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“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.]

Reading Macron’s speech, I couldn’t understand what the fuss is all about. Why state the bleeding obvious? Why promise to make abortions irreversible?

Abortions are already irreversible, aren’t they? Once you’ve cut a foetus out of the womb, you can hardly put it back, can you? And in general…

At this point my bilingual wife looked over my shoulder and reminded me of another blindingly obvious fact: my French needs work (she used a ruder, ego-crashing expression from which neither my French nor my brittle psyche will ever recover).

Turns out Manny doesn’t want to make abortions irreversible. It was back at that Amiens school that Brigitte, his foster mother cum school mistress cum mistress tout court, taught him they always are. What Manny is after is making the right to abortion irreversible.

To that end he is trying to amend the constitution to include that sacred, sorry, laic, right. And it isn’t as if Manny is being a maverick on this one. He enjoys overwhelming support in both chambers of parliament, the National Assembly and the Senate. They just put a slightly different spin on it.

The wording approved by the National Assembly says that the law should “guarantee the effectiveness of and equal access to the right to voluntary termination of pregnancy”. The Senate coyly modified that to say “the law determines the conditions in which the freedom of women to put an end to their pregnancies is exercised”.

A distinction without a difference, I say. One way or the other, France will become the first country in history to include abortion into the main text of a constitutional document.

Manny delivered a rousing oration evoking an image of Demosthenes and Cicero rolled into one. “Think about it, citoyens and citoyennes,” he said. “Had this constitution existed 46 years ago, when Madame Macron got pregnant, you could be spared my toxic presence.”

Just kidding. What Manny did say was that it’s vitally necessary “to change our constitution in order to engrave the freedom of women to have recourse to the voluntary termination of pregnancy to ensure solemnly that nothing will be able to hinder or to undo what will thus become irreversible.”

The lad does have the gift of the gab, doesn’t he? Compliments to his speechwriters. He also has a knack for political diversion.

For France is in the midst of riots yet again, this time over Manny’s decision to extend the pension age. Giving the citoyens and citoyennes a chance to play with the constitution, Manny hopes, will divert their attention from burning Paris to cinders.

He is in for a let-down on that one. Riots are a ubiquitous presence in French life, side by side with baguettes, chitterling sausages and frog’s legs. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if next “engraved” in the constitution will be “the freedom to have recourse to riots, to ensure solemnly that nothing will be able to hinder or to undo what will thus become irreversible.”

Political shenanigans apart, it’s hard to see the point of this constitutional editing job. Abortions have been legal in France since 1975, without the sanctity of any solemn constitutional endorsement.

Mandatory secularisation, laïcité, goes back even further, to 1905. Originally, it was sold to the public as freedom of religion, though the framers knew that it really meant freedom from religion, which in France more or less meant Catholicism.

That policy has been more successful in promoting atheism than anything Britain has ever done. Going by personal experience, I’ve been known to decline tennis dates on Easter Sunday in both countries, but only in France did such retrograde obtuseness cause much mirth. “Bonnes cloches!” laughed my French partners (“Enjoy your chimes”).

Hence Manny’s pet project seems redundant. Yet in fact, it isn’t. For Manny and his fellow fanatics of wokery the world over were scared witless by the US Supreme Court ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Manny fears that a future conservative government may do what the US Supreme Court did and decentralise abortion laws, leaving them to the discretion of local bodies and provinces. By enshrining abortion in the constitution, he hopes to pre-empt any such outrage, unlikely as it may be.

Perhaps I should say ‘impossible’ rather than ‘unlikely’. For conservatism in our sense of the word doesn’t exist in France. Some individual conservative throwbacks do survive, but they don’t add up to a political force, nor even to a political influence. The mainstream political spectrum in France runs from mild socialism to Trotskyism, leaving conservatism beyond the right margin, and nothing really beyond the left one.

But hey, better safe than sorry. Manny obviously wants to hedge his woke bets.

However, he has been so persuasive that I’m ready to make an exception to my abhorrence of abortion. Perhaps I’d be able to support the post-natal variety, up to the age of, say, 46. Provided that procedure would be performed just once.

Gary Lineker, ex-footballer and now the highest-paid BBC employee, came out in defence of illegal refugees braving the rowdy Channel to land on these shores.

Any sensible person would look at the term ‘illegal refugee’ and realise that the magic word there isn’t the noun but the adjective. Anyone doing anything illegal by definition breaks the law which any government, also by definition, is constituted to uphold.

In that spirit, Home Secretary Suella Braverman announced a new policy to stem the flow of illegals landing in Britain. Effectively the policy amounts to a long overdue ban: anyone entering the country illegally will be expelled, blocked from returning in future and disqualified from ever claiming UK citizenship.

I’ve called this measure ‘overdue’ on a purely arithmetical basis. In the past four years the number of such illegal mariners has risen by two orders of magnitude – from around 300 in 2018 to more than 45,000 in 2022.

If the same tendency continues at the same rate, in a few years the homegrown population of London will decrease from its present, already puny, 40 per cent to nothing. London tots will be asking “Mummy, what’s an Englishman?” the way they are already asking “What’s a shilling?”

Yet Gary effortlessly glides over demographic and legal debacles visited on Britain. He doesn’t care about such trivia. What he cares about is sputtering spittle at the Tories.

Hence he effectively accused Mrs Braverman of being a crypto-Nazi. If she were whiter, he’d doubtless charge her with racism as well, but as it is, crypto-Nazi will do to be going on with.

At first, Lineker refrained from drawing historical parallels, simply tweeting: “Good heavens, this is beyond awful.” The Nazism bit was brandished after someone suggested Lineker’s comment was out of order.

That made blood rush to his head, traumatised over the first half of his life by regular contacts with fast-flying heavy balls. “There is no influx,” he wrote. “We take far fewer refugees than other major European countries. This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s, and I’m out of order?”

I’m not aware of any Nazi official announcing a policy designed to stem the flow of illigal immigrants into Germany. Neither, I’m sure, is Mr Lineker. His point is that all Tories are Nazis, or at least as bad as. That’s the story, and he won’t let facts interfere with it.

Now, Gary is the kind of person known as ‘limousine liberal’ in America and ‘Bollinger Bolshevik’ in Britain. This breed is characterised by half-baked wokery and overcooked social conscience, all mixed with hatred for anything the Tories (or, in America, Republicans) do.

Unlike others of the same persuasion, Lineker has a ready excuse for his idiocy, one I’ve mentioned but he refuses to offer: the cerebral trauma exacerbated each time he smashed a ball with his forehead. He’ll have to think of some other excuses though, for even his employer, the BBC, is aghast.

If you don’t live in Britain, you may not realise that the BBC accusing a journalist of being too woke is a bit like Pravda, c. 1950, castigating one of its reporters for being too Stalinist.

Lineker has always insisted that his Tweeter account is his chattel to do with as he sees fit. A BBC spokesman disagrees: “The BBC has social media guidance, which is published. Individuals who work for us are aware of their responsibilities relating to social media. We have appropriate internal processes in place if required.”

Yet Gary clearly feels that the BBC needs him more than he needs the BBC. If they don’t like it, they can lump it, and he’ll continue to rake in his millions elsewhere. In that spirit, he has always voiced opinions as inane as they are immoral.

Once, for example, when a Palestinian was shot dead in Israel, Lineker accused the Israelis of the same sin he seems to think Mrs Braverman personifies. Yet the innocent victim of those Israeli Nazis turned out to be a Hamas terrorist.

This time around Mrs Braverman made the mistake of trying to argue with Lineker’s comments. Speaking on his own alma mater, the BBC, she said: “I’m disappointed, obviously. I think it’s unhelpful to compare our measures, which are lawful, proportionate and – indeed – compassionate, to 1930s Germany.”

If you aren’t familiar with official British English, in that jargon ‘unhelpful’ is fully synonymous with ‘asinine’, ‘deranged’ and ‘venomous’. I’d also add ‘irresponsible’ to that sequence, and that’s the most important modifier.

For anyone, especially those with high name recognition, committing his thought to public space takes on a responsibility. He must know that everything he says will be subjected to scrutiny because he is an influencer, that awful word.

Thus he should refrain from promulgating views that are both incendiary and manifestly untrue. If he doesn’t realise they are untrue (in this case, Britain doesn’t take “far fewer refugees than other major European countries”), he should check his facts or ask someone else to do it for him.

Lineker has championed the cause of refugees, legal or otherwise, for a long time – to the point of putting two of them up in his home. That’s a nice gesture, even though I suspect he has more than one residence, and the one into which he welcomed the refugees must be so large that he probably doesn’t even notice their presence.

What Lineker doesn’t seem to realise is that at issue here isn’t just the number of new arrivals but Britain’s sovereignty. One of its key markers is control over the country’s borders, which has become an especially sensitive issue after we left the straitjacket of the EU with its suicidal commitment to free movement of people across national borders.

That commitment hasn’t worked out especially well for EU members. Germany, for example, took in a million Muslims within a couple of recent years, which hospitality has created a crime rate from hell. And Sweden, another welcoming refuge, had a few hundred rapes a year before the influx and some 10,000 now.

It hardly needs saying that Lineker bitterly opposes Brexit. After all, it happened under a Tory administration, which seems to be a sufficient reason. Neither is he evidently a great fan of democracy – more Britons voted for Brexit than for anything else in history.

He is welcome to present a well-argued case for a single European state (good luck to him, for no one else has managed to do so yet) or the more plausible one against plebiscitarian democracy (many others have done so). What should be off-limits for any public figure is frothing at the mouth and spewing out vile unfounded invective.

Still, I hope Lineker keeps his BBC job. He’s a good Match of the Day presenter, and I can’t think of an adequate replacement offhand. However, one hopes his employer will be able to muzzle him when it comes to subjects other than football. He’s sorely unqualified to enlarge on them.

Darwin’s slapdash theory is still treated as gospel 160-odd years after the publication of his Origin. Normally, no theory gets as much latitude.

A theory gets 30 to 40 years for it to be proved beyond reasonable doubt. If it is, it stops being a theory and becomes a scientific fact. If it isn’t, it’s consigned to a science museum, the room where quaint but discredited hypotheses are kept.

It has taken a miracle for Darwin to be still going strong, and the miracle has a name: political necessity. Post-Enlightenment modernity needed Darwinism in biology as much as it needed Marxism in economics.

Both created a purely materialist view of life that sounded plausible enough to the masses. Their revolt (so called by Ortega y Gasset) thus acquired a scriptural support, making the old scripture redundant in the eyes of many.

The new gospel developed an army of proselytisers who managed to convince the newly enlightened throng that Darwinism was solid, irrefutable science. Yet even Darwin himself had doubts.

Hence this scathing post-publication comment, dealing with the complexity of the human eye: “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”

Yet history suggests Darwin was too reticent even in his most self-lacerating assessments. In the intervening years, science has never proved conclusively a single one of his conclusions of a more sweeping nature.

Unlike Darwin himself, today’s politicised Darwinists don’t even try to see how his assertions tally with the most elementary scientific data.

They dismiss the dearth of any intermediate forms of living creatures in the fossil records. They ignore the empirical evidence supporting not the appearance and development of new species but rather the degradation and disappearance of the old ones.

(Scientists now agree that about 99 percent of the species that have ever inhabited the earth are no longer with us. Really, the book ought to have been called The Disappearance of Species.)

In fact, Darwinism, along with other materialist explanations of the world, has been refuted by every natural science we may wish to consider:

Cosmology has reached the conclusion that our material world hasn’t existed for ever: conclusive evidence shows it appeared more or less instantaneously at the beginning of time. The word ‘God’ burning the lips of modern scientists, they came up with ‘The Big Bang’, but that is a matter of semantics only.

And today’s public, with its knee-jerk rejection of anything religious, doesn’t realise it’s being tricked by semantic legerdemain. Weaned on veneration of science, it salutes at the flagpole flying terms like ‘The Big Bang’, ‘Intelligent Design’ or, better still for being less comprehensible, ‘quantum fluctuations’. What people don’t realise is that they are looking at Genesis, encoded in scientific cant.

The physics of elementary particles has reached the level where some forms of matter (particles and field) can’t always be differentiated. Their material characteristics are now often seen as secondary to their metaphysical properties describable in terms of information only.

Palaeontologists have found and studied millions of fossilised remains of ancient organisms, and yet discovered practically no transitional forms in their development. This applies to all living beings, not just man.

Deep down, scientists know that, if millions of fossils collected over 160 years have shown no evidence of macroevolution, no such evidence exists. In fact, experiments with bacteria (whose lightning-fast propagation rates make it possible to replicate within a few decades the millions of generations normally associated with the length of biological life on earth) show no macroevolutionary developments whatsoever.

Genetics has demonstrated that mutations can only be degenerative in nature. Also, the amount of information in a single DNA molecule is so vast that it couldn’t have been accidentally created even in the time exceeding by trillions of years the most optimistic assessments of the age of our universe.

Biochemistry accepts irreducible complexity as fact: each molecule of living matter contains a multitude of intricate systems that wouldn’t have existed at all in a simpler form. That means they didn’t evolve but were created as they are at present. 

Geology is another example. We were all taught at school that the sequence of geological layers testifies to the gradual, smooth development of life from the more primitive to the more complex forms.

That idea was so firmly entrenched that it became impossible to ask questions that beg to be asked. Such as: If evolutionary development was smooth and gradual, then how is it that we observe sharply defined layers at all, rather than the evidence of some species disappearing, others appearing, and still others evolving gradually?

How is it that specimens of new species always appear in fossil records instantly and in huge numbers, fully formed and lacking any obvious predecessors? How is it that many species appearing in the earlier layers are in no way more primitive than the later ones?

In general, how can we decide which species are more primitive than others? Studies in microbiology have shown that even single-celled organisms believed to be the simplest living beings are in fact incredibly complex systems of interacting functional elements.

Even greater complexity is revealed at the genetic level, accompanied by much confusion in deciding what is primitive and what is advanced. Indeed, if we look at the number of their chromosomes, man, with 46, is more complex than the mouse (40), mink (30), fly (12) and gnat (6).

Yet using this criterion, man is more primitive than the sheep (54), silkworm (56), donkey (62), chicken (78) and duck (80). And the prawn, with its 254 chromosomes, leads the field by a wide margin.

So is man perhaps the missing link between the gnat and the prawn? Actually, even some plants are more complex than we are. Black pepper, plum and potato each boast 48 chromosomes, and the lime tree a whopping 82.

But never mind the hard physical facts. It’s the sheer beauty of the world that Darwinism has been unable to explain. Left out of its cold-blooded and ill-founded musings is something that has to be obvious to any unbiased observer: the world is organised according to aesthetic, not only rational, principles.

And in many instances aesthetics comes before practicality, or even cancels it out. Not only, as Dostoyevsky suggested, can beauty save the world – beauty is the world.

Look at the peacock’s tail for example. At first sight, this is a hindrance: after all, the oversized protuberance reduces the bird’s mobility, thus making it less able to flee from predators.

Darwinists explain this and many other examples of seemingly useless aesthetic characteristics as a factor of sexual selection. The more striking the male’s appearance, the more likely it would be to appeal to the aesthetic sense of a female and thereby pass its own genes on to the next generation.

However, this raises a question that’s rather awkward for Darwinism: whence do animals acquire their aesthetic sense in the first place? In the case of the peacock this comes packaged with characteristics that actively hamper the survival of the species. Clearly, metaphysical aesthetics overrides physical functionality – yet again metaphysics takes the lead.

There are many examples of that: the bright colouring of many species of both animals and plants, the beautiful singing of birds (which not only attracts females but also betrays the male’s location to predators, again jeopardising physical survival for the sake of beauty), and the geometric perfection of physical bodies. The golden section is particularly telling here, for all the negative publicity it has received in Dan Brown’s semiliterate fiction.

The problem with Darwinism is that it clashes with science, not with faith. No contradiction exists between faith and evolution: God can create species slowly, as well as fast.

It’s not just Darwinism but science in general that can happily coexist with religion. “The book of nature is written by the hand of God in the language of mathematics,” wrote Galileo, as if pre-empting the current debates.

The conflict between science and religion exists only in the agued minds of ideologised atheists, who love to cite the story of Galileo as proof. In fact, Pope Urban VIII was Galileo’s greatest admirer and patron.

What got Galileo censured was the arrogance and intolerance with which he spread his views. Even so, he was neither immolated nor imprisoned, as so many modern ignoramuses believe. Galileo was exiled to a comfortable villa in a picturesque part of Italy – those taking issue with atheistic communism suffered a worse fate in Russia and elsewhere.

Giordano Bruno was indeed burned in Rome’s Campo di Fiore, but, contrary to modern mythology, his indictment contained not a single word about his scientific exploits. It’s all about his rude, incontinent attacks on every sacrament and dogma of the Church, accompanied by his refusal to recant.

This type of historical revisionism goes hand in hand with scientific chicanery. Neither has anything to with either history or science – and everything to do with obtuse, febrile ideology. A mark of our times, I suppose.

Whenever I feel like reminding myself what a glorious city London is, I walk out of my building and look around. But I don’t see London.

All I can see is some quarter-mile of the New King’s Road, a few shops, restaurants, pedestrians, trees, cars. That’s all one sees at street level: street. The vantage point is too low.

I could move around, see other streets, other parts of the city. But I still wouldn’t see London, only its multiple isolated parts, much as I’d like to see the whole thing.

Such a vision can’t come piecemeal. It requires a single point of view, high enough to encompass the whole panoramic scene. Hence, I climb, huffing and puffing, up on the roof of my four-storey building.

That exertion uncovers a greater field of sight. Now I can see much of Fulham, all the way to the river to the south, Chelsea to the east, perhaps Hammersmith to the north. I can even see the taller buildings in Putney, on the other side of the Thames. But London? I still can’t see it.

I don’t know how high I’d have to climb to see all of London. A couple of miles? More? Still, the limits of human vision are such that the total picture I seek will forever remain elusive. But one thing for sure: the higher one soars, the more one can see.

It’s my observation that only theology, that summit of the mountain of philosophy, provides a single point of view from which one can see and understand much of life. A theory of everything may not exist but, if it did, that’s where it would be found.

Numerous attempts to explore other pathways and other destinations have been made, by physicists, chemists, biologists, neuropsychologists, geologists and other scientists. They’ve uncovered many of life’s mysteries, but without ever even coming within touching distance of explaining the world, its origin and its most unfathomable denizen, man.

Only theology assisted by philosophy satisfies the requirement Sherlock Holmes explained to his hapless sidekick, Dr Watson. Having investigated all the possibilities but one and found that they don’t explain the available facts, then the remaining theory, no matter how seemingly improbable, has to be true.

Only theology, and a system of thought based on it, provides such a theory. But say this in polite, which these days means atheistic, society, and you’ll be deafened with a chorus of “Proof! Prove that God exists!”

He doesn’t, I invariably say. It’s because of God that everything else exists. This never fails to add a few decibels to the litany: “Proof! Where’s your proof?!?”

Modern vulgarians, it has to be said, understand proof only as the empirical outcome of forensic investigation, something conducted in a lab or on a test stand. In that sense, there isn’t, nor can there be, any proof – practically by definition.

Proving means understanding and, with God, that’s patently impossible. A higher system can understand a lower one, but not the other way around.

But if there is no empirical proof, there are many indications – of a life above physical realities. If you don’t believe me, ask any pathologist.

Those professionals handle the human brain every workday of their lives. They touch it, they feel it, they study it – they certainly see it. Yet not one of them has ever seen a mind, the spectacular, tangible and yet undefinable product of the brain.

Does this mean the mind doesn’t exist? Not even the rankest atheist would suggest that, not unless he is imbecilic as well. They thus accept the reality of metaphysical phenomena, while illogically refusing to acknowledge their ultimate source. But then no one has accused atheists of a talent for logical ratiocination.

Today’s lot get hung up on all sorts of causes, half- or quarter-truths at best, and usually not even that. They sense how pitiful a wholly egocentric existence is, and so they have to issue a statement of caring – for ‘our planet’, animals, trees, minorities, assorted victims assigned to that category arbitrarily.

Thereby they hope to rise to the superpersonal without touching on the supernatural. A forlorn hope, that. Hugging the trees of trivial causes, they can’t see the luxuriant wood of truth.

However, if that vulgar proof of God can’t possibly exist, there are plenty of proofs of superphysical phenomena. I happen to be living with one of them, my wife Penelope.

As a brilliant artist, she has an in-built receiver attuned to high frequencies imperceptible to regular folk like me. Still, for her to be able to receive those UHF signals, someone has to send them to begin with. So is it empirical proofs you want? Here are three of them.

We moved to London from New York in 1988, when Penelope’s father lay gravely ill in hospital 200 miles away, in Exeter, their home city.

In those days Penelope could sleep for England. She’d drop off within minutes of her head hitting the pillow and sleep without stirring until woken up the next morning. If not woken up, she could sleep 10-11 hours, approaching Olympic standards.

Yet one of our first nights in England she couldn’t go to sleep at all. Something was bothering her, she was tossing and turning, dozing off for a few minutes, then waking up again – I had never seen that before.

Suddenly, at about 1.00 AM, she went quiet and fell asleep with a serene expression on her face. The next day we found out that her father had died at exactly that time, to the minute. She had known it – without knowing it in any empirical sense.

Then a couple of years later we stayed with friends in Amsterdam, who gave us a comfortable bedroom in the loft. The same thing happened: Penelope was so anxious she couldn’t sleep. She claimed she could sense some emanations in the air, and she might have even used the word ‘vibes’ that I dislike.

So I told her to forget those old wives’ tales and go to sleep. Then over breakfast the next morning our friends showed us a written history of their house – and what do you know. During the war a Jewish family was hiding in that very loft. They were betrayed, arrested, shipped off to a concentration camp and never seen again.

I could cite many such examples but, lest you accuse me of being uxorious, I’ll give you only one more. Fast-forward a few more years, and we stayed with another friend in Moscow.

We arrived on a crispy cold night and, that being Penelope’s first visit to the city of my birth, went out for a walk straight away. We took a long street (Myasnitskaya, which in my day used to be called Kirov Street) leading from the boulevard ring to Lubyanka, the square that houses… well, you know what it houses.

I must emphasise that Penelope knew nothing of Moscow’s geography and didn’t have a clue what that street was and where it was leading. I don’t know if she had seen photographs of the KGB building but, if she had, they would have only shown the façade.

Since we were approaching that sinister place from the rear and from the side, there was no way anyone but a Muscovite would have known what it was. I knew, but said nothing.

When we reached the rear corner of the building, Penelope again said something about evil emanations and, that dread word, ‘vibes’. Somehow she was in communion with the souls of the thousands murdered in that building, and the millions sent to their deaths from there.

Neither she nor I nor any scientist can explain such phenomena. They belong to a kingdom not of this world – certainly not of this physical world. But that doesn’t make them any less real. They simply point to the existence of another, higher reality, and most people are aware of at least some of it.

And yet many of those same people refuse to accept even in theory that a higher reality also has to exist. Thereby they reject the notion of causality, making Newton et al. weep in their graves. The rest of us know that, if something exists, something else caused it to exist – and notice I’m deliberately staying within the realm of reason.

Faith is something else again, and it’s a more sophisticated cognitive mechanism. But we don’t have to talk about it, even though it’s Sunday.

For a laugh, that is. Instead of striking fear into the hearts of their audience, their animadversions are beginning to have a distinctly comic effect.

By contrast, no one is laughing at Zelensky – this though he started his career as a stand-up comedian. (Commitment to truth forces me to admit he wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs even then: to paraphrase Mark Twain, Zelensky’s jokes were no laughing matter.)

If Zelensky progressed from bad comedian to statesman and wartime leader, Sergei Lavrov’s career path took him in the opposite direction. Everything that KGB officer cum foreign minister says these days causes much unintended mirth among the listeners.

The other day, for example, Lavrov attended India’s G20 summit. There he met US State Secretary Blinken, but the meeting was brief and, from Lavrov’s standpoint, unsatisfactory. Blinken just told him, in no uncertain terms if not in so many words, that there isn’t much to talk about for as long as Russia is persisting in its aggressive war on the Ukraine.

Blinken was curt, but at least he didn’t laugh in Lavrov’s face. That came later, when Lavrov made the mistake of taking questions from the audience.

The first question was: “How has the war affected Russia’s strategy on energy, and will it mark a privilege towards Asia? And if it does, how is India going to feature in it?”

In reply, Lavrov went into his stand-up routine: “You know, the war, which we are trying to stop, which was launched against us, using the…” The audience burst out laughing without waiting for the punchline.

Since the art of such performances is relatively new to him, Lavrov lost the thread. “…The Ukrainian people, uh, of course, influenced…” he started but wasn’t allowed to finish. Instead of finding out what it was that the Ukrainian people had influenced, the audience roared with laughter and shouts of  “Come on!”.

Abandoning his preamble, Lavrov went straight to the original question, which he answered with uncustomary honesty. The war, he admitted ruefully, has indeed affected the Russians’ energy policy, and they “would not rely on any partners” going forward.

This time the audience detected a serious note, and no one laughed. Some, however, must have rejoiced, in a schadenfreude sort of way. What, they must have been thinking, not even North Korea?

To be fair, Lavrov was simply regurgitating the official line of Soviet propaganda, one that has been bandied about since at least 2014. I first heard it at around that time, when an old friend I hadn’t seen in decades was passing through London with his young Russian wife in tow.

The girl was an unreconstructed Putinista, which made me doubt my friend’s sanity or, alternatively, allegiances. When the conversation veered to international politics, the young lady accused the West, specifically the USA, of bestial aggression towards Russia.

When I wanted to know where that aggression was taking place, she looked at me with touching concern for the mental health of someone blind to the obvious. “In the Ukraine,” she said contemptuously. I tried to point out it was Russian troops, not the 82^nd Airborne, occupying Ukrainian territory, but made no headway whatsoever.

Speaking of mental health (and comedy, come to that), Putin the other day outdid his foreign minister with room to spare. However, considering that his listeners were Russian, they had to laugh only inwardly. Here’s what happened.

A unit of 40 commandos entered Russia’s Bryansk region from the Ukraine. Reports identify it as belonging to the Russian Volunteer Corps, manned with Russians fighting for the Ukraine against Putin’s aggression.

According to the Corps spokesman, the commandos shot up a Russian personnel carrier, then entered a nearby village and filmed a short video calling for resistance to Putin. No civilians were harmed during the production.

According to the Russian side, the raiders attacked a school bus, killed two people and wounded a child. Such was the initial report, which has since been modified, more than once.

The wounded child was first identified as a girl, then as a boy, and then perhaps there was no wounded child at all. The target vehicle was in consecutive reports downsized from a bus first to an SUV, then to a car. The commandos took hostages, though perhaps they didn’t.

According to the Ukrainian government, the raid was a false flag provocation by the Russians. Neither side, however, produced any evidence, be it videos, photos or eyewitness reports, one way or the other. (The Russian side did release a photo of a bullet-riddled car with no number plate.) However, the old cui bono principle points an accusing finger at Russia, not the Ukraine.

Now make a death-defying leap of imagination and put yourself in Putin’s Size 6 shoes. How would you comment on that incident – what kind of conclusions were possible to derive from it even in theory?

Those nasty Ukies try to carry war into Russia? Wrong. This shows that the Ukraine has been the aggressor from the start? Wrong. Unable to defeat Russia on the battlefield, those Nazis are resorting to terrorism? Wrong.

Not wholly wrong, that is. Things along those lines were indeed said, but a great leader had to put them in a broad existential perspective. That’s when Putin donned his jester’s cap and put his funny foreign minister to shame.

Those 40 chaps, he said (quipped?), “set themselves the task of depriving us of historical memory, depriving us of our history, depriving us of our tradition and language.”

If such was their intention, their effort was undertaken on a rather small scale… but forget this remark. Any attempt to find a rational response to the ranting of a lunatic is wrong by definition.

If you doubt my qualifications to diagnose psychiatric disorders, you are welcome to come up with your own interpretation of that tirade. The only other possibility I can think of is one I suggested earlier: Putin and his henchmen are playing for laughs.

Back in the old days they all had to study Marx (Karl, that is, not Groucho). Hence they must be familiar with his adage that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.

But they are proving Marx wrong. His aphorism implies a consecutive progression. But Marx’s erstwhile disciples are showing that tragedy and farce can unfold concurrently. Yet, appalled by the former, I’m not laughing at the latter.

Well, not exactly soar, but they have indeed grown – by two. However, the newly homeless couple is unlikely to sleep rough, drink rotgut out of a brown paper bag and pester passers-by with “giza quid” pleas.

After all, Harry and Meghan are rich, and they do have a roof over their heads in California. That’s their real home because that’s where their conjoined heart is.

King Charles has ordered the couple to vacate the five-bedroom Frogmore Cottage the Queen gave them in 2018. H & M are supposed to pick up their stuff and get out at their leisure, by early summer, which suggests there’s a lot of stuff to pack and ship.

I’m impressed with the King’s forbearance and amazed it has taken him so long. For Harry, expertly egged on and assisted by his objectionable wife, is clearly committed to continuing his late mother’s mission: damaging, ideally destroying, the British monarchy.

However, I can understand the King’s vacillation. After all, kicking out a prince of the blood isn’t the same as evicting a commoner in default of his rent payments. There are constitutional issues to consider, which, in Britain, involves studying the precedents.

Harry owes his position not to any achievement or appointment but strictly to the blood in his veins, which, legally if possibly in no other sense, is royal. As such, it doesn’t depend on any qualities of character (appalling in Harry’s case) or behaviour (even more so).

Since his status was neither given nor earned, taking it away completely is tricky de facto and impossible de jure. Harry was born a prince and so he’ll remain no matter what he does.

Yet that last sentence should be amended with a crucial proviso: within sensible limits. And, as the precedent I have in mind shows, the definition of what is and isn’t sensible is out of Harry’s hands.

The way our constitution works, the royal family gets every opportunity to sort out its internal squabbles. Yet should it be unable to do so, parliament can step in and chop through any Gordian knot with Alexander’s elan. An Act of Parliament can even remove a prince from the line of succession – something the monarch doesn’t have the power to do.

As the precedent I have in mind shows, the combined force of those two institutions is strong enough to reduce a transgressing prince and his bride to the status of pariahs and supplicants. And, unlike Harry, the Duke of Windsor had been a king, Edward VIII.

That he stopped to be when he decided to marry Wallis Simpson, an American divorcée whose questionable romantic past even included some on-the-job training in Asian brothels. Her political affiliations were no less dubious, since Wallis was a Nazi sympathiser, to say the least.

All things considered, the Baldwin cabinet told the king to choose between Wallis and the crown. He chose the former in a tear-jerking broadcast and was summarily banished not only from Buckingham Palace but indeed from the country.

From then on the Duke of Windsor was only ever allowed to come to Britain for the odd flying visit, mostly to beg his younger brother the King for more money to bankroll the style to which Wallis had become accustomed. She, by the way, never received the HRH title, which kept bugging her husband no end.

Meghan did, and of course Harry is entitled to it from birth. Yet while they both retain the title, neither of them is any longer allowed to use it.

Now King Charles has served an eviction notice, which has enraged the fans of that awful couple. Since those who love Harry and Meghan typically hate the monarchy, they accuse the king of maliciously acting out of spite.

In fact, he presciently averted a possible constitutional problem. For Harry’s rank in the line of succession would enable him to become one of the Councillors of State, effectively stand-ins for the King should he be ill or absent.

Yet there is a catch: a Councillor of State must be domiciled in Britain to retain a claim to that post. Now that he has been kicked out of Frogmore Cottage, Harry no longer has a UK address, which disqualifies him from a place among potential Councillors.

I doubt any modern prime minister would be able to act as decisively as Stanley Baldwyn did in 1937. However, the government has the precedent-based constitutional mandate to do so. The very minimum it should do is take the HRH title away from Meghan. After all, she only uses it as a weapon in her war on the monarchy.

And, by analogy with John Lackland, Harry should now be called Lackhome. That nickname could act as a constant reminder that he isn’t welcome in the country whose constitution he tries to undermine so resolutely.

Meanwhile, Parliament ought to consider removing Harry from the line of succession either permanently or at least for as long as he stays married to Meghan. That may not be for ever: once the couple lose the glitter, and hence the earning potential, conferred by their current status, Meghan may well dump Harry, citing Schiller along the way: “The Moor has done his work, the Moor may go.”

Then again, this may be one of those marriages made in heaven, with both cretinous male and manipulating female finding an ideal mate. Did I say heaven? Hell is more like it.

Yesterday I committed treason – yet again.

At least that’s how many NHS fanatics describe using private medicine. This proves that a state doesn’t have to be unashamedly totalitarian to scour the people’s minds free of any modicum of sound thought.

Anyway, my treasonous act involved a series of lung function tests, administered by a young man with a sense of humour. Afterwards he lifted my spirits by saying that the results exceeded expectations for a man my age and size.

“How do you know I’m a man?” I asked, thereby claiming impeccable modern credentials. “I may identify as a woman.”

We had a short laugh about that feeble joke, but then the young chap said something serious. “Men and women show different results, mostly because women’s lung capacity is much smaller,” he explained. “That’s why whenever we test transsexuals, we have to tell them in advance that for our purposes we have to go by their biological sex.”

“Do they protest?” I asked. “Not at all,” he smiled. “When it comes to their health, they don’t mind at all.”

I don’t get it. We are made to believe, on pain of punishment, that a man who used to be a woman is as much of a man as anyone blessed with the XY chromosomes. Such a freshly minted man may sue anyone for ‘misgendering’ (referring to him as a her), and he’ll probably win the case every time.

And yet when the health chips are down, he is happy to be regarded as a woman. Does one detect a touch of hypocrisy there somewhere?

Far be it from me to hold myself up as a model, but in this case I’m sure I’m no different from most XY humans. As such, I uncompromisingly identify as a man because, well, I am. That’s how God made me.

Now, if a nurse told me I’d have to be treated as a woman for medical purposes, I’d object vociferously, possibly violently. Much as I adore women, I’m not one, happy not to be one, and I won’t be treated as one, health or no health.

Methinks, on this basis at least, those recent converts to manhood remain somewhat different from me and, though I haven’t been delegated to speak for other men, from other XY humans as well. And whoever insists they aren’t different is either a fool or, more likely, a rank hypocrite.

While we are on the subject of hypocrisy, Putin and his propagandists struggle to pinpoint any legitimate reason for their bandit raid on the Ukraine. As a former adman who had to plug any number of lost causes, I follow their efforts with schadenfreude leavened – I’m man enough to admit this – with some latent empathy.

The overall thrust of their PR campaign is neither strategic nor strictly military. It’s mostly moral, which I, as an admirer of the early Crusades launched for moral reasons, have to welcome.

Morality is a multifaceted notion, as any reader of the Decalogue and the Sermon on the Mount will confirm. However, even Putin and his merry men aren’t so cynical as to feign commitment to the injunctions against murder, theft, perjury or cupidity.

Instead they’ve crystallised the whole moral message to its sexual aspects, none of which, incidentally, is mentioned in the Decalogue and the Sermon on the Mount. And even those are reduced strictly to railing against rampant homosexuality, transsexualism and their derivatives, such as homomarriage, propaganda of homosexuality, child adoptions by same-sex couples and so forth.

Since the West is depicted, not groundlessly, as the bastion of such perversity, and the Ukraine is treated as the West’s proxy, the on-going bandit raid can be described as a moral crusade. Russia casts herself as the last upholder of traditional morality, what one of Putin’s Western propagandists obligingly called “the most conservative and Christian nation in Europe”.

It’s not immediately clear how carpet bombings of cities, accompanied by mass murder, torture, looting and rape, can cure unnatural sexual propensities. Even if they can, the therapy strikes me as somewhat too radical.

Hence, much as I sympathise with the cause of traditional morality, I deplore Russia’s championship of it. And since my knowledge of Russia doesn’t come from books or flying visits on tourist visas, I find it hard to see it as a stronghold of sexual probity.

Words like Sodom and Gomorrah come to mind more readily, and today’s leaders of the country can claim residency in those towns with ample justification. Enter Lieutenant General Aleksandr Matovnikov, deputy chief of Russia’s land forces, member of the Kremlin inner circle and currently commander of the Russian contingent in Belarus.

In such capacities, the good general can be seen as the cutting edge of pristine morality slashing through the mire of Western degeneracy. That image, however, is rather at odds with the selfie video Gen. Matovnikov shared on the Telegram messaging app: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_WMtkduN6E

The general is seen performing full-frontal striptease and, unfamiliar with the genre as I am, I can’t judge the choreography. I can, however, judge the general’s physique and let me tell you: a Chippendale he ain’t.

A message accompanying the video describes the general as being “an avid connoisseur of restaurants and ladies in Minsk”. However, the facsimiles of his letters published later (whose authenticity is disputed) show it’s not just ladies that the general is an avid connoisseur of.

Yet even assuming that the intended audience is straight as an arrow, one finds it hard to see the general as a moral crusader. It’s easier to see him as a betrayer of state secrets, one of which is that Russia’s leaders hardly set an example of monastic behaviour.

Many of the country’s top functionaries are widely rumoured to be homosexuals. Mentioned in this context, inter alia, are Duma Speaker Volodin, the late LDP leader Zhirinovsky, former PM Zubkov, Gazprom chairman Miller, chairman of the Duma budget committee Makarov. And even Putin himself hasn’t been spared such accusations.

His KGB career was rather sluggish, plagued as it was by an early scandal involving his using a safehouse for illicit assignations, believed to be of a “non-traditional” nature. That may explain why his terminal rank at age 40 was a lowly major (he was promoted to lieutenant-colonel at retirement to give him a higher pension). By comparison, his KGB superior Oleg Kalugin was already a lieutenant-general at that age.

It’s widely believed that Putin ordered the 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko mainly because the KGB defector was about to publish documents proving those accusations. Currently, another KGB defector, Sergei Zhirnov, refers to Putin’s homosexuality as common knowledge within the ranks of that organisation (in view of what happened to Litvinenko, Mr Zhirnov would be well-advised to watch his step).

Reports of both hetero- and homo- orgies within the Kremlin elite are too numerous and detailed to be treated as so much smoke without fire. I for one am sure they are true: it’s that absolute power that, as Lord Acton explained, corrupts absolutely.

It would be easy to shrug and say something about boys being boys, or girls if they so choose. We are all sinners, aren’t we? We are, to varying extents. But not all sinners pretend to be crusaders for righteousness. And even fewer are willing to do mass murder under that pretext.

It’s that hypocrisy again.

The argument was dragging on, and Dr Johnson, never the most patient type, ended it with a cutting phrase: “Sir, we know our will is free, and there’s an end on it.”

That conversation-stopper wielded by a first-rate English mind was as correct as it was, dare I say it, un-English. For the English mind tends to be suspicious of any judgement reached without a painstaking analysis of every possible detail. The English regard general principles as too, well, general.

That’s often sensible: few things in life are so clearcut as to be either black or white. Even the fashionable context in which those adjectives are often used, race, leaves plenty of room for disagreement.

This isn’t my subject today, so I’ll limit myself to a fleeting observation: both racists and anti-racists seem to regard anyone with any African blood at all as black. (I am ignoring the insane insistence that even someone with no black ancestry is still free to identify as black if he so chooses. This sort of thing belongs in the loony bin or else a Guardian editorial meeting.)

They are free to hold that view, provided they realise that their standards are more stringent than even the Nuremberg Laws. There it took one Jewish grandparent to be classified as a Jew and hence slated for extinction. Today’s racists and anti-racists proceed from the principle associated with Jim Crow in the US: a drop of tar, all black.

This is an example of a wrong principle, and their name is legion. Apply any one of those to a situation at hand, and any conclusion reached thereby is bound to be wrong. Hence the English are right to be suspicious: it’s more reliable to analyse the specifics of every problem, rather than jumping to hasty conclusions.

Alas, such pragmatic reliance on empirical fact sometimes leads to intellectual and ultimately moral relativism based on contempt for principles as such, right or wrong. This is a widespread failing in England, with people likely to skip over any philosophical musings and ask the lapidary question: “What are we going to do about it?” If no satisfactory answer is forthcoming, they lose interest.

Yet I maintain that, when they are backed up by lifelong experience, study and ratiocination, general principles can take one to correct conclusions quickly and directly, bypassing all the superfluous – and potentially misleading – nit-picking.

Such principles are an indispensable cognitive tool, provided one leaves room for adjustments should contradicting facts come to light. Without such in-built flexibility, overreliance on general principles may lead to doctrinaire obscurantism, which is never especially clever.

On the other hand, proper general principles properly used are the structural framework of any thinking methodology. They provide a discipline without which any thought becomes amorphous – like wine escaping from the confines of the glass to form an unsightly puddle on the tablecloth.

A few illustrations from my own experience, if I may, and please don’t accuse me of boasting if I only cite examples casting me in a good light. If you expect me to list the numerous instances where I’ve been proved wrong, you place an exaggerated trust in human goodness.

I moved to Britain from the US some 35 years ago and soon thereafter made friends with an NHS doctor, a friendship that’s still going strong. Yet the beginning was hardly auspicious.

The dinner-table conversation veered towards the NHS, and I remarked casually that any problems it experienced were systemic. Any giant Leviathan instituted on socialist principles is a condemned structure soon to collapse, I added.

Defending his corporate honour, my friend for life to be almost snapped my head off. I knew nothing about the NHS, he fumed, and he was almost right. Am I aware that… – and a long litany of facts followed, most expressed numerically.

I wasn’t. I proceeded from general principles and lifelong observation, but they were correct principles and accurate observations, which is why they have been proved right. A couple of decades later, my friend admitted as much, if only tacitly.

Another self-serving example, taken right out of the Peter Hitchens book of self-aggrandisement, is that back in the late eighties, early nineties I instantly saw through all that Western triumphalism about the victory in the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and even, to mention the extreme inanity, the end of history.

In those pre-Internet days I didn’t follow the details of the unfolding transition, although I knew a fair amount about the key personalities involved. But however few details I possessed, they rested atop a vast mountain of knowledge and understanding – of Russia, communism and the symbiosis of the two in the national character.

Hence, proceeding from general principles, I instantly saw that all that putative triumph of virtue was in fact a transfer of power from the Party to a new elite formed by a fusion of the KGB and organised crime. This is a devil we don’t yet know, I was writing at the time, but rest assured it’s no less black than the one we are familiar with, and more dangerous for having a greater capacity for subterfuge.

It gives me no satisfaction to have been proved right, but proved right I demonstrably was. The same goes for China, a country about which I know much less than about Russia.

Here many Western observers go wrong not because they don’t know the facts but because they try to jam the square pegs of correct data into the round holes of general principles that happen to be false. One such is their unshakeable belief in the redemptive power of free enterprise.

At its heart, I suspect, lies the Calvinist dogma of wealth being God’s reward for virtue. Even though such people may be unaware of the historical motivation of their belief, it leads to the perdition of an incorrect syllogism. Thesis: Wealth generated by hard, free labour is a sign of goodness. Antithesis: China is wealthy. Synthesis: China has to be good, or at least not as bad as some doubting Thomases insist she is.

Being one such incredulous sort, I proceed from a different syllogism. Communism is evil, regardless of any economic window-dressing. China is communist. Ergo, China is evil and hence eminently dangerous.

Another example is economic. Whenever I am treated to endless ledger sheets of economic indicators, especially if they are accompanied by the ubiquitous word ‘paradigm’, my eyes glass over. Before long, I say, we’ll all be marching to soup kitchens, singing a version of the Depression song, “Brother, can you paradigm?”

To paraphrase Dr Johnson (without in any way comparing myself to the great man), I can say: “Sir, we know a state based on profligate public spending and exorbitant taxation is courting economic disaster from hell, and there’s an end on it.”

I lay no claims to any particular brilliance. Anyone can arrive at truth by riding the vehicle of a sound cognitive methodology based on correct general principles. Conversely, no recondite knowledge of endless arcane details will get even an intelligent person to the same destination if he proceeds from wrong premises.

And don’t even get me started on metaphysics. Suffice it to say now that the wrong general premise of atheism acts as a road barrier coming halfway down any intellectual route: thus far, but no further. That’s why an atheist philosopher is an oxymoron – even if an intelligent atheist isn’t.

This is the general principle I apply to judging such matters, and so far no one has proved me wrong. So long live general principles, provided they are correct.

Having finally bothered to look up my Wikipedia page, I found out they had made me a year younger than I am. This is most welcome, unless of course it’s their subtle way of saying that, when one reaches a certain age, a year here or there doesn’t really matter.

Then I discovered one sentence that calls for an explanation: “He has also proposed that a return to the gold standard would restore monetary rectitude.”

This goes to show how silly ideas may sound if taken in isolation, outside the philosophical context into which they fit. Thus, I’ve never proposed any such thing: that would be like proposing to turn back the whole course of modernity.

However, I do think that a currency pegged to an objective equivalent creates a better society, if not necessarily a more dynamic economy. In the good tradition of Aristotelian induction, this belief takes off from a verifiable fact.

In Britain, the last 50 years of the 19^th century produced a combined inflation of 10 per cent. For the last 50 years of the 20^th century, the corresponding figure is 2,000 per cent. Hiding behind these numerals is a sweeping existential shift, not just an economic one.

Since inflation is mostly caused by government overspending, a question arises. Why do governments spend more than they take in if they know that such profligacy will turn money into wrapping paper (or, in our days of electronic transfers, not even that)?

The only logical answer is that they want money to lose value. They must feel that they thereby advance their objectives.

The most imperative one is a steady increase in their own power, which these days comes out of the money purse more often than out of the barrel of a gun. The mechanism involved seems intricate but is really simple.

By reducing the purchasing power of a monetary unit, the state makes people seek a greater and greater number of such units to make ends meet. Apart from producing wage slavery, this increases state control at both ends of the economic scale.

Winners and losers alike have to be wholly committed to economic activity to stay afloat. This commitment has to be expressed not only in working halfway around the clock but, whether or not they are so able or inclined, also in taking a gambler’s risks with investments.

Those who fail will have to fall back on the government’s largesse in order to survive – this is self-explanatory. But even those who succeed will also depend on the government, if less directly and more negatively.

After all, a quick pull on the printing press lever can usher in, say, a 15-percent inflation rate. A few years of that, and a nest egg lovingly hatched over a lifetime is broken, with no omelette anywhere in sight.

Inflation, be that of money or assets, thus sends a message to the people: a half-hearted commitment to the pursuit of money won’t get you even a half-decent life. You can’t swap a modicum of discomfort for more freedom to pursue what really matters to you. No gentlemanly sinecures await; it’s all or nothing.

You must barter your soul in order to survive (in the sense in which survival is now understood). Ostensibly you may be working for your own well-being, but in fact the state, swinging the double whammy of taxes and inflation to claim much of what you earn, will make sure you toil mostly for its benefit. Nothing short of a Faustian transaction will do if you don’t wish to tumble into the clutches of the social services.

If you were prepared to take such a fall, that would be fine too – your dependence on the state would become even more total and direct. One way or the other you sit white-knuckled on a non-stop rollercoaster speeding so fast you can’t jump off.

To keep inflation going governments have to spend more than they collect in tax revenues. Hence, if they wish to use inflation for crowd control, they must be able to increase the money supply as they see fit, with no constraints to curtail this ability.

And if governments can arbitrarily issue any amount of paper currency they fancy, then such currency can have nothing but virtual value. Real money has to be replaced with the fake variety. Ignoring the legalistic casuistry for a moment, governments have to get into the counterfeiting business.

The only way of keeping money real would be to limit the state’s ability to counterfeit it. Traditionally this used to be achieved by pegging paper currency to a precious metal, usually gold.

Step by step, Western governments adopted a system whereby the paper money they issued was backed up by their gold reserves. Every banknote was redeemable in gold, and both the paper and the metal were equally real and tangible. This introduced stability, enabling people to plan for their future with confidence.

All major Western economies eventually went on the gold standard. Britain did so in 1717, the USA in 1834 (de facto), Germany in 1871, immediately after her formal unification. It was, however, understood that a rigid monetary system based on the gold standard would be hard to maintain during major wars, when deficit spending was unavoidable (“Unlimited money is the sinews of war,” wrote Caesar).

Thus Britain suspended the gold standard during the Napoleonic Wars, the USA during its Civil War, and most countries during the First World War. But in that distant past they inevitably relied on the post-war return of the gold standard to bring some deflationary sanity to the crazy inflation caused by wartime promiscuity.

This was the case before modern governments realised that inflation could be a useful power tool – before they became fully aware of their inner imperative. Once that realisation sank in, the gold standard had to go. Wishing to bind its citizens hand and foot, the state itself had to slip the tethers of fiscal responsibility.

To be fair, the gold standard isn’t without its downside. For one thing, it limits the government’s ability to increase the money supply as a means of combatting recessions.

However, the gold standard limits not only the state’s flexibility but also its ability to increase its own power by using inflation for redistributive highway robbery, the way Robin Hood used his bow.

We don’t want the modern state to have the short-term flexibility to steer the economy into safe havens, for we know that in the long term the state will steer it into dire straits.

As a matter of fact, we must do all we can to reduce modern governments’ flexibility to meddle in the economy. As Burke wrote, “The moment that Government appears at market, all the principles of market will be subverted.”

Hence the attraction of the gold standard, at least to those who value their freedom above the ability to ride the economic rollercoaster through hair-raising climbs and dips. It puts people, as opposed to the state’s whim, in control of their own pecuniary destiny.

The gold standard may make an economy less upwardly mobile, but in return it will definitely make it more stable and free. For that reason, it is anathema to any modern government.

That’s why they have all seen fit to devote much energy to waging a sustained war of extermination against the gold standard. Finally the right tool for the job was found.

It was perhaps partly for the purpose of phasing the gold standard out that the quasi-independent Federal Reserve system was created in 1907: the US government wanted to abrogate some responsibility for what was bound to follow. And in 1913, the year the Federal Reserve Act came into effect, the Sixteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was passed, empowering Congress to levy federal income tax as it saw fit.

In due course, the gold standard disappeared everywhere in the West, and the power tools of runaway taxes and inflation were plugged into the mains. That two-prong strategy was to be used by modern states over and over: the shock of one blow can affect the people so deeply that they may hardly notice the second one.

Yesterday’s eccentricities become today’s orthodoxies. Since the gold standard was phased out, people have learned to regard both exorbitant taxation and inflationary public spending as simply a fact of life, like hurricanes or for that matter death.

A few generations of that conditioning, and they no longer realise how those two evils affect not only their economic behaviour but indeed their lives in general. More and more they have to strain every sinew just to acquire the necessities of life, becoming more dependent on the state, one way or another.

I cited one telling comparative fact earlier; let me end on another. The side streets around me are lined with small two-up-two-down houses built in the late 19^th, early 20^th century. At the time, they cost roughly the average annual income, which is why they are still called workers’ cottages.

Today they cost about £3 million, which is greater than the average income by two orders of magnitude. This is a small tessera in a vast mosaic. Using it you can reconstruct the whole picture – and perhaps appreciate the virtual world created by the debauchment of real money.