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Don’t know about you, but I find our political taxonomy imprecise, misleading and generally tedious. By way of illustration, both Adolf Hitler and Margaret Thatcher are routinely described as extreme right-wing.

Since that implies a great degree of similarity, let’s compare the two – keeping our minds as open as possible without letting our brains fall out.

Hitler was a Nazi, with all that this nomenclature entails. Hence, to test our terminology, let’s dress Lady Thatcher in that dashing Hugo Boss uniform complete with a swastika armband and see if it fits.

Hitler believed in an omnipotent totalitarian state run by fiat, controlling every aspect of life and allowing next to no freedom to the individual. Thatcher believed in a small state run by parliament and ruled by law, with the individual given maximum freedom to run his own life. Hitler was a dictator accountable to himself only. Thatcher was a constitutional democrat accountable to parliament and therefore the people.

Hitler believed in economic corporatism, with enterprise remaining private only nominally. In fact, the owners were turned into managers, doing what the state ordered them to do. It was the state that told them what and how much to produce, how much to pay their employees and how much to charge for their products. It was socialist nationalisation in all but name.

Thatcher believed in private enterprise, unbridled initiative, denationalisation and a state acting only as a referee in the economic game, not a player.

Hitler despised international law and was a nationalist. Thatcher upheld international law and was a patriot. Hitler was a militant atheist who hated religion. Thatcher was a Christian, guided by her faith in most aspects of her life and work.

And so on, ad infinitum. Anywhere we look, Hitler and Thatcher aren’t just different but diametrically opposite. Thus, if the same term puts them both into the same political category, there’s something wrong with the term.

This also goes for the word ‘liberal’ and all its cognates. Lady Thatcher’s political beliefs – minimum power to the state, maximum power to the individual – would have been described as liberal in the 19^th century. Yet today’s liberals preach exactly the opposite: burgeoning state power, with the corresponding diminution of individual liberty.

National liberation, when applied to, say, the Ukraine, means defending the country’s sovereignty in the face of evil aggression. When applied to, say, Uganda, it means a transitional stage between colonialism and cannibalism. In Australia, ‘liberal’ means conservative. In the US, it means socialist.

‘Conservative’ doesn’t fare much better. Both Stalin and Churchill were conservatives in that they sought to preserve as much of the existing order as possible. Yet few are the intrepid individuals who would see them as ideological twins.

In Britain, the word ‘conservative’ has acquired a typographic definition, to distinguish a real, lower-case, conservative from a member of the Conservative party. That’s a tacit admission that the party is these days known by a misnomer. Incidentally, the Liberal Democratic Party is neither liberal nor democratic in Britain and downright fascist in Russia.

The upshot of it is that politics is too fickle to inspire any sound taxonomic system. Right and left converge too often to lend the two concepts to any sensible definition. Sometimes they converge within the same breast and at the same time. Thus Hitler was a right-wing extremist in his jingoism and racism. Yet in his political dirigisme and economic centralism, he was a rank socialist, which is to say left-wing.

Any classification should earn its keep by elucidating both similarities and differences. If it doesn’t do that, it’s in default of its remit and should be dismissed with contempt. Yet some classification is essential to understanding and proper discourse, as long as it isn’t based on the two meaningless and widely misleading poles of right and left.

With those, we ought to consider the source. The term goes back to the French Revolution, when the Jacobin faction in the National Assembly sat to the left of the aisle, and the Girondins to the right. Both were revolutionary parties, typologically presaging the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks in the Russian revolution. In each case, the difference wasn’t qualitative: it was in more or less of the same thing.

The classification I proposed in my book How the West Was Lost treated politics as only a subset of the real division, and not the most significant subset either. Rather than talking about political movements, I talk about the dominant sociocultural, or civilisational types.

I distinguished between two overarching ones, which I called Westman and Modman. That dichotomy was based on historical observation and analysis. These led me to believe that one type built the house of Western civilisation, while a totally different one, hostile to the first, inhabits it now.

In fact, the energy that ousted the first and produced the second was mainly negative and destructive. Modernity was brought to life by the urge to annihilate, ideally without trace, the traditional Western civilisation, starting with its religious and philosophical foundation.

A creative impulse also existed but, unlike the destructive one, it was rather nebulous, only expressible in vague slogans, along the lines of liberté, égalité, fraternité. None of the constituents of that unholy trinity would withstand five minutes of casual examination, never mind scrutiny. But it did nicely as the inspiration and vindication of mass slaughter and destruction.

Westman lost his dominant status in our civilisation, but individual Westmen still survive, just as some royalists survived the French revolution and some anti-Bolsheviks the Russian one. And the traditional Western ethos, though marginalised, hasn’t been expunged.

That’s why my classification is still useful. For example, I’d describe both Hitler and Stalin as nihilist Modmen, while, say, Biden and Starmer as philistine ones. This would highlight both the convergence of ultimate goals and the divergence of immediate means.

If Hitler is a nihilist Modman, then Thatcher is a residual Westman. Suddenly, we no longer run the risk of lumping them together into the same taxonomic category. But, say, Starmer and Sunak do belong together – both are philistine Modmen, as distinct from nihilist ones, such as Putin or Corbyn.

There exist any number of nuances, impossible to cover in a short article – which is why I wrote a longish book on the subject. Yet one point is indisputable: anyone is in for a let-down who hopes to understand modern politics, or modernity in general, by pondering such categories as left and right, or liberal and conservative, or even democratic and authoritarian.

Those terms have lost whatever meaning they ever had, which wasn’t much. New ones are needed, and I’ve done my bit.

One is amazed at our government’s tireless efforts at impoverishing the people not only financially, but also intellectually and morally.

Coming on stream in May will be an app converting smartphones into dashcams. That will enable drivers to snitch on traffic violations and report them to the police in real time.

At launch, the app will work on 21 different offences, such as running a red light or failing to indicate, but the ability to clock other cars’ speed will also be added shortly. This technological breakthrough goes a long way towards the goal of turning us into a nation of snitches and spies.

We are already encouraged to denounce people suspected of tax evasion and ‘hate crimes’, such as saying it’s women and not men who give birth. Now we’ll be able to get rid of the traffic police, with every driver taking up the slack.

The app will inform the transgressor to the police in under a minute. And it’ll come with features ensuring that the evidence will stand up in court. No need to buy an expensive dashcam. Just put your finger to the touch screen, and another driver gets done.

It’s good to see that enterprising creativity isn’t yet extinct in Britain. One only wishes that talent were applied to a worthier end.

We are steadily moving to a bright future of no real policing. His Majesty’s subjects are already joining the ranks of volunteer informants, and before long they’ll be encouraged to arrest suspects and presumably rough them up if they resist. Yes, I know that the concept of a citizen’s arrest exists, by so far it hasn’t extended to such crimes as changing lanes without indicating.

If our officials believe that the new app will reduce the number of traffic offences, they may be right (although constantly checking other cars’ speed may well reduce the control of one’s own). However, if they think that such DIY policing will foster good community relations, they are grossly, catastrophically wrong.

Britain’s roads are far and away the safest in Europe. Thus, by trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, HMG aggravates one that’s already pernicious: the declining moral health of the nation.

When people begin to treat one another with suspicion, before long they’ll treat one another with hatred. This isn’t a theoretical postulate, but a confident observation by someone who has seen it all before.

For I grew up in a country where citizens were legally required to denounce one another at the slightest suspicion of political crimes. Those they denounced, millions of them, would often vanish without a trace, never to come back.

Hearsay was enough; evidence, hard or even soft, was strictly optional. That provided a perfect stratagem for getting rid of love rivals, neighbours whose room the snitch coveted, other candidates for the same promotion, spouses opposed to a divorce, strict parents and so on.

The scripture Soviet children grew up on was the story of Pavlik Morozov, a 13-year-old peasant who denounced his father to a GPU murder squad and was consequently lynched by his surviving family. The story is largely apocryphal, but that’s not the point.

The point is that all Soviet children were brainwashed to see Pavlik as their role model. Snitching was raised to a civic duty and the highest virtue. In short order, that produced a population of deracinated individuals treating one another with suspicion, often hatred, and with a pandemic lack of trust.

Granted, a Briton caught jumping a red light isn’t going to suffer the same consequences as did a Russian guilty of telling a political joke in mixed company. A stiff fine is as far as we’ll go, at least for the time being. But the real damage will be done not to the finances of the denounced, but to the morality of the denouncers.

It is indeed one’s civic duty to report a felony, planned or committed, especially when people’s property and lives are at stake. Yet most of us go through life without ever getting the chance to do something like that.

Yet every one of Britain’s 30 million drivers witnesses (and, truth to tell, commits) dozens of traffic violations every time he takes to the road. How many drivers stick to the 20 mph limit on some of London’s major roads? I know I don’t.

Suddenly we’re no longer talking about doing one’s civic duty. We are talking about perverse, sanctimonious nastiness encouraged by the government with little regard for the damage done to collective morality.

Such damage is easier done than undone. Give it a generation or two, and it’ll seep into the national DNA, producing a social disaster. And I’ve already lived in a nation of Pavlik Morozovs, thank you very much.

The International Criminal Court has charged Putin with war crimes and issued an arrest warrant. If he now visits one of the 123 countries recognising the ICC’s jurisdiction, the local authorities will be able, possibly obliged, to arrest Putin and extradite him to the Hague to stand trial.

Predictably, the Russians are furious. Former president Medvedev screamed that the warrant has no other than lavatorial use. And Duma speaker Volodin matched Medvedev’s decibel level by shouting: “Yankees, hands off Putin!”

Considering that the US isn’t one of the 123 ICC countries, that entreaty was ignorant, but one should consider the source. The word ‘Yankees’ has been largely desemanticised in Russia – and to a smaller extent in the rest of the world too.

The world doesn’t acknowledge its original and enduring meaning of strictly Americans living north of the Mason-Dixon line. Those who apply the term to all Americans should go to a barbecue joint somewhere in Alabama, call their fellow diners ‘Yankees’ and see what happens.

The Russians expand the term even further, to designate all Americans, most Westerners and, generally, the forces of evil in the world. The word Yankees gained currency during my Moscow youth. In those days mobs were recruited, equipped with Vietcong (or Cuban) flags, taken to the US Embassy and told to shout “Yankees, go home!” at the top of their lungs.

More serious commentators dismiss the warrant as a purely symbolic gesture. Putin isn’t going to travel to Europe in any foreseeable future, is he? Well then, this symbol is meaningless.

Some of the same people argued that Putin was justified to pounce on the Ukraine because he was genuinely worried about Nato’s westward expansion. When asked if those experts genuinely thought Nato planned to attack Russia, they’d say: “Of course, not. But Putin was right to detest the symbolic value of that expansion.”

So do symbols matter or don’t they? You can’t have it both ways. My way is arguing that the fence provides a perfect seat in this one. Some symbols matter more, others less, but they should never be ignored.

The ICC warrant is far from meaningless even if it doesn’t lead to arrest and trial. For one thing, it’s now not just individuals, however numerous they may be, who consider Putin a war criminal, but a legally constituted international body.

Henceforth, any foreign leader dealing with Putin will be shaking hands not just with a nasty piece of work, but with a war criminal evading justice. That may put a new spin, for example, on the upcoming visit to Moscow of the newly crowned Chinese emperor Xi.

Xi is palpably trying to create an anti-Western coalition, starring China, the feudal warlord, and her vassals Russia and Iran. Both are under Western sanctions, but only Russia is led by an indicted war criminal on the run.

I’m sure Xi will be put off by this development, though probably not enough to cancel the visit. He’ll forge ahead to cement his status as a peace-making leader of the anti-Western forces, who nonetheless wants to do business with the West.

Xi strengthened his claim to that status the other day, when he brokered a peace treaty between Iran and Saudi Arabia or – looking at it from another angle – between the Sunni and Shia branches of Islam. There’s also another angle of vision, doubtless favoured by the Israelis. To them, the treaty means that the two major sponsors of anti-Israeli terrorism have joined forces under China’s aegis.

I’m sure the Israeli high command are seriously considering an immediate air strike to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities. That action has always been in the back of their mind, but it now must have moved up to the very front.

Xi will next try to broker some sort of ceasefire between Russia and the Ukraine. The Ukrainians correctly regard any treaty not predicated on a complete withdrawal of Russian troops from their territory as giving Putin a victory he failed to gain on the battlefield. It’s a total non-starter, in other words, as it has been all along.

But the ICC warrant makes it even more so. If Xi starts any meaningful negotiations with Putin, he’ll no longer be able to don the mask of a benign elder statesman. He’ll be seen, certainly in the West, as someone who is aiding and abetting a criminal.

If he does deal with Putin as if nothing has happened, Xi can demand further concessions from Russia, chiselling her vassalage in stone. Recently published Chinese maps list all Russian cities between Vladivostok and the North Sea (their name for Lake Baikal) under their original Chinese names.

That reflects the reality of Chinese businesses and settlers slowly colonising the Russian Far East. Yet that process may now pick up pace, with Putin’s dependence on Xi’s good graces having just grown no end.

The ICC warrant also weakens Putin’s position at home, what with the Russian ruling elite not exactly a solid bellicose monolith. The other day, Putin addressed the so-called oligarchs, explaining to them that Russia’s economic isolation was actually a good thing. They could now concentrate on home industries and markets, presumably selling oil to one another.

Most of his listeners have already lost billions in the past year, and their prospects of rebuilding are far from certain. They left the indoctrination session with strained expressions on their faces, matching, I’m sure, the mien of many generals and government officials.

Some of them don’t fancy a future without any contacts with the West, but with China increasingly relegating Russia to the status of a supplicant vassal, if not yet a colony.

The warrant may well make it easier for them to consolidate opposition to Putin within the Kremlin. I can just hear them whisper: “Putin has got us into this mess, and now he won’t be able to get us out. Who the hell will want to do business with a war criminal under an arrest warrant?”

So yes, it’s official, and yes, it does matter. So yes, it’s symbolic, and yes, symbols count. The ICC has got the snowball rolling downhill, and it’ll gather size as well as momentum.

The warrant only mentions the deportation and re-education of Ukrainian children, which is definitely a war crime, but just one of the many committed by Putin’s hordes. It’s distinctly possible that before long an international tribunal will be convened to indict Putin and his gang for mass murder, plunder, rapes, deliberate bombing of civilian targets and so on.

Wouldn’t it be nice to see Wanted posters with Putin’s mug on them pasted all over every European capital? I’d love the display, symbolic though it may be.    

This question has caused many an aesthetic philosopher to break out in a sweat. For all the lofty height of their academic attainment, they find it hard to come up with a better answer than anyone else.

And that anonymous individual will probably reply with the cliché “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, or its variant, “I can’t define it, but when I see it I know it.”

Now, since the world houses some eight billion beholders, each with a pair of eyes, either definition effectively means that beauty is anything anyone says it is. That makes beauty undefinable for all practical purposes because it lends itself to eight billion different definitions.

We are none of us nominalists who insist that abstract concepts have no reality whatsoever, other than the names attached to them. If that’s the case, then beauty doesn’t exist.

Yet we know it does, don’t we? We can see it, touch it, hear it, even smell it. The definition may be elusive, but the sensation certainly isn’t.

Enter Ralph Waldo Emerson, who came up with (or at least hinted at) the only definition that makes the concept intelligible. “Beauty,” he wrote, “is God’s handwriting”. The same idea can be expressed less epigrammatically, but the meaning will be the same: beauty is a creation of God and, as such, it’s objective and independent of any individual perception.

Therefore, what’s in the eye of the beholder isn’t beauty, but the ability to recognise it. That ability is otherwise known as taste, a rare commodity these days.

Emerson’s idea of God lay outside any known religion. His contemporary Dostoyevsky, a devout Christian, approached the same definition from another angle. “Beauty will save the world,” he wrote in The Idiot.

Now, Christians associate their hope for salvation with God only. That means that, to Dostoyevsky, beauty was an aspect of God, not just his creation. This he confirmed in many of his other works by treating the beautiful, the true and the good as an inseparable divine whole.

Tolstoy, the greater artist than Dostoyevsky, but, unlike him, a mediocre thinker at best, wrote that any association of beauty with goodness was a delusion. This only goes to show that adhering to any other than the Christian cognitive methodology can make even a brilliant Westerner sound inane.

Divorcing beauty from God also divorces it from intelligibility, turning any aesthetic philosophy into nonsensical speculation. That Tolstoy proved in his writings on the subject, such as his essay What Is Art? Art, according to him, is something equally accessible to everyone. If it isn’t, it isn’t real art.

Thereby he reduced art – and beauty – to the same common denominator to which he reduced everything else: the saintly Russian peasant. So never mind highbrow chaps like Mozart and Beethoven – according to Tolstoy, it’s only simple village songs that qualify as art.

That saves us the trouble of indulging in reductio ad absurdum. Tolstoy managed to reduce his theories to absurdity all on his own. (If you are interested in this subject, look up my book God and Man According to Tolstoy.)

For brevity’s sake, let’s reduce beauty to art only, its tiny part, and see how Emerson’s and Dostoyevsky’s definitions tally with our own observations.

Any suggestions along the lines of “you like Schubert, I like rap; both are beautiful, if different, art” run headlong into the same problem I mentioned earlier: if art is anything anyone says it is, it doesn’t exist. And since we know it does exist, we dismiss such egalitarian statements as intellectually feeble.

However, if we accept that beauty is an aspect of God, then the definitions click into place. Art’s job is to uncover and discover metaphysical beauty the same way that natural science uncovers and discovers the physical plant of life. The better art is at that job, the better art it is.

God can never be knowable completely (Si comprendis, non est Deus, as Augustine put it). But that’s not to say that God is completely unknowable. Variously close approximations are possible, and logic suggests that the closer art comes to God, the better it uncovers the essence of beauty.

The examples of Emerson, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy show that different people and different civilisations have their own notions of God. Yet our Western civilisation was brought to life by one: Christianity. (This isn’t to say there were no other inputs. But they were absorbed into Christianity and baptised by it the way, according to Chesterton, Aquinas baptised Aristotle.)

That’s why, unbeknown to themselves, even rank Western atheists often think about serious matters along Christian lines. Now I’m in the quoting mood, that’s what the poet Mandelstam meant when he said, “Today, every cultured man is a Christian.”

If imitating Christ is the ideal towards which a Christian life strives, then art, even if it’s not overtly religious, has to gravitate towards that ideal. In other words, it has to be true, beautiful and good in both content and form.

Nor can we separate the two: the Incarnation showed that God and man can co-exist in the same breast. Hence the greatness of art is contingent on its ability to approach a perfect symbiosis of content and form. The closer it gets, the more powerful and elevating is its effect on man.

That explains why music expresses the essence of our civilisation more comprehensively than any other art. In music, the link between form and content is absolute and direct, unmediated by words, as in literature, or by images, as in painting and sculpture.

That’s why only in Christendom did music rise to its dizzying height, both formal and spiritual. Thus, comparing the busts of Greek philosophers or Roman emperors with, say, the portraits of French nobility sculpted by Houdon in the 18^th century, one can’t say that sculpture progressed no end in the interim period.

Yet a comparison between what little has survived of Graeco-Roman music and the works composed by, say, Bach in the same 18^th century will show more than just progress. It will show a gigantic upward shift in both culture and civilisation.

Sculpture is limited by the human form, which can change its size but not shape. Music, on the other hand, has no such limitations – it can climb one plateau after another on its way to infinity, elucidating our understanding of beauty every step of the way.

While elevating itself, real music also elevates man by showing how he can soar to greater and greater heights of subtle spirituality and noble feeling. That’s where pop fails: it appeals to the human spirit at its crudest, coarsest and most primitive. If real music pulls man up, pop pushes him down.

Logically then, the closer other genres come to music, the closer they approach absolute beauty. That explains why poetry, the closest relation of music among art genres, is a higher and more enduring literary genre than the novel.

The novel was only born in the 18^th century and, if you believe many experts (which you don’t have to do), it was already dead by the late 20^th. Even at its best (Tolstoy comes to mind again), the novel can’t clarify the essence of beauty as well as, say, a Shakespeare sonnet can.

A quick article is a wrong format for delving deep into such complex subjects as the essence of beauty. Scratching the surface is the best one can hope to do. My purpose was more modest: to show that only Christological cognitive methodology can make our civilisation intelligible.

If you take exception to this observation, try to define beauty in any other way. See how far you get.

How time flies. A mere 10 years ago, Xi and Vlad were happy newlyweds.

Xi had just been elected to his first term, and marrying Vlad was his first priority. Hence Russia became the first country Xi visited – he had to check out his bride. Vlad met his expectations, and conjugal bliss ensued.

By way of trousseau, Vlad (in his female role) offered the alpha male Xi some Russian gas at throw-away prices. And Xi offered Vlad undying love for better and for worse, in sickness and in health… well, you know the drill.

Actually, such nuptials are usually called ‘strategic partnership’ in geopolitical, but a rose by any other name, and all that. Nor was there any doubt as to who played the man’s role and who the woman’s in that new marriage – or, again in geopolitical, who was the senior partner and who the junior one in that partnership.

Xi brought into the marriage a GDP 10 times the size of Vlad’s and, though in matters martial it’s not always the size that counts (as the Ukraine is showing), there too Xi’s was definitely bigger than Vlad’s. Both same-sex spouses were in no doubt about that.

But then, the very next year, in 2014, Xi’s ‘in sickness and in health’ vow got severely tested. Vlad did the dirty to the Ukraine by grabbing her jutting attraction, the Crimea. That gave Xi food for thought, for he was playing big-time economic footsies with the West, while at the same time lusting after Taiwan.

The West began to impose sanctions on Russia, at first only hinting, without saying it outright, at what it would do to China if Xi did you-know-what to Taiwan. Eight years later Vlad really went for broke. He tried to rape the Ukraine so she stayed raped, and the West’s language became more straightforward and eloquent.

It started to support the Ukraine with just enough weapons for her to repel the rapist, without yet being able to bring him to justice. That sent a message to Xi: you do to Taiwan what Vlad is doing to the Ukraine, and you know what will happen. Watch your step, Xi.

So watch his step Xi did. While still trying to keep his marital vow by buying Russia’s raw materials and sending Vlad armaments, if on the sly and through third parties, he still keeps an eye out on the West. One wrong move towards Taiwan, he fears, and the West may well dump on him the way it’s dumping on Vlad – or worse.

But anniversaries are important milestones that must be commemorated. Hence, Xi is going to Russia again, having won his third term and effectively becoming president for life. He’ll also talk to President Zelensky on Skype or some other video link. The message is entirely predictable: Yes, I know Vlad tried to rape you. But now is the time to kiss and make up. Or just make up, and never mind kissing.

If that message isn’t hard to predict, no one knows what Xi will be telling Vlad. There are three possibilities: 1) We’ll supply arms, 2) We won’t supply arms and 3) We’ll supply them, but on the quiet. You spill the beans, and it’s divorce time.

Considering that China’s economy is in dire straits at the moment, it’s possible Xi wants to reiterate his marital vows with Vlad before trying to rape Taiwan. Military aggression is a time-honoured way for tyrants to stay in power in spite of economic difficulties.

If that’s the case, Xi won’t care about the West’s sensibilities. He may well throw his military largesse at Vlad, making sure there’s enough left for his own playing away from home should the Americans decide to take their treaty with Taiwan seriously.

One way or another, the situation is worth watching. The happy couple may yet succeed in blowing up the world.

Speaking of which,  I must have put the jinx in. No sooner had I sung DeSantis’s praises the other day than he said some awful things about the Ukraine.

Awful they may be, but they are certainly not new: the two sides must settle their differences and sue for peace in what DeSantis ignorantly called a “territorial dispute”. After all, both sides are exhausted. And to make sure the Ukraine’s fatigue is really bad, America should stop giving her “a blank cheque”. That’s a coy way of saying ‘no cheque at all’.

My advice would be for Ron to read the history of the 1930s, at least. He’d learn that dictators bent on expansion never stop at the first piece of estate ceded to them. They regard any such concession as a sign of weakness and press on. Since most of Russia’s other European neighbours are Nato members… well, you know what will happen. Americans will start paying with red blood, not just green banknotes.

DeSantis insists he isn’t a Wilsonian, which is another way of saying he is an America First isolationist. That role had already been written out of the script even by the 1930s – and there’s no conceivable way of putting it back in.

If America renounces her role as the leader of the free world, before long the dollar will lose its position as the world’s reserve currency, possibly to be replaced wholly or partly by Xi’s yuan. Then all those trillions of the national debt will come crashing down on the US economy, burying it under.

Really, DeSantis should get a foreign policy adviser who understands such things. And no, I’m not volunteering.

Got you going, didn’t I? If so, let me reassure you that I haven’t yet begun to feel like a woman trapped in a man’s body.

In fact, if that were the case, I wouldn’t use the word ‘gender’ at all, choosing ‘sex’ instead. For, unless I’m quoting someone else, I only ever apply the word ‘gender’ to a grammatical category.

That’s exactly where I have problems. For my first language, chronologically at least, was Russian, in which, as in German, even inanimate objects have three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter. My third language, French, got rid of neuter, but perversely kept the other two.

In French, inanimate objects are either masculine or feminine, which gives me nightmares. You see, Russian gets in the way. For the same objects are often different genders in the two languages, confusing me no end. I would be even more desperate if French kept the three genders of its source language, Latin. But even two are bad enough.

Thus table and chair are men in Russian but women in French. Yet fork and spoon are feminine in both languages.

Russian being a morphological language, gender is conveyed by unmistakable inflections. But most, though not all, French nouns don’t help me out that way. So how am I to know? Especially since sandwiched between those two tongues, is my English, second chronologically, first in every other respect.

English doesn’t treat objects as if they were human. All of them, with the exception of ships, are usually sexless and genderless.

Humans are, or at least used to be, known as either men or women, which is why English has kept the personal pronouns needed to differentiate between the two. Yet even human babies are sometimes linguistically neutered, as in “Will it ever shut up?” which I said the other day when someone’s baby was screaming on the bus.

As a linguist by training if not by profession, I’m fascinated by that. Why do Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages stubbornly cling to their genders, while English tosses them away contemptuously? Has it always been like that?

It hasn’t. In fact, Old English, the language of Beowulf, had the same three German genders, which, considering it was a Germanic language, is hardly surprising. Like German (and Russian), Old English added gender suffixes to all nouns, with, for example, the sun taking on the feminine article and suffix to become seo sunne.

Yet, as Old English became Middle English in the late Middle Ages, our nouns began to shed their genders. Why?

Linguists will tell you that the fault lies with those marauding Vikings who turned their own nouns into hermaphrodites by fusing masculine and feminine together, and then used their swords to educate the proto-English. Fair enough: gender loss did start in the northern areas of England that in those days were occupied (or at least often raided) by Scandinavians.

From there, the tendency spread down to the Midlands and then to the South, with Kent the last one to surrender, in the mid-14^th century. The Great Vowel Shift that started in the late 15^th century signalled the arrival of Modern English and the demise of gender.

That’s what the linguists will tell you, but not the philosophers. The latter will point out that England wasn’t the only place invaded by the Vikings. France and Italy suffered the same fate, and yet they wouldn’t let their genders fall into oblivion. How come they were so recalcitrant and the English weren’t?

That’s where philosophy steps in, asking awkward questions dealing with the relationship between national language and thought. Which came first, the chicken of the former or the egg of the latter? Either way, the two are so intimately and intricately connected that we may understand much about one by studying the other.

Endowing inanimate objects with gender is a case of anthropomorphism, assigning human characteristics to things. Another case of anthropomorphism is the Sistine Chapel, with its depiction of God the Father as a bearded man, but that’s a separate subject.

Anthropomorphism was the dominant feature of medieval thought, of which we are reminded mostly by fairy tales. Even in the youthful Modern period, not too far removed from the Middle Ages, Shakespeare makes a forest move in Macbeth, creating a production headache for West End theatres.

The so-called medieval realism in art and thought was, in fact, medieval anthropomorphism, largely a survival of pre-Christian paganism. Even inanimate objects were talked about in the Thomistic (and Aristotelian) categories of essence and being, which was reflected in grammatical categories, such as gender.

Now, could it be that anthropomorphism proved enduring on the Continent but moribund in England? This is no more than a wild hypothesis, but something worth pondering.

If there is a kernel of truth to it, then the English parted ways with medieval thought more decisively than, say, the French. And even the massive post-1066 influx of French into the Anglo-Saxon dialects proved powerless to stop that trend.

It fact, it was then that the English declared war on the gender category, which resulted in almost total victory three centuries later. Moving on from hypothesis to guess, could it be that the pragmatic and empirical English mind refused to accept the reality of fairy tales with their anthropomorphism?

One can just see a young Saxon asking his grandfather: “What do you mean, calling the table ‘she’, Grandpa? It’s not a woman, you know.”

That other aspect of anthropomorphism, one I touched upon in my throw-away reference to the Sistine Chapel, was a sensitive issue in the past, with much blood spilled on either side of the argument. Also much ink, for a vast library could be compiled of books written on the subject.

However, grammatical anthropomorphism is a terra incognita, at least for me. I can’t seem to find any books on it, which makes me rely on my own resources. Meagre though they may be.

The recent clash between President Biden and Governor DeSantis has highlighted the key conflict of our time and I’ll give you a clue: it has little to do with economics.

Back in the 1990s, whenever Bill Clinton’s campaign staff went off on a tangent, his strategist James Carville told them to stay on course. “It’s the economy, stupid,” he’d repeat.

That mantra has since lost some of its pulling power, although the economy remains a hot topic in any electoral debates. But the real demarcation line is drawn elsewhere.

If mainstream parties and politicians differ from one another on the economy, it’s only quantitatively, not qualitatively. Should the taxes be exorbitant or extortionate? Should the state print and borrow money promiscuously or suicidally? Should government regulations shackle the economy or strangulate it?

Voters look at such debates and shrug with indifference and ennui: six of one, half a dozen of the other. They do sense there’s a war going on, but the economy isn’t its pivotal battlefield.

What little is left of Western mentality, morality, legality and even aesthetics is fighting a desperate rearguard action against the onslaught of hostile forces hellbent on annihilating traditional culture, in the broadest possible sense. And those forces inscribe on their banners slogans dealing not with economics, but with race and, increasingly, sex.

They have declared war on the core certitudes of mankind in general and the West in particular. Those certitudes used to be based on religion, but they survived for a long time even as the West was steering away from theism. Common sense, custom and taste took up the slack for a while.

No longer. All those good things are reeling under the blows of modernity, and they are ceding their positions one by one. But there’s still fight in the old tradition left, a point made by Florida governor Ron DeSantis.

I don’t follow US politics as closely as I should but, looking from across the ocean, DeSantis increasingly looks the leader I wish we had. I like everything he does, and I never thought I’d be able to utter such praise of a politician.

That leader of the cultural rearguard in America has recently fired a mighty salvo. DeSantis signed a law prohibiting transgender treatment for children and classroom discussions of such issues. The discussions are banned for children of eight or younger, while treatment with puberty blockers, hormones and surgery is banned for new patients aged under 18.

The shells of decency hit home, and the aggressor came back with a return barrage directed by Joe Biden. Joe has never seen a destructive (aka progressive) idea he couldn’t love, and he wheeled out the big guns.

What DeSantis is doing makes Joe feel just awful. He communicated his disgust with his customary fluency: “It’s as my mother would say close to sinful. I mean, it’s just terrible what they’re doing. It’s not like, you know, a kid wakes up one morning and says, you know, I decided I want to become a man or I want to become a woman or I want to change,” Biden said.

“I mean, what are they thinking about here? We’re human beings. They love, they have feelings. They have inclinations . . . It just to me is, I don’t know, it’s cruel.”

When it suits him, Biden likes to describe himself as a devout Catholic. One has to assume his sainted mother indeed was one, which is why her understanding of sin couldn’t possibly have been the same as her son’s. Had little Joey told her he saw nothing wrong with trans- or homosexuality, she probably would have sent him to bed without supper.

Yet for Biden and his ilk the only sin left is the insistence that any sin other than opposing wokery exists.

One senses that the next US presidential election will greatly affect the fortunes of the on-going battle for our civilisation. If DeSantis becomes the Republican nominee, as many observers think likely, and Biden fronts the Democrats, it’ll be so much more than just a clash of two candidates or two parties.

One urge of modernity is to turn grown-ups into children and children into grown-ups. To that end, adults are deprived of their intelligence and children of their innocence. I mean it’s like, you know, just terrible what the little ones are exposed to – my mother, though, unlike the late Mrs Biden, an atheist, would say it’s close to mad.

If the so-called leader of the free world thinks it’s cruel not to enlighten eight-year-olds about the joys of trans- and homosexuality, then this world is no longer free, nor indeed sane. And anyone who thinks that such teaching can ever be anything other than propaganda is sorely mistaken.

At that age, children should be taught stories about bunny rabbits going hop-hop up the hill, not about the rich panoply of sexual variants. If they do have perverse inclinations, let them sort it out for themselves when they grow up. Any elucidation of such issues is bound to sound like encouragement.

In most cases, the angle of trans inclinations isn’t sufficiently acute for people to fall that way. Hardcore transexuals and homosexuals will find their level one way or another, with or without formal education to that effect. But more people find themselves sitting on the fence, and depending on circumstances they can come down on either side.

There used to be a stigma attached to perverse sexuality, which helped such borderline cases stay on the right side. Now they are taught that neither side is wrong. Both are equally right, and the choice is up to every individual. It takes wilful ignorance of human nature to think that teaching such diabolical nonsense to little tots won’t have an effect.

Transsexuality in particular was a non-issue when I was young. In my whole, lamentably long, life I’ve only met three or four transsexuals, and seen just a few more. That tallies with statistics: in the past transsexuals numbered in the hundreds; today, in the tens of thousands. Britain, for example, boasts 260,000 of them.

What has caused such an inordinate growth? Something in the air? Carbon monoxide? Meat in the diet? Clearly, destigmatising perversion contributes to its numerical spread.

Yet numbers don’t paint the full picture. For in cultural wars, the face value of the banner slogans doesn’t matter all that much. Connotation dominates denotation. Subtext trumps text.

What’s going on is a concerted effort to destroy a civilisation, which isn’t accompanied by any clear idea of any workable replacement. Hence the specific targets in that assault are irrelevant, which is why they can be thrown together at will.

Biden showed how in the same interview. First, he vowed “to protect LGBTQ Americans, especially trans kids who are dealing with all these regressive state laws”.

From there, he effortlessly switched to touting another newly hatched orthodoxy: “People can’t deny it anymore. If we don’t keep the temperature from going above 1.5 degrees Celsius raised, then we’re in real trouble. That whole generation is damned.”   

Eudaemonic bliss will only descend on the world if we busily castrate children in operating theatres lit with electricity generated by windmills. That’s how Biden sees life, but it’s not how DeSantis sees it. I and what’s left of the free world will pray for his victory. It may well be our last hope.

“I feel privileged to help spread awareness of lived queer experiences, partner with charitable organisations, and above all create a sense of community for our LGBTQ+ employees and allies.”

Now, what do you think is going to happen to a bank one of whose top executives has this list of priorities? Correct. Exactly what happened on Friday to Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). It collapsed, burying thousands of investors and borrowers under the rubble.

The reported losses of $1.8 billion make SVB the largest bank to collapse since the 2008 crisis, and one has to congratulate SVB for winning the gold medal. Those directly affected probably don’t feel congratulatory. They must be asking questions, some beginning with the adverb ‘why’.

The statement above, in which I highlighted the key words, may begin to answer such inquiries. It was uttered by Jay Ersapah, the Chief Risk Officer for the bank in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Miss Ersapah uses corporate videos to boast of being a “queer person of colour from a working-class background”.

That pride was transformed into her dedicating her unbridled energy to serving “underrepresented entrepreneurs” and organising a month-long campaign actually called Pride, along with another one called ‘Lesbian Visibility Day and Trans Awareness week.’ She also indoctrinated staff in the spirit of her passion, using ‘safe-space’ catch-ups.

The board of the parent American bank, one of the biggest lenders to the high-tech industry, evidently felt that such commitments in no way encroached on Miss Ersapah’s day job, that of managing operational risks on three continents.

The board’s own approach to that function was rather lackadaisical anyway. Suffice it to say that for eight months in 2022 the bank didn’t have a Head of Risk at all, on the evident assumption that financial services were risk-free, able to tick along nicely come what may.

The CVs of most of the board members hint at the possibility that their own priorities aren’t drastically different from Miss Ersapah’s. Writing in fluent woke, SVB directors specify the pronouns that best reflect their self-identification, which is a dead give-away. Some disgruntled investors say it’s mostly such credentials that helped those executives climb the corporate ladder.

The bank certainly based its hiring policy on woke qualifications above all, as Miss Ersapah’s career suggests. Combined with SVB’s relaxed approach to risk management, the end was likely, although there must have been other contributing factors as well.

Many commentators, including on occasion me, have commented on the moral, social and intellectual costs of wokery, which are nothing short of prohibitive. But it appears that the costs can also be denominated in hard currency.

At the cost of sounding parochial, some of those costs were going to be borne by the British tax-payer. For the Chancellor was planning a bailout, which in this case wouldn’t have come cheap.

More than 3,000 British tech firms have about £7 billion in deposits with the bank’s UK subsidiary. Now Britain’s budding high-tech industry is screaming bloody murder: many companies can meet neither the payroll nor their own obligations to creditors.

By bailing out bankrupt firms, the state violates every fundamental tenet of classical economics. Money should be shuffled around the economic table not by the state, but by what Adam Smith called the invisible hand of market forces. Yet such economics is now seen as a quaint anachronism. The invisible hand is largely atrophied, and it needs regular boosting with steroidal injections of state capital.

We may not like it, and conservative economists may throw their hands up in horror, but such are the facts of life. It, life, has neither a reset button nor a rewind one, and we must accept state interference in the economy the way we accept earthquakes and hurricanes.

In this case, British tax-payers dodged the bullet. At the last moment, HSBC stepped in, bought SVB for £1 and assumed its debts. But the Chancellor was otherwise prepared for a multi-billion bailout, apparently seeing nothing wrong with such generosity. It’s the way of the world, isn’t it?

The state is both referee and player in the economic game, and all games have both winners and losers. If the state wants our money to make sure no one loses too badly, there’s precious little we can do about that.

However, we must be able to analyse why such seemingly successful concerns as SVB go under. And if their wokery is a contributing factor, then we do have some recourse. We can all fight that unsavoury alphabet soup of perversions being shoved down our throats. (Incidentally, when did ‘queer’, as in Q, stop being a pejorative term? It’s now seen as a badge of honour.)

The fight can start with small mano a mano skirmishes, with us standing fast in defence of morality and proper language. We can insist that there exist only three singular third-person possessive pronouns: his, her and its. We can refuse to address individuals in the plural. And, more to the point, we can withhold investment from companies emblazoning wokery in their corporate charters.

We can boycott companies whose hiring policy puts wokery before competence. And we can unite into large lobbying groups, on the assumption that a fist can deliver a harder blow than outstretched fingers.

Or we can do nothing and just sit back, watching wokery destroy what’s left of our civilisation – including its wealth – step by perverse step. Our choice.

Forget Russia’s aggression. Never mind the scandalous state of the economy. Don’t worry about the NHS dropping below Third World standards. Don’t give a second thought to our education churning out cultural savages.

None of this matters, comparatively speaking. Or at least that’s the impression one gets.

For four days now, every newspaper has been devoting most of its front-page inches to Gary Lineker, BBC footie presenter who refuses to see a difference between Tories and Nazis. That lack of discernment got him suspended from Match of the Day, took the BBC to a point of meltdown and kicked off impassioned debates.

What turned an incident into a calamity was a solidarity walkout of all BBC sports hacks, starting with Lineker’s permanent sidekicks, Ian Wright and Alan Shearer. As a result, some sports programmes were reduced to a travesty and others cancelled altogether.

When I wrote about this debacle four days ago, I never thought the resulting din would muffle all other news. Yet I did write about it, and I shan’t repeat my arguments.

But what other people are saying is worth a look because they cover the whole spectrum of opinion, with some totally inane, some moving away from the ridiculous, but without ever reaching the sublime.

Ably representing the inane end was sports journalist Martin Samuels, who recently moved leftwards from The Mail to The Times: “Lineker is still being derided for comparing government rhetoric around immigration to that of the Nazis; except he didn’t mention the Nazis. He specifically referred to 1930s Germany.”

Yes, but I don’t think he meant the Weimar Republic that was replaced in 1933 by you know whom. If Samuels thinks he scored there, he should realise the goal was his own.

Other dim commentators insist that Lineker shouldn’t have been punished because he was right: any attempt to stem the influx of illegal migrants is tantamount to Nazism. Thus spoke Lineker’s acolyte, another ex-footballer Ian Wright:

“They need Gary Lineker to distract everybody because for me it is a human issue, it’s not political. They’ve got no empathy, the vulnerable ones are the ones that suffer, they’re the ones that suffer… On his own platform he should be able to say what he wants to say.”

All issues are political these days, or, as Thomas Mann once put it, “All intellectual attitudes are latently political.” Wright proves that by launching his own assault on ‘them’, which is to say Tories.

The other day I said all I could about the pathetic face value of Lineker’s comment. But Wright’s last sentence makes a free speech argument, which is worth a few words – especially since it has also been wielded by many debaters brighter than him.

Out of curiosity, how would Wright feel if Lineker used “his own platform” to say that any black man having sex with a white woman should be lynched? Couching that in a language that wouldn’t expose him to criminal prosecution for hate speech? Let’s say he’d write something like: “Makes one think of 1930s Alabama, doesn’t it?”

That would test Wright’s commitment to free speech, and I doubt it would pass muster. Like most left-wingers, he believes free speech really means free left-wing speech. They ignore elementary logic that says freedom means nothing if it doesn’t also protect statements we dislike.

That fundamental freedom also protects obvious lies, which latitude was avidly grasped by numerous commentators who have accused the BBC of… – I know you won’t believe this, but I swear it’s true – … a pro-Tory bias.

That’s like accusing today’s Russian TV of Americanism or, come to that, Der Stürmer of Judeophilia. The BBC is so pro-Tory that in the last general election, when the country voted Conservative in a landslide, over 90 per cent of Beeb staffers voted Labour. The Tory voters there were mostly the technical personnel: cameramen, grips, drivers, electricians.

BBC recruitment ads appear only in the Appointments section of The Guardian, our leftmost broadsheet. Sometimes BBC programmes do invite token conservatives to create the impression of balance. But, as I can testify from personal experience, such troglodytes are easily outshouted.

Accusations of Tory bias are based exclusively on the personalities of Richard Sharp, BBC Chairman, and Timothy Davie, its Director General, both Tory appointments who are indeed Tories, if dripping wet.

It’s quite possible they censured Lineker because, unlike Messrs Wright et al., they found his comment abhorrent. But that’s not what they gave as the real reason. Lineker’s diatribe, they said, violated the Beeb’s commitment to impartiality, for which the Corporation is widely known, if only within the narrow circle of those who love its unwavering wokery.

Writing for The Telegraph, Charles Moore typically tried to be even-handed and civilised. His main argument was that Lineker was censured not for the content of his statement, but for stepping outside the BBC guidelines.

I don’t think Lord Moore has seen Mr Lineker’s employment contract, and neither have I. So we have to go by the BBC Charter that does state it must “provide impartial news and information to help people understand and engage with the world around them”.

Since the BBC is about as impartial as the erstwhile chap spouting harangues from a soapbox in Hyde Park, it violates its Charter at will. That apart, Lineker and his defenders insist, correctly, that he spoke not as a BBC employee but as a private individual.

I couldn’t find anything in the Charter that says BBC employees (staffers or freelancers like Lineker) have to keep their views to themselves even in private. It’s possible Lineker’s contract stipulates something along those lines, in which case Lord Moore is right: he was suspended not for his views but for disobedience.

Anyway, the scandal has reached such a fervour pitch that one or both of Messrs Sharp and Davie will probably be sacked. They have the same premonition, which is why Mr Davie has already indicated he’ll be happy to take Lineker back.

But no satisfactory solution to the situation is possible. For, as defence barristers are fond of saying, “It’s society’s fault, M’lord”. As long as society is willing – nay, agog – to listen to any ignorant gibberish, as long as it comes from a celebrity, such problems will recur.

Alas, history has no rewind button which alone could resolve the issue. We could push it and backtrack to the happier times when footballers talked publicly only about football, astrophysicists about astrophysics, and neither trespassed on one another’s fields.

Conversely, today’s voracious demand for celebrity opinion will always produce steady – and increasing – supply, boosted by social media. That’s why I suggested four days ago that Lineker shouldn’t be sacked. Not because such punishment would be unjust, but because it would be pointless.

Now I think the BBC should take him back, but insist that he sign an ironclad contract covering every aspect of his behaviour in and out of the studio. Resistance is futile, as they say in bad films.

“They plunder, they steal and they slaughter: this they falsely name Empire, and where they make a wasteland, they call it peace,” wrote Tacitus.

Replace “…they call” with “Trump calls”, leave everything else intact, and this quotation reads like today’s reportage.

[Note to Trump, should he accidentally read this: Tacitus was a Roman historian, sort of a cross between a wop and a kraut.]

This little bowdlerisation of the classic has been prompted by Trump’s radio interview the other day. There, for the first time, Putin’s long-time admirer outlined his peace plan for the Ukraine.

[Note to Donald: Ukrainians live in the Ukraine, not in the UK.]

Trump has said a thousand times if he said it once that, had he been president a year ago, the war wouldn’t have even started. And even if it had started, he would have ended it within 24 hours.

Donald has been trying to score points off Biden so hard that once he even held “Sleepy Joe” solely responsible for the war. Dastardly Biden twisted Putin’s arm. “Frankly,” said Trump, “I don’t think Putin wanted to do it. I think he was sort of forced in by the statements being made by Biden.”

Vlad was sort of forced, and Donald could sort of unforce him – such is the recurrent theme. And though Trump’s fans never doubt his omnipotence, some still ask tactless questions about the specifics of his peace plan. Finally, their idol’s natural loquacity burst out.

First Trump reiterated, in his typically elegant style, his subjunctive mantra about what would have happened had he and not “Sleepy Joe” been president last year.

Putin, explained Trump, would have “understood” what’s what. To wit: Vlad “took over nothing” while Donald lived in Pennsylvania Avenue. However, since he tragically no longer lives there, Vlad is going for “the whole enchilada”.

That understanding would have come osmotically: “That’s without even negotiating a deal. I could have negotiated. At worst, I could’ve made a deal to take over something, there are certain areas that are Russian-speaking areas, frankly, but you could’ve worked a deal.”

I might have said this before, but it doesn’t hurt repeating that I detest Trump’s favourite word, ‘deal’, in a geopolitical context. Shaking hands with a chap whose name ends in a vowel on building a Mafia-run casino is a deal. Negotiating a momentous geopolitical development produces a treaty, an agreement or a compact.

But forget semantics, never Donald’s strong point. Let’s see what he is actually saying.

He would have blackmailed the Ukraine into ceding to the invader the whole eastern part of the country, mostly inhabited by Russian speakers. The linguistic argument comes straight out of Putin’s copybook: any place where Russian is spoken rightfully belongs to Russia.

By the same logic, Germany could now claim all of Austria where they blabber away in German like there’s no tomorrow. But hold on a second – Germany did do that, citing exactly the same reason, back in 1938. And the German-speaking Sudetenland also had to belong to Germany, along with the rest of Czechoslovakia for good measure.

[Note to Donald: I’m referring to what happened immediately before and after the Munich deal involving the krauts, the limeys and the frogs. The next year the krauts grabbed the whole enchilada.]

That historical reference clarifies the meaning of the deal Trump has in mind. He would deliver half of the Ukraine, and therefore a resounding victory, to Putin. That would make a mockery of the devastation wreaked on the Ukrainian people by the Russian invaders, the plunder, the slaughter – just reread the Tacitus quote above for the general idea.

Moreover, just like his typological predecessor from whom Putin borrowed the linguistic argument, the Russian Hitler would treat any such deal as only a breather. He would rebuild his army, replenish his arsenal and, a few months later, pounce again.

That time it wouldn’t be just the Ukraine on the receiving end. Like Hitler before him, Putin doesn’t even bother to conceal his far-reaching aggressive designs. He wants to rebuild the Russian or, to be more precise, Soviet empire that, it’s useful to remember, included several current Nato members.

That would put the whole world at risk, not just the low-rent part of Europe. Now, Ukrainians understand all this, which is why they’d never accept any such deal unless forced to do so. And the only way Trump could bend them to his (and Putin’s) will would be to threaten cutting off all American and Nato supplies.

The words ‘Manchurian candidate’ come to mind. Though the term may not be quite accurate, there’s no doubt that, if Trump were president now, Putin would have a de facto ally in the White House – with globally catastrophic ramifications.

Fox News, which can never be accused of anti-Trumpism, reran the radio interview in question. But Trump’s pro-Putin plans were too much even for the Tucker Carlson crowd. Hence they cut off the interview after “I could have negotiated.” Even Fox realised the rest of it was a continuation of Putin’s policy by other means.

Trump enthusiasts among my American friends insist that his domestic policies were, and would be, much better than Biden’s. That’s undeniably true. Yet talking about domestic policies at a time when a global catastrophe looms large is neither moral nor clever.

In the same vein, people praised Hitler for the German economy picking up, Mussolini for trains running on time, and Stalin for industrialising the Soviet Union. That reminds me of the old American joke: “Yes, but apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”

[Note to Trump: President Lincoln was shot dead when watching a play in the theatre.]