Nor do I care because what they really think is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that, even if they thought, as I do, that copulating with a person of the same sex is nothing to be proud about, they would never be able to say so.

As I keep arguing, the underlying orthodoxy is already chiselled in stone, and no one can chip away at it without risking his job, status and in some cases even liberty. That again brings back the hideous memories of the Soviet Union, where it was only possible to criticise little excesses at the lowest rungs of the Party hierarchy – never the premise for the existence of that hierarchy.

Whenever I point out the similarities between the Soviet Union and today’s West, people counter by citing the differences. However, while rejoicing in the latter, we should still bemoan the growing number of the former. Not only does today’s West resemble the USSR in many respects, but the gap between them is getting smaller by the day.

The second case again involves Sky Breakfast News, which I watch for some 10 minutes over my first cup of coffee. That’s usually enough time to vindicate the title above.

This morning, presenter Kay Burley was interviewing the chieftain of Just Stop Oil, the subversive movement whose members disrupt traffic and sporting events. Their chosen weapon against the latter is orange paint that they spray all over everyone and everything within range.

Cesare Lombroso would have had a field day with Burley’s guest. He looked every bit the fanatic he is, his eyes glaring in a way that would make me cross over to the other side of the street if I saw him coming. As my professor friend used to say back at university, “When you see a madman, step aside.”

Again, Burley repeated Morgan’s cowardly (or else stupid) stratagem of taking issue with the zealots’ methods, while endorsing their principal premise. “Scientists agree that we are in the midst of a climate crisis,” ranted the fanatic. “No one is disputing that, but…,” objected Burley.

That was another orthodoxy on show. “Roma locuta; causa finita est,” as Augustine once said. Rome has spoken; the case is closed. Except that in this instance, the speaker isn’t an almighty empire, but the rancid, malodorous zeitgeist emanating from the vociferous woke minority given the power to put its foot down.

It would be pointless to suggest even to the marginally sane Burley, and certainly to her rabid guest, that scientists don’t really agree. Some write extremely well argued and extensively documented books against that fraudulent claim, and I could recommend a small library of such tomes.

Yet they would remain unread and unmentioned. Orthodoxy locuta, and, as GULAG guards used to say to marching prisoners, “Any step aside will be treated as an escape attempt. We’ll shoot without warning.”

The two cases I’ve mentioned show that the only possible outcome of any meekly abject resistance to insanity is putting an added emphasis to its resounding victory. Perhaps realising that, the Bank of England decided to go the whole hog and surrender unconditionally without even pretending to put up a defence.

That venerable institution agreed that people of any ‘gender identity’ can become pregnant. And should any employee feel the need for gender reassignment treatment, the Bank will pay for it using private medical insurance.

Its memorandum on ‘family leave policy’ uses the phrase “birthing parent”, neglecting the rather long tradition of calling such a parent ‘mother’. To clear up any possible confusion, the Bank explains that the term means “the parent who is/was pregnant with the child but includes persons of any and all gender identities.”

The Bank also reiterated its commitment to gender-neutral lavatories, a shift to which is described as an “upgrade”. At the same time, the Bank’s 4,000 UK employees have been drafted into the service of insanity.

Each of them will be given a “diversity and inclusion objective” for every year, at the end of which their performance will be assessed on that criterion. They are also encouraged, though not yet ordered, to wear a rainbow lanyard and display the symbol at their workstation.

It’s good to see that, at a time of interest rates going up and inflation refusing to go down, our central bank never loses sight of what really matters in life. High principle comes before petty pecuniary concerns, and isn’t that laudable?

Piers Morgan and his dog-loving friend wondered why Pride activists defend their noble cause by such ignoble methods. Why can’t they be happy celebrating their well-merited pride for the same number of days as the calendar assigns to Jesus?

I’ll be happy to answer this question. They do those things for the same reason Bella licks her genitals: because they can. And, as their fellow subversive Lenin taught, if they can, they must.

Their objective isn’t to assert the right of homosexuals proudly to parade perverse practices, but to take away the majority’s right to resist.

All modern perversions, and not necessarily sexual ones, are inherently aggressive. Their aim is to smash traditional society to smithereens and reassemble its fragments under the rainbow (red, green) flag of victorious insanity.

If they are the lunatics, we are the asylum. And you know who is in charge.  

In a slight deviation from its ‘all-white’ rule, Wimbledon has allowed female players to wear coloured shorts under their skirts.

Even a traditionalist like me doesn’t mind. A little spot of colour doesn’t offend my sensibilities in any way.

That, however, doesn’t mean my sensibilities are impervious to offences of any kind. Gross affronts to taste and propriety still make me wince, as does vulgarity of any kind.

(To pre-empt my friends’ sneering and invoking teapots and kettles: I don’t necessarily consider swearing to be vulgar. It only becomes that when used in wrong places and at wrong times.)

And when Sky presenter Anna Jones and sports reporter Jacquie Beltrao discussed that Wimbledon innovation this morning, my sensibilities took a savage beating.

The ladies explained, in that chatty yet serious way TV hacks always assume whether or not it’s appropriate, that Wimbledon officials weren’t driven by aesthetic considerations. Nor was it a conscious decision to modernise the old fuddy-duddy codes.

The problem was that white knickers can get visibly stained when a woman player has her period. Apparently, tampons don’t always provide a perfect seal and some unfortunate leakage can occur. (Ideally, I’d suggest a girl should make gravity work for her by playing on her head, but that way she wouldn’t get to the ball fast enough.)

The victim of that malfunction would then have to rush to the lavatory, but the number of times a player can do so during a best-of-three match is limited to one. Should a different need arise later, the woman would have to grin and bear it – or else do a Paula Radcliffe (I’ll spare you the details).

Now those who know me well will confirm that my standards of what is and what isn’t fit for public airing aren’t unduly stringent. But at that point I winced: Jones and Beltrao were really telling me more than I wanted to know.

Yet they didn’t stop there. What followed was a series of interviews with some top players who all hailed the code change. One after another, in the same matter-of-fact tone they’d use to discuss their warm-up techniques, they were saying things like: “I had my period during last year’s Wimbledon, and it was [“embarrassing”, “uncomfortable”, “cramping my style”, take your pick].

As far back as 1965 Kenneth Tynan became the first to say “fuck’ on British TV. That widened the boundaries of the allowable in one fell swoop, and they have been pushed further apart since then.

However, it may be only me, but I don’t mind hearing obscenities as much as I mind graphic, technical discussions of matters gynaecological, physiological, excremental, urinary, prostatic and so forth. I could just about tolerate them when they come from a doctor offering public-service advice, though even that could be delivered more discreetly through less public media.

But when TV presenters evoke vivid images of tennis players leaving blood trails on the Wimbledon grass, I see that as gratuitous vulgarity, a forehand slap in the face of decency and propriety. What makes it even worse, especially in the British context, is that such logorrhoea is part of a general trend.

Britons, especially middle-class ones or higher, have traditionally been known for their reserve and reticence. In my wife’s family, for example, certain subjects always were off limits even among adults, never mind children.

Even now Penelope, who has lived her life in the blasé circles of musicians, artists and writers, won’t allow one of the latter, namely me, to broach some topics, especially in a language she never heard from her parents.

She succeeds at home, but outside she is spitting against the wind (it has taken Penelope years to make me say ‘spitting’ in that expression). Britons have been brainwashed to think that reticence is a sign of a psychological disorder.

One can only validate one’s mental health by letting it all hang out, sometimes literally. Nothing is off limits, there are no tabooisms left. It’s grown-up and healthy to talk openly and publicly about our sex lives, excretions, VDs, private and intimate matters. Actually, there are no private and intimate matters left – everything has been shifted into the public domain.

It’s fashionable these days to blame all our social ills on Americans, but in this case there is some justification for it. However, Americans have had much experience in that sort of thing, and it comes naturally to them.

I found such openness quite irritating even when I lived there but, you know, when in Rome… and all that.  But when Britons begin to walk and talk like Americans, they sound strained and generally pathetic.

A message to Sky presenters: next time you talk about Wimbledon, stick to backhands and volleys or, if such is your wont, strawberries and cream. Leave menstruation to gynaecologists or perhaps the players’ parents. Talking about it on camera is grating, cringe-making – and vulgar in a particularly un-British way.

One has to applaud Manny Macron for getting his priorities right. He puts culture above the little problems of life, which strikes a chord in my heart.

As riots spread to the centre of Paris, with shops torched (and presumably looted) in the elegant rue de Rivoli, Manny was last night partying with Elton John after the latter’s farewell concert.

As far as one can judge from the photographs, the party was à quatre: Manny, his foster mother Brigitte, Elton and his ‘husband’. (The moment I put quotation marks around that last word, I realised I could be arrested for such punctuation – but decided it was a chance worth taking.)

The venue for the festivities was located in Bercy, not exactly the most salubrious part of Paris, and hence a likely arena for riotous self-expression. Yet I’m sure Manny was protected well enough for his cultural quest to proceed unimpeded.

Thus safeguarded, he pinned a Légion d’honneur ribbon on Elton John’s shell suit, and I’m sure that wasn’t the first time a hideous, talentless creature received such an accolade. But I shouldn’t impose my aesthetic tastes on you – let’s stick to the rioting.

As Manny hobnobbed with Elton, the police all over France were battling frenzied mobs, with both sides taking casualties. So far over 650 arrests have been made, and an unspecified number of policemen injured.

The rioting proceeds under the slogan of ‘Vengeance for Nahel’, the 17-year-old Muslim shot dead by a policeman when refusing to stop his Mercedes AMG as ordered. That gave rise to the conflagration and to the silly pun popping into my head: ex nihilo Nahel fit.

The usual phrasing of rioting slogans highlights justice, rather than vengeance, and the difference is telling. Justice can be served by trying the trigger-happy cop and, if he is found guilty, putting him in prison for a long spell. He has already been charged with voluntary manslaughter, which is a logical step in that direction.

Vengeance is something else. Unlike justice, it’s open-ended. If justice can be denominated in so many years of imprisonment, it’s impossible to say how many torched cars, burned buildings, barricaded thoroughfares and trashed shops it will take for vengeance to be deemed adequate. Basically, it’s whether or not the rioters run out of steam before the police run out of tear gas.

Remarkably little has been reported about the victim, other than his name, age, the car he was driving to deliver pizzas, and his mixed Algerian-Moroccan origin that doesn’t sound all that mixed to me. The French papers mentioned in passing that Nahel “was known to the police”, which vindicated my wild guess: most Mercedes-driving youngsters who refuse to obey police orders must have a reason for being so stubborn.

Could it be that Nahel had borrowed the car without the previous owner’s permission? All we can do is guess.

Now Manny has reconfirmed his commitment to culture, even at its lowest, I wonder how he assesses the progress of France’s commitment to diversity. An outside observer like me may get the impression that French multi-culturalism is no more successful than ours. Race riots certainly are a more regular feature of French life than British.

We could discuss the face value of multi-culti diversity till the social workers come home, but that would be a wasted effort. As with most distinctly modern practices, face value doesn’t even come into it. What matters is subtext not text, connotation not denotation, ideology not ideas.

French civil servants tend to be clever and well-educated, at least they were back in the 1960s, when the massive influx of North Africans started. Hence I doubt France’s interior ministers and their staffs were confident in their ability to integrate millions of Muslims seamlessly into a residually Christian and predominantly secular society.

Educated at France’s elite grandes écoles, the mandarins and other fruits knew some groups can adapt to a new culture better than others, and some can’t adapt at all. The issue is indeed cultural rather than racial, as Britain illustrates. For example, immigrants from Trinidad or Barbados adapt well, whereas those from the adjacent Jamaica don’t.

Some Muslims can fit into Western societies as easily as some Westerners can feel at home in Arabia (remember Lawrence?). But ‘some’ is the operative word. It’s unrealistic to expect millions of Muslims to feel they belong in a culture they find alien and detestable.

It was entirely predictable, and I’m sure French officials did predict, that those huddled masses would end up settling in vast ghettos along the periphery of major cities, with social security cheques being the only part of Western culture they’d appreciate. Proportionally, they’d boost welfare rolls and crime statistics more than they’d swell the labour force.

Had public officials in the West been motivated by the hardnosed weighing of the rational pros and cons, Muslim immigration would have been tightly controlled and severely limited. But the underlying motivation of the officialdom was different. They were ideologically committed to signalling their multi-culti virtue, and bono publico be damned.

Now those alien chickens are coming home to roost, and there is no end in sight. France has thrown 40,000 policemen into battle (twice as many fighters as the Wagner Group has altogther) and so far they are acquitting themselves reasonably well. But the future can’t be too remote when the balance of power will swing away from the police, when rioters will be able to overrun them. God save us all when that happens – and not just in France.

However, I am happy to report that, though the drive towards diversity isn’t unfolding without a snag or two, the idea of European homogeneity is thriving. Similar riots have broken out in Belgium, specifically Brussels, whose Muslim suburbs are also engulfed in flames.

The rioters there emulate their French brethren by torching cars, using fireworks as weapons and battling with the police. But they’ve added a few nice sartorial touches by wearing hoodies and masks, which doubtless adds to the gaiety of the nation.

Police forces all over Europe are on alert, expecting impassioned displays of supranational solidarity throughout the EU, certainly its high-rent part. It’s good to see that European federalism works even if multi-cultural diversity doesn’t, not quite.

And it’s especially rewarding to see that the president of France knows what really matters in life: culture comes before social tranquillity. In fact, some of history’s greatest artistic achievements have been known to coincide with the greatest unrest.

The on-going riots don’t quite make it to the greatest unrest yet. But then Elton John’s outpourings don’t quite make it to the greatest artistic achievements – indeed to art at all.

This magnificent feat has been achieved by Sky News, which is the umbilical cord linking me to Britain when I am away.

Pre-empting your gasps of delight, I hasten to clarify that Sky hasn’t yet reduced to nothing the content of carbon in the atmosphere. Yet it has done its level best to deliver net zero in integrity, intellect and informativeness.

This is the case in its coverage of most subjects, but what I find especially indicative is its tackling of climate change, né global warming. Though adding nothing to my knowledge of climatology, Sky puts some telling touches on my understanding of anthropology.

People have a dire need for orthodoxies anchoring their thought and guiding their behaviour. These used to be ancient and permanent, passed along from one generation to the next through the mediation of family, church and, to a lesser extent, school.

The first two are no longer in play: the church has been relegated to the status of an antiquated eccentricity, and the family to that of merely a provider, if that. Schools do shape orthodoxies but not the ancient and permanent kind. Fly-by-night would be a more accurate description.

Hence, for the time being you won’t find many young people who don’t accept gender fluidity as an irrefutable orthodoxy – nor people of any age who don’t confer the same status on climate change.

‘Orthodoxy’ comes from Greek: orthos ‘right’ + doxa ‘opinion’. However, the notion of what constitutes right opinion is these days fickle and laden with relativities.

In the past, the church would pronounce on that issue and it still does, except that practically no one listens. Considering the quality of most such pronouncements, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

High church officials routinely display ignorance even of their chosen subject, for example when referring to God as “he or she”. And when stepping outside their remit, they tend to ignore absolute, eternal truths, promulgating instead pernicious half-baked fads.

When it comes to forming orthodoxies, the church at best plays second fiddle to the school, with the media, especially television, picking up the conductor’s baton. It’s outlets like Sky TV that tell our increasingly dumbed-down masses what the right opinion is on any subject.

Back in the 1970s, before Sky graced the airwaves with its presence, the right opinion on climate was that a new Ice Age was just round the corner. Then the UN, that world authority on climatology, ruled that a gas that makes up 0.04 per cent of the atmosphere was warming up ‘our planet’ so much that the only way for us not to fry to death was to reduce its content drastically.

The same experts who used to preach global cooling then began to advertise global warming with an ardour fuelled by generous grants and subsidies. This neatly dovetailed with the anti-capitalist orthodoxy already in existence, adding to it an enticing new dimension.

Capitalism is powered by modern industry and modern industry is powered by hydrocarbons. Yes, that created and spread wide a prosperity the likes of which the West had never seen. But that’s nothing but crass materialism, explained the orthodoxy mongers.

First, if not everyone is equally prosperous, then no one should be prosperous at all. After all, modernity was inaugurated by a promise of equality, which means capitalism is in default. And then, most important, that immoral prosperity was bought at a fatal cost to ‘our planet’.

The message was so striking that it quickly took pride of place as an aggressive constituent of the orthodoxy thus formed. Global warming became an article of faith, a new religion allowing for no heresy or apostasy.

Sky News, which I’m singling out because it’s the only news channel I watch, if only for 10 minutes a day, is one of the temples of the new creed. Though the subject of net zero comes up every morning, neither Sky presenters nor their guests ever question the underlying assumptions.

Every premise is accepted with an unquestioning loyalty that few religions have seen since the Middle Ages. Some ministers go out on a limb and say that net zero remains the sacred goal towards which they strive. Alas, that goal is slower in coming than any right-thinking (orthodox?) person would wish.

These virtuous individuals must be reassured that, while the goal remains the same, the state of the economy is such that hurrying matters along may result in general impoverishment.

We would desperately love to eliminate hydrocarbons altogether and all at once, say politicians and commentators. And in due course we shall – bear with us. Just let us break the back of inflation (low productivity, post-Brexit and post-Covid slowdown, you name it), and then we’ll be able to kiss hydrocarbons good-bye.

The valid argument that the scientific justification for net zero is fraudulent is never heard, not even in the name of balanced journalism. Someone saying, for example, that the climate has been warmer than now for 85 per cent of the earth’s existence, even when neither hydrocarbons nor indeed people were a factor, wouldn’t be seen as a chap with a different opinion.

He’d be seen and treated as a heretic, to be immolated in the pyre of public disdain. So it’s best to keep him off the air. Both he and the orthodoxy will be safer that way.

P.S. Speaking of immolation: as I write this, France is on fire again. Two days ago a cop demanded that a 17-year-old Muslim stop the car he was driving. When the boy refused to comply, the cop shot him dead.

President Macron made a scathing statement about that ‘inexcusable act’, this before the policeman involved had been tried and found guilty. But then the French tend to be less pedantic than les anglo-saxons about the presumption of innocence.

Thousands of ghetto-dwellers all over France responded in a characteristically logical and measured manner. They started torching cars and burning houses in their own neighbourhoods, as one does.

Well, when in France do as the French do. So it was only by a great effort of self-control that I desisted from torching my neighbour’s car. What finally stopped me was the mournful realisation that I wasn’t French enough to act in such an indigenous manner.

A propos of cars, the victim was delivering pizzas in a Mercedes AMG, the high end of the range. Even assuming that the car wasn’t brand new, pizza delivery must be a remarkably more lucrative occupation in France than even in my rather upscale part of London. There the victim’s colleagues tend to ride scooters – leaving a much smaller carbon footprint.

No matter how high the premiums, no insurance company would agree to sell a life policy to Yevgeny Prigozhin. The risk would be unacceptable.

Now those Wagnerian Valkyries stopped their march within swearing distance of Moscow, Prigozhin’s life isn’t worth that proverbial brass farthing. The same goes for all his officers and men.

The whole scenario seems to vindicate Hegel’s saying, later repeated by Marx, that “history repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a farce”. In that spirit, Wagner’s exploits quickly turned from opera to operetta.

Start with Prigozhin’s putative reason for turning around: I have moved within 100 km of Moscow, he said, without spilling any Russian blood. If I go any farther, that precious blood will be spilled, and that’s unacceptable.

First, Wagnerians shot down eight Russian aircraft, killing at least 15 flyers, possibly more. By Russian standards that may not count as spilled blood – I believe they start counting only at five digits, possibly not even then. Still, the claim of “no Russian blood” was farcical — especially coming from a man who had had his own stragglers publicly killed with a sledgehammer.

Most military experts agree that Prigozhin could have taken Moscow had he not stopped. The capital was denuded: the battle-worthy units in its garrison had been shipped to the Ukrainian front.

What was left was the so-called National Guard and security forces, armed only to disperse peaceful demonstrations. They still greatly outnumbered Wagner’s vanguard of some 5,000 advancing on Moscow, but one Wagner cutthroat is worth 10 such truncheon-wielders.

I was especially moved watching videos of the defensive measures taken by Putin’s men as the Wagner column advanced on the main highway linking Russia’s south with Moscow. Putin’s men brought in excavators, tore up the tarmac in several places and dug trenches across the roadway.

That wouldn’t have slowed down Prigozhin’s armour for no longer than an hour or two, but I confidently predict it’ll take the Russians many years to repair the highway. When it comes to such infrastructure projects, they move even more slowly than their British counterparts, which is saying a lot.

For all that, Prigozhin’s only hope was that the Russian army would switch sides and, buoyed by enthusiastic popular support, install Prigozhin in the Kremlin. Yet no such mass desertions took place, and the popular support was rather low-key. To be fair, one didn’t see any crowds waving Putin’s portraits either.

Even assuming that Prigozhin could have ridden his white steed into the Kremlin, he wouldn’t have lasted there. “Losing Moscow doesn’t mean losing Russia,” as Field Marshal Kutuzov said in 1812. He then let Napoleon take the ancient capital, whatever was left of it after Kutuzov and Governor General Rostopchin had burned Moscow to cinders (along with some 26,000 Russian wounded no one had bothered to evacuate).

I’m not suggesting Putin would have done a Rostopchin, but Prigozhin had no military, political or administrative resources to turn his putsch into a successful revolution. That meant the mutiny, if that’s what it was, was doomed. And so now is Prigozhin, along with his whole Wagner group. (I’ll mention another possibility later.)

The conclusion to the march was farcical. Putin, who just a few hours earlier had been describing Prigozhin’s foray as treason, promised to dismiss all charges and allow the Wagner men to return to their “positions of prior deployment”. The deal was mediated by Lukashenko, who generously offered Prigozhin asylum.

First, who on earth is Lukashenko? He is the figurehead leader of a country occupied by Russian troops. Thus he has no more say in such matters than, say, Pierre Laval had in the politics of Nazi-occupied France.

And, considering that Belarus is indeed controlled by Putin’s army and FSB, how safe do you suppose Prigozhin feels there? One word from the Kremlin, and there comes a cup of polonium tea or a spray of novichok aftershave.

Those who may think that Putin will abide by his promise of safe passage misread Russia and her politics woefully. Russia has no state and hence no politics in any accepted sense of the word. The country is run by a gangster family, along the lines explored in The Godfather.

Remember the attempt to assassinate Vito Corleone? The Godfather then went on to prove the old adage that if you merely wound the king, beware. If you don’t kill him, he’ll kill you. As Vito was recovering from his wounds, his enemies, the whole Tattaglia family, were wiped out, along with Corleone’s turncoats.

A mafia boss can neither forgive nor forget. If he does, he shows weakness, loses face. And losing face will inexorably lead to losing his life – such is the law of the criminal underworld.

Sure enough, yesterday Putin finally graced the TV audience with his appearance. Talking to the officers of his enforcement forces, he said that, despite reports to the contrary, the criminal case against the mutiny leaders hadn’t been dropped. The rank and file, he added, can either sign contracts with the Russian army or – listen carefully – join Prigozhin in Belarus.

In any case, the Wagner group seems to have been disbanded. All its officers are under a mafia death sentence and, logically, so is Prigozhin, even though Putin didn’t mention him by name. If any of them or their men choose to join Prigozhin in Belarus, that only means they’ll be killed there rather than elsewhere.

Those deciding to enlist in the Russian army will also be killed, in the Ukraine. There is no doubt they’ll be used as readily dispensable cannon fodder sent on suicide missions.

Such is the scenario lying on the surface. Yet there exists another one, more macabre if less likely.

At first, when Prigozhin’s exile to Belarus was announced, everyone was led to believe he’d be there by himself, a general without an army and therefore not a general any longer. Yet yesterday, Putin gave Wagner fighters the option of joining their caporegime.

Now, assuming that Lukashenko still retains a modicum of power in his land, he must be quaking in his boots at the prospect of several thousand armed bandits inundating his country. The most immediate prospect is that they’ll do to Belorussian towns what they’ve already done to Ukrainian ones, going on a blood-soaked rampage of murder, torture, rape and looting.

Then, of course, the same men who almost took Moscow within a couple of days could probably take Minsk within a couple of hours. Prigozhin has so far failed to oust Putin, but he could easily oust Lukashenko.

The latter understands this perfectly well, which is why he would never have accepted such an arrangement unless pressured by Putin. But why would Putin want to see a Wagner contingent in Belarus? After all, he is already in de facto control of that country.

So here’s some nourishing food for conspiracist thought: Prigozhin’s mutiny occurred within days of the announcement that Russian nuclear weapons had been deployed in Belarus.

Some analysts mulled over the possibility that Putin was going to deliver a nuclear strike on, say, Poland from Belarussian territory and then disclaim any responsibility. It’s all Lukashenko’s fault, he could have said. So, Mr Nato, if you want to retaliate, hit Minsk, not Moscow.

That would have been a transparent lie, but the West would have been predisposed to accept it for fear of an all-out nuclear holocaust. Still, some forces within Nato could have refused to be so credulous. That would have created unpredictable consequences for Putin, and he might not have liked his odds.

But the West could digest the same claim more easily if the nuclear strike were delivered not by a technically sovereign Belorussian state, but by a terrorist gang seizing control of those weapons. Enter Prigozhin and his merry men.

As I mentioned earlier, this scenario is unlikely. But unlikely doesn’t mean impossible – nothing is, with gangsters operating outside any moral constraints.

Come what may, Prigozhin would be well-advised not to make far-reaching plans for the future. He won’t survive any scenario, including the unlikely sinister one I’ve outlined.

Whether he is held responsible for a mutiny against Putin or a nuclear strike against the West, “Putin’s chef” won’t be allowed to live. His goose is cooked.

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.