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In 1964 Barry Goldwater won the Republican nomination for the presidency – much to the weeping and wailing of the ‘liberal’ press.

Goldwater was an old-fashioned American conservative: patriotic, fiscally sound, anti-Communist, anti-New Deal. Naturally, the lefties hated him with unmitigated passion.

An indelible tag of ‘extremist’ was attached to Barry. Cartoonists were drawing him against the backdrop of nuclear mushrooms. The Soviets, in addition to all that, highlighted the original name of the Goldwater clan, Goldwasser.

He was Jewish on his father’s side, a fact of paramount importance in Russia. Never mind that, when his paternal grandfather emigrated to England and then the US in the mid-19^th century, the family name was immediately translated into English. A century wasn’t enough time to destigmatise a Jew in Russia – this though Barry had a gentile mother and was raised as an Episcopalian.

The US media didn’t make a big deal out of Barry’s ethnic mix. ‘Extremist’ gave them enough of a weapon, and they were proved right in the subsequent election, which Goldwater lost in a landslide. No one liked Lyndon Johnson very much, but the prospect of nuclear holocaust, so vividly depicted in the press, put people off Goldwater.

But that came later. Meanwhile, delivering his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention, Barry decided to attack the extremism tag head on. His speechwriter, probably Harry Jaffa, put spiffy words into his mouth:

“I would remind you that extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”

The trick didn’t work. All that the ‘liberal’ press chose to hear was the words “extremism is no vice”. They took that as an admission and pounced on Barry with renewed energy. His presidential bid was doomed.

It’s against that historical background, if outside that historical context, that I can say I disagree with Goldwater. Any extremism, whatever it’s in defence or pursuit of, is a vice.

Extremism is closely related to fanaticism, zealotry and violence. It dims the mind, dulls reason and replaces decisive action based on nuanced thought with spittle-sputtering emotional incontinence.

Extremism compromises any idea, even one as sound as defence of liberty, by, if nothing else, presenting an easy target to the opponents. It also sets the scene for semantic muddle. Its practitioners use it – wrongly – as a synonym of fortitude, courage and resolve. Their adversaries use it as a synonym of hysteria – and they are right, whatever the inspiration of extremism.

Extremism relates to fortitude as jingoism relates to patriotism. It’s an emotional cloud so thick that it obscures the idea behind it, if any. Or else it’s a squatter ousting the original idea. Before long the idea flees and extremism has the whole place to itself.

This brings me to Israeli extremists attacking Christians who come to worship at the holy sites. Pilgrims are assaulted, cemeteries are desecrated, property is damaged. A few months ago, for example, an extremist mob trashed an Armenian restaurant in Jerusalem, screaming “Death to Arabs, death to Christians!”. There were incidents of attacks on the pilgrims during the Orthodox Holy Week.

Now, though extremism is never excusable, sometimes it’s understandable. Israeli Jews have lived with the dire threat of annihilation their whole lives. The country exists on a knife’s edge, always in a state of emergency. That has to jangle people’s nerves, tighten them like a rope on a winch. When that happens, nerves can snap.

The restraining mechanisms often fail, especially in young people bursting with hormones. Those young Israelis have all served in the army, many have seen action in battles and skirmishes. That sort of thing doesn’t promote a moderate, balanced outlook on life.

That, as I said, may be an explanation. But it’s not an excuse. A Jewish mob baying “Death to Christians!” is as reprehensible as a Christian mob baying “Death to Jews!”, although the latter battle cry has been heard much more often throughout history.

Correction: though anti-Semitic murderers have often called themselves Christians, they had no right to that appellation. Launching a pogrom out of tribal hatred isn’t what real Christians do. I know dozens of true Christians, some of them priests, and there isn’t an anti-Semite among them (admittedly, my friends are a preselected group).

Moreover, they are all friends of Israel, that oasis of Western civility in a sea of obscurantist barbarism and the only reliable ally of the West in that region. It takes a true fanatic to express anti-Israeli sentiments in the West – and an equally objectional one to scream anti-Christian slogans in Israel.

I wonder if those Israeli yobs realise how much damage they can do to their country. After all, Israel depends for its survival on support from countries that are at least nominally Christian, the US prime among them. And support of Israel is by no means monolithic there.

In America specifically, strong anti-Israeli (not always anti-Semitic) sentiments can be found both on the right, among America First types, and on the left, where affection for Third World barbarism, in this case Palestinian, is an article of faith.

There is also a broad swathe of indifferent opinion, people who can’t be bothered. Many of them are Christians who vote for pro-Israeli candidates. If anti-Christian attacks multiply in Israel, it will be the easiest thing in the world to destroy any kind of consensus behind such candidates.

In addition to being morally wrong and aesthetically unappealing, extremism in word or deed is also counterproductive. Just look at how Russian imperial extremism unified Nato countries more than they have been unified for a generation – and how Nato has added two valuable members, Finland and (soon) Sweden, neither of which had ever wanted to join before last year.

Anti-Christian sentiments and actions can similarly galvanise anti-Israeli opinion in the West – that much is obvious. But perhaps the most significant damage extremism does is the warping effect it has on the soul of the extremist.

I hope the Israeli government steps down hard on its anti-Christian extremists, as I hope our government stamps out our own eco-yobs, and the US government puts an end to BLM extremism. For Barry Goldwater was wrong, in his choice of words if not the sentiment behind them.

His mistake also illustrates the danger of overfondness for epigrammatic aphorisms (he who is without that sin…). Had he said something like “strength in the defence of liberty is no vice; weakness in the pursuit of justice is no virtue”, rhetoric would have suffered, but truth would have gained.

Snooker is one of Britain’s national sports, a sort of working class croquet. Its most important tournament is the World Championship in Sheffield, currently under way.

Yesterday witnessed a ground-breaking event in the history of the game. Two Just Stop Oil vandals attacked the two tables in play.

One of them, a man, jumped on the baize and sprayed some orange goo all over it. Another, a woman, tried to superglue herself to the other table but was dragged off at the last moment. The game was disrupted, the enjoyment of the spectators, many of whom had travelled from afar at a considerable expense, was ruined.

I see this as a strong argument against university education. For both saboteurs boast academic credentials.

The orange man reads politics, philosophy and economics at Exeter University. It bills itself as “Probably, the best university in the world”, a slogan borrowed from Carlsberg lager (they say ‘beer’ instead of ‘university’ in case you’re wondering).

Considering that the fanatical thug is 25 years old, he is either a slow developer or a PhD candidate. In either case I wonder how they teach those subjects at Exeter.

Also, if that’s (probably) the best university in the world, I’m glad the chap doesn’t study politics, philosophy and economics at the worst one. Rather than spraying the snooker table with orange paint, he would (probably) have sprayed the audience with bullets.

The superglue babe is older, 52. She is identified as a ‘museum professional’, which can mean anything from floor sweeper to curator. I rather think it’s the latter: she expresses herself grammatically, which the English lower classes no longer do. The eternal student of English in me rejoices; the champion of our civilisation weeps.

After she was arrested, the superglue quinquagenarian said, eschewing contractions: “I did not take this action lightly, but I cannot remain a passive spectator while our government knowingly pushes us down a path to destruction.”

The orange philosopher added: “We’re facing mass starvation, billions of refugees and civilisational collapse if this continues.”

I agree with both of them: our government is indeed pushing us down a path to destruction and we are indeed facing civilisational collapse. But the problem isn’t the gas in our cookers and the petrol in our cars. It’s the scum like these two.

The world has suffered from many shortages throughout history, but hysterical antinomian malcontents have never been one of them. We’ve always had a nice, steady supply of those. But at different times different societies have treated such saboteurs differently.

Exactly what excites their passions is irrelevant. These people are possessed by an evil spirit, and such energumens wreak mayhem for its own sake. There is no reason for it, just a long menu of seemingly plausible pretexts.

It can be religion or atheism. Global warming or cooling. Militarism or pacifism. Black or white activism. Pro- or anti-immigration. Fascism or communism. Basically, show us a man, and the devil will find a cause.

The worst mistake in dealing with such zealots is engaging them in a sensible argument. That’s why I won’t cite heaps of evidence showing that global warming is a hoax, nor recommend books proving it with irrefutable science in hand.

I won’t even reference data showing that, since gas production and nuclear energy have been reduced or phased out, largely thanks to such zealots, Europe’s coal production has doubled. That replaces the cleanest energy with the dirtiest, but we shan’t get into this argument.

First, we’re never going to win it: diabolical passions won’t be quelled by facts and reason. Second, in the unlikely, nay impossible, event we do win it, they’ll just find another cause – there are plenty of those sloshing about in the world’s putrid swamps.

The problem is zealotry, not the pretext for it. And there I agree with the superglue babe: “our government knowingly pushes us down a path to destruction”. Yes it does – by being too lily-livered to stamp out scum like her once and for all.

I don’t mean troops should be brought in and the ‘fire at will’ order issued. Much as such a reaction may be aesthetically pleasing, most people will see it as incompatible with our core principles.

What the government should do is step up public education, teaching the people that none of the popular woke causes has any serious substance to it. Those who do vandalism or violence in their name aren’t ‘protesters’ but marginal loonies who should be isolated or at least ignored and ostracised.

If taken seriously, they multiply at a rate normally associated with bacteria only and become a deadly civilisational threat. They themselves are a much more serious problem than any they take as a call to disruptive action. If our society suffers from a disease, they are its most bothersome symptom.

And what does our government do? What do all Western governments do? They encourage wokery by teaching subversive nonsense at schools and universities, bowdlerising great literature, spreading evil propaganda through the media and adopting a laissez-faire attitude to politically inspired criminal acts.

Has a single education minister ever withdrawn government funding from any university that allows its Red Guards to ‘cancel’ conservative thinkers? Has any official ever pointed out that only events can be cancelled, and cancelling people is creepy?

I said earlier that we shouldn’t argue with energumens. The only such argument that has every worked for me consists of two words, of which the second one is ‘off’. But the general public is a different matter – it can be educated.

A massive public education campaign sustained for a couple of years could push the fanatics not just to the margins, but off the page. But that’s a pipe dream: one side of the Parliament aisle is inhabited by former activists in various subversive causes, and ‘former’ is too kind.

Is there a single MP on the Labour benches who doesn’t think ‘protesters’ have a point, even if they go about it with too much gusto? More important, is there anybody on the Tory benches who shares my views? There are some – but they are greatly outnumbered.

If a Tory minister with prime-ministerial ambitions says “trans women are women”, then that minister isn’t going to step hard on trans activists, is she? (It’s Penny ‘Thunder Thighs’ Mordaunt I’m talking about.)

And if cabinet members refuse to say publicly that the evidence against global warming is much stronger than that for it, then the vandals, motorway blockers and – as history shows – eventually mass murderers will crawl out of the woodwork.

When scum rises to the top, it should be skimmed off. Alas, I can’t see a single force that can do the skimming.

All we can do is keep explaining the facts of life to every normal person who’ll listen, ‘normal’ being the operative word. We may not save our civilisation, but there’s an outside chance we may save our own souls.

In Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Cleese famously asked an amusing question: “What have the Romans ever done for us?” That was followed by a long litany: “The aqueduct, sanitation, roads, irrigation, medicine, education, wine,” and so on.

Cleese’s character asked that silly question for laughs. Yet Hitchens has neither the sense of humour nor the talent to entertain people. Instead he has a keenly felt duty to serve Putin’s fascism, even at the expense of making himself sound idiotic and ignorant.

Hence he asks in today’s Mail not one stupid question but several. Yet, I hope, nobody laughs.

What has piqued Hitchens’s curiosity is the leaked presence of 50 SAS soldiers in the Ukraine. Hence the litany of questions:

“Why are we in this? How does Britain benefit from war between Russia and Ukraine? How, for that matter, has poor Ukraine benefited from it…? Why should any British soldiers be there at all?”

After all, “as far as I know, this country is not at war with Russia.” That’s true, if he means a declared state of war.

But then the SAS has also operated in a few other countries that failed to satisfy that supposedly ironclad requirement. One could mention, off the top, Malaya, Borneo, Oman, Yemen, Northern Ireland, the Falklands, Sierra Leone, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria – stop me once you’ve got the point.

Neither, for that matter, was Britain at war with Iran in 1980, when SAS soldiers attacked that country’s territory, its embassy in London, where British hostages were held. Nor was Britain at war with London, come to think of it.

Hitchens obviously considers all those questions rhetorical. What he means is that we shouldn’t be “in this”, Britain doesn’t “benefit from war between Russia and Ukraine”, neither does the Ukraine, and British soldiers shouldn’t “be there at all”.

This is an extension of the mantra he has been reciting with maniacal persistence for at least a decade, probably longer. Putin’s Russia is “the most conservative and Christian country in Europe”. Putin is the strong leader Hitchens wishes we had. Russia isn’t to blame for any banditry. Putin had nothing to do with the Skripals’ poisoning (this came in Hitchens’s indignant e-mail to me). The Ukraine is a fascist country run by an illegal government. Putin didn’t attack it – he was forced to defend Russia against Nato aggression…

All this time, while Hitchens has been writing about Russia, I’ve been writing about him. This is monotonously repetitive, but I consider it my duty to counter enemy propaganda as best I can. Since it’s clear that Russia is our enemy and Hitchens is her witting or unwitting agent, I suppress nausea and put my fingers on the keyboard each time.

So let’s pretend the questions above were asked in good faith, and they are a genuine request for information. Such pleas must be satisfied.

“Why are we in this? How does Britain benefit from war between Russia and Ukraine?” We are in this for the same reason we were in the Second World War: to stop an evil aggressor from dominating Europe. Just like Hitler who never concealed his intentions, Putin has been declaring since at least 2007 that his mission is to restore the Soviet Union to its past grandeur.

Russia practises what he preaches, pouncing on neighbouring countries like a rabid dog and openly threatening Nato members, both collectively and individually.

Hardly a day goes by that either Putin or one of his mouthpieces doesn’t threaten to sink Britain with a couple of well-placed bombs. The Ukraine is only the first step towards Russia’s pan-European domination, which directly impinges on Britain’s strategic interests.

“How, for that matter, has poor Ukraine benefited from it…” This is either the most cretinous question I’ve ever heard or the most cynical, you decide. The underlying assumption is of course that the Ukraine started this war with a specific benefit in mind.

His editors should mention to Hitchens that it was Russia that attacked the Ukraine, not the other way around. Having started in 2014 with Putin’s bandit raid on the Crimea, the war steadily escalated until, on 24 February of last year, Russian hordes swept across the border to turn the Ukraine into a prostrate colony.

That, according to Hitchens, was Putin’s sacred right and, rather than resisting, those Ukrainian warmongers should have rolled over meekly. Since they didn’t, they have only themselves to blame for the destruction of their cities, along with the satanic murders, rapes and tortures their civilians have suffered at the hands of Putin’s bandits.

Their latest achievement is a video they posted of a Russian soldier beheading a POW with a knife. There have been other videos in the same genre: POWs castrated, resisters within Russian ranks killed with a sledgehammer and other such niceties. (This, by the way, is consistent with the way the Russians have acted elsewhere, notably in Syria.)

The Ukraine’s benefit is saving her people from the most diabolical ghoul threatening Europe since Stalin and Hitler. “Poor Ukraine”, is how Hitchens now describes that heroic country, feigning empathy. This after he has spewed out gallons of spittle, screaming hatred of that country and her government, while at the same time declaring love of Russia.

“Why should any British soldiers be there at all?” He means they shouldn’t be, of course. I think I’ve already answered that question in general terms. Talking specifically about the 50 SAS soldiers, I don’t know what their mission is.

That’s the point: the SAS operates in the shadows, everything it does is highly classified. Hitchens outdoes his own put-on idiocy by insisting their action should have been approved by Parliament. That’s like saying that HMG should publish a complete list of British spies everywhere in the world. That would kind of defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?

Britain has been training Ukrainian soldiers since 2014. The SAS has played a prominent role in that effort, training Ukrainian special forces in weapons and tactics. I suspect that’s what they are doing there now. Along with the heavy stuff, Britain supplies the Ukraine with sophisticated infantry weapons, and SAS soldiers are ideally qualified to teach their use.

Another possibility is that they are keeping an eye on the Russians’ movements. For example, it would be a dire strategic necessity to spot any massing of Russian troops in a formation suggesting a possible offensive against a Nato country.

I don’t know. All I can do is wish them Godspeed and pray they come to no harm in defence of the Ukraine’s freedom – and ours. They serve a noble cause.

Hitchens reserves his last salvo for those awful people in America who keep the war going because “they believe passionately that Russia must never be allowed to rise again”.

If Russia rising again means regaining her ability to create puppet regimes all over Europe and use them to advance Russian imperial megalomania, then I share that passionate belief. So do all decent people, a category to which Hitchens manifestly doesn’t belong.

That he proves with every sentence, such as: “If every dollar these 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.”

America and the rest of the West have pumped billions into Russia (and China). The entire Soviet industry was built by Western, mostly American, capital and technology when Lenin and Stalin were still in business.

That continued throughout the Cold War. For example, Russia wouldn’t be able to blackmail Europe with her oil and gas without the massive transfer of Western exploration and production technologies.

Since their perestroika, that is transfer of power from the Party to the KGB, the West has intensified its efforts. So has Russia become “prosperous and free”? Is the world now “a startingly better place?”

By Russia’s own data, a third of her people live below the poverty line (about £150 a month). The slightest dissent is punished by draconian prison terms, banishment or the odd murder. And the world has been taken to the brink of nuclear holocaust, something Putin’s propagandists are openly promoting.

The amazing thing is that Hitchens doesn’t even bother to conceal his allegiance to the cause of Russian fascism – and that his paper does nothing about it. Free press ought to end where enemy propaganda begins.   

My first reaction is to say none. In fact, a human being born with a penis is a good working definition of a man, not of a woman.

But that’s only my uneducated guess. Admittedly I haven’t conducted any surveys, nor, truth to tell, even read them. My reply is based strictly on general principles, and they aren’t always a reliable guide to the truth.

Now, Sir Keir Starmer, the Leader of His Majesty’s Opposition and probably our next prime minister, is different from me. He withdraws judgement until he has studied the issue in detail. And then he speaks, with each word carrying the weight of his erudition and also the extra gravitas of his exalted position.

Don’t know about you, but I’m humbled by his authority. And I applaud the conclusion his research led him to. According to Sir Keir, 340,000 British women are blessed with the appendage in question.

To be fair, he didn’t quite put it that way. When asked if women could have penises, Sir Keir begrudgingly admitted that 99.99 per cent don’t.

The rest of it is my pocket calculator speaking. There are about 34 million women in the UK. If only 99.99 per cent of them don’t have penises, then 0.1 per cent do. Translating percentages into absolute numbers, we get 340,000. That’s how many British lasses must show a noticeable bulge in their knickers.

Since you know, and I know, and even Sir Keir knows that this is insane bilge, we have to consider the reasons for his statement. After all, his Tory counterpart, Prime Minister Sunak, gave the same answer I did: none.

So why did Sir Keir lie to us? Now, politicians have been known to tell porkies strictly for electoral reasons. So did Sir Keir state that 340,000 British women have penises because he thinks that’s an election winner? Sort of like promising to cut taxes in half?

On the surface of it, he miscalculated. Every poll I’ve seen says that most Britons agree with Mr Sunak on this subject, not with Sir Keir. So is he cutting his electoral throat to spite his political face?

He isn’t. But to understand why we need to delve beneath the surface.

Over the past few decades, politicians of both parties, ably assisted by the media, the academy and the liberal intelligentsia, have succeeded in effecting one seismic shift, even if they’ve failed in most other undertakings. They’ve replaced actual reality with the virtual kind.

If you remember Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, its protagonist Cincinnatus C. is sentenced to death because in a country where everyone is transparent he alone is opaque. Since in reality people aren’t made of a see-through material, that was a strong dystopic metaphor for virtual reality ousting the actual kind.

In Nabokov’s novel those who remained opaque were sentenced to death. Transparency was elevated to a totemic ideology enforceable by every means possible.

Read wokery for transparency, and virtual for actual reality, and you’ll get the picture. Wokery in the modern West is the secular equivalent of religion in a theocracy, or perhaps of the communist party in the Soviet Union.

Not every denizen of a theocracy has to espouse the state religion, and not every Russian had to belong to the Party. Moreover, neither the former nor the latter even have to believe the dominant ideology. However, they all without a single exception must pay lip service to it.

When that goes on for a couple of generations, interesting psychological mechanisms whirr into life. People may continue to disbelieve, especially when incontrovertible empirical data support their apostasy. But they feel guilty about it.

That sense of guilt is cultivated by total, not to say totalitarian, propaganda they are inundated with from cradle to grave. They know they themselves don’t mean the sanctimonious phrases they utter. But everybody else around them may, for all they know.

So how can they be right and everyone else wrong? Their parents taught them that thinking so is egoistic, immoral or – in modern parlance – uncool. Then their tribal instinct kicks in: no one wants to be a pariah. People feel a compulsion to belong somewhere, ideally everywhere.

They’ve been trained to identify themselves by group membership. It could be something small, a book club, supporters of a football team, fans of a pop group. Or it could be something all-embracing: a religion, an ideology, general coolness as it’s commonly understood.

Every totemic cult comes with its own set of shibboleths. They act as passwords, a sort of Open, Sesame. A man is asked to say the password of the day before he is admitted to the sanctum of the initiated. Most are so well-trained that they know the magic word intuitively. They are also trained to welcome the kindred possessors of that knowledge – and reject those ignorant of it.

Actual reality isn’t allowed to interfere with the virtual kind. Thus, in our example, every sane person knows that hundreds of thousands of British women can’t have penises. But that’s not the point. Facts belong in actual reality, and it has been disfranchised.

Most people are fully paid-up members in the virtual reality club, and they hunger for the company of their own kind. The whole system of today’s one-man-one-vote democracy is based on this presupposition.

Sir Keir knows this. He may not know it in his mind, but that is superseded by his viscera. And those organs combine to send a signal directly to his tongue, bypassing whatever he has for a mind.

He doesn’t have to think. He just knows that, by uttering that idiotic falsehood, he’ll gain more support than he’ll lose. The audience, he feels, has been sufficiently primed to accept make-believe as real and reality as make-believe.

The media act as formulators, promulgators and enforcers of virtual reality. Before it triumphed, a question like “Do women have penises?” couldn’t even have been conceived, never mind publicly asked.

Now it acts as a demand for the password, with the journalist cast in the role of sentry. A politician facing that demand has a stark choice. He has to make an instant judgement of the encroachment virtual reality has made on the actual kind. Is it total or partial? And how partial is that?

If he delivers the requisite password, he thereby announces his allegiance to virtual reality, hoping most people worship at the same totem pole. Conversely, obtusely sticking with actual reality may either win votes for him or lose them. It all depends on how accurately he assesses the public mood.

The very fact that the penile question has become ubiquitous testifies to a collapse of culture, morality, reason, indeed public sanity. Who was the first British prime minister who wouldn’t have laughed in the face of the inquirer? Probably Tony Blair, would be my guess. That gives us roughly the time when virtual reality conquered, or at least began to do so.

A mere generation ago, if that. That’s when Britain was hit with a pandemic of insanity much worse and more durable than any Covid. And that virus isn’t going to die out by itself. It’ll continue to multiply in the medium beneficial to it: our anomic modernity.

One has to pity Joe Biden’s aides. They are falling over themselves trying to dispel the malicious rumours that their employer is virulently anti-British.

That’s a bit like Hitler’s aides protesting in the 1940s that their Führer didn’t have an anti-Semitic bone in his body. A tall task, requiring more spin than even Nadal can put on a tennis ball.

Anyway, if anyone can appreciate his aides’ conundrum, it’s Joe himself. And what better time to help them out than his pilgrimage trip to Ireland, supposedly to celebrate the 25^th anniversary of Britain’s surren… sorry, Freudian slip. I mean the Good Friday Agreement of course.

And speaking of Freudian slips, the other day Joe visited a pub just south of the Ulster boarder. There he proudly invoked the name of his distant relation, the rugby player Rob Kearney, who, Biden announced, “beat the hell out of the Black and Tans”.

He meant the New Zealand national team nicknamed All Blacks that Kearney destroyed almost singlehandedly in 2016. Now everyone knows that Joe isn’t quite compos mentis. Never the sharpest chisel in the toolbox to begin with, with age he has added senility to his mental deficiencies.

Thus his gaffes and pratfalls are too numerous to mention, although some hacks do their level best to list the whole inventory. Yet not all gaffes are the same.

Slips of the tongue are often caused by a man talking about an unfamiliar subject and replacing a new term with a similar-sounding one lodged in the front of his mind. As an American, Joe knows nothing about rugby, the precursor of American football. Hence the term ‘All Blacks’, helpfully provided by his poor aides, meant nothing to him. The term ‘Black and Tans’, on the other hand, must always be in his thoughts. Hence the gaffe.

The Black and Tans was a British militia, 10,000-strong, recruited into the Royal Ulster Constabulary to quash the 1919-1921 Irish rebellion. They failed, but not before distinguishing themselves for atrocities against civilians. The Irish thus remember the Black and Tans with the same bitterness as they do Oliver Cromwell, who drowned Ireland in blood back in 1649.

Immediately after the island was divided into the British North and republican South, the unit was disbanded and has since sunk into oblivion. But apparently 100-odd years aren’t enough to erase its memory altogether.

That war and all its participants, including the Black and Tans, must still occupy a fair chunk of Joe’s mental capacity, to the exclusion of all those little problems that should typically concern the Leader of the Free World.

In his present state, he has a hard time trying to conceal his palpable hatred of Britain. Biden’s mentality is pure IRA, and I don’t mean Individual Retirement Account. Subterfuge is now beyond Joe’s faculties, which must be why, on the same trip, he also took a selfie of himself with Gerry Adams, the former leader of Sinn Féin.

Now Gerry has always insisted he had nothing to do with the IRA and its terrorist activities. This in spite of numerous witnesses testifying to his past involvement. He was the IRA’s Chief of Staff in the 1970s and a member of its War Council until 2005.

Adams was arrested numerous times, although the prosecutors never managed to make the charges of terrorism stick. Nonetheless his IRA past isn’t so much a rumour as common knowledge.

That’s why he was denied entry to the United States on several occasions. But in 1994, following a campaign led by Senator Biden, President Clinton granted Adams a 48-hour visa to attend a conference in New York. However, he wasn’t allowed to travel farther than 25 miles outside NY, which kept him from South Boston, the hub of IRA fund raising in America.

In short, the case of Biden’s Anglophilia wasn’t helped by his choice of co-model for that selfie. Somebody ought to tell the president that he brings his office into disrepute by so blatantly meddling in the affairs of America’s most reliable European ally.

I’m not sure, however, that Joe would listen. All those tribal resentments so many Americans inherit from their distant European past are especially pronounced in people whose mental capacity is impaired either from birth or by age, or, as in Biden’s case, both.

Such resentments, by the way, don’t exist in Britain, not so that I’ve noticed anyway. One of my close friends is of French Huguenot ancestry, another had a German mother, yet another has roots both in Scotland and Ireland, still another’s descent has Welsh inputs. Yet they all consider themselves English, and their interest in their distant ancestral lands is no greater than mine.

Moreover, they eschew the double-barrel self-identification so rife in America. You can hear ‘French-American’, ‘German-American’ or ‘Irish-American’ all over the place there, but Englishmen remain just English, wherever their ancestors lived.

Mario Puzo of the The Godfather fame once described his clash with Frank Sinatra over the striking similarity between the singer and one of Puzo’s characters. The conflict, explained the novelist, was exacerbated by their heritage. Yes, both were Italian-American, but Puzo’s ancestors came from Sicily, while Sinatra’s from somewhere up north. Even though one of them was born in New York and the other in New Jersey, that sort of geography mattered to both.

Most of the time such particularism is benign and good-natured, although one may be forgiven for thinking that perhaps the glue binding the American nation together is thinner than similar substances in Europe.

But when a president of the United States bases his foreign policy pronouncements and even decisions on his great-great-grandparents’ nativity, that’s neither benign nor good-natured. It’s both pathetic and potentially detrimental to the interests of America and, in this case, Britain.

Those Americans who are horrified by the sight of a clearly incompetent man in the White House talk about compulsory tests of mental ability for all presidential candidates. I’d also add an IQ test to the mix, to exclude Joe for sure and a few others possibly. Dubya, anyone?    

Who was the greatest writer ever? This is one of the silliest questions one can ask.

Unlike tennis players and pop hits, writers and other artists have no official rankings. Ask 100 well-read people and you’ll get 100 different answers, or more (well-read people like to hedge their bets with phrases like “or else perhaps…”).

However, it’s a safe bet that Shakespeare and Tolstoy would get their fair share of mentions in our hypothetical poll. And while many people would come up with their own candidates, few would say those two don’t belong in that company.

Neither writer, however, would – or rather should – make any sensible list of great historians. Nor would the two giants have any posthumous problems with such exclusion. Though both read a fair amount of history and used historical motifs in their work, neither devoted his life to painstaking scholarly enquiry.

Both wrote historical stories, and the noun is more important than the adjective. When the narrative demanded playing fast and loose with facts, they both did. Artistic truth mattered more to them than factual accuracy, and rightly so.

At times, however, the demand to distort history came not from their art but – and here we are getting to a real problem – from their ideology. When that happened, they betrayed not only scholarly integrity but also, much worse, artistic truth.

However, to the powers that be ideology tends to be almost everything, while artistry is next to nothing. Hence, they found the great writers’ ideology useful and canonised their take on history as unquestionably true to life.

Thus many generations of English schoolchildren read Shakespeare’s Richard III as reportage on the Wars of the Roses, while Russian pupils never doubted the historical veracity of War and Peace and its view of the 1812 war.

Should both Shakespeare and Richard III still be alive, the latter could sue the former for libel and win the case hands down. Just recently we got a reminder of that when the Richard III Society republished a lost history text The History of King Richard III by Sir George Buck, roughly Shakespeare’s contemporary.

The Society of Antiquaries certified the text’s authenticity and endorsed its portrayal of Richard as a “just” and “good” king – not the perfidious, murderous hunchback depicted by Shakespeare.

In 1485, Richard lost his battle and his life to the man who thus became Henry VII, the first Tudor king of England. Writing his Richard III drama during the reign of Henry’s granddaughter, Shakespeare was working to what the Soviets later called ‘social order’.

The order was twofold: first to besmirch Richard, then to glorify Henry, whose rights to succession were rather tenuous. The first objective was achieved by depicting Richard as an evil hunchback who murdered those little princes in the Tower. Both parts were mendacious.

Richard had one shoulder slightly higher than the other, that’s all. A real hunchback wouldn’t have been able to wield a heavy 15^th century sword with the athletic agility required to stay alive in many battles, which Richard did.

As to the two young sons of Edward IV murdered in the Tower of London, there isn’t a shred of evidence to connect Richard with that crime. Shakespeare based his play on Sir Thomas More’s account that solely relied on cui bono conjecture.

The Duke of Richmond, later to become King Henry VII, was a Welsh usurper who had a much better reason for killing the little princes. That doesn’t mean he did, but then it doesn’t point an accusing finger at Richard either.

Writing a century after the event, Shakespeare had the benefit of hindsight but ignored it. He knew that Henry’s subsequent reign was tyrannical and generally unsuccessful. And yet he put in his mouth a soliloquy that any Stalinist hack would have been proud of:

O, now, let Richmond and Elizabeth,
The true succeeders of each royal house,
By God’s fair ordinance conjoin together!
And let their heirs, God, if thy will be so.
Enrich the time to come with smooth-faced peace,
With smiling plenty and fair prosperous days!

This is ideological sycophancy at its most emetic. That, however, didn’t prevent Richard III from becoming historical orthodoxy. The artist of genius lent his gravitas to a falsehood.

Three centuries later Tolstoy (who, by the way, detested Shakespeare) did the same in his mendacious, ideologically inspired portrayal of the 1812 war against Napoleon.

Two of Tolstoy’s pet ideas, both false, came into play. The first is that personalities have no role to play in history. The only impetus comes from some mysterious historical forces Tolstoy left unidentified. Those forces move people around like pawns on the chessboard, and the people have no more say in the matter than do those wooden figurines.

Tolstoy borrowed that determinist concept from Joseph de Maistre (who appears in the novel as a minor character). In fact, Tolstoy copied whole pages from de Maistre’s essays without attribution. But he missed the point: de Maistre identified those forces as divine providence. Since the only God Tolstoy believed in was himself, he left that part out.

His other hobbyhorse was the saintly nature of Russian peasants and whichever other Russians came close to that ideal. That’s why he poopooed every foreign officer in the Russian army as an incompetent fool – this though some of them, such as Clausewitz, Stein and Bennigsen, have a different reputation in history. Then again, Tolstoy even managed to show Napoleon as a military nonentity, which took some doing.

At the same time he extolled the senile Field-Marshal Kutuzov, the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian forces. In the eyes of serious military historians, the latter fought a do-nothing campaign of staggering incompetence which could easily have ended in catastrophe.

As it was, Kutuzov lost the only major battle of the war and as a result surrendered Moscow. (Tolstoy lovingly describes how Kutuzov slept through the War Council meeting where the decision to abandon Moscow was taken. In some quarters, such somnolence could be seen as gross negligence, if not outright treason.) Later Kutuzov missed the easiest of chances to finish off the French army in full flight, capturing Napoleon and ending the war a couple of years earlier.

However, Tolstoy, ever the dialectician, argues that even the battle of Borodino was actually a Russian victory because the French lost the war in the end. That’s like saying that the French defeated the Nazis in 1940 because de Gaulle triumphantly entered Paris in 1944.

As to the saintly Russian peasants Tolstoy credits as the principal factor of victory, rather than fighting the French, they rose against their serf-owning masters. Peasant uprisings broke out throughout the country, and at the critical points of the war Kutuzov had to send whole divisions out to quell them.

Dumas’s accounts of France’s 17^th century history are another example of history distorted by fictional portrayal. The greatest French statesmen of that period, Richelieu, Mazarin and Colbert, come across as, respectively, a sinister tyrant, a thieving nonentity and a bean-counting flunky. But Dumas neither pretended nor was considered to be a writer of genius.

He wrote light entertainment of very high quality, and though many children read his musketeer stories with delight (I still do, in my dotage), few take them as historical orthodoxy. Shakespeare and Tolstoy, geniuses as they are, have a much greater influence – and a much better chance to falsify history.

P.S. Speaking of history, we must set the record straight: Joe Biden doesn’t hate Britain. In fact, an unverified account reports him as saying: “Some of my ancestors and best friends are colonialist murderers”.

To paraphrase Dr Johnson, Russian culture is great and original. The trouble is, where it’s original it isn’t great. And where it’s great it isn’t original.

Russian culture rose to greatness when it began to borrow heavily from the West towards the end of the 18^th century. That worked wonders: within a single century, the country’s artistic culture reached at least parity with any other, certainly any contemporaneous with it.

Alas, when it came to politics, philosophy and political philosophy, Russian culture remains puny and epigonic. To be sure, being derivative isn’t necessarily bad in itself. It all depends on what’s held up as a worthy model to emulate.

The thing is that Western political thought isn’t monolithic. For example, Burke’s exegesis of the French Revolution is diametrically opposite to Paine’s, de Maistre’s constitutional ideas to Jefferson’s, the Whig interpretation of history to the conservative one.

The trouble with anti-totalitarian Russians is that, perhaps understandably, they borrow only from the West’s liberal strain. That intellectual fallacy isn’t doing particularly well even in its native habitat, where it has been cultivated for centuries. In Russia, where no such tradition exists, that kind of thought leads to an intellectual fiasco – but, to us, a useful one.

Russia is like a convex mirror held up to the West to enlarge its failings into a grotesque caricature. That should enable us to see them clearly, although few of us are willing to focus our eyes for long enough.

Enter Tamara Eidelman, a Russian historian who looks like everybody’s favourite aunt and sounds the way a Russian Easter cake would sound if it could talk. Dr Eidelman has her own YouTube channel she uses to stream popular accounts of history.

Most of her effort to carry history to the masses is highly commendable. Her erudition can’t be faulted, and neither can her integrity, which is more than one can say for many modern historians.

However, when she flies too close to the sun of modernity, she does an Icarus by just rehashing views one can read in The Guardian, The New York Times or Le Monde. That makes her sound as intellectually bankrupt as those publications.

Her latest programme is about Franco, who, says Dr Eidelman, makes her feel “chilling horror”. In that she is no different from any leader writer at the papers I’ve mentioned. But I did tell you that, unlike them, Dr Eidelman possesses laudable integrity.

That’s why, having shared with us her innermost feelings, she proceeds to explain that the infernal Franco wasn’t as black as he is painted.

To wit: “he prevented Spain from being dragged into the Second World War.” All he did was “allow volunteers… to form the Blue Division that was sent to the Eastern Front”. That’s why “Hitler was enraged, saying he’d rather have his teeth pulled than ever talk to Franco again.”

“He wouldn’t let Hitler move troops through Spain in 1942, after the Allies had landed in North Africa.”

“He declared several amnesties for political prisoners” and paved Spain’s way to democracy “by appointing Prince Juan Carlos as his successor.”

Oh well, on balance I’d suggest that’s pretty good going, especially for a man described in the aforementioned papers as a fascist dictator. Dr Eidelman confirms that: “I know he was far from being the scariest of Europe’s 20^th century dictators… Franco can’t be put into the first rank of cannibals.”

So what’s the source of the “chilling horror” Dr Eidelman feels whenever Franco’s name is mentioned? She kindly explains: “I am scared by his complete coldness, total self-control, absence of sentiments. He had neither Hitler’s hysterical fanaticism nor Mussolini’s temperament.”

Most of us would say “and a good job too”. Franco indeed managed to keep his head when all around him were losing theirs (yes, I know Kipling used that phrase first). That’s a job requirement for a leader, especially at crisis time. What’s the problem then?

Well, you see, Dr Eidelman is appalled at the cold-bloodedness Franco showed when ordering people to be executed. Would she prefer him throwing a hysterical fit every time he issued such an order?

Apparently not. After all, “He had neither Hitler’s hysterical fanaticism nor Mussolini’s temperament.” One gets the impression Dr Eidelman is horrified that any such orders had to be issued. Franco should have treated the communists’ attempt to deliver Spain to Stalin the way a Guardian-reading social worker treats a drug addict in his care.

Had he done so, Spain would have suffered the kind of terror Stalin’s other dominions suffered. The number of people executed in cold blood or otherwise would have exceeded Franco’s score by orders of magnitude.

Historical figures must be viewed not from the lofty height of humanitarian ideals but in the context of the alternatives available under the circumstances. The only alternative to Stalin in Spain circa 1936 was Franco, not a typological precursor of Dr Eidelman – praiseworthy as her humanitarian impulses may be.

She should take her cue from her colleague Adolphe Tiers (d. 1877), the great historian turned statesman, who suppressed another communist power grab, the Paris Commune. Thereafter the liberal press invariably referred to him as a Bloody Cur, with Tiers just shrugging: “Somebody had to be”.

Dr Eidelman hates communism as much as I do. I’m sure she detests Putin’s Nazism with equal passion. That part is easy, or at least should be for any decent person, which Dr Eidelman undoubtedly is. What’s hard is coming up with a realistic alternative – and ways of realising it.

Alas, many extreme situations can only be resolved by a Francisco Franco, not an Albert Schweitzer. And when a Franco-type figure (Pinochet comes to mind as a similar man in a similar situation) does resolve the situation, he should be hailed as a hero and saviour of his nation. Not panned for being unlike Dr Schweitzer in his methods.

I’ve seen hundreds of photographs of Franco, and never once did I spot a pair of wings on his back. He was no angel, and any normal person should deplore some of his methods. But a scholar can’t afford being just a normal person. The job calls for dispassionate – coldblooded! – analysis and a rational weighing of all relevant factors.

Dr Eidelman has learned from the West, but the wrong kind of the West. Yet in the process she, along with her whole country, teaches the West a lesson – in how not to think of complex events and complicated historical figures.

One hopes we don’t play truant at such classes. Every day of her life Russia teaches us what not to do, how not to approach public affairs. And the academic faculty includes decent people like Dr Eidelman alongside a full complement of monsters like Putin. Let’s learn from them.

Vive la différence, say the French. Originally the concept applied to sexes, but it’s fair to say it has now been pushed a bit too far.

However, differences among us are indeed worth celebrating, if only to remind us that each person, each nation, each society is unique.

Or perhaps such reminders are superfluous. We already know we aren’t the same as even our relations, friends and neighbours. And when it comes to strangers from elsewhere, we don’t need reminding how different they are, thank you very much.

But successful families, societies and cultures coalesce not on things that set them apart but on those they have in common. However distinctive each floor in a building may be, they must all rest on a single sturdy foundation. If that foundation is termite-eaten or subsiding, the structure will collapse sooner or later.

Our culture, indeed our whole Western civilisation, was erected on the foundation of Christianity. That’s a matter of fact, not faith. And staying in the cold realm of facts, one has to acknowledge that every attempt to replace that foundation with some other has failed.

Individuals, families, societies resemble more and more atoms spinning out of their molecule. Brotherhood of men, that notorious fratérnité in the French triad, has turned into an indigestible pie in the sky concocted in a secular cooker.

Men can be brothers only if they have the same father, and such kinship is the most enduring of all. That point was made and reiterated by millions of men over hundreds of years every day, when they said the Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father…” – one for all.

Some of you still say those words every day; most, I suspect, don’t. But all of you must sense that a sense of brotherly unity is missing in the world. The misguided effort to squeeze various surrogate fathers into the space vacated by the real one has turned us into culturally homeless orphans.

Having built the edifice of history’s greatest civilisation, we’ve either walked away from it or, worse, tried to bring the structure down. We’ve succeeded in the former, failed in the latter.

For the edifice hasn’t been pulled down; it has only been obscured by a dense fog. Yet its outlines are still visible, reminding us all that it’s never too late to turn around and walk back.

Sooner or later we’ll do just that, even though it looks as if we’ve lost our way. Yet every other structure we see emerging out of the fog is a mirage. Only one edifice is real. Here in the West there can be no other – which has been proved empirically over the past few centuries in a series of experiments paid for in blood.

That one real edifice bears a superficial resemblance to the Tower of Babel in that its inhabitants converse in different tongues. But whatever their language, on this day they all say the same thing.

Christ is risen!

Le Christ est ressuscité!

Christus ist auferstanden!

Cristo ha resucitado!

Cristo è risorto!

Kristus on üles tõusnud!

Kristus er oppstanden!

Xристос воскрес!

Chrystus zmartwychwstał!

Kristus vstal z mrtvých!

Cristo ressuscitou!

Kristus ir augšāmcēlies!

Christus is verrezen!

Χριστὸς ἀνέστη!

Krisztus feltámadt!

Kristus är uppstånden!

Kristus prisikėlė!

Kristus nousi kuolleista!

Hristos a înviat!

INDEED HE IS RISEN! HAPPY EASTER!

China’s ambassador to the EU, Mr Fu Cong (careful how you pronounce it) said something no one expected. Even my uniquely unfailing clairvoyance proved to be not so reliable (just this once!).

As you recall, Fu’s ventriloquist, Emperor Xi, visited Moscow the other day, where he co-signed some sort of agreement with Putin. The document had 14 paragraphs, most of which had to do with economic cooperation.

If you don’t speak Sino-Russian, in this context ‘economic cooperation’ means confirming China’s control of Russia’s Far East and Eastern Siberia. It also means that Russia accepts her role as China’s de facto vassal. And oh yes, I almost forgot: on that basis they also swore undying, limitless friendship.

The document reiterates both sides’ opposition to siting nuclear weapons in countries that don’t have their own. They also agree that using, or even threatening to use, nuclear weapons is unacceptable.

I wonder how Russia goes about that part. The only way to abide will be banning Russian politicians from making any public pronouncements on foreign policy. So far not a single one over the past couple of years has omitted the threat to reduce the West to radioactive ash or some such.

The two chaps also had a private chat that went unrecorded. No details have been released, but it doesn’t take my clairvoyance to know what they talked about.

Putin begged Xi to rearm Russia and start providing the military electronics for her to begin to rearm herself. He must have thanked Xi for his surreptitious help provided through third parties, but lamented its naturally limited scope. Massive direct help would be greatly appreciated.

Surmising Xi’s reply is harder, although many commentators did try. They were more or less evenly divided between favouring either a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ answer, and only I, the clairvoyant, stated uncompromisingly that either was possible.

Unable to read anything on Xi’s inscrutable face, commentators agreed to wait and see what the two limitless friends would do next. Depending on what it was, they could then figure out Xi’s response retrospectively.

Alas, Putin’s next move didn’t clarify matters. He announced that Russia would deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, which went against both the letter and the spirit of his public agreement with Xi. Rather than answering the old question, this action raised new ones.

Either this development was discussed and agreed by the two chaps in private or it wasn’t. If it was, Xi must be happy. If it wasn’t, he must be incandescent. Which is it?

Enter the ambassador with a precariously pronounceable name, Fu Cong. Asked about that boundless friendship, he said that some people “deliberately misinterpret this because there’s no so-called ‘no limit’ friendship or relationship. ‘No limit’ is nothing but rhetoric.”

For all my clairvoyance, I can’t be sure I understand every implication. There are too many. First, speaking through his dummy (you don’t think Fu was stating his own opinion, do you?), the ventriloquist Xi tells the West to disregard the empty words he and Putin put into that agreement.

Friendship, what friendship? No limit? You bet every part of your body limits exist, in everything but rhetoric.

Two scenarios are possible here, and the first one is obvious. Xi refused to provide direct military help to Putin, and the latter retaliated by blatantly breaking their agreement not to proliferate nukes.

That enraged Xi, and Fu’s statement is a public rebuke of Putin. It’s also a plea to the West that it shouldn’t treat China as Russia’s ally in that bandit raid on the Ukraine.

Alliance with Russia may make China a target for massive sanctions, and her economy isn’t doing well as it is. So far Xi has been doing all he could not to fly too close to the sun of sanctions, and Fu’s disclaimer seems to confirm China’s intention to keep her nose, well, cleanish.

It may also mean that China is withdrawing her friendship and, more important, support from Putin. If that’s the case, he won’t last long.

His nearest and dearest may decide that the end is nigh, and their only chance of their own survival is to blame it all on Putin, deliver him to the Hague and make it easy for the West to pretend it believes that Russia has found God.

But that’s only one possibility. The other one is subterfuge, something of which both China and Russia are eminently capable. Using rhetoric to repudiate rhetoric, China is planning to step up her secret supplies to Russia, while trying to stay just this side of Western sanctions. There, the results would be unpredictable.

Giving up that silly tomfoolery about my clairvoyance, I must admit I don’t know which of the two scenarios is real. Neither does John Kirby, US National Security Council coordinator.

“Look,” he said. “For us it’s actions, not words… It’s certainly encouraging to hear that they are publicly making that pronouncement. But we’re going to obviously continue to monitor.”

Mr Kirby’s grammar is questionable, but his words are wise. Nothing emanating from manifestly evil powers must be taken at face value. Remember the Russian proverb Reagan once quoted, “trust but verify”? The first part is strictly optional; the second, vital.

Meanwhile, the Russians disavow Fu’s statement, suggesting he didn’t mean it the way it sounded. Just go by the official documents signed by Putin and Xi, says Putin’s spokesman Peskov: “The whole context of their mutual understanding is stated in the two documents… They clarify completely the whole gamut of questions currently on the mutual agenda.”

Yes, except that Putin broke that agreement both in deed (planning to deploy nuclear weapons in Belarus) and in word (continuing to make nuclear threats). And Xi tells the world that the agreement is just hot air to be ignored.

Which of the two scenarios is true to life? Let’s hope for the first and prepare for the second. That’s the best we can do, and never mind the Chinese whispers.

Everything about and around Trump is just that, gaudy. Though born to money, he comes across as a truck driver who has just won the lottery.

His language, dress, mannerisms, reliance on rabble rousing, tastes in everything including women suggest an ideological commitment to tawdry vulgarity. Now, and I hope Shakespeare won’t mind, some people are born vulgar, some achieve vulgarity, and some have vulgarity thrust upon them.

For all I know, Trump might have manufactured his personality to fit his assessment of his audience, the American people. If that was his ploy, it has worked, after a fashion. But it may also backfire.

Every dramatic event of Trump’s life, certainly his political life, brings out into the streets two mobs, those who either love him or hate him with equally hysterical passion. The mobs clash, scream, swear or even, in extremis, try to storm government buildings. It’s all passionate, loud – and vulgar.

Moving from the sublime to the, well, less sublime, that is from Shakespeare to Wilde, all vulgarity is a crime. Trump has done his level best to drag American politics into the gutter of mob tastes, and that’s infinitely worse than his alleged mishandling of hush payments to assorted women of easy virtue.

In modern democracies, politics takes on an inordinate importance. It becomes not only the face of a nation, but also its essence. When the masses become subjects, rather than objects, of governance, they shape politics and politicians – and hence their country – in their own image. But the reverse is also true: politicians retaliate by doing the same thing to the masses.

Thus politicians can have a powerful, sometimes formative, effect on the style and tone of a nation. And the brasher the politician, the greater and more enduring the effect. Style perseveres long after substance evaporates.

Each president as a person affects the presidency as an institution. What Trump fails to grasp is that the latter is much more significant than the former. Presidents come and go, as do their policies, good or bad. Subsequent presidents usually undo the good ones and exacerbate the bad ones, but the permanent institution lives on after the transient individuals withdraw into history books.

If that institution loses honour and dignity, the loss may well prove irreversible. And President Trump damages the presidency both in and out of office.

For example, he and his fans scream themselves hoarse that the Democrats stole the latest election. That may or may not be true, but those tasteless shrieks undermine the dignity of the institution one way or the other.

Compare Trump’s behaviour with Nixon’s, who can hardly be held up as an exemplar of presidential probity. However, when in 1960 his advisers showed him the data proving that the Democrats had stolen the election in the swing state of Illinois, Nixon refused to demand a recount. Doing so, he said, would diminish the presidency – and he was right. No such compunctions for Trump.

As to the face value of his indictment, let the lawyers figure it out. Trump’s acolytes claim the case against him is politically motivated, and no doubt they are right. But, however reprehensible such a motivation may be, it doesn’t in itself mean the case is groundless.

Personally, I can’t believe that Trump, a clever operator who had been around the block or two, made the amateurish mistake of passing hush money as legal fees. Surely he could have found a fool-proof way to compensate his lawyer for the payment the latter had made to that porn star.

Most commentators say that the resulting brouhaha will boost Trump’s chances of securing the Republican nomination, if not presidency. Again, I’m not an expert. Maybe it will or maybe it won’t.

But I do detect an opening for Biden to scupper Trump’s campaign once and for all. All he has to do is issue a presidential pardon for Trump, what Ford did for Nixon in 1974, and Nixon’s crime was infinitely worse than Trump’s.

That would be a noble, magnanimous gesture that could be sold to the public as upholding the dignity of the institution. Trump’s constant whining about his stolen presidency would then look petty and, by comparison, unpresidential.

However, he is doing a creditable job of that all on his own. I mentioned his taste in women earlier, and it’s identical to that of my hypothetical truck driver who has won the lottery. Basking in the glow of his unexpected millions, that chap would instantly use some of his new fortune to reel in models, Playboy bunnies, porn stars and hookers – the same demographic pasture in which Trump grazes.

One can say in Trump’s defence that he isn’t the first president whose sexual shenanigans have ever brought the presidency into disrepute. At least, according to the indictment, Trump misbehaved before, rather than during, his tenure.

JFK indulged his priapism while in the White House, with Secret Service agents running hookers and trashy actresses through his bedroom. Their colleagues in the next generation provided a similar service for Clinton. Bill also had a tawdry affair with a young intern, proving in the process that sometimes a cigar isn’t just a cigar.

Speaking of the dignity of the institution, I cringed when reading Monica Lewinsky’s recollections of having “phone sex” with the president. At least, by all accounts Trump eschews the mediation of electronic appliances, although I wouldn’t put anything past him.

To be fair, the media can either boost or soft-pedal whatever damage presidents do to the presidency. In the case of Kennedy and, to a lesser extent, Clinton they downplayed it, while for Trump they are turning their amplifiers on full blast.

That’s where politics barges in. The major TV networks and mainstream papers like The New York Times and The Washington Post tend to reflect the views of the Democratic Party, and not necessarily its right end. Hence they either ignored Kennedy’s and Clinton’s misbehaviour or treated them as friends who had done something naughty.

By contrast, they treat Nixon and Trump as mortal enemies, not friends gone slightly awry. When that’s the case, the media pounce like a pack of rabid dogs.

Nixon did something wrong, but one can’t help thinking that similar infractions wouldn’t have received as much attention if committed by one of the Kennedy brothers. How busy were investigative reporters with, for example, the case of Teddy, the Chappaquiddick swimming champ? And had Joe Biden paid off a talkative hooker with campaign funds, would the media be as worked up?

Whenever and however politicians are involved, so is politics. But that doesn’t excuse either Nixon or Trump, whose actions damaged the presidency. With Nixon the damage was substantive: he was a president accused of trying to cheat his way to a second term.

Trump’s misdeeds are minor by comparison, but only in essence. One could argue that he harms the institution even more stylistically, by compromising its dignity and honour. This regardless of what we may think of his policies, executed or proposed.

For the record, I quite like most of them. But that’s neither here nor there.