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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.    

I don’t know why I chose this silly pun to talk about the scandal brewing around the football commentator Martin Tyler.

After all, other than his surname, he has nothing in common with Wat Tyler who led a 14^th century peasant rebellion. I knew that, but the words came to me and I just put them down without giving it another thought. So there.

But boy, am I glad I’m not held to as much scrutiny as Martin Tyler and everyone else in the public eye. One gets the impression that the only way for those chaps not to get in trouble is to keep shtum.

Perhaps our TV channels should start hiring Trappist monks as commentators. They may not add any insights, but then neither would they offend our sensitive public the way Martin Tyler did – more than once.

His latest transgression came yesterday, when a Korean player named Son wrestled his opponent to the ground and got a yellow card for his trouble. Mr Tyler’s comment on the incident included the words ‘martial arts’, dropped as casually as my title above.

Within minutes the whole Internet hell broke loose. “Are we not taking that as a racist comment?” asked one irate viewer.

Another fan said: “Martin Tyler saying ‘martial arts’… is not a good look.”

Such opprobrium was way too mild for another sanctimonious viewer: “Martin Tyler’s ‘martial arts’ comment about Son’s yellow card was disgusting, xenophobic and racist…”

Sky Sports, Mr Tyler’s employer, issued a grovelling apology and a veiled threat to the commentator: “Martin Tyler has been reminded of need for care with his wording. No offence was intended.”

Yes, but it was taken, though it’s hard to understand why. The part of Asia Mr Son is from is widely associated with martial arts. In fact, every one, other than boxing, I’ve ever heard of originated in China, Japan or Korea. That, I’d suggest, in no way demeans the dignity of Oriental people – quite the contrary.

In fact, Shaolin monks developed kung fu thousands of years ago because they weren’t allowed to carry weapons. Personally, I have nothing but admiration for people capable of defending themselves without running their assailant through with a sword.

Some people may feel differently, but still – where’s the racist offence? Mr Tyler’s remark was perfectly innocuous, as any sensible person would know. I’m sure that Son himself wouldn’t be in the least offended – as he isn’t when his besotted fans sing: “He will run and he will score, he will eat your Labrador”.

Not every racial stereotype is offensive – most are good-natured. Moreover, I’m absolutely positive that none of Mr Tyler’s detractors was genuinely offended. No one, not even football viewers, is as cretinous as that (I am one myself, by the way… and no remarks from you).

The issue, I’m afraid, is much more sinister than common or garden stupidity. Our masses have fallen victim to a Pavlovian experiment, designed to produce a reflexive response that has nothing to do with the professed irritant.

The subject is systematically indoctrinated in the values of new, virtual morality that may co-exist with the old, real kind, but ideally should supersede it. This new code is like a private club charging a membership fee or a religion demanding a tithe.

It’s paid not in money but in attacks on anything that goes against the tenets of virtual morality. One such tenet is that a generalised reference to any group identity is ipso facto offensive.

Yes, we know that, for example, men and women are different in some respects, black athletes are better at running and jumping than their white colleagues, the Irish hold their liquor better than the Japanese, Italians are more emotive than Swedes, and the Dutch have a compulsion to produce and consume mountains of mediocre cheese.

But the guardians of virtual morality will censure anyone who reveals, by word or even gesture, that he knows not everyone – and not every group – is the same. Modernity worships at the altar of fake uniformity, and its priests will punish any perceived heresy.

This is brainwashing indoctrination at its most sinister. Our masses are being converted to a bogus secular religion with its code of virtual morality. The converts discipline themselves. They know that even the most innocuous reference to any group stereotype is sacrilegious – and react on cue.

If you ask them whether they really are offended by, say, a suggestion that Asians have something to do with martial arts, they won’t know what you are on about. Their consternation will be caused by the word ‘really’.

What do you mean, really offended? You miss the whole point. Reality has nothing to do with it. It’s that club membership, isn’t it? Or tithes to be paid to the virtual religion.

A neophyte doesn’t want to be drummed out or excommunicated. Registering the indignation he doesn’t really feel is like paying a membership fee or dropping a fiver into the collection plate.

As to poor Martin Tyler, he’d better watch his step because he has previous. Last month, he commented on a slightly injured Ukrainian player who, he said, should “soldier on”.

That too was deemed insensitive, disgusting and offensive. Doesn’t he know there is a war on, and many Ukrainians, including soldiers, are dying?

Admittedly, the link between Tyler’s use of that old idiom and his racism, homophobia, misogyny and perhaps global warming denial is less immediate than in the case of his ‘martial arts’ affront. But given enough painstaking scrutiny, it can be found.

And by the way, if Tyler wants to keep his job, he should refrain from talking about yellow cards. You can be sure some people out there will be offended by the racial allusion.

I started with one silly joke, so let me leave you with another. A woman is buying a chicken and holding up the queue by examining the bird for five minutes. She sniffs under the chicken’s wings, then between its legs, and finally pronounces her verdict: “This chicken smells.” The angry butcher answers: “Lady, are you sure you could pass the same test?”

“Judge not…” is a wonderful moral dictum for an ideal, sinless life. But I don’t think either Jesus or Matthew meant for it to extend to British courts of justice. Of injustice, is more like it.

Here’s another case in point. A drunk thug named Steven Allan was staggering through Covent Garden when he decided to call a friend.

At the same moment Paul Mason, a wealthy banker and godfather to five children, stepped out of The Ivy, a private club where he had just had dinner with friends. Having put one of them into a taxi, he phoned his Uber.

The two mobiles lit up at the same time and Allan’s few brain cells tried to mesh. That doomed process yielded a conclusion, to him the only possible one under the circumstances. The thug decided that the middle-aged banker must have stolen his friend’s telephone.

That was a call to action. Allan violently yanked Mason’s phone out of his hand. Thinking he was being robbed, the latter tried to walk away. Allan would have none of that.

He attacked Mason from behind and violently beat him up. A few days later the victim, much beloved of his friends and family, died in hospital.

What happened next proves yet again, if any more proof were necessary, that the law is no longer just “a ass”, as Mr Bumble described it. It’s a much more vicious animal, one plunging its dripping claws into what’s left of our civility.

The incident was caught on camera. Allan was arrested and charged with grievous bodily harm with intent (his victim was still fighting for his life). And then he was locked up… Just kidding. Where do you think you are, a country ruled by just law?

No, he was let out on bail, presumably with a warning not to kill anyone else while awaiting trial. Then Paul Mason died, and Allan was charged with murder.

In Britain, a conviction on that charge calls for a mandatory life sentence. So is that what Allan got? Be serious. Didn’t I tell you to remember where you are?

His case was plea bargained down to manslaughter. Still, the maximum penalty for that is the same as for murder, life in prison. But by now you know not to ask silly questions.

Of course, that’s not what Allan got. He was sentenced to three years, nine months. With the time already spent in custody he’ll probably be out in just over a year.

His defence was based on his being drunk and agitated at the time. Oh well, that’s all right then. Whenever you’ve had a few and feel agitated, go out and murder a stranger. You’ll get off with a slap on the wrist.

One doesn’t know where to begin. Starting from the end, being drunk should be an aggravating circumstance, not a mitigating one.

If drink can turn a man into a feral animal, it’s his responsibility to control his intake. If he doesn’t, that means he doesn’t mind turning into a feral, murderous animal. In that case, such sociopathic anomie makes whatever he does worse, not better.

Then the very notion of plea bargaining is morally suspect in all crimes, but especially in violent ones. Any wanton taking of a human life is murder. If in some extremely rare cases genuine extenuating circumstances exist (being drunk and agitated doesn’t qualify), enough to change the charge to manslaughter, the punishment should still be commensurate with the value of the life taken.

Plea bargaining divorces law from morality, and that’s an unbearably ruinous divorce. And morality is dealt another blow by the automatic assumption that a convict will seldom serve more than half his sentence.

Both travesties of justice are sold as fiscally pragmatic measures. Court proceedings are expensive and so is keeping a criminal in custody.

So if someone commits, say, a murder, money becomes a decisive factor. Instead of lasting a few days, the trial could stretch to many weeks. The CPS may also have to call in many expert witnesses who don’t come cheap. Throw in the cost of keeping the convict in prison for decades, and the sums speak for themselves.

It’s so much more cost-effective to declare urbi et orbi that murder is no longer murder, robbery is no longer robbery, assault is no longer assault. They are whatever the state can afford.

The amorality of that is staggering. Western law turns into an Asian bazaar where haggling about price is the norm.

The only way to reduce the cost of justice without destroying society in the process is to have less crime. And passing derisory, risible sentences for the most awful of crimes is guaranteed to have exactly the opposite effect.

This is a gift that keeps on giving or, less colloquially, a vicious circle. The state haggles the cost of crime down, deterrence becomes weak to nonexistent, crime goes up as a result, so does the cost of justice, the courts have a stronger economic incentive to pass lenient sentences or none. And so on, until what used to be civilised society turns into a jungle ruled by predators red in tooth and claw.

By implicitly declaring that Paul Mason’s life is worth little more than a year in prison, the court in fact stated that a human life is worthless. That betokens a moral catastrophe for which it’s hard to find any parallels.

The sovereign and equal value of each life is the cornerstone of Western civility. The state and its courts largely exist to assert that value, along with inviolability of personal property. When they deliberately ignore that sacred responsibility, they lose their legitimacy.

They become instruments of oppression, and it doesn’t matter one jot that the people vote their oppressors into office. Tyranny is tyranny, whether it’s of the majority or the minority. If you don’t believe me, ask Paul Mason’s bereaved and infuriated family.

The other day I mentioned the emotional fervour contorting the faces of Trump’s fans and detractors alike. Love him or hate him is a cliché, but an apt one in this case.

People indeed either love him or hate him with hysterical passion. In public perception, poor Donald swings from saviour to devil incarnate, and the two extremes are at war.

As we know, all is fair in love and war. Replace love with rape, and you get weaponised sex used to slay Trump, as a politician at least.

Now, Donald doesn’t strike me as a man who’ll easily take an amorous no for an answer. He is a self-admitted practitioner of the ‘grab’em by the pussy’ school of wooing, and it’s conceivable that not every pussy he has ever grabbed purred with delight.

Hence, while his political persona makes him a figure of hate in some circles, his feline braggadocio makes him an easy target for accusations. That much is par for the course.

What I find amazing is that a case as frivolous as one brought against Trump by E. Jean Carroll ever got to trial. It’s one of those ex post facto rapes that have all the credibility of flying pigs, with tooth fairies sitting astride them. A porky, in other words.

Whoever defends Trump will have the easiest trial in his life – provided the trial is fair, which isn’t guaranteed in such cases these days. Just about every part of Miss Carroll’s story is open to doubt, if not ridicule.

According to her, almost 30 years ago she ran into Trump at New York’s upmarket department store Bergdorf Goodman (a “lovely place” according to my wife, an authority on the subject).

They had met before, but mostly knew each other by reputation. Carroll was an agony aunt working on TV and at Elle magazine; Trump was, well, Trump.

He asked Carroll to use her professional expertise to advise him on buying a gift for a girl. She agreed, and they travelled from department to department, eventually ending up in lingerie.

Trump picked a see-through body suit and asked Carroll to try it on for him. They went into a fitting room together, where he raped her. Call Trump frisky if you will, but what do you call a society woman in her 40s who is willing to model see-through underwear for a practical stranger?

According to her lawyers, “Trump’s sexual assault has caused Carroll to suffer lasting psychological harm, loss of dignity and intimate relationships, and invasion of her privacy.”

If so, one has to admire her fortitude: she has lived with that pain for 25-odd years before first crying out in 2019. Why wait so long?

When Carroll suffered her loss of dignity, she shared her misfortune with a couple of friends. Instead of advising herself in her professional capacity, she asked for their advice, and they told her not to bother. Trump, they said, had hundreds of lawyers who would “bury you”.

Perhaps. But how is today’s situation any different? Has the New York bar since declared Trump a persona non grata? Probably not. So he can still hire competent attorneys who must be glad Miss Carroll had to wait decades. Had she gone to the police immediately, some evidence other than hearsay could have come to light.

According to Miss Carroll, she tried to fight Trump off, but in vain. One wonders why she waged her battle in silence. Surely, had she cried out, a shopper or a sales clerk would have come to her aid?

Oh well, you see, there was nobody else on the lingerie floor. No shoppers, no sales clerks, no store detectives who normally watch out for potential shoplifters with an eagle eye. Nobody. This though Bergdorf is one of New York’s most popular department stores, and it’s located in Fifth Avenue, where the buzz of well-heeled shoppers is at its loudest.

An unlikely story, I’d say, and any sane jury would agree. Moreover, any sane prosecutors would refuse to put such a flimsy case before a jury.

Imagine for the sake of argument that Miss Carroll made a complaint identical in every detail except the defendant. Instead of the once, and possibly future, president and a billionaire, her putative assailant is, say, an accountant or a plumber.

So there’s Miss Carroll telling the police the accountant-plumber she barely knew asked her 25 years ago to model some see-through lingerie in an always busy department store… And so forth. What do you think the cops would tell her?

Or, should the bored cops decide to take the case to a DA just for fun, would the latter be willing to prosecute? It’s those tooth fairies again, riding the flying pigs.

If Miss Carroll indeed suffered that crime, my commiserations. Moreover, I wouldn’t put it past Trump to do something like that.

But, truth to tell, I’m not especially interested in either Miss Carroll or Mr Trump. I am, however, interested in our civilisation and its legal underpinnings. If a case like this can be taken seriously, our civilisation no longer can be.

Western criminal justice is based on evidence – not on the defendant’s status in life. And Western courts are places for establishing the truth, not arenas for politically motivated character assassinations. Even at the time the alleged rape took place, these places demanded more than just an accuser’s say-so to convict or even try a defendant.

But that was almost 30 years ago. Justice, that cornerstone of Western civility and polity, has since become tainted with faddish obsessions and political pressures. Any woman can now destroy any man’s life by a false accusation of sexual assault – the police, prosecutors and increasingly juries have their conscience drowned in the quagmire of wokery.

The damage will be done even if the defendant is acquitted. “You can beat the charge, but you can’t beat the ride,” say American policemen. Meaning that the very fact of a rape trial, especially if a public figure is involved, will make people talk about smoke, fire, and how the former is always caused by the latter.

Whatever we may think about Trump, I do hope American justice has enough residual sanity left to dismiss this case with the contempt it deserves. And if it doesn’t, that’ll be proof positive it’s no longer sane.

When Biden first got elected, I wrote http://www.alexanderboot.com/an-old-man-and-dc/, saying he was too old for the job.

Well, he hasn’t got any younger in the intervening period. And yet Joe Biden has just announced his candidature for a second term in the White House.

You are welcome to read my earlier piece, making it unnecessary for me to repeat myself. That leaves space for making a different point: this announcement puts American democracy on hold, if not yet in a coffin.

Now, I’m not a great champion of unlimited democracy, in fact of unlimited anything. That’s why I believe in severely limited franchise and any number of other constitutional counterbalances to elected power.

And I am man enough to admit that at least two chaps beat me to this bright idea by 2,500 years: Plato and Aristotle (not that I’m suggesting I belong in that company). However, in this case it doesn’t matter what the three of us think. My ideas, and even those of the other two gentlemen, have no bearing on American politics.

The only thing that counts is what most Americans think, and they tend to worship at the altar of democracy, with franchise spread as wide as common sense will allow, and sometimes beyond such limits.

The essence of that form of government is that only elected officials wield political power. In our case it’s Parliament spearheaded by those on the ruling party’s front benches. The American system is different, with the powers separated more sharply. The president isn’t a member of the legislative branch, and neither are the cabinet members he appoints.

But the same core principle applies: both the president and the legislators are elected officials, the only kind allowed political power by the US Constitution. My contention is that an octogenarian president who is manifestly incapable of wielding power undermines the Constitution.

Even at the time I wrote that article, it was clear to anyone with eyes to see that Joe Biden wasn’t quite compos mentis. His two attacks of cerebral aneurism combined with a heart condition known to cause senility and with plain anno domini to produce a demonstrable cognitive decline.

Everything about Joe Biden is progressive, including such conditions. No miraculous recovery will occur. His mental state will continue to worsen steadily.

In that old piece I wrote that Kamala Harris was likely to act either as an éminence grise or as a conduit for the more subversive groups on the left of US politics. Since then it has become obvious she is incapable of playing the first role, although she may well act in the second.

But that’s neither here nor there. What ought to be clear to everyone is that, if Biden is re-elected, he’ll be president in name only. Presidential powers will be in someone else’s hands and, as far as the Constitution is concerned, it doesn’t really matter whose.

The last time America faced such a situation was in Reagan’s second term, when the de facto president was James Baker, an appointed official in all his government posts. That too was unconstitutional, but at least both the situation and the personalities involved were different.

China wasn’t yet a major world power, the Soviet Union was in transition and therefore temporarily unthreatening, both inflation and unemployment were down, the country was in her longest post-war period of expansion. Hence it was enough to keep two fingers on the helm for the ship to maintain a steady course.

Who owned those two fingers had a great legal significance but little of any other kind. Today, when the world is teetering at the edge of an apocalyptical conflict, and Western economies are flagging everywhere, US included, things are far from being as rosy.

The weaker a country, the greater its need for a strong leader – this is axiomatic. But in a democracy run riot, such as the US, it’s not enough for the electorate to know the leader is strong. The people must also know whether or not the leader is the same man they elected.

A country like America mustn’t be ruled by a faceless cabal lurking in the shadows. That, however, is exactly what will happen if Biden is re-elected. When the president is an empty space, someone will fill it – and I have a hunch that the group of likely candidates includes no one as competent or well-meaning as James Baker.

Americans don’t need Plato, Aristotle or even me to tell them all that. They know it themselves, which is why 70 per cent of them are opposed to Biden’s running. An opinion poll has no legal power, but surely this one provides a reliable insight into the will of the democratic majority.

This suggests that practically any Republican candidate will waltz into the White House, assuming, rather than delegating, constitutional powers. But that’s not a forgone conclusion – after all, as things stand now, the likeliest Republican candidate is Donald Trump.

Now, for the same reason that I don’t like unlimited democracy, I dislike any politician inspiring equally hysterical emotions both pro and contra. Allowed to run free, emotions override (trump?) reason, and their clash may well take governance out of the constitutionally stipulated offices and into the streets.

That’s not the British way and, inasmuch as many American institutions are modelled on their British precursors, neither is it American. That sort of thing is best left for countries without strong constitutional traditions but with emotionally volatile populations.

I wonder how many of those 70 per cent opposed to Biden are as or more fervently opposed to Trump as well. Confronted with what they’d see as the evil of two lessers, they may well deliver a second term to Joe.

Reagan was senile in his second term, but before he lost the capacity to govern he had appointed a few able men who could take up the slack. Biden doesn’t have such a talent pool at his disposal, which he proved in his announcement speech.

To his credit, he managed to read the teleprompter without committing any of the gaffes that have become his trademark. But the only policy he mentioned as a panacea for America’s economic ills was his proposed tax on billionaires.

That was a direct appeal to emotions and some of the cardinal sins, mainly envy. But couldn’t his speechwriters and advisers come up with something less transparently idiotic?

There are 724 billionaires in the US. Forcing them to pay enough in taxes to make the slightest bit of difference to a country with a budget of somewhere between six and seven trillion would simply make them flee, leaving everyone else the poorer.

The next US presidential election won’t be the first one to make me quake in my boots. But the amplitude of the quaking will be greater than ever before.

The US and what’s left of the free world need a strong leader more than they have needed one for generations. And they have the right to know exactly who that strong leader will be, not which cabal he’ll front.

Some American states have a baseball-style law saying “three strikes and you are out”. That means a criminal with two convictions on his record gets a mandatory life sentence if he is convicted again.

I quite like that law, even though it’s hard not to feel sorry for a petty thief who nicks a wallet and gets a life sentence because he nicked two other wallets before. But the spirit of the law is clear: society doesn’t condone career criminals.

British law is different, suggesting that so is British society. We treat our career criminals with avuncular understanding if not sympathy. They may be convicted over and over again but, having served derisory sentences, they go back to pursuing their chosen careers with renewed gusto.

And when a victim, God forbid, harms a burglar, a robber or a car thief, then the tables are turned. The criminal becomes a victim; the victim, a criminal. And if a man defends his property with deadly force, then he is a murderer in the eyes of our law.

This brings me to Neil Charles, 47, described by his fiancée as: “loving, caring and kind and not at all aggressive”. A real prince among men, in other words. Shame about the 66 criminal convictions Charles amassed during his eventful career.

I’ll spell it out for my American readers who may think that’s a typo. Sixty-six. Criminal. Convictions. Not three, not even ten. Sixty-six.

If an American reader lives in one of those baseball states, he’ll cry out: “What the [EXPLETIVE DELETED] was he doing at large?” I must admit I, His Majesty’s loyal if not always uncritical subject, ask the same question.

Then I’d go a step further and say, with utmost conviction, that anything that happened to Mr Charles as he went searching for his 67^th conviction is society’s fault.

That mantra is usually used to exonerate a criminal in court, absolving him of individual responsibility for his actions. In this case, I’d use it to exonerate Charles’s potential victims who took the law in their own hands. After all, the hands of the law were idle.

David King and his son Edward lived in Bury St Edmonds, a quiet Suffolk town. They and their neighbours had been victims of numerous crimes against their homes, cars and other property. Or let me apologise for that cliché and rephrase more precisely.

There is no such thing as crime against property. A crime against property is one against the owner of property. So that new-build estate in Suffolk was inhabited by victims of multiple crimes that the law couldn’t – or dare I say it, wouldn’t – prevent.

And then one night Charles went on the prowl at that estate. It wasn’t a quick in and out job either. For three and a half hours (would you like me to repeat that too?) the career criminal was trying his luck with the door handles of cars and houses. Alas, they were all securely locked.

Mr Charles must have felt despondent. He couldn’t get paid for his night’s work, and not for any lack of trying. Unfair or what? Whatever next? He might have to whip out his trusted crowbar…

That line of thought was interrupted by the Kings who confronted the criminal and stabbed him to death in an ensuing scuffle. You see, according to Richard Kelly KC who prosecuted the Kings at the subsequent trial, they “had harboured for some time angry resentment against those who were thieving locally”.

You don’t say. Angry resentment? Just because their BMW’s wheels had been nicked once or twice? Or their neighbours’ cars stolen? Their houses broken into? Really, there’s no understanding some people, feeling resentful just because they were unsafe in their own homes.

The trial was all about the Kings’ obsession with exotic weapons. Their house was chock a block with knuckledusters, machetes, ninja swords, shotguns (which the father was licensed to own) and daggers, one of which was used to kill the criminal.

The prosecution pointed out the two were obsessed with Charles Bronson’s character in the Death Wish films and were on record saying things like “scum must die”. I’m not going to list all the details – you can look them up yourself if you are interested.

But the verdict was predetermined: life for both, with a 21-year tariff for the father, 19 for the son. Oh well, dura lex, sed lex, as the Romans used to say. The law is strict, but it is the law. If our law says we can’t kill someone committing a crime against us, or indeed harm him in any way, then we must bow our heads in filial obedience.

And yes, it’s quite possible that the Kings are indeed nasty bits of work who overreacted. But, defending David King, Kieran Vaughan KC encapsulated the essence of the whole case neatly: “The reality is that if Mr Charles had not been up to his activities that night, none of us would be here.” 

Civilised societies resort to vigilante justice when they can get no other. My friend, a prison doctor, will tell you that someone with 66 convictions must have committed hundreds of crimes. An average burglar, for example, perpetrates dozens of break-ins before he is convicted.

That means justice isn’t doing its job, but justice has to be done. An Englishman’s home is his castle, and castles must be defended against marauding hordes. One way of doing that is to make sure career criminals like Charles are locked up and the key is thrown away.

The other way is what got the Kings a life sentence. I can’t think of any other way. If the law won’t protect us, we’ll protect ourselves – or meekly submit our lives and property to any interloper who fancies his chances.

The upshot of this situation is ominous. If bad people no longer fear the law, good people will no longer respect it. Sooner or later this will turn a civilised society into a crime-ridden, blood-soaked jungle ruled by mob justice, not law.

This is how the Kings’ case ought to have been covered if journalism is to have any value. Instead, our papers savoured every piece of cold steel in the Kings’ arsenal, every threatening phrase they had ever uttered. As if their verdict would have been any different had they killed Charles with a kitchen knife or a meat mallet.

Whatever their guilt, it’s all society’s fault, M’lud, not Charles Bronson’s. Having judged the Kings, now let’s judge the judges and ultimately ourselves, for we are the society.  

HM’s Civil Service has become a leftie pressure group, growing more and more politicised and pari passu incompetent. Hounding Tory politicians, ideally out of office, has become their main passion in life.

When they smell blood, they close ranks and pounce like a pack of dogs on a wounded boar. Their most recent casualty, Deputy PM Dominic Raab, can testify to their burgeoning political power, boosted by expert interaction with the likeminded press.

Just to think that HM’s Civil Service used to be an exemplary institution. It served the Crown and its government with cold, ruthless efficiency untainted by political afflatus.

I’m sure few civil servants were ever apolitical personally. But collectively, the Civil Service certainly was. Ministers from different parties came and went, but their ministries kept ticking over thanks to the people who always stayed in place until they retired, gold watch, sometimes knighthood, in hand.

Though they defined their lives by the duty of service, they’d never use such highfalutin words to describe what they did. Their patriotism was as fierce as it was tacit. Not for them demonstrative hand-over-heart, eyes-to-flag patriotism – proclaiming their love of Britain was as unthinkable to them as proclaiming their love of breathing.

They were Britain and Britain was them. That was all there was to it, it went without saying, now let’s get back to work.   

Those mandarins were mechanics of government, not its creators or designers. Most of them – in the distant past, all of them – received excellent education at a top public school first, Oxbridge second.

Such people didn’t pull rank, not even in the army. Their equality of background trumped their inequality of position. When Major Stirling came up with the idea of an SAS, he could barge into a field marshal’s office and pitch it to him with easy familiarity: the great man used to be a shooting companion of Stirling’s father.

In the past, the Civil Service was the backbone of the country, not to say its whole skeleton. And look at it now.

Their educated accents have gone the way of their educated minds. The Civil Service has become the microcosm of everything wrong with the country. It seems to be hellbent on acting as an extension of the Labour Party, its embodiment and a conduit for its powerlust.

That came to the fore in the runup to the Brexit referendum, when our civil servants, Remainers almost to a man, did all they could to keep Britain in the EU. They were plugged into the pan-European network of bureaucrats whose corporate loyalty to themselves superseded their loyalty to their national governments.

When Britons voted for Brexit, in greater numbers than they ever had voted for anything else, the mandarins and other fruits were enraged: their power wasn’t boundless after all. But it was still significant enough for them to stick one crowbar after another into the spokes of the Brexit wheel. There was much bureaucratic rigamarole involved in that complex withdrawal, and the mandarins used every snag they could to undermine it.

Then came Boris Johnson who won a landslide election under the slogan of Let’s Get Brexit Done. That by itself was a slap in the mandarins’ face. But then Johnson went ahead and did what he had promised: he got Brexit done.

Our new, politicised Civil Service took that as a declaration of war. Working hand in glove with the ‘liberal’ media, the mandarins began targeting one Tory politician after another. They’d leak stories of the slightest indiscretions, and the media would then blow them up into career-ending scandals.

Johnson’s closest adviser Dominic Cummings, the architect of the Brexit campaign, was torn to pieces. Then Johnson himself fell, for having dared to eat a piece of cake at a party that shouldn’t have been held during Covid. That was ill-advised, but at worst a misdemeanour, nowhere near a felony.

Johnson was never my cup of vodka, but credit where it’s due: he did manage to break through the barriers our corrupt Civil Service was trying to put up in the way of Brexit. And he was the first Western leader to pledge assistance to the Ukraine following Russia’s bandit raid.

Never mind – the leftie rabble made him choke on that cake. And then Tory ministers began to fall like overripe apples off a tree. In no particular order: Suella Braverman, Priti Patel, Michael Gove, Nadhim Zahawi, Gavin Williamson – and now Dominic Raab.

They are all very different political animals, but you win no prizes for guessing what they all have in common. Correct: all are variously passionate Brexiteers.

Raab was undone by mounting claims of bullying. Apparently, he’d rebuke civil servants so strongly that they were afraid to enter his office. Now, I was once introduced to Mr Raab long ago, when he was a lowly backbencher, and he struck me as a pleasant young man, if not without a layer of steel underneath.

Yet I realise how hard it must have been for him to remain pleasant when, as Justice Secretary, he found his staff consistently sabotaging his initiatives. Instead of finding a well-oiled, smoothly running mechanism at Justice, he found Machiavellian intrigue, backbiting and surreptitious sedition.

I can’t blame him if he indeed raised his voice once or twice. I wouldn’t even blame Mr Raab if he had relied on his karate mastery (he has a third-dan blackbelt) to vent his frustration, although I realise violence has no place in an office.

Yet he did nothing of the sort. A few stern words, that was all. But it was enough for his subordinates to leak and embellish the news to the BBC, The Guardian and other volunteer PR departments of the Labour Party. The rest was their business, and they know it well. A molehill was turned into a mountain of dung, and Raab had to go.

Now, I don’t have it in me to be passionately attracted to any politician, even if I happen to agree with his politics. But I am passionately attracted to the British constitution, and it hurts me to see it grossly abused, if not yet completely destroyed.

A civil service assuming enough political power to oust any Cabinet minister constitutes such an abuse. It’s not our mandarins’ remit to provide ammunition for fanatical Labour savages like Deputy Leader Rayner who doesn’t mind screaming “Tory scum!” in Parliament. And it’s certainly not their remit to impose their own agenda on Britain.

Civility has gone out of our Civil Service. The backbone of British politics now suffers from a bad case of scoliosis.

P.S. Labour is running an ad campaign directed against the prime minister personally. A typical ad shows his photograph and says: “Do you think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison? Rishi Sunak doesn’t.”

So far the PM hasn’t dignified that sort of stuff with a response, and he may be right. But as an ex-adman I’d love him to retaliate with ads saying, for example: “Do you believe women can have penises? Keir Starmer does.”

The Sussexes didn’t coin the term ‘unconscious bias’, but they’ve certainly raised its popularity rating.

The distinction between that and racism is so subtle that we must be grateful to Harry for elucidating it. As he explained, “The difference between racism and unconscious bias, the two things are different.”

What better explanation could one wish for? The difference is that they are different. That’s it, in a nutshell.

There was no need to enlarge any further, but I’m glad Harry did. It gave us a chance to appreciate the fine stylistic nuances the English language makes possible:

“But once it’s been acknowledged, or pointed out to you as an individual, or as an institution, that you have unconscious bias, you therefore have an opportunity to learn and grow from that in order so that you are part of the solution rather than part of the problem.”

The phrase “if you aren’t part of the solution, you’re part of the problem” made me feel warmly nostalgic. It brought back the memory of Texan honkytonks, where signs with that adage adorned the walls, next to “There are no strangers here, just friends you haven’t met” and “Now it’s Miller time.” The old ones are the best.

But what exactly is the problem? And is unconscious bias the same as racism or not? (In case you missed it, I was facetious when saying Harry explained it perfectly.)

Before we try to understand what it is, let’s remind ourselves that it’s because of ‘unconscious bias’ that Meghan won’t attend the coronation, staying behind in California to look after Archie and Lilibet.

Of course, another explanation of Meghan’s absence may be that the Sussexes can’t afford a babysitter. But considering the rip-roaring success of their sustained media efforts to undermine our monarchy, one doubts they are especially hard up.

Apparently, the real reason is indeed that ghastly unconscious bias. Four years ago, that subcutaneous villainy emboldened an unspecified member of the Firm to wonder out loud about the skin colour of the child Meghan was then expecting.

Geneticists tell us that the odds of a mixed-race child being darker than the darker parent are less than one in a million. All those stories of throwbacks are basically old wives’ tales. But they are persistent tales, and our royals, for all their sterling qualities, aren’t known for their voracious study of genetics.

Nor are they really students of any other scientific discipline, with the possible exception of climatology. That they do study, by never missing a single Guardian article on the subject.

Anyway, that seemingly innocuous question left a deep scar on Meghan’s brittle psyche and, vicariously, also on Harry’s. That’s when the talk of unconscious bias started, to culminate in Meghan’s absence from the coronation.

It’s no use asking you whether you have an unconscious bias against members of other races. How would you know if it’s unconscious?

Still, though I can’t delve deeply into your unconscious inclinations, I can try to come to grips with my own. And then I can be so presumptuous as to suggest that, whatever bias I have lurking deep down is extremely common, not to say universal.

We all feel more comfortable in the company of our own kind. Call it communal spirit, call it tribal instinct, call it anything you want, but it’s an observable fact. As is its opposite: we feel less comfortable in the company of those visibly different from us.

Walk through any major city and you’ll get proof galore. You’ll find Chinatown and Little Italy in New York, a Chinese area around Paris’s Place d’Italie, predominantly Muslim areas in London’s East End and Paris’s Saint-Denis, Jewish neighbourhoods in Brooklyn and North London, black areas in all three cities I’ve mentioned. You’ll also find solidly middleclass neighbourhoods everywhere.

How did that come about? No one forced those groups to stick together, whatever The Guardian tells you. Unlike some ghettos of yesteryear, people gravitate to those places because they like to live next to those who aren’t too different from them. That’s the positive end of unconscious bias, whether of race, ethnicity, wealth or class.

The negative end is a momentary sense of unease we experience in the presence of someone looking drastically different. ‘Momentary’ is the operative word. For at that point civilisation either kicks in or it doesn’t.

I’ll venture a guess that any white person experiences that nanosecond of discomfort when suddenly encountering a member of another race. But in the next nanosecond, a civilised white person will suppress that feeling. Because, if our civilisation teaches anything, it’s the unique and equal significance of every human being based on the fact that he is indeed human.

Denying him that ultimate equality is therefore shameful. Thus it’s that second nanosecond that makes a difference. If a man has heeded the lessons of his civilisation, he’ll rebuke himself for that initial reaction and turn truly colour-blind. Once overcome, that first nanosecond will sink into oblivion.

If, however, he played truant when civilisation taught this particular lesson, the initial reaction will linger. He’ll ignore all that stuff about “neither Jew nor Greek” and will treat the other man not as a brother, but as a variously unpleasant alien.

No one should be held responsible for that first nanosecond – and everyone should be held responsible for the second.

Now, that first nanosecond could be legitimately called ‘unconscious bias’ if Harry and Meghan hadn’t given the term a bad name. It’s an intuitive awareness of group identity and a natural human instinct to gravitate towards similarity.

Demonising that bias is the same as castigating the self-preservation instinct or the urge to procreate. Doing so would be denying our humanity.

However, if the second nanosecond fails to override the first, especially if a man still feels that belonging to a certain group makes him not just different but ipso facto superior, then he must be rebuked for it. Doing so would be asserting our humanity.

I realise that my attempt to distinguish between unconscious bias and racism is more prolix than Harry’s, and less epigrammatic. But hey, unlike him, I wasn’t born to the language.

However, also unlike him, I wasn’t born without some basic intelligence. That’s why I know how idiotic it is to blame our royals or anyone else for any ‘unconscious bias’ – or, come to think of it, ignorance of genetics.

Still, say what you will about unconscious bias, but it has done us all a favour. We’ll be spared Meghan’s presence at our milestone constitutional event.    

If you recall, in that 1964 film a nuclear Armageddon starts by accident. That calamity comes in the shape of a US Air Force general who goes insane and orders a pre-emptive nuclear strike.

That sort of thing is probably unlikely: there have to be sufficient safeguards in place to prevent insane officers from giving insane orders. But that doesn’t mean accidents can’t happen – especially if one side is technologically backward.

That point was made with explosive power last night, when the pilot of a Russian SU-34 accidentally dropped a bomb on Belgorod, a Russian city close to the Ukrainian border. The blast was so strong that a car was thrown onto the roof of a five-storey building.

The crater was some 70 feet in diameter, but no, the bomb wasn’t nuclear. This time. But the accident, acknowledged by Russia’s defence ministry, certainly gives one food for thought.

Also for jokes, come to think of it. The Russian Internet is abuzz with them, such as suggestions that the pilot confused Belgorod with Voronezh (another Russian city, if your geography is uncertain). The Russian proverb “beat your own to make others fear you” is being repeated no end.

Experts have figured out what happened. When the Russian blitzkrieg failed in February-March last year, they realised a war of attrition was beckoning. Having taken stock of their arsenal, the Russians found their missiles to be in short supply.

However, they did have large stocks of old FAB-500M-62 blockbusters designed for carpet bombing. Such dumb bombs can be smartened up, as American showed. They came up with a JDAM system (Joint Direct Attack Munition) that, attached to an old-style bomb, turns it into a guided missile. So equipped, the bomb can cruise dozens of miles before hitting a target programmed into its GPS.

The Russians hastily produced their own JDAM equivalent and began to deploy the new weapon a month or two after the war started. But, now we are talking in proverbs, haste makes waste – especially considering the Russians’ lackadaisical approach to quality control.

If anything, I’m surprised it has taken so long for an accident to happen. Until now, those FAB bombs have been causing quite a lot of damage to the Ukraine.

An aircraft would launch one from the Russian territory, out of reach for the Ukrainian AA defences. The bomb would then unerringly guide itself to the Russians’ favourite targets: hospitals, kindergartens, residential blocks – and, well, I’m sure there must be some military targets too. However, that was an accident waiting to happen.

Sooner or later a mishap had to occur: failure of the Russian JDAM, GPS malfunction, wrong coordinates put in – ask the experts, they’ll tell you. To err is human (I must have proverbial logorrhoea today), especially in Russia.

Anyone familiar with Russian manufacturing will know that, given their monumental administrative and managerial incompetence, coupled with pandemic negligence, it takes an immense creative ingenuity to keep things afloat, after a fashion.

As proof of that, émigré Russian engineers have no trouble instantly finding high-paying jobs in the West, where they are greatly appreciated. But, like those Polish artists only achieving greatness abroad (Chopin, Conrad, Apollinaire), those same Russian engineers aren’t nearly as successful at home.

If you don’t believe me, compare, say, a Russian Lada or Volga with an Audi or a Toyota. Also, take stock of all your possessions, from shoes to computers, and see how many are made in Russia. (Then see how many are made in China and weep.)

If the Russians can only produce automotive answers to Chernobyl, that’s their business. But if they produce bombs, especially nuclear ones, that have a mind of their own, it becomes everyone’s business.

A Dr Strangelove scenario is far from impossible, and Putin’s bellicose rhetoric may well trigger a doomsday finale. As you know, hardly a day goes by without either him or one of his stooges threatening the West with nuclear annihilation.

That has to produce some reaction, especially since Russia’s words are backed up with deeds, such as deploying nuclear weapons in Belarus, frequent overflies of Nato territory by nuclear-armed aircraft and so forth. I’m sure Nato’s own nuclear forces are on high alert, ready to deliver a retaliatory, or ideally pre-emptory, strike at a moment’s notice.

Two trigger-happy forces facing each other create a high potential for accidents. Human error, like the one imagined by Stanley Kubrick, is unlikely, one hopes. But a technical malfunction, like the one last night, is possible. And the longer the confrontation lasts, the more possible it becomes.

Western commanders are trained – and empowered – to make tactical decisions on their own, without waiting for an order coming down the chain of command. If a Russian nuclear missile or bomb hits, say, Warsaw, the response may come instantly even if that was an accident.

Rattling today’s sabres is dangerous: they may blow up in your face. Those Russian bandits should keep that in mind and pipe their rhetoric down. Their threats may come true, whether they want it or not.

P.S. The other day I (and a very perceptive reader) commented of Peter Hitchens’s idiotic statement: “If every dollar these [American] zealots have spent on war had been spent instead on building prosperous free countries in places such as Russia, the world would be a startlingly better place.”

But since then a wild thought occurred to me: what if that wasn’t just Hitchens’s usual pro-Putin waffle? What if Putin is using him as a conduit for a blackmailing offer to the West: we’ll end the war, but it’s going to cost you? If you promise Russia a massive aid package along the lines of the Marshall Plan, we’ll sue for peace.

Hitchens could have been used consciously or ‘in the dark’, with a supposed leak fed to him. This is of course conjecture, but with some basis in reality. Putin, by his own admission, grew up as a common thug, and has spent his whole career in cahoots with organised crime. Blackmail comes to him naturally, it’s coded into his DNA.

If that’s indeed his offer, and the West takes him up on it, then I propose a time-saving procedure. Since all such aid would end up in the personal accounts Putin and his merry men keep in Western banks, the costly procedure of transferring money to Russia can be eliminated. Just shift all those billions sideways into their accounts in the same banks, and Boris is your uncle.