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Give us a mob and we’ll find a cause. And if one cause doesn’t wreak enough havoc, we’ll merge a few together.

This seems to be the rationale behind yet another paralysis visited on central London by cause hounds. So if you plan to drive to, or through, that area today, plan again.

Two mobs, Just Stop Oil and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, have joined forces to hold London hostage yet again. They are marching under the flags and slogans proclaiming the unassailable justice of both causes – singly and in combination.

At first glance the fit seems imperfect. If we just stopped oil, we’d thereby just stop the funding of Palestinian causes, much of which comes from the oil revenues of some Arab states.

Then again, Just Stop Oil activists have also been known to share their rage with LGBT campaigners. You’d think that their today’s co-marchers would hold such association against the planet defenders. After all, many Palestinian marchers have to believe that LGBT people ought be stoned, thrown off tall buildings or otherwise abused.

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is also taking part in the fun, but only as one of the funders. I wonder where its money is coming from. In the past the CND was a Soviet front, and much of its funding came courtesy of the KGB.

That organisation has since changed its name, but has it kept its clients? That seems logical: after all, that group campaigns for the nuclear disarmament specifically of the West, which has to be martial music to Putin’s ears.

However, he may hear some discordant notes: one poster also says “UK criminalising protest like Putin”, which some may take as tacit disapproval of Vlad.

One has to assume that London bobbies will wade into the protest march, smashing some heads with truncheons, stamping others into the tarmac and then sentencing dozens of people to a tenner in prison. That’s what the phrase ‘like Putin’ seems to imply.

In fact, they are referring to the proposed Public Order Act currently in the Lords. It had cleared the Commons in the run-up to the Coronation as a way of ensuring that the ritual would take place undisrupted.

When assorted mobs did try to disperse the procession, the police pushed them aside, with nary a truncheon seeing the light of day. I surfed the Internet trying to find photos of London cops playing footie with human heads (still attached to the bodies or otherwise), and came a cropper.

In short, all this proves that many causes into one do go, especially since marching mobs don’t mind it if the interconnections are somewhat tenuous. This isn’t about logic, is it? It’s about finding an outlet for bubbling gonadic hatred – of whatever is supposed to be hated today.

But the ring masters don’t want to come across as mindless thugs. If it’s logical interconnections you seek, you reactionary troglodyte you, they are happy to oblige.

Come forth, a Just Stop Oil spokesman: “Palestinians are among the most vulnerable people on earth to the effects of climate collapse, and in the daily struggle to survive in an apartheid state, they have no capacity to protect themselves against what is coming.

“The Public Order Act has criminalised peaceful dissent. Anyone speaking up about the injustices wrought on Palestinians or calling out the corruption and criminality of the UK government, risks arrest.”

Now that’s an impressive potpourri if I’ve ever seen one. Because Israel is an apartheid state, the UK government is corrupt and criminal, and any dissent against it is criminalised, global warming will destroy the planet, starting with Palestinians. Who can argue against this logic? Exactly. Only the people I’ve called reactionary troglodytes.

Since I am manifestly not one of them, I’m happy to put my somewhat rusty but still extant advertising skills to the service of political virtue. So here are some slogans to energise the masses into – justified! – civil unrest:

“Save the whales, the planet, Palestine and each initial in LGBT”, “Yes to wind, no to antacids”, “Down with the syndrome”, “No nukes, no dukes”, “Kill an Israeli for Islam and CND”, “Yasser, that’s my baby, Nasser, don’t mean maybe”, “Wind farms and cannabis farms”, “Right to riot”, “Make Palestinians and healthcare free”, “Do it man to man”, “Kill the Bill” (that one will need a picture of a policeman) – stop me please, before I suggest something really bizarre.

The French tend to treat such slogan wielders with tear gas and water cannon, not that it does them much good. But, and now I’ll sound serious for a change, if people wish to protest against anything, it’s their right to do so.

They should be welcome to exercise it – provided they don’t thereby impinge on the rights of others. If an ambulance or a fire engine can’t get through because our planet and Palestine need saving, lives may be lost in the more immediate term. And even barring such dramatic scenarios, my right to have a quiet walk through London’s gorgeous centre is valid too.

There should be some areas designated for such protests, where the mobs can vent their innermost emotions without bringing a great city to a standstill. Perhaps Highgate Cemetery may be perfect, with Marx’s grave providing the centrepiece. Or the Regent’s Park Zoo, where protesters could multitask as exhibits.

The Public Order Act doesn’t go far enough, in other words. It should be based on the premise that blocking the traffic and paralysing the city is not an assertion of freedom, but its denial.

Just write to your MP, chaps, if you want to protect Palestinians from warm weather. That’s the civilised way to protest without too many people thinking you’re just a bunch of destructive morons. And that’s how Britain is still different from Putin’s Russia. “Down with spurious similes!”

As I watched the Victory Day parade in Red Square, admired the spinal strength of old men bending under the weight of their medals, and listened to the speeches glorifying Soviet veterans, I was doing sums.

Mathematical nous isn’t my core strength, but my numeracy still stretches to simple additions and subtractions. Putting those modest talents to work, I whipped out my trusted calculator and went to work.

The youngest Soviet participants in Stalin’s war against Hitler were born in 1927. Today that would make them… let’s see: 2023 minus 1927 equals 96. That’s almost 30 years more than the average life expectancy for men in Russia. And would it be wild conjecture to assume that the physical and mental traumas of a horrible war don’t bolster longevity?

Combining these basic calculations with empirical observation, one could notice that most of those bemedaled veterans in Red Square were no older than me. Meaning they were born several years after the war that the Russians have elevated to a secular cult.

And yet they were applauded every time the Second World War was mentioned, which was all the time. Why, even that great veteran of KGB wars, Putin, sat flanked by those senior citizens, wingmen to his flight leader.

Actually, the one on his right looked as if he just might be old enough to have caught the tail end of the big war, if not to have had enough time to garner all those decorations. And there were a lot of them.

Each wingman exhibited more decorations than Field Marshal Mongomery and Gen. Bradley had between them. But then the Soviets were notoriously generous with tinsel, if nothing else. Actually, that was the only war the Soviet Union ever fought for a good cause, if not from the very beginning.

For almost two years, from 17 September, 1939, to 22 June, 1941, it was an ally of Nazi Germany and hence shared her guilt in starting the Second World War. However, the veterans of the Soviet attack on Poland would now be way over 100, and no one lives that long in Russia.

The chap on Putin’s left looked the right age to have taken part in the Soviet war on Afghanistan, 1979-1989, as an officer, not an enlisted man. But since that war ended in abject defeat, its veterans aren’t usually feted with effusive enthusiasm.

So where did those men win their medals? No doubt Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t need anyone’s help to figure out their life stories by just examining the photograph through a magnifying glass. But since I possess neither his talents nor indeed a magnifying glass, I welcomed the help of someone who has done the legwork for me.

It was Tamara Eidelman, whom I recently described as “a Russian historian who looks like everybody’s favourite aunt and sounds the way a Russian Easter cake would sound if it could talk”. Even though she has been exiled from Russia, she still managed to dig up the information I sought.

The older wingman, Yuri Dvoikin, indeed caught the very end of that war, but mostly distinguished himself after it. He served in the NKVD punitive troops “fulfilling assignments of liquidating the nationalist underground on the territory of Western Ukraine”.

Allow me to translate the quoted phrase from Soviet into Human. Until 17 September, 1939, Western Ukraine had been known as Eastern Poland, and until 1918 it had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The people there were fierce nationalists who fought first the Poles, then the Soviets, then the Nazis (with whom some of them collaborated), then the Soviets again. After the war, Western Ukrainians supplied most (though far from all) fighters for the guerrilla units that continued to fight the Soviets well into the mid-50s if not later.

The Soviets responded to the resistance movement the only way they knew how: with unrestrained brutality. Hostages were taken and shot, whole villaged were burned down, hundreds of thousands were deported, the fighters’ families were exterminated, and eventually the resistance was suppressed.

But mutual hatred remained, and you can hear its echoes in today’s battlefields. The Ukrainians’ hatred was largely fed by the artificial famine the Soviets organised in the early 1930s. Some five million starved to death in that fertile land – and that’s a conservative estimate.

So Yuri Dvoikin was Vlad Putin’s colleague in Soviet security, though his service was more hands on. He earned his medals by shooting Ukrainians, some of whom shot back, some – I suspect most – didn’t. They were what’s today called ‘collateral damage’, civilians exterminated pour encourager les autres, as Voltaire described the execution of the English admiral John Byng.

Putin’s left wingman, Gennady Zaitsev, looks about my age, meaning he was born way after that war. Dr Eidelman doesn’t specify the origin of all his numerous decorations, but she does mention the probable origin of some.

Gen. Zaitsev, as he now is, took part in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, nipping the so-called Prague Spring in the bud. If some of Dvoikin’s victims were armed, Zaitsev’s targets weren’t. The Czechs, most of them young idealists, came out into the streets demanding a communism with a human face.

That was their mistake: communism has no human face. It has a scowling snout red in tooth and claw. (Having first used Voltaire’s phrase, I’m now using Tennyson’s. About time I came up with my own, wouldn’t you say?)

And some of those red splotches were doubtless added by Comrade Zaitsev. That made him a precursor of Putin’s stormtroopers currently trying to do to all of the Ukraine what Comrade Dvoikin did to its western part, and Comrade Zaitsev did to Czechoslovakia.

Kremlin watchers knew in the past to ponder the order in which Soviet leaders appeared on the Lenin Mausoleum during Victory Day parades. Proximity to the Great Leader at the time was symbolic. Expert analysts were able to infer all sorts of zigs and zags of Soviet policy just looking at the people who flanked the Secretary General.

That job description has changed, but the symbolism remains. Putin chose his wingmen advisedly, as a tacit declaration ad urbi et orbi. You don’t need me to understand its meaning: Russia is proud of her past and present of stamping out freedom movements at her borders. Get the message?

When the Soviets captured the historical Prussian city of Königsberg, they renamed it after their figurehead president, Mikhail Kalinin.

That name has been an annoying irritant for both the Germans and the Poles. The former still referred to that Baltic port as Königsberg, and with ample historical justification.

After all, the city was founded in the 13^th century by the Teutonic Knights who named it after the Bohemian king Ottokar. Even after the Prussian capital moved to Berlin in 1701, their kings were still crowned in Königsberg, although with less pomp than some Hanoverians, such as our own dear Charles III.

But halfway through the period I’ve so far demarcated, Königsberg belonged to Poland for a couple of centuries. Rather than finding a new name for the city, the Poles showed a singular lack of imagination by simply translating the German name into Polish, which came out as Królewiec.

Now the Poles have announced that henceforth they’ll be referring to Kaliningrad by that Polish name. I must say it doesn’t mean as much to me as Königsberg does. All I know about the place comes from books by and about Immanuel Kant, its greatest denizen, and I dismiss with contempt all claims to the same designation by the aficionados of Hanna Arendt, who was also from there.

And Kant lived neither in Królewiec nor, most definitely, in Kaliningrad. He lived in Königsberg and there he stayed, practically without ever leaving, his whole life. Every morning he went on exactly the same walk at exactly the same time, and his neighbours checked their clocks by the philosopher striding by.

I’d be happy if the city were renamed Kantberg, but my happiness doesn’t come into this. The Poles’ sensitivities do, and these are considerable. Some of those are simply national pride, similar to that of the Chinese who stubbornly refer to the places in Russia’s Far East by their original Chinese names. Northern Sea, anyone? That’s what they call Lake Baikal.

Now, the Chinese are busily colonising that area, and the time may come soon when it will be incorporated into China, making all the original names a fait accompli. The Poles probably have no reasonable hope of reclaiming Kaliningrad, but their desire to rename it is perfectly understandable.

For Kaliningrad isn’t just any old Russian name. Mikhail Kalinin was one of the six signatories to the infamous Katyn order. Following it some 21,000 Polish POWs were massacred in Katyn and elsewhere during two months of 1940.

That crime left a bleeding wound in the Polish psyche, and it has never closed because Russia has been rubbing salt into it ever since. The Soviets installed a communist regime there at about the time Königsberg became Kalinigrad, through which they ruled Poland in the time-dishonoured Soviet style for the better part of half a century.

Throughout that time the Soviets denied their guilt in the Katyn massacres, for all the incontrovertible evidence, including the aforementioned order. Then in 1990 Gorbachev finally admitted that the massacre had been perpetrated by the NKVD.

The Soviet Union was disintegrating, and it was important for the government to procure Western aid. To that end they would have been prepared to own up even to a crime they had nothing to do with, such as the execution of Socrates, never mind one they did commit, such as Katyn.

Now that Putin has girded his loins to take on the West, starting with Russia’s immediate neighbours, the Russians are again claiming it was the Nazis who murdered those Poles. Again facts don’t matter. Only political expediency does.

Next to Britain, Poland is the most ardent European supporter of the Ukraine’s efforts to keep the Soviet brand of Nazism at bay. The Poles must be partly driven by noble impulses but also, for a greater part, by their acute sense of danger. Unlike some of our pundits, they understand that, should the Ukraine fall, Poland may well be next.

There’s the rub. For the sake of good neighbourly relations the Poles, I’m sure, would be happy to forget Russia’s crimes against them. Well, if not exactly forget – such atrocities are unforgettable – then at least to pretend publicly they have forgotten.

But the Russians won’t let them. By razing Ukrainian cities from the face of the earth, murdering, torturing, raping and looting Ukrainians – all in an act of naked and unprovoked aggression aimed at restoring the Soviet Union, Poland’s slave master – the Russians keep the Poles’ resentment fresh and their fears justified.

Putin’s flunkeys have responded to that Polish philological exercise with predictable howls of Russophobia. Now, the Greek word φοβία means inordinate fear of something. But add Russo- to it, and the word begins to mean something else, to the Russians at any rate.

It denotes any attempt to resist or even decry any Russian effort to dominate Europe, or ideally the whole world. At every historical junction it has also meant disliking the current Russian dictator, these days Putin. You know, the chap whom even his closest associates call “a complete arsehole” on camera.

Hence the whole world, with the exception of Belarus and Peter Hitchens, is Russophobic. The Ukrainians are especially so, with their obdurate refusal to stay supine, docilely watching the Russians rape their country. Poland and Britain are next in the stakes of European Russophobia – they support and arm the Ukraine, and that dastardly Britain has just sent over some long-range missiles.

The Russians clearly refuse to see Królewiec as a reasonable compromise between Königsberg and Kaliningrad. No meeting halfway for them – they want the whole enchilada… or make it kielbasa – no, wait, I mean bratwurst.

Meanwhile, I hope one day Kaliningrad will officially become Königsberg again. I’d even settle for Królewiec, provided that ancient city is no longer named after that Soviet butcher.

The phrase sounds oxymoronic to me, but then I’m just a poor boy from downtown Russia. So I get terribly confused with all those pronouns, identities and genders.

I even used to be confused with the definition of a transgender woman. Is it a woman who becomes a man or a man who becomes a woman? Well, at least that confusion has been cleared up by the trial of Lexi-Rose Crawford, né Dominic.

“Miss Crawford” is a former man who tends to use “her penis” for criminal purposes. The incongruous phrases in quotes came from the trial, where they were used throughout by the defence, prosecution and judge.

The new-fangled woman used her penis to rape a friend, who was naturally female and therefore not strong enough to fight “Miss Crawford” off. It took the jury a lightning-quick two hours to convict, and Lexi-Rose was sentenced to nine years – in a men’s prison, which is something new, or at least recent, in the history of such crimes.

After several transgender women were sent to women’s prisons, they used their penises to rape other inmates and even guards. Hence the Ministry of Justice went against its instincts and issued guidance under which women who use their penises to commit sex offences will automatically go to male prisons.

Rather than clearing up my confusion, this guidance exacerbates it. Are transgender women, with their penises intact or removed, women or men? If they are women, they should go to female prisons and, if they happen to rape someone there, that’s just collateral damage in an ideological war.

But if they are still tacitly regarded as men, then by all means, off to the male pokey they go. But in that case, they shouldn’t be addressed as “Miss” anything, and their penises should keep their original personal pronouns.

“Miss Crawford” had some previous. When she was still a he, Mr Crawford was sentenced to four years for sex with a minor, otherwise known as statutory rape. But he was then released on licence (parole, to my American readers) and realised he was really a she.

By way of celebrating her new identity, Miss Crawford then used her penis as a shortcut to nine years in prison. However, those unfamiliar with the mysterious ways in which our jurisprudence works should know that things aren’t all that grim for “Miss Crawford”.

In spite of being a recidivist sex offender, she’ll probably be out in less than five years, entering the free population with her penis at the ready and looking for action. But that’s not the reason I’d describe the trial as a resounding victory for Lexi-Rose and everything she represents.

Some may argue that nine years is too soft a term for a repeat offender, and I for one fail to see how our society will be improved by a continued presence of Crawford in our midst, whatever he/she/it is called. Had the judge added a zero at the end of her sentence, I wouldn’t have objected.

But that still isn’t the point. Neither – and I hope you won’t think me heartless – is the pain suffered by Crawford’s past and doubtless future victims. (You don’t think her penis will stay idle when she is at large, do you?)

The real damage was done by all the other participants in that trial, those who referred to Crawford as “Miss” and spoke of “her penis”. A society, in which bewigged ladies and gentlemen, one of them wielding a gavel, can utter such phrases without flinching or being smitten by lightning from high above, has gone totally, probably irredeemably bonkers.

The use of such phrases endorses and perpetuates the madness plaguing society, precluding any possibility of successful treatment. Any normal person would balk at saying “her penis” for aesthetic reasons, if no other.

Injecting this kind of poison will eventually kill the English language – there are only so many toxins it can absorb and still survive. It won’t die as a means of communication, only as a vehicle of coherent expression laden with useful, sometimes beautiful, nuances.

And when the language goes, everything else does, at least everything that matters. If the word was in the beginning, it’s not illogical to fear it may also spell the end. Notice that all social perversions and revolutionary upheavals started with an assault on language.

For words convey concepts and concepts convey thoughts. Hence whoever controls language imposes his reign on people’s minds, and that’s the worst – and longest-lasting – of all possible tyrannies.

Political tyrants can be deposed in minutes, the shackles of economic bondage can also be shed quickly. But despotism imposed on people’s minds takes permanent residence there, and it may take centuries to abrogate its squatting rights.

So fine, if His Honour thinks nine years, in reality no more than five, is an adequate punishment for a brutal rapist with a history of sex offences, let’s not quibble. But what sentence would you suggest His Honour and both counsel merit for raping the English language and what’s left of collective sanity?

All sorts of bloodthirsty ideas are crossing my mind, but I’ll keep them in check. Perhaps if “Miss” Crawford used “her penis”, and Mr Crawford his, to rape, respectively, the women and men involved, it would be fitting and sufficient punishment replete with poetic justice.

Striking them off afterwards wouldn’t go amiss either. In a country ruled by law, crazy laws will impose a crazy rule. And the only way to keep the law sane is to rid the ranks of its practitioners of crazed saboteurs.  

In 1997, O.J. Simpson’s lawyers played the race card to get him acquitted of the murder he had clearly committed.

Commenting on the verdict, the columnist George F. Will remarked wittily: “That goes to show yet again that a black man can’t get a fair trial in America.”

Yes, but can a white man? Apparently not, especially if his name is Donald Trump and the court is in Manhattan.

That’s why the other day he was convicted of sexual assault supposedly committed almost 30 years ago. His accuser, the columnist E. Jean Carroll, is now some five million richer as a result – and American justice infinitely poorer.

Justice should never defy reason, the way politics routinely does. And when justice does defy reason, then it’s usually because politics interferes.

I wrote about this travesty of a trial the other day, so I’m not going to recount the details. In very broad strokes, Miss Carroll claimed Trump had raped her in a dressing room of the upscale Manhattan department store Bergdorf Goodman.

According to her, she kept silent throughout her ordeal and, in any case, there wasn’t anyone on the floor to hear her even had she screamed. “I’m telling you he raped me, whether I screamed or not,” said Miss Carroll.

That’s an extremely unlikely story. The only reason that comes to mind for a raped woman not to scream is a threat to her life. However, for all of Trump’s boorishness, I can’t imagine him brandishing a knife at Bergdorf’s and telling Miss Carroll he’d slit her throat if she made a sound.

And you know what? The jurors agreed. That’s why they acquitted Trump of rape, for which I applaud them. However, they still convicted him of sexual assault, for which I rebuke them.

Let me see if I understand this correctly. The standards of proof are looser in a civil case than in a criminal one. Instead of proving the charge beyond reasonable doubt, the plaintiff must only prove it on the balance of probability.

Weighed in that balance, Miss Carroll was found wanting. In other words, the jury decided her accusation of rape was false. Let me rephrase: she was found to be lying. Then on what balance of probability was she found truthful when claiming sexual assault?

Without going into salacious detail, sexual assault can these days mean something that in the past barely qualified as bad manners. Rape means something very specific, but sexual assault no longer does. It can mean an uninvited kiss or a pat or a light squeeze – something for which a telling off or perhaps a slap in the face used to be deemed sufficient punishment.

So how could the jury decide Trump was guilty of some or all of those transgressions? On what balance of probability? On what evidence?

The only evidence was that old chestnut, her word against his. And her word was already found to be untruthful on her claim of rape. What suddenly made Miss Carroll trustworthy on a lesser charge?

The logic escapes me, but the political motivation doesn’t.

Americans either love Trump or hate him. But that dichotomy doesn’t apply in Manhattan. Most of its denizens loathe Trump with unmitigated passion. A prophet is not without honour… and all that. Though I can’t ascribe prophetic powers to Trump, he certainly isn’t honoured in his own land, Manhattan, where he has lived most of his life.

Manhattan is a heavily Democratic borough, and always has been since the days of Tammany Hall, the political machine of the Democratic Party founded before the party even got its name. Trying a Republican presidential candidate there was like trying a homosexual Jew in Saudi Arabia.

Thus Miss Carroll had a reasonable expectation of success. Still, suing anyone, especially a man with deep pockets, is an expensive undertaking. Had she lost, the legal fees would have ruined her, wouldn’t they?

They would, had she paid them. But she didn’t. Her lawsuit was funded by Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, a lifelong Democrat donor and campaigner for Democratic causes. So Miss Carroll was playing with house money and couldn’t lose whatever the outcome.

That fact was known before the trial, which to my legally unsophisticated mind seems like a valid reason for dismissal. But evidently not in Manhattan.

America’s founders knew that justice and politics can only ever converge to the detriment of both. Yet not only in America but throughout the West the courts are becoming increasingly politicised. That can damage a country more surely and devastatingly than any economic downturn short of a total meltdown.

Independent judiciary, evidence-based jurisprudence, judges impervious to political pressures or ideologies – these are the bricks of which the foundation of the West is built. Remove them, and the whole structure does a Jericho.

That verdict also brings into question the continuing validity of the jury system. Jurors are randomly selected from an available pool of humanity, and if that pool is poisoned with ideologies, justice can quickly become very unjust indeed.

I’ve been wondering for a long time whether it’s any longer statistically probable to find 12 (in civil cases, sometimes nine) good men who understand what guilt means, what evidence is, and whose judgement isn’t queered by political afflatus or class hatred.

My friends who are sometimes involved in trials in various capacities assure me the jury system still works. However, lately their assurances have been offered rather half-heartedly.

Perhaps we should adopt elements of the French system, where any jury panel includes one or two lawyers who understand basic legal concepts. On second thoughts, scratch that idea. It may work in some places – but certainly not in Manhattan. And not in London either, come to think of it.

P.S. Speaking of politics, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, whose private military company Wagner is trying to take Bakhmut, no longer seems to have much time for Putin.

Commenting on yesterday’s parade in Red Square, he said: “The happy Grandpa thinks everything is going well… What’s the country to do, what are our children and grandchildren to do, how are we to win this war if (hypothetically) it so happens that this Grandpa turns out to be a complete arsehole?”

He didn’t have to specify who the hapless Grandpa is, but he didn’t have to. If I were Prigozhin, I’d be looking over my shoulder.

William Congreve’s popular line mentioned “a woman scorned”, which only goes to show how long ago the 17^th century was.

I bet Congreve didn’t even know the word ‘trans’, although he could have observed the underlying phenomenon. There’s every chance he might have visited a county fair in his native Yorkshire, with a bearded woman as a star attraction.

As to the word ‘misgendering’, I’m willing to bet my house that old William neither knew the word nor could even guess its meaning. One has to celebrate the constantly expanding English language, if not necessarily every way in which it is expanding.

The noun ‘gender’, for example, used to designate a grammatical category only. It then took on an extra job, one formerly held by the word ‘sex’. But even then it remained a noun.

No longer. We can now ‘misgender’ someone, which by inference suggests that ‘gender’ is also a transitive verb. Isn’t English wonderful?

Then there is the word ‘Karen’ that I’ve only learned this morning. Do you know it? Don’t fret, you can always rely on me to expand your vocabulary. As I found out, ‘Karen’ is a pejorative American term for a white, middle-aged woman.

The term is so essential that we have imported it along with other American products, such as hot dogs, Coke and verbs made out of nouns. Anyway, put the words ‘trans’, ‘misgender’ and ‘Karen’ together and you get an unsightly clash at a Starbucks in Southampton.

A ‘Karen’ ‘misgendered’ a ‘trans’ working at that coffee shop. Oh by the way, I forgot to mention ‘transphobe’, another word that would have puzzled Congreve. That’s what the misgendered trans called the offending Karen: “You’re calling me a man, you’re being transphobic, Karen. Now get out.”

Karen disobeyed and a scuffle ensued. When the trans saw that another customer was filming the action, he/she/it knocked the phone out of his hand and was subsequently sacked for his/her/its trouble.

That has produced a torrent of Internet comments, some in support of the trans, others extolling the Karen for her courage. The first group wields the term ‘trans rights’, and I shan’t even mention Congreve’s possible reaction to it had he lived improbably long.

These days the word ‘rights’ has the same effect on me as the word ‘culture’ allegedly had on Dr Goebbels. This term has always been in circulation, but never as widely as these days.

The ‘rights of Englishmen’, for example, were invoked by the rebellious American colonists, who went on to prove, somewhat illogically, that one such right was to stop being Englishmen.

But these days we are served up any number of rights: to marriage, education, health, development of personality, leisure time, warm and loving family or – barring that – warm and loving social services, employment, paternity leave and so forth.

Using the language of the rebellious American colonists, the assumption is that all rights are created equal. They aren’t. Some, such as the right to life, are natural rights, inherent in the very nature of man. Others are strictly a matter of consensus.

It’s easy to tell them apart. Natural rights don’t presuppose a concomitant obligation on someone else’s part. Other rights, such as those I mentioned above, do.

For example, one’s right to employment would mean something tangible only if there were someone out there who consents or is obligated by law to give one a job. One’s right to education presupposes the existence of someone obligated to provide such education – and so on.

Negating a natural right is usually a crime. Murder, for example, denies the right to life; keeping someone locked up in the cellar denies the right to liberty. What about trans rights then?

That all depends on what we mean by the term. If a man wishes to live his life as a woman, it’s his right to do so – inasmuch as his right doesn’t impinge on someone else’s, specifically mine.

If that man decides to go the whole medical hog, his right becomes rather dubious, in some cases downright bogus. There he depends on other people’s consent to facilitate that transition. Doctors must agree, for example, to prescribe a course of hormonal treatments. A surgeon must agree to perform the necessary operation.

Moreover, our saintly NHS must agree to pay for all that. That’s where I sense my rights being curtailed. After all, the NHS is financed by the public, of which I’m a small, but to me rather significant, part. Don’t I have a right to object when my money is being used to an end I find deplorable?

We are in a grey area there because a right doesn’t have to be natural to be valid. But it’s worth reiterating that the right to change sex is consensual and therefore not natural. And the beautiful thing about consent is that it can be not only given but also withdrawn.

Thus it should be reasonably clear that our ‘Karen’ had a natural right to refuse to accept the Starbucks trans on his/her/its terms. At the same time, the trans had no right at all, natural or otherwise, to insist that the ‘Karen’ refuse to believe the evidence before her eyes and agree to misuse the English language accordingly.

Here we observe a clash of two rights, one real, the other virtual, which is to say bogus. When such a conflict arises, common sense suggests that actual reality should defeat the virtual kind every time. So it would have done, in William Congreve’s time.

In our time, I wouldn’t be surprised if the sacked trans appealed to a tribunal and won compensation for unfair dismissal. After all, it’s not only the English language that evolves, but also our understanding of reality. That’s progress for you.

There was bunting everywhere, but no one to look at it. Our normally busy street was deserted. No pedestrians were dodging traffic – there was no traffic and there were no pedestrians.

All the would-be drivers and pedestrians were either in or around Westminster, or else glued to TV screens. They were watching Britain doing what only Britain can do: stage a great political pageant linking heaven and earth.

What we saw yesterday was a coronation mass, complete with all the liturgical elements including the Eucharist. God was at the centre of the proceedings, and it was in his name that Charles III was crowned.

When the head of state is anointed, rather than appointed or elected, a country’s backbone doesn’t start at the neck and end at the coccyx. It starts, stays and ends in eternity, which makes the country stand upright and tall.

One is tempted to say that Charles and Camilla were almost bit players in the grand spectacle. “I came to serve, not to be served,” said the King, correctly identifying the role in which he is cast: not the master, but a servant. To his people and his God.

One could quibble about a few false notes here and there. The multicultural makeup of the realm was overemphasised. I could have done without American-style gospel singers, for example – nothing wrong with the genre, but it seemed out of place next to William Byrd and even Handel.

Better composers than Andrew Lloyd Webber could have been found for the musical centrepiece, and I would rather have seen someone other than Penny ‘Thunder Thighs’ Mordaunt carrying the sword. Yes, I know Penny was institutionally entitled, but warrior queens have been somewhat out of fashion for 2,000 years. And she doesn’t quite cut it as Boadicea anyway.

But these are minor gripes belying a great sense of relief. All my worst fears were laid to rest by that bravura performance. After all, no one minds it when a great musician hits a wrong note or two. It’s the overall sublime effect that counts. And for those two hours Britain was at her best, which, in the historical scheme of things, was as good as any country has ever been since the time of, well, Boadicea.

And then it was back to reality, as it’s crystallised in Liverpool. Their football team played a match later that afternoon, and the Premier League had decided that God Save the King would be sung at all grounds on Coronation Day.

So it was in Liverpool, but the singers’ lips were moving wordlessly. Whatever sounds they were making were drowned by jeers, boos and whistles synchronised into a disgusting din by thousands of morons.

On the day they should have felt proud to be British, they felt enraged. The Britain celebrated in Westminster isn’t their country. They don’t love it, they don’t respect it, they owe it no allegiance. They hate everything it represents, including – especially? – the reassertion of its links with eternity.

Those barnyard noises weren’t a statement of republican convictions. That, though sorely misguided, would have been some sort of positive statement coming from reason. But reason had been left outside the stadium. Only visceral hatred remained.

It wasn’t spontaneous. Those Scousers came armed with posters, such as the one above and ‘Not my king’. Their crime against British civility was premeditated, which isn’t like saying it had been thought through.

I noticed a long time ago that today’s lower classes seem to believe that Britishness, and certainly Englishness, is quantifiable and defined by class. I’ve heard people comment on my wife’s patrician diction by saying: “She’s very English.” I tried to find out what they meant – after all, how can anyone be more or less English? You either are or you aren’t, aren’t you?

They’d invariably look at me with the condescension of someone to whom a higher truth had been vouchsafed. The lower down the social scale you descend, the less English you become.

So what do they become, if not British? A deracinated, anomic wad of humanity, trained in the art of class war and hardly anything else. The Britain on show in Westminster yesterday isn’t their country. It’s their enemy launching an offensive to be warded off.

“Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws…”

When Disraeli wrote this in 1845, that confrontation was already very much in evidence. But at least those two nations met in one church every Sunday. Once a week they were reminded of the ultimate oneness of the nation before God – the ultimate brotherhood of all men. As they moved through the week that understanding attenuated, but there was still enough left to last until next Sunday.

Take that away, and the alienation Disraeli spotted turns into hatred bottom to top and contempt top to bottom. That’s the stuff of which revolutions are made, and we all know what they bring.

What we are left with is hope – that yesterday’s London is a fairer reflection of Britain than yesterday’s Liverpool. That the moving ceremony in Westminster was testimony to unity, not to seething discord. That it was the cheers and not the jeers that were the voice of real Britain.  

When I met Metropolitan Hilarion in February, 2014… Hold on, I know time flies, but this isn’t just fast. It’s bloody supersonic.

If asked, I would have guessed the meeting took place some five years ago. But it was almost 10 – and I wrote about it at the time: (http://www.alexanderboot.com/the-c-of-e-and-the-kgb-converge-on-traditional-values/)

Anyway, at that time Hilarion was head of the Church’s External Affairs Department, a post traditionally seen as the anteroom of the patriarchate. (For example, it used to be held by the current KGB patriarch, Kirill.)

That job, alas, also presupposed not just links with the KGB/FSB, but practically full-time employment in it. I regretted that at the time because I found Hilarion to be a truly impressive man.

Anyway, everyone knew he was on a fast track to become the next patriarch. But then everyone had to eat humble pie. About a year ago, Hilarion was abruptly removed from his high perch and exiled to the comparatively minor post of metropolitan of Budapest and Hungary.

Again, everyone, including me, wondered about his demotion. And, explained a friend of mine, everyone, including me, was wrong again. That wasn’t a demotion. It was a special assignment.

Unlike me, this friend is an Orthodox scholar, which means his antennae are more finely attuned to the toing and froing within that church. What he told me brought back to mind the story of Nikolai Berdyayev, one of the Russian thinkers exiled in 1922 on the infamous “philosophers’ steamer”.

His first stopover was Prague, at that time the nerve centre of Russian emigration. On his first night there, Berdyayev attended a meeting held in the house of Anton Kartashev, the last Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod.

He and other renowned Russian exiles were discussing ways of fighting Bolshevism. Suddenly, quite out of the blue, Berdyayev delivered an oration to the effect that, rather than fighting Bolshevism, they should cooperate with it.

Everyone present was stunned. Then Kartashev delivered his verdict, so much more poignant in Russian than in translation: “I thought they’d exiled [vyslali] you. But in fact they’ve implanted [zaslali] you.”

That’s exactly what my learned friend told me about Hilarion. According to him the FSB Collegium, the Politburo of Putin’s Russia, was seeking to turn Hungary into the centre of pro-Kremlin subversion in the EU.

Though Hungary is a predominantly Catholic country, its president, Orbán, is a known stooge to Putin’s regime. It was hoped that, working in ecumenical tandem with Hilarion, he could subvert European opposition to Russia’s bandit raid on the Ukraine.

I didn’t argue with my friend – I never argue with anyone who clearly knows more about a subject than I do. I just said something along the lines of “let’s wait and see”.

Well, we have waited, and we have seen. Last week Pope Francis visited Hungary on, as he declared, a secret mission to stop the war. “Peace,” said His Holiness, “is always achieved by the opening of channels.”

He then held a meeting with Orbán and Hilarion where “all that was discussed”. All three parties, added the pontiff, “are interested in finding a road to peace”.

Blessed are the peacemakers and all that, but this side of absolute virtue we live in a world of endless relativities. Even such a seemingly indisputable virtue as seeking peace can be mired in a relativist quicksand.

Peace may always be achieved by the opening of channels, but what kind of peace? In a world ruled by absolute goodness, the two sides use those channels to kiss and make up. They each retreat to their pre-peace positions and live happily ever after, exchanging postcards every Christmas.

Alas, history shows that in our relativist world such an outcome is rare, if not entirely impossible. Typically, said channels are used to negotiate one side’s defeat and the other side’s victory. So what kind of peace does that triumvirate have in mind?

Now it took His Holiness seven months after 24 February, 2022, – and eight years since the annexation of the Crimea! – to describe Russia as the aggressor. But even now he waffles at regular intervals that the issue is not as clearcut as all that, Nato is also at fault, Putin might have overreacted but he had been provoked – and so on, Kremlin propaganda almost verbatim, but with a pontifical touch.

As to Orbán, his line is that, since the Ukraine can’t possibly win the war against Russia, the West should withdraw its support that does nothing but prolong the bloodshed. However, all European countries, moans Orbán, except Hungary and Vatican City, continue to send arms to the Ukraine. That, according to him, makes nuclear holocaust not only possible but likely.

Meanwhile, his country is churning out maps of Greater Hungary, incorporating parts of the Carpathian Ukraine. To make that a reality, Orbán continues to buy Russian oil, effectively running the economic blockade of the aggressor.

All this should give you an idea of what Francis, Orbán and Hilarion mean by peace. It’s exactly what Putin means: the Ukraine permanently cedes her territories currently occupied by Russia, disarms and agrees to become a Belarus Mark II, effectively Russia’s puppet.

In return, Putin would agree to cease hostilities. In effect, that would mean he’d lick his wounds, regroup, replenish his arsenal and choose the propitious moment to strike again.   

Yet there is that obdurate warmonger Zelensky, who stubbornly refuses to accept that kind of peace. Fancy that.

In short, that tripartite meeting shifted my position on my friend’s suggestion from “You may be right” to “You definitely are right”.

Exactly 100 years after Berdyayev was sent to the West as a fermenting agent of pro-Bolshevik sentiments, Hilarion seems to have been given a similar mission. He and Orbán are on assignment from Putin, and part of it seems to be running the Pope “in the dark”, which is the KGB jargon for an unwitting agent.

Did you notice how I keep repeating the word ‘seems’? Yes, though I’ve come down from the fence, I’m still holding on to it with one hand. A part of me seems to cling to the hope that Hilarion, a brilliant man and my former Moscow neighbour, isn’t a Putin agent.

Oh well, hope’s cheap.

What little I’ve read about the forthcoming coronation fills me with a sense of foreboding. By the sound of it, Princess Anne, our busiest and (whisper it softly) best royal, shares my feelings.

She seems to be aware how dangerous her brother’s modernising instincts are to the survival of our indispensable institution. An awareness, I’m afraid, that isn’t shared by the small but influential coterie fronted by The Guardian and the BBC.

Since most of those people have been to good schools, they’ll be able to shroud their preference for an elected president in a dense fog of academic jargon. But blow it away, and you’ll find nothing behind but the destructive urge that’s the defining characteristic of that lot.

With their education they must realise the scale of the catastrophe that would follow should they succeed in turning Britain into a republic. When that revolting Blair tried to get rid of the institution of Lord Chancellor, he found even that impossible – so wide and intricate was the constitutional ganglion around the post.

Trying to get rid of the monarchy would produce an instant collapse of government, followed by the kind of social unrest comparable to the one that did for Charles I. Charles III would be unlikely to lose his head on a Whitehall scaffold, but he’d lose his crown – and Britain would lose everything that makes her British.

That is an existential threat, and to ward it off the monarchy should stay close to the principle expressed by Matteo Ricci: Simus, ut sumus, aut non simus” (“We shall remain as we are or we shall not remain at all”). Some tweaks here and there are unavoidable and even desirable. But only as long as they don’t compromise the inherently conservative nature of monarchy.

Princess Anne understands all that. But does her brother? He should really listen to his sister who said that King Charles’s plan to slim down the monarchy “doesn’t sound like a good idea from where I’m standing”.

The Royal Family, she added, brings “long-term stability, continuity and goodness” to the UK and Commonwealth. The princess didn’t specify what the demise of the Royal Family would bring, leaving that task for wretches like me, people unbound by any protocols.

It’s not just His Majesty’s idea of a cheaper, more populist monarchy that scares me, but just about everything else he says during the run-up to his coronation. For example, he is planning to apologise for the historical links between the monarchy and slavery.

Any such apology would be a tacit admission of the family’s criminal record, which is indefensible constitutionally, questionable morally and illiterate historically. Anne seems to realise that too, saying that her own view is “slightly different, maybe more realistic”. She said: “Come on… don’t be too focused on time scales and periods. History isn’t like that.”

She is exactly right. History isn’t like that. But those who want to destroy the mionarchy are — and worse.

Incidentally, the same people who yelp the loudest about the monarchy being undemocratic despise democracy more than any monarch in recent memory ever did. Every poll I’ve seen shows that the British love their monarchy and certainly don’t think the king should apologise for slavery.

But hey, they are just hoi polloi. None so contemptuous of the people as those who seek to destroy tradition in their name.

Admittedly, his mother set the royal bar so high that Charles faces a hard task. But he makes it much harder by espousing progressivist bilge in unison with those who hate him and everything his family stands for.

His mother the late queen was a figure of utmost dignity, respected even by those who hated her and the institution she headed. She was never mocked, even though some people spoke of her with a good-natured chuckle.

Mockery can be a more murderous weapon than hatred. The Catholic Church might not have found itself on the receiving end of Luther’s diatribes, had it not in the previous centuries been exposed to cutting ridicule by writers like Boccaccio, Ariosto and Rabelais.

Alas, certain things Charles III is planning for his coronation seem to invite malicious mockery. Such as his idea of TV viewers taking the oath of allegiance as they watch the ceremony.

When I first scanned those reports, I thought of every Briton reporting to the local courthouse, putting a hand on the Bible and then doing what American schoolchildren used to do at the beginning of every day (do they still?): “I pledge allegiance to… [King Charles III, rather than the flag of the Unites States]”.

That shows how important it is not to scan reports, but to read them word for word. Turns out what His Majesty thinks we should do is scream allegiance at the TV screen. I can’t help thinking that such an oath would be less than legally binding, making it out and out kitsch.

Anyone with a shred of humour is bound to laugh, and not necessarily in a very good-natured way. First they laugh, then they cry, then they march – and then they vote. Or, even worse, revolt.

The monarchy must preserve its grandeur, its pomp and circumstance precisely to perform its key function of continuity that Anne spoke about. Is it too late to crown her instead?

Yes, I know orderly succession is essential, and those who accede to the throne must be those legally entitled, not necessarily those best suited. But a man can have wild dreams, can’t he? In reality, such dreams never come true. Anne will remain the best monarch we’ve never had.

The lady, Mother Russia that is, doth protest too much. Like Mohammed Ali in his prime, she keeps screaming “I’m the greatest!”

Actually, if you want to be pedantic about this, it’s not Russia that screams. It’s everyone who presumes to speak for her: politicians, writers, journalists – just about every Russian with access to public media.

Some of them, Putin and his merry men, see violent imperial expansion as a factor of greatness. Others, known as ‘liberals’, don’t mind imperial expansion but wince at too much violence.

Since the first group of Russians is busily imprisoning, murdering and banishing the second, most commentators highlight the differences between them. The more significant similarities are overlooked.

The two groups converge in their loudmouthed insistence that Russia’s great culture, especially literature, makes her people spiritually superior even to Western Europe, never mind the country’s neighbours. Such smugness would be unbearable even if it were justified. But is it?

Russians tend not to ask that question. For them, the presumption of cultural greatness is axiomatic.

If anyone disagrees, they start wielding names as single-word counterpunches: Pushkin! Tolstoy! Dostoyevsky! If the doubting Thomas still isn’t convinced, the litany of names will continue. Gogol! Lermontov!

Please stop bragging, chaps, I get it. Russia has indeed produced a great literature. But I can refute her claim to cultural greatness with a single numeral: 1755.

That was the year when Russia got her first University, 767 years after Christianity arrived at her shores. More to the point, Poland got her first university in 1364, Lithuania in 1579, Estonia in 1632 – and these are the neighbours Russians look down on. I could strike out farther afield and mention Italy, France and England where universities began to spread in the 12^th and 13^th centuries, but there is no need.

Tarde venientibus ossa, the Romans used to say. Nothing but bones for the latecomers, and that applies to cultures as well.

Until the mid-18^th century (and for a long time thereafter) Russia satisfied her need for educated people by sending a few aristocratic youngsters to European universities, while importing swarms of European scientists, academics, administrators, engineers, generals, historians and so forth.

Russia was largely run by foreigners, mostly Germans variably Russified, until the 20^th century, and it was German immigrants who wrote the first history books in the country. Thus Russian culture couldn’t help being derivative and provincial, adding its own indigenous touches to foreign implants as it went along.

French became the dominant language of cultured discourse, a tendency often satirised in Russian literature, from Griboyedov to Tolstoy and Chekhov. Even in the 19^th century French-speaking aristocrats like Karamzin were still creating Russian words by translating (not simply borrowing) French ones.

(But for that court historian and poet, Russian wouldn’t have words for impression, charity, free thought, responsibility, industry, touching, amusing, concentrate, aesthetic, epoch, harmony, catastrophe and many others.)

For all their efforts, the Russian vocabulary remains small to this day, a third the size of English, for example. But it’s true that Russian is big enough to have accommodated an impressive number of great writers.

But a dozen or so great writers do not make a great national culture. Especially in Russia, where literature has always had to assume functions that civilised countries delegate to other disciplines, such as philosophy, political science, history, economics and so on.

Practitioners of those disciplines have always been hamstrung by censorship, backed up by the punitive machine of the Russian state. For example, any critical analysis of Russian culture could have serious consequences for a thinker.

The first Russian philosopher Chaadayev (d. 1856) found that out the hard way when he published his essay Lettres philosophiques, written in French of course. As a result, he was officially declared insane and confined to home arrest – the first, but far from last case of penal psychiatry used as an extension of censorship in Russia.

Yet poets and novelists could get away with taking a few liberties, albeit within very narrow limits. Thus they had to assume a didactic role, teaching the population the essential ingredients of culture and civilisation.

Since at the time when great literature was produced most Russians were illiterate, the poets and novelists had to go through intermediaries by teaching the teachers, who’d then disseminate these lessons to those unable to receive them from the horse’s mouth.

So what did they teach? Take Pushkin, Russia’s national poet in the same sense in which Shakespeare is England’s, Goethe is Germany’s, Dante is Italy’s, and Racine is France’s. Though toying with the odd liberal idea here and there, underneath that veneer Pushkin was a dyed-in-the-wool Russian imperialist and supremacist.

When the Poles rose against their Russian masters in 1830-1831, Pushkin showed his true colours by publishing the poem To the Slanderers of Russia, in which he issued an open threat to Europe:

Ye’re bold of tongue — but hark, would ye in deed but try it
Or is the hero, now reclined in laurelled quiet,
Too weak to fix once more, Izmail’s red bayonet?
Or hath the Russian Tsar ever, in vain commanded?
Or must we meet all Europe banded?
Have we forgot to conquer yet?

Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and numerous lesser figures wrote about the innate moral and spiritual superiority of Russians to anyone else. They glorified Russia as a great empire, implicitly entitled to civilise her neighbours, by flogging them if need be.

That sort of thing has been not so much the omnipresent motif of Russian culture, but the dominant one. When expressed with the artistic mastery of Pushkin or Tolstoy, the theme enchanted readers – and inspired men of action.

When you describe your country as the greatest, that’s both a superlative and a comparative. ‘Greatest’ means greater than anyone else – in Russia’s case, specifically the West and any other place that’s not Russia.

When those countries are smaller and weaker, pouncing on them is depicted as a cultural mission, not merely naked aggression. This is especially pronounced in the way Russia treats her former dependencies trying to break free, such as Georgia and the Ukraine.

The great Russian culture is touted as a justification for invasion – in exactly the same way that Pushkin called for disciplining Poland and anyone else who dared support her. I’d suggest no culture that teaches such lessons can be great – regardless of the number of accomplished artists it has produced.

The ultimate role of culture is to elevate man to a perch as near God as possible, not to reduce him to a feral beast or, at best, a smug, provincial Johnny-come-lately.

A message to the Russians: stop thumping your chest and screaming how great your country is. If it really is, quiet self-confidence, backed up by good and noble actions, will communicate that message much better.

And do leave others to their own vices and devices. They may have a point, you know.