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Thanks to Kemi Badenoch’s loquacity, we now know how she feels about God. Personally, I’d be more interested to know how God feels about Kemi Badenoch, but He isn’t talking – yet.

Second-guessing God is a losing proposition, and I can’t guarantee that he’ll consign Mrs Badenoch to the fires of hell. But I am sure perdition awaits the Conservative Party, specifically because it’s led by Mrs Badenoch and similarly unimpressive politicians.

In broad strokes, Mrs Badenoch says she used to believe in God but doesn’t any longer. In itself, there is nothing remarkable about this loss of faith: apostasy from Christianity is as old as Christianity itself.

Religious faith is a gift, something presented by an outside donor. Or perhaps that’s not quite accurate: a gift, once presented, becomes one’s irrevocable property.

Faith, on the other hand, is more like a loan, something the lender grants but can also foreclose. Since we can’t know God’s reasons for either giving or taking away, we can no more rebuke a man (or in this case a woman) for losing faith than we can praise him for acquiring it.

We can, however, be horrified to see that our venerable political institution is led by a woman who talks about Christianity like a 10-year-old child. And not a particularly bright one at that.

St Augustine said, and St Anselm repeated, that we don’t understand in order to believe. We believe in order to understand, which establishes the proper sequence of religious experience.

To be valid, any rationalisation of faith has to be post-rationalisation. No amount of study, however intensive and extensive, will lead one to faith. Faith, however, may activate one’s intellectual faculties and lead one on a lifelong quest for the truth (and not just religious truth).

But this is strictly derivative and ultimately unnecessary. A tiny majority of egg-headed believers apart, billions of devout Christians over the past two millennia never read any patristic literature, theology, Christian philosophy or for that matter Scripture. This didn’t make their faith any less strong and pure.

However, one should expect an intelligent and educated Christian to have some basic understanding of doctrine. After all, intuitive, mysteriously acquired faith doesn’t put one’s mind on hold. Faith activates the mind, lets it soar to new heights – and not just in religious thought.

The reverse is also true. If a supposedly intelligent and educated believer is pig-ignorant about Christianity, then that person is neither intelligent nor educated. And when an unintelligent and uneducated person leads a major political party, its future is bleak.

Kemi Badenoch was a Christian who lost her faith in 2008, after reading about that Austrian monster Josef Fritzl. He kept his daughter imprisoned in the cellar for 24 years, raping her regularly and producing thereby seven children of whom six survived.

Throughout, the woman prayed for her deliverance, but her prayers went unanswered. Reading about it “killed” Mrs Badenoch’s faith, but I don’t think it died hard.

As she explains, “I thought, I was praying for all sorts of stupid things and I was getting my prayers answered. I was praying to have good grades. My hair should grow longer, and I would pray for the bus to come on time so I wouldn’t miss something. It’s like, why were those prayers answered and not this woman’s prayers?”

In other words, Mrs Badenoch, whose parents were Christians with advanced university degrees and whose grandfather was a Methodist minister, grew up without having a clue about Christian prayer, what it does and what it’s for.

Making supplications to God isn’t like ordering a meal in a restaurant, expecting it to be to one’s liking and sending it back if it isn’t. Every prayer is ultimately a version of the Lord’s Prayer, a statement of faith.

By talking to God and asking him to do certain things, a Christian reaffirms his belief in a loving deity. He knows his prayers will be heard, and he hopes they will be answered.

But he doesn’t expect to have a transactional relationship with God, exchanging prayers for favours. God has his own ways and his own reasons, which our own reason can never grasp. The very definition of God precludes any possibility of complete intelligibility: a higher system can understand a lower one, but not vice versa.

When an adult (Mrs Badenoch was 28 in 2008) loses faith because God didn’t keep his end of the bargain, that adult isn’t very bright. Losing faith can happen to anyone, but when it happens for that reason, neither the believer’s faith nor her mind can be especially strong.

Mrs Badenoch served up a version of the traditional gripe: “If God exists, then how come he allows [insert your favourite calamity]?” Such questions have been asked even by people manifestly more intelligent than Mrs Badenoch, such as David Hume.

He applied his intellectual gifts and literary brilliance to the perennial issue of reconciling God with the existence of evil. If God is merciful and good, Hume kept asking, then why does he allow suffering? If that’s beyond his control, then how omnipotent is he? And if he doesn’t know what’s going on, is he really omniscient?

Countering such questions is called theodicy, vindication of God. Its principal argument is based on free will, God’s gift enabling us to make our own free choice between good and evil.

We are free to make it, just as God is free to punish us if we choose wrong and, one hopes, reward us if we choose right. And, though Christ showed a clear path to individual salvation, we remain free to take that path or not.

Josef Fritzl chose not to take it, thereby abusing God’s gift of free will. But the gift remained on offer, which puts the blame not on God but on Fritzl.

Be that as it may, if Mrs Badenoch chose to follow Hume’s faulty logic, I wonder why she had to wait so long. Surely she must have heard about other acts of evil, those committed on an infinitely vaster scale?

Millions of Russians also prayed on the way to the NKVD’s shooting cellars, as did millions of Jews marching to the Nazi gas chambers. And yet their gruesome fate didn’t shake Mrs Badenoch’s faith. It took the plight of one continually raped woman to do that.

It then got even worse: “I rejected God, not Christianity. So I would still define myself as a cultural Christian.” She is clearly not a cultured one, but let me repeat the question in the title. What in hell is a cultural Christian?

If you reject God, you may still be a wonderful, caring, intelligent person. But you can be no kind of Christian. That breed is defined by the Creed first enunciated exactly 1,700 years ago at Nicaea. It starts with the words “I believe in one God…” and goes on from there. That’s it, in a nutshell.

Does Mrs Badenoch mean she likes Christian culture, say Byzantine iconography, Dante’s poetry and Byrd’s motets? I doubt she is familiar with such recondite things, but I’ll take her word that she is.

But one doesn’t have to be any kind of Christian to have such tastes. For example, a friend of mine, a successful icon trader who genuinely loves his wares, is an atheist. Another friend, a brilliant performer of Western, which is to say Christian, music is himself no Christian.

Mrs Badenoch lists Roger Scruton among her influences, which may shed some light on her curious statement. He was what I’d call a Christianist, someone who believed Christianity was essential for keeping the masses in check, but he himself was above it.

I recall arguing with him, saying that Christianism meant believing that a successful society could be built on a false premise. That was a long time ago, and I don’t remember how Roger replied, although I’m sure he was more eloquent and precise in his statement than Mrs Badenoch was in hers.

More recently, I heard similar arguments from a French friend who, unlike Scruton, actively dislikes Christianity. My point is the same: if you think that Christianity is a pernicious lie, which is nonetheless essential for civilised society, you despise not only God but also people.

You see them as a mindless herd that can be duped by any old lie, provided its sounds good. Is that how Mrs Badenoch sees her electorate? If so, I hope for her sake, and also her party’s, that she doesn’t say that out loud. If she did, I wouldn’t rate her electoral chances highly. Come to think of it, I don’t anyway.

The White House has announced that Trump and Putin will hold peace talks in Alaska on Friday.

This just goes to show how lackadaisical I am in following world events. I didn’t even know that the US and Russia were at war, nor that the hostilities are about to end.

If they are, I’m glad: no one likes to see two nuclear powers go at each other hammer and tongs. One wrong move and the whole world goes kaboom, or so we’ve been told…

Hold on a moment. Penelope has this annoying habit of looking over my shoulder, and she tells me I’ve misread the whole situation. Apparently, there has been no war between the US and Russia, which means no peace treaty is necessary.

That is, between those two countries at any rate. America isn’t currently involved in any conflict, but fair enough: Russia is indeed waging a brutal war of aggression against the Ukraine. Hence the peace the two presidents will be discussing is supposed to end the war between those two countries, with America looking on from the outside.

Now I’m really confused. If America isn’t fighting Russia but the Ukraine is, then surely any peace talks should be held between the two belligerents? A third party, such as the US, may act as the mediator, but that’s strictly optional. The sine qua non of any peace treaty is that it must be concluded between the warring parties, isn’t it?

Enough of this buffoonery. I resorted to it only to make a gravely serious point: Trump and Putin are ganging up on the Ukraine. This regardless of what kind of agreement, if any, they concoct in Alaska. The very fact that the meeting is bilateral and not trilateral proves that neither president regards the Ukraine as a sovereign state.

Putin’s view on this matter is no secret: like all totalitarian leaders, the Russian chieftain is quite open about his monstrous ideas.

The official Kremlin position is that the Ukraine is a province of Russia and, as such, can only have as much sovereignty as Russia allows. In 2014, the Ukraine brazenly went over her allowance, which set in train a series of punitive acts culminating in Russia’s full-scale invasion of 2022.

Trump hasn’t been quite so forthright on the issue – decorum demands that US presidents express themselves equivocally and, if at all possible, within diplomatic protocol. But, as the cliché goes, actions speak louder than words.

By cutting the Ukraine out of the talks in which her national sovereignty and territorial integrity are to be decided (or even discussed), Trump implicitly accepts Putin’s assessment of that heroic country. The Ukraine is the naughty boy sent out of the room not to interfere with a serious talk between the grown-ups.

Trump’s statement on the forthcoming event bespeaks wishful thinking at best, most refreshing ignorance at worst. “President Putin, I believe, wants to see peace, and Zelensky wants to see peace.” Trump said. “In all fairness to President Zelensky, he’s getting everything he needs to, assuming we get something done.”

The talk surrounding the meeting speculates that the grown-ups will agree to trade some of the naughty boy’s territory for a ceasefire. However, saying that Putin wants to see peace and would therefore be happy with such terms is naïve bordering on moronic.

Putin didn’t start this war because he wants more land. Russia already has more than she knows what to do with, and she is de facto ceding to China greater areas, in the Far East, than all of the Ukraine.

Nor does Russia need Ukrainian natural resources. Putin already has the entire periodic table sloshing underfoot everywhere he takes a step in Russia. What Putin wants is to rebuild the Russian Empire to its former wicked grandeur, an unachievable task if even a rump Ukraine keeps her independence.

Putin doesn’t want peace, Mr Trump. He wants victory – over the Ukraine first, Eastern Europe second, the West in general third. Hence no cessation of hostilities Putin will ever accept will amount to genuine peace if it doesn’t include the Ukraine’s capitulation. Otherwise, it can only ever be a short pause.

If Trump doesn’t understand this, he is ignorant and stupid. If, as is more likely, he understands it and still carries on as if he didn’t, he’s immoral and perfidious.

If I read the US president correctly, he wants that whole mess out of his dyed hair. He thinks he can bully Zelensky into some sort of phony peace, collect his Nobel Peace Prize and wash his hands of the whole affair.

He’ll then remove all sanctions on Russia, cut all sorts of ‘deals’ with Putin helping him rebuild Russia’s economy, and watch with avuncular insouciance as Russia rearms, regroups and gets ready to pounce again. As long as Putin can wait until 2029, whatever happens thereafter won’t be Trump’s problem.

Nor is Zelensky “getting everything he needs to”. He understands, even if Trump doesn’t, that ceding 20 per cent of the Ukraine’s territory to Putin will only mean a short delay before Russia gobbles up the rest. What Zelensky needs is Russia withdrawing to the 1991 borders and staying there for ever behind the wall of international peace guarantees.

But he isn’t going to get that, is he? What he’ll get is Trump twisting one of his arms, and Putin the other. Quite possibly, the disgusting scene in the Oval Office will be re-enacted, with a slightly different cast, featuring Putin instead of Vance.

That’s provided a trilateral meeting ever takes place, which isn’t a foregone conclusion. A more likely scenario is Trump and Putin putting on dove plumage and announcing urbi et orbi that they’ve agreed peace terms, of a kind that would be unacceptable to the Ukraine.

If Zelensky then rejects the ‘deal’, Trump will declare him the warmonger, the Ukraine a pariah state, and Russia a peace-loving country that must have all sanctions against her summarily removed.

Then off to Stockholm to collect his gong and read an “I’d like to thank…” speech off the teleprompter. Job done – Trump will go down in history as a blessed peacemaker; the Ukraine will go down, full stop; and Putin will go down as another Ivan III, the 16th century grand duke known as ‘the gatherer of the Russian lands’.

Another possible scenario is that Trump and Putin decide, and Zelensky agrees, to halt temporarily the aerial bombardment of each other’s territory. In exchange, Trump may lift most sanctions on Russia and all the secondary tariffs on her trading partners.

That wouldn’t be a fair exchange either because, while the Ukraine hits only Russian military and strategic targets, the Russians attack Ukrainian cities, murdering civilians in the hope of breaking the nation’s morale. Any pause in that criminal activity would save some lives, which is good news, but only from the humanitarian standpoint.

By contrast, a pause in Ukrainian drone attacks of Russian troops, infrastructure, communications, oil refineries and munitions factories would allow the Russians to catch their strategic breath, beef up their AA defences and then come back in force.

Hence even this palliative measure would hurt the Ukraine and benefit Russia – while also probably sending Trump on the road to Stockholm. Any way you look at it, the announced chinwag will either be useless, if an agreement isn’t reached, or detrimental to the Ukraine, if it is.

One just hopes the Russians won’t demand the return of Alaska, which they sold to the US in 1867 for today’s equivalent of a derisory $130 million. At least, if that happens, Trump will be in his comfort zone of a property developer haggling about a piece of land.

Robert Tombs answers this question in the affirmative. “Being English is not a matter of your ancestry,” he writes, but I think he left an important word out.

Had he written “… not only a matter…,” I’d agree without demurring. As it is, I have reservations.

Still, it’s wrong to accuse Prof. Tombs of being a defender of multiculturalism, as some of his detractors apparently do. On the contrary, his point that “to see little girls in headscarves reciting Kipling and singing the national anthem showed that becoming English was possible” says exactly the opposite.

It’s certainly better than to see such girls reciting the Koran and singing “from the river to the sea”. But that example still doesn’t constitute an argument. Not by itself.

Still, Prof. Tombs isn’t a champion of multi-culti subversion. He doesn’t want those little girls to grow up in the culture of their forebears. He wants them to become English and he thinks it’s possible, given the proper motivation and encouragement.

I’m not so sure, not completely. The other day I watched an old Peter Ustinov show, and he described himself as “a foreigner, although one who feels more at home in England than anywhere else in the world.”

Now, Ustinov’s genetic inputs were a hodgepodge of ethnicity: Russian, German, French, Jewish, Ethiopian – and I’m sure I’ve left a few out. He was also fluent in several languages and lived and worked all over Europe and the US.

Yet he was born in London, grew up in England and English culture, and his mother tongue was unquestionably English. However, he recognised that he was still a number or two short of winning what Cecil Rhodes called “first prize in the lottery of life”.

Prof. Tombs correctly draws a distinction between British and English: “The United Kingdom is technically a ‘state nation’. England is a ‘culture nation’, based on shared history, customs and emotions. Without these, the UK is an empty shell.”

All of these can, he writes, be learned by immigrants, provided they make an effort to integrate and eventually assimilate. And we must help them do so: “We have a very clear choice. Either we do everything possible to make them and their eventual descendants part of our nation. Or we treat them as perpetual outsiders, ‘ethnic minorities’ in a tribalised England.”

All true. The question is: Can a fully integrated and assimilated Afghani or, to take another purely random example, Russian become English, in the same sense in which my wife Penelope is English?

Much as I dislike clichés, this boils down to the old argument about nature and nurture. There is no question that English culture can be learned and adopted, and I could name at least one Russian who has made a fair fist of it. But that’s not all there is to it.

Penelope and her whole family look English, or, as my former advertising colleagues. who associated Englishness with ‘poshness’ and therefore quantified it, used to say, very English. Granted, not every Englishman born and bred boasts the same appearance, but that doesn’t negate the observation that a stereotypical English look exists.

Hence dozens of English generations leave a genetic imprint on a person’s physique. But is it just physique? Surely, there exist many innate character traits that are uniquely English?

Is there really no genetic component to being English? Is it true that one’s ancestry plays no role in a nation’s “shared history, culture and emotions”?

“Every baby is born with a blank mind,” writes Prof. Tombs, which may be true. But the same baby’s DNA is far from blank. It has been encoded over millennia by hundreds of generations.

I think those genes transmit at least some cultural and spiritual traits, but this may be ignorance speaking. I’m no expert in genetics. Neither, for that matter, is Prof. Tombs, but I’d be interested to hear what such scientists have to say.  

If I were privileged to have a conversation with Prof. Tombs, I’d ask him a question or two. Such as, imagine that a boy is born to a family in which every male member has been a soldier, going back to 1066. What are the chances of that boy choosing the same line of work?

Certainly not 100 per cent. But they have to be higher than the same boy growing up a pacifist.

Let’s skew this hypothetical example in Prof. Tomb’s favour. Suppose that boy was adopted at birth and grew up in a family not imbued with martial mores. I’d suggest, without being able to prove it, that, even if he’d be less likely to become a soldier, he’d be no more likely to become a pacifist.

Or take another example. Penelope grew up some 10 miles from the sea, and most Englishmen are within 50 miles. That may be why the English are a nation of mariners, sea travellers, naval tars, pirates, explorers, colonisers.

Every English person I’ve ever met, including all members of my family, goes weak-kneed at the sight of a vast expanse of salty water. I, on the other hand, grew up some 400 miles from the nearest sea, which I first saw when I was 20 years old.

As a result, I quite like the sea, but it doesn’t hold any mystical fascination for me. I much prefer rivers and lakes, the water features I grew up with.

This, though I dare say I’m as assimilated as one can get. I meet all of Prof. Tombs’s criteria: knowing English history, following English customs and even having English emotions. In an exercise of hubris, I may even feel that I write English as well as Prof. Tombs.

In fact, my good friend, an Anglican priest and a proud Englishman, once said that I’m more English than he is, in that I showed more emotional restraint.

He meant it is a compliment, which is how I took it. But, though we both acknowledge that stereotypical English behaviour exists, we are both aware that there is more to Englishness than that, some ineffable quality that he possesses and I don’t.

I have to disagree with Prof. Tombs when he writes: “We have no single religion …”. England is traditionally a Christian country, and has been since AD 597. That’s long enough for Christianity to have become a universal formative force of English character, regardless of how many people have abandoned it.

If he means we have no single confession of Christianity, he is almost right, although, unlike most Western countries, England has an established confession, one to which my good friend has devoted his whole life.

But by that criterion, no national character exists anywhere in the West – no Western country has a single (or any other) religion any longer. “For centuries,” he adds, “Englishness revolved round institutions – the Kingdom, the Church, the Common Law and the inherited rights of ‘free-born Englishmen’.”

Yes, but what if an Englishman is ill-advisedly a republican, an atheist and a proponent of the Roman Law? I’d maintain that, “in spite of all temptations”, he remains an Englishman, if a deracinated one.

All of this is conjecture on my part, something I sense but can’t prove. However, Prof. Tombs’s assertions are also open to debate, or at least sensible discussion.

The rest of his article makes an indisputable case, to me even a self-evident one. Whether or not Englishness can be learned, writes Prof. Tombs, it can certainly be unlearned, and what passes for our intellectual elite is busily trying to indoctrinate both children and adults in that spirit.

He lists all the usual culprits, “from the National Trust via the Museums Association to the Church of England”, with, I’m sure, schools, universities and mass media in between. They are busily working towards denigrating what’s left of Englishness, destroying social and cultural cohesion in the process.

If I wanted to show off the extent to which I’m assimilated, I’d call those reprobates ‘jammy buggers’. As it is, I’ll call them deliberate and perfidious subversives, and I think Prof. Tombs would agree. Alas, I can’t quite repay the courtesy by accepting that ancestry plays no part in Englishness.   

In mid-July Trump delivered a 50-day ultimatum: if Putin doesn’t agree to a ceasefire in the Ukraine by 2 September, Trump will punish Russia with any number of the Plagues of Egypt.

If Trump expected a reaction, none came, not a verbal one at any rate. Putin’s response took the shape of missiles raining on Ukrainian cities with renewed intensity, and Trump’s disappointment deepened.

He upped the ante, cutting the 50 days down to 10-12, with the ultimatum now expiring on 7-9 August. Yet again Putin said nothing, other than remarking that Trump’s disappointment came from excessive expectations.

A longer reply was delivered by Putin’s poodle Medvedev, who issued yet another nuclear threat to the West. In response, Trump announced that he was moving two Trident-bearing nuclear submarines closer to Russia.

Nuclear blackmail has, of course, been a standard feature of Russia’s dialogue with the West for at least 20 years. The message is simple: we are prepared to take millions of casualties and have our major cities incinerated. Are you? Are you ready to swap New York and London for Moscow and Petersburg? You aren’t, are you? So watch your step.

The blackmail has worked. The West watched its step in 2008, when Russia attacked Georgia. It did so again in 2014, when Russia annexed the Crimea and parts of Eastern Ukraine. Yet again in 2022, when the full-scale invasion began. And ever since.

That’s why NATO hasn’t even mooted a direct military involvement in the Ukraine. And even military supplies to the beleaguered country have been carefully measured out not to provoke Russia into a cataclysmic retaliation.

Hence there was nothing new about Medvedev’s threats, but America’s answer with subs rather than just words supposedly signalled a change. Trump’s announcement looked like America’s substantive response to nuclear blackmail, but that impression is illusory.

The US Navy keeps on permanent patrol seven or eight of its 18 Ohio-class subs, each capable of carrying 24 Trident ICBMs. I don’t know where they tend to sail but, at a wild guess, I doubt they concentrate on the coast of Argentina or New Zealand.

Thus, they can’t be very far from Russia anyway and, even assuming they’ve now shortened the missiles’ time to target by a few minutes, the difference is trivial. As is Trump’s much-vaunted toughness provoked by Putin’s intransigence.

What’s going to happen at the end of this week, when the 10-12 days of America’s ultimatum have expired?

Steve Witcoff, the sorriest excuse for a strategic negotiator I’ve ever seen, will fly to Moscow a day or two prior, but he is unlikely to get anything other than yet another run-around designed to gain time for Putin.

What will America do then? Introduce tougher sanctions on Russia? Putin has already announced the country is immune to them – with a little help from her friends in China, India and some EU members.

Hit all those friends with secondary tariffs? Trump already threatened astronomical levies on China once but backed off when the latter retaliated in kind. Competent economists have explained to Donald that America can afford a trade war with China no more than she can afford a nuclear war with Russia.

How else can Trump make good on his threats and ultimatums? I doubt he knows, mainly because his understanding of global relations doesn’t allow him to know.

Trump has raised his transactional, property developer’s view of the world to an absolute. Every little problem of life can be solved with a deal, he believes, an offer the other side either likes or at least can’t afford to refuse.

That’s why Trump was sure he could end the war in the Ukraine within 24 hours of his inauguration. All he had to do was make Putin an offer better than anything that demented villain Biden could even think of.

Sure enough, the offer Trump ended up putting on the table made Munich, 1938, look like a resolute stand on principle.

All Putin had to do was agree to some, any ceasefire. In return, he was welcome to keep the 20 per cent of the Ukraine’s territory he already controlled.

The Crimea was to be declared Russian in perpetuity. The rump Ukraine would become a neutral country forfeiting all plans of joining NATO or the EU. All sanctions on Russia would be rescinded. All American military aid to the Ukraine would cease. Trump even advanced that last offer on spec, as a gesture of good will. Military supplies to the Ukraine slowed down to a trickle and even stopped altogether for a while.

No other president, not Biden, not Obama, not Clinton, not even Nixon, could have offered Russia a better deal. There was no better deal imaginable, short of US troops going into action on Russia’s side.

Trump fully expected Putin to gobble up the deal and bite Donald’s arm off. Instead, the man Trump had always admired told him, not in so many words, exactly where he could shove his offer. Excessive expectations indeed.

Neither Trump nor Witcoff nor, alas, most Western leaders and commentators understand what Putin wants to get out of this conflict. That’s why they are perplexed: Trump is giving Putin what appears to be victory on a platter. But the US president doesn’t realise that, for the Russian chieftain, that offer is tantamount to defeat.

The KGB rulers of Russia don’t want 20 per cent of the Ukraine. They want to extinguish the Ukraine’s sovereignty and incorporate 100 per cent of the country into the empire they strive to recreate on the ruins of the Soviet Union. The KGB didn’t oust the Communist Party and dismantle the USSR to turn Russia into an essentially Asian country, a vassal to China in all but name.

And without the Ukraine, Russia has no claim to being an empire and a European power. In fact, the Duchy of Muscovy only became Russia, and eventually the Russian Empire, when the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth began to fall apart in the 17^th century. Much of the Ukraine was then incorporated into Russia, with the rest to follow after the three partitions of Poland in the 18^th century.

The Ukraine became the westernmost part of the Russian Empire not only geographically but also civilisationally. Quite apart from the strong Catholic influences west of the Dnieper, the Ukraine has always been more Western than Russia.

Even her Orthodox bishops were culturally and intellectually closer to their Western colleagues than to the Russian clergy. In fact, when Peter I set out to westernise the Russian Church, he had to rely on two Ukrainian bishops, Stefan Yavorsky and Theophan Prokopovych, to provide the theological and philosophical impetus of the reform.

Nevertheless, the Russians have always looked down on the Ukrainians with the condescending smirk of an imperial bully. Ukrainians have been treated as Little Russians boasting no culture of their own and speaking a corrupted Russian patois, not their own language.

When, towards the end of Yeltsyn’s tenure, the government of Russia de facto moved from the Kremlin to Lubyanka, the recreation of the Russian Empire moved to the forefront of the country’s desiderata.

In 2005, Putin described the collapse of the Soviet Union, which is to say the communist version of the Russian Empire, as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century”, and one he was implicitly committed to reverse. And his Munich speech of 2007 made the imperial ambitions clear: Russia wasn’t going to accept any world order in which she played no dominant role.

Both Yeltsyn and Putin knew from the start that an independent Ukraine was a major obstacle to their far-reaching imperial ambitions. Russia couldn’t recreate her 19^th century role of “the gendarme of Europe” or especially her 20^th century domination of half of Europe if a sovereign Ukraine stood in the way.

Without incorporating the Ukraine, Russia can’t be an empire. Without being an empire, its ruling KGB/FSB can’t lord it over Europe. Whether an independent Ukraine is neutral or allied with blocs like NATO or the EU is immaterial. Her very independence in any form is stuck in Putin’s craw.

I mentioned Munich, 1938, earlier. That attempt to appease an evil aggressor turned the dial of world war from possible to inevitable. True to form, the West never learned that lesson – history is more likely than any other science to have its lessons unheeded.

The countdown for another, more devastating, war has been started, and no ‘deal’ will stop the timer’s ticking. Some military analysts believe that Russia will be ready to test the West’s courage with nuclear blasts by 2036. Others insist Putin will want to settle matters during Trump’s tenure.

Making such predictions is their job, not mine. All I can suggest is that the danger is real, I’d even say imminent. And it can’t be averted by haggling with Putin, on the assumption that a good deal could bring him round.

However, just as the Second World War could have been prevented by a resolute show of united force, so, one hopes, can the Third one be averted by reminding Putin in tangible, physical terms that the West’s military potential is several times greater than Russia’s.

The West has greater numbers, more sophisticated and numerous weapons, much stronger and bigger economies, more advanced technologies, greater financial resources. Yet these matter nothing without spiritual and moral strength, and I hope our deficit in such qualities won’t prove fatal.

Putin’s silence is thunderous. As far as he is concerned, there is nothing to discuss. I’ll be curious to see what will happen in the next few days, if Witcoff is sent home empty-handed. I do hope I’ll live to see my next birthday (10 August). 

Such is the overall theme of A.N. Wilson’s article on the appointment of the Right Rev Cherry Vann as the Archbishop of the Anglican Church in Wales.

This epochal development, believes Mr Wilson, sets a fine example the Church of England ought to follow: “As a churchgoer, I do not absolutely insist that the next Archbishop of Canterbury should be a lesbian, though I would much prefer it if she were.”

If I were close to Mr Wilson (whom the late Auberon Waugh used to call ‘Ann Wilson’), I’d be concerned about his mental health. Since I’m not, I’ll simply comment on the arguments he puts forth. The effort is worthwhile because one hears similar nonsense more and more often.

To begin with, you don’t play the game, you don’t make the rules, as Americans say. Since I’m not an Anglican myself, it ill-behoves me to lecture the Anglicans on their criteria for consecrating bishops or ordaining priests.

If they believe that any mammal with a pulse is fit for high ecclesiastical office, who am I to argue? All I can do is bemoan that the established church of my country has evidently gone mad.

Yet Mr Wilson invites not just regret but also argument by stating, correctly, that: “Anglicans have traditionally believed to be part of one holy catholic and apostolic church.”

Now, as far as I’m concerned, the only two apostolic churches are Orthodox and Roman Catholic. Henry VIII’s break with Rome was also a break in the apostolic succession started by the original twelve disciples of Christ.

Though Henry himself didn’t become a Protestant, the English Church did – as a result of his turning his back on the throne of St Peter. It’s true that the High end of the Anglican Church has kept much of the Catholic structure and liturgy, along with pomp and circumstance. But its credal document, the Thirty-Nine Articles, is sheer Calvinism – a confession no one has ever accused of being apostolic.

If you seek tangible proof of the fundamentally Protestant nature of the C of E, then its 1994 decision to ordain women should satisfy your curiosity. My view on the matter is based on theology and church tradition, which I’ll discuss in a moment.

But first let’s see how Mr Wilson frames his opposite argument: “It may well be the case that the majority of Christians in the world – Catholic and Orthodox – are the inheritors of a tradition that is patriarchal if not actually misogynistic; but this is where they are…”.

Mr Wilson magnanimously agrees that the majority of Christians have a right to such obscurantism. But:

“The progressives, however, are also right – so very, very right – to say not only that our perceptions of human character and human sexuality have changed but that a great deal of what was considered morality in the past was not merely wrong, it was a hypocrisy, a denial of what was real.”

And reality is in constant flux, with no absolute, eternal truths anywhere in existence. If ‘progressives’ believe that it’s now perfectly moral for a man who used to be a woman to produce a child by a woman who used to be a man, then the rest of us should grin and bear it. Tempora mutantur, and all that.

As applied to the issue in hand, this means that, since the feminist movement has won its historic battle not just for women’s equality but for their identity with men in every respect, the church should accept that fact and change accordingly.

This means that Mr Wilson’s argument has nothing to do with Scripture, theology or church tradition. It’s wholly secular and relativist. In other words, it draws its intellectual content from the avowed enemies of Christianity who over the past few centuries have succeeded in turning it into nothing but a quaint personal preference.

That sort of thinking is puny even when applied to quotidian life. When applied to church affairs, it’s deranged.

In the same fateful year of 1994, Pope John Paul II settled the issue of female ordination once and for all:

“In order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church’s constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Luke 22:32), I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgement is to be held definitively by all the Church’s faithful (Ordinatio Sacerdotalis 4).”

Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, added that the ban on female ordination required “definitive assent, since, founded on the written word of God, and from the beginning constantly preserved in the Tradition of the Church, it has been set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal magisterium”.

The word ‘infallibly’ meant that the 2,000 years’ tradition of ordaining only men was free of error. Putting it simply, apostolic churches don’t ordain women because Jesus didn’t include them in the original twelve apostles charged sacramentally to act not just in Christ’s name, but also in his person.

In his Summa Theologica, St Thomas Aquinas explained what that meant. “Sacramental signs represent what they signify by natural resemblance.” To act in persona Christi, a priest needs to have a natural resemblance to Christ, who was a man.

Jesus conferred that status on his disciples, who then transmitted it through the centuries. This in no way means that Christ or his followers regarded women as in any way inferior. They are fully equal to men, but the role they play in life and the Church is different.

I’d suggest that, at the time of Jesus’s ministry, the women in his entourage weren’t just equal to the men but superior to them. The Virgin, for example, has always been venerated by the Church more than any apostle, and, unlike them, she is regarded as sinless.

When Jesus was crucified, it was women who kept vigil at the foot of the cross, while the men cowered at a distance. Peter, the rock on which the Church was built, betrayed Jesus thrice, and it was a woman to whom Christ first appeared after the Resurrection.

Throughout history, and especially during Christianity’s heyday in the Middle Ages, convents were every bit as vital to the religion as monasteries were. Héloïse was more of a seminal figure than Abelard was, and Hildegard of Bingen stood out among her male contemporaries. The communion of saints includes numerous women – none of whom, however, administered sacraments at the altar.

It’s basic theological ignorance to insist that we must follow the dicta of our times just as Jesus is supposed to have followed his. God is timeless, and his church can’t be a weathervane turning the way the wind blows. It’s a factor of constancy, guardian and transmitter of the eternal truth – or it is nothing.

Mr Wilson doesn’t seem to understand this. Since he claims to be an Anglican churchgoer, he must have noticed the empty pews every Sunday. As a thinking man, he must have wondered why, but the conclusion he has reached is exactly the opposite of the truth. The Anglican Church has become an irrelevance in every other than the purely ceremonial sense not because it doesn’t respond to woke zeitgeist quickly enough – but because it does so with servile alacrity.

The Anglican Church is rapidly turning into an ecclesiastical extension of social services or else organisations like the Women’s Global Empowerment Fund. This renders it superfluous: the cause of wokery is amply served without it.

Notice also that ‘Ann Wilson’ hankers not only after the consecration of female bishops. In the ideal he sees in his mind’s eye, Anglican bishops should be not just women, but specifically lesbians.

“Jesus never mentioned homosexuality, as far as we know,” he writes. This is the line of thought one expects from a sectarian (and theologically ignorant) Protestant, not from a man who believes he worships in a catholic apostolic Church.

Christianity isn’t just the teaching of Christ but also – some will say primarily – the teaching about Christ. Much of this teaching comes from both Testaments, and not necessarily from the words uttered by Jesus. And the Bible contains numerous injunctions against homosexuality: Genesis 19, Leviticus 18 and 20, Romans 1, 1 Corinthians, 1 Timothy, to name a few.

Still, if the Anglicans must have female bishops, they might as well have lesbian ones, especially those who come from ethnic minorities. In for a penny, as the saying goes.  

What do Steve Bannon, Elon Musk and Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik have in common?

You’ll probably find it easier to identify the common ground between the first two. Bannon is, and Musk was, often espied sporting MAGA caps, signalling their affection for Donald Trump and everything he stands for.

Now, a good friend of mine, a psychiatrist by trade, claims that habitually wearing any baseball cap lowers the man’s IQ by at least 20 points. He didn’t diagnose precisely the further reduction caused by the MAGA insignia on that headgear, other than saying it’s significant.

Even if true, I’m sure that dropping 20 or even 30 IQ points still left Messrs Bannon and Musk with an above average level. In any case, one can detect some commonality between them.

But Breivik? The chap who in 2011 first blew up four people with a car bomb and then shot another 69 dead? Now serving a long prison sentence, Breivik seems the odd man out in that trio. Granted, Bannon was also a jailbird, but he only served four months for contempt of Congress. Hardly a mass murderer then.

So what do those three chaps have in common? I shan’t keep you in suspense any longer. All three are champions and admirers of Tommy Robinson, the English criminal bizarrely as popular in MAGA circles as he is reviled in his native land.

Even as we speak, Tommy is a fugitive from justice. The other day, he was spreading anti-immigration leaflets at St Pancras Station. Now, Tommy is a fire-eating crusader against Islamic immigration, legal or otherwise. He is entitled to his views, especially since I happen to share them.

But an old man at St Pancras didn’t. He tried to argue with Tommy, who responded in his well-honed manner. He shouted, “Come at me then” and punched the old man in the face, leaving him unconscious on the floor and the onlookers in a state of shock.

“He f***ing came at me, bruv,” yelled Tommy in the only idiom that comes naturally to him. In Tommy’s circles, you dis someone at your peril. A disrespectful word, and you’ll end up in hospital, as that argumentative old man did.

After that assault, Tommy hastily left the station, and soon thereafter a warrant was issued for his arrest. But he didn’t wait around to have his collar felt, as it had been so many times in the past. He hopped on a plane and fled the country, apparently for Cyprus or perhaps Tenerife.

That was by no means an isolated blip in an otherwise exemplary CV. Last October, for example, Robinson was sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to 10 breaches of a High Court injunction.

At the time, Steve Bannon, Elon Musk and other MAGA types claimed that Robinson was a political prisoner convicted for his views, which proved that Britain was a fascist country with no respect for freedom of speech.

I share their commitment to that fundamental liberty, but I’d rather it were upheld by someone other than a thug with a long list of criminal convictions. Alas, not all of them had much to do with support for free speech.

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon grew up in Luton, a town that relates to London the way Bedford-Stuyvesant relates to mid-town Manhattan. In 2003 he got a job at Luton Airport, but lost it when he was convicted of assaulting an off-duty police officer in a drunken argument, for which Stephen served a 12-month prison sentence.

At about the same time he adopted the name of the football hooligan Tommy Robinson as his nom de guerre and then proceeded to tread the path charted by his idol. He became a prominent member of Luton Town MIGs, a hooligan crew ready to do battle against all comers for the honour of their team.

In 2011 Robinson was convicted for instigating a 100-man brawl with supporters of Newport County. Overall, he served four prison terms between 2005 and 2019, including those for mortgage fraud, using a false passport and violating bail conditions.

During that time, Robinson entered politics, first as a member of the fascist British National Party (BNP), then as founder of the English Defence League (EDL). It was within the ranks of the latter that in 2011 he got another 12-week prison sentence for headbutting a fellow EDL member.

Prior to his 2018 sentencing for violating a court order, Tommy appeared on the American website InfoWars to ask for political asylum in the US. As far as I know, that wasn’t granted, but Tommy clearly knows which side his bread is buttered.

For, though Tommy’s tireless fund-raising in Britain does bring in some money, most of his financing comes from the US and Canada. The sums are significant, and they aren’t always put to political causes.

In 2022, Robinson filed for bankruptcy. According to The Times, he owed about £2,000,000 to various creditors, plus £160,000 in back taxes.

Appearing at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, Tommy explained he was spending about £100,000 on gambling in casinos and online. In general, he wasted large sums on “drink, alcohol, partying”, which admission must have pleased his sponsors no end.

Their pockets are deep. Tommy enjoys the support of the US social media platform Breibart, started by Bannon, and its Canadian counterpart, Rebel Media, owned by Ezra Levant. Elon Musk has also been known to join the whip-around with a bob or two.

Philadelphia-based think tank, Middle East Forum (MEF), has spent about $60,000 on Robinson’s legal fees. They were also behind plans to get Tommy around $1,000,000 for a US speaking tour, but he was denied a visa because he had been jailed in Britain in 2013 for using someone else’s passport to travel to the US.

Another US sponsor is tech billionaire Robert Shillman, who donated to Rebel Media in 2017 for them to employ Tommy at around $5,000 a month. He also gets funds from all sorts of international right-wing organisations, such as the Australian Liberty Alliance and, according to strong rumours, Russian trolls.

Most of Robinson’s North American sponsors describe themselves as MAGA conservatives, libertarians or both, and they see this common thug as a kindred soul or else brother-in-arms.

I’ve spent so much time on Robinson’s CV to illustrate the confusion reigning on the American Right. It has to be tremendous for them to describe Tommy as a conservative, as my MAGA podcast host insisted to me many times.

Demanding terminological precision from modern people is always a losing proposition, but especially when it comes to political taxonomy. Thus, Americans use the word ‘liberalism’ to describe socialism, one of the most illiberal doctrines in history.

The term ‘conservative’ is similarly misused and abused, which is understandable in a revolutionary republic constituted along Enlightenment lines.

Intuitive, which is to say the only real, American conservatives find it hard to reconcile their inclination with America’s founding egalitarian documents. These proclaimed that “all men are created equal”, abolished all titles of nobility and, according to Jefferson, “created a wall” between state and religion.

That makes it hard to imagine how true political (as opposed to cultural) conservatism can exist in America. If probed, most Americans who consider themselves conservatives will admit that they define that political creed largely in economic terms.

They – including such brilliant and erudite thinkers as the late William F. Buckley – readily describe themselves as libertarians, which is unfortunate. Most libertarians I’ve met seek liberation not just from the state, but also from any religious, cultural or intellectual authority. This is an unacceptable price to pay for free markets, much as all conservatives see them as a sine qua non of just society.

Another outlet for dejected intuitive conservatives seeking a political home is single-issue causes, such as anti-immigration. This too is unfortunate, even if the single issue is worthy, as it is in this case.

That way lie ideological zealotry, fanaticism and eventually madness, for single-issue politics tends to put blinkers on the mind’s eye. In that focus, a disgusting recidivist criminal like Tommy Robinson becomes a fellow conservative and a natural ally.

This is the same warped logic that led French revolutionaries to proclaim pas d’ennemis a gauche (“no enemies on the Left”). Replacing gauche with droite doesn’t make this approach to political thought any more sound.

British conservatives are partly to blame for this confusion. They either shy away from hands-on politics, which they – well, I – find distasteful, or else pretend that today’s Tory Party has anything to do with conservatism. Its shilly-shallying on every issue that matters, emphatically including immigration, opens doors for thugs like Robinson to barge in waving a conservative flag.

As a result, conservatism becomes associated in the public mind with political, often criminal, thuggery. That does untold harm to both the concept and its chances of ever emerging from its present doldrums.

I could say the same about the MAGA movement in the US, but won’t. I’ve already upset enough people for one day.  

What can make even a staunch Brexiteer regret leaving the EU? One thing only: Britain aligning herself with every law, rule and regulation of the EU, but this time around without any say in how they are adopted.

This seems to be the ploy devised by Keir Starmer whose federalist loins ache for returning Britain to the EU fold. If so, he gets top marks for perfidy and bottom marks for just about everything else.

His latest attempt to shove Westminster closer to Brussels involves cars, which all Marxists hate, even from the back seats of their government limousines.

The other day I suggested that the word socialists detest the most is ‘private’, “as in private healthcare, private income, private pensions, private enterprise”.

A reader of mine pointed out two omissions from that list, private education and private sponsorship of arts, and he is of course right: a heavy socialist hand can only ever produce non-education and non-arts.

Yet another Labour bugbear neither of us thought of at the time is private transportation, which is to say cars. When they first appeared, cars were the prerogative of the affluent few. But Henry Ford and Ferdinand Porsche put paid to that exclusivity by producing affordable cars for mass consumption.

But who said resentment and class hatred can’t outlive their original source? They certainly can, and cars provide a perfect target.

In spite of all the petty regulations attached to their use, private vehicles remain a factor of freedom. A driver can get in, push the starter button and go in any of the available four directions, rather than rely on typically unreliable public transport to follow a fixed route.

Socialists on either side of the Channel would dearly love to ban cars altogether, but that final solution is so far unachievable. Hence they settle for second best: making the drivers’ life as hard, unpleasant and expensive as they can.

I shan’t bore you with a litany of measures governments take to that end. Suffice it to say that driving in European capitals, such as London and Paris, is already more trouble than it’s worth. Yet the new outrage to be perpetrated by Labour will make even rural driving difficult.

A few years ago, most Continental governments mandated that all new cars be fitted with in-built breathalysers, so-called Alcolocks. The device is linked to the ignition system.

After getting into the car, the driver has to blow into the breathalyser for five seconds. If he is under the legal limit, the car will start. If he is over, it won’t.

Many countries mandate Alcolocks to prevent repeat offending by those convicted of DUI. However, in Britain such repeat offenders are few. Between 2013 and 2024, there were only 27,000 of them. That’s a trivial number in a country that has 40 million drivers.

I’m sure these statistics must be similar on the Continent. But socialists don’t just want to punish recidivists. They want to turn most people into law-breakers, the better to lord it over them.

To that effect, many EU countries make Alcolocks mandatory for all new cars. And, faithful to its ploy of having Britain bossed by Brussels, HMG has announced that Britain will follow suit. From now on, a chap sinking a couple of pints with his mates somewhere in rural Cornwall will have to walk home on empty roads he could have driven in perfect safety.

Two inner imperatives of our Marxist government come together to deliver yet another blow to drivers: socialist hatred of private transportation and Starmer’s ploy of turning Britain into an EU vassal, a de facto member, but without membership privileges, such as they are.

Socialist assault on cars is usually justified by a touching concern for ‘our planet’, haunted as it is by the spectre of global warming. This time, however, Starmer has come up with a new excuse, and I never thought he was capable of such ingenuity.

He argues that differences in car manufacturing between Britain and the Continent will lead to higher costs being passed on to the customer. That’s why Lord Hendy, Minister of State for the Department for Transport, stated that the government “takes an explicit presumption in favour of alignment”.

The argument from cost is as mendacious as one from non-existent global warming. Mandatory breathalysers and black-box recorders will add thousands of pounds to the cost of a new vehicle. In France, that sum is about 3,000 euros, to give you an idea.

Be that as it may, Starmer’s government isn’t driven by concerns for the financial health of the 40 million British drivers. Their motivation is erasing enough legal differences between Britain and the EU to make any arguments against re-joining sound churlish.

Hence my title above. Indeed, why not replace the precedent-based English Common Law with the Roman positive law widespread on the Continent? If I hated Britain as much as the socialists do, that would be my first proposal.

While we’re at it, let’s get rid of the monarchy too. After all, most EU countries are republics, and even those few that nominally aren’t have abandoned the notion of anointed kings.

Then again, to be fair, successive governments have done their level best to turn the House of Lords into a travesty, but the name still persists, and it’s a constant irritant. Let’s call it the Senate, shall we?

That has a better, republican ring to it, as does President Starmer. If our monarch will no longer be head of state, someone has to be, and Starmer’s name just rolls off the tongue. Make him president, Angie prime minister, Britain a republic, and Macron is your uncle.

This little exercise in reductio ad absurdum isn’t as absurd as you might think. Another socialist, Mao, taught that a journey of a thousand miles starts with a small step. During their short tenure, the Starmer government has taken quite a few steps in the direction of the EU, and these can turn into giant strides at any moment.

I hope this socialist march through the institutions can be stopped before King Charles III becomes Charlie Mountbatten. And the way of stopping it is revolting against any move in that direction, no matter how small and insignificant it may seem.

“One talon gets stuck, the whole bird will perish,” says the Russian proverb. I’m not sure our folklore has an exact equivalent. But this is the spirit in which our government acts – and Britain is the bird.

P.S. An attempt to commit a crime is criminal in itself. Thus any self-policing driver who fails his car’s breathalyser test, should arrest himself for attempted DUI – and rough himself up if he resists. I wonder if Sir Keir has thought of this.

Donald Trump is an uncouth, overbearing, narcissistic, tasteless, ill-bred, megalomaniac, loud-mouthed, ignorant, rude and uncivilised bully.

All these traits figure high on the list of things I detest the most in people, and Trump doesn’t seem to have any decent human traits to counterbalance those I’ve mentioned.

Hence the temptation is strong to argue with him even when he says and does all the right things. That temptation must be resisted, however.

By all means, let’s agree with Buffon that “the style is the man himself” (le style c’est l’homme même) and conclude that Trump’s style paints his character a solid black. But a truism remains true no matter how it’s uttered or how obvious it is.

When words escape a speaker’s mouth, they leave behind his personality and begin to fly solo. At that point, one must look at them on their own terms and stop considering their source, hard as it may be in Trump’s case.

When Trump doesn’t talk gibberish, which he does most of the time, he speaks in truisms, ideas that are true but self-evident, unoriginal and hardly in need of saying. Or so one would think.

However, when he talks to European leaders, Trump’s banalities acquire the power of earth-shattering revelations. For little they say and nothing they do suggests they are familiar with basic ideas one can overhear in pubs, when the punters are still on their third pint.

Trump clearly despises most European politicians, and I include British ones in that category. This upsets me – not because he is wrong to feel that way, but because he is right. I know exactly what Pushkin meant when he wrote to his friend Vyazemsky: “Of course, I despise my country head to toe – but I am offended when a foreigner shares this feeling.”

Look, for example, at the political lecture Trump gave Starmer. It wasn’t even a teacher talking to a student – it was a grown-up explaining to a slow child that sticking fingers into an electric socket isn’t a good idea.

Assuming that Starmer’s main rival at the next general election will be Nigel Farage, Trump charted a route to Starmer’s victory:

“Generally speaking, the one who cuts taxes the most, the one who gives you the lowest energy prices, the best kind of energy, the one that keeps you out of wars… a few basics… And in your case a big immigration component… I think the one that’s toughest and most competent on immigration is going to win the election, but then you add… low taxes, and you add the economy.”

Then Trump gave Starmer the benefit of his opinion of London’s mayor, affectionately known as Sadist Khan. Sir Sadiq, said Trump, is a “nasty man” who has done a “terrible job”. I agree with that characterisation wholeheartedly, but Sir Keir didn’t. “Actually, he is a friend of mine,” he muttered.

Undeterred, Trump repeated what he had just said, perhaps implying that Starmer ought to choose his friends more wisely. Bad manners, yes. But also true.

Although Trump isn’t widely known for his diplomatic skills and chivalry, he then issued a fulsome compliment to Sir Keir and, bizarrely, to his wife, Lady Starmer. The latter left me perplexed because I know nothing about Lady Starmer. The former left me wondering if Trump was perhaps talking about a different Sir Keir Starmer.

The one I know fails miserably on every count mentioned by Trump. Britain is slumping under the burden of the highest taxation in modern history. Her government’s fanatical pursuit of net zero is beggaring the country even further. And in the first six months of this year, 20,000 people crossed the Channel illegally, 50 per cent more than during the same period last year.

Surely Trump must be aware of all this. And still he complimented Sir Keir on “getting tough on immigration” and in general doing a sterling job. “[Sir Keir] did a great thing with the economy,” explained Trump, “because a lot of money is going to come in because of the [US trade] deal that was made.”

That I’ll have to see to believe. The deals Trump strikes with other countries manifestly lack an altruistic aspect. In this case, the deal Britain got is good only comparatively.

Our exports to the US will be hit with a 10 per cent tariff across the board, and it’s still possible that the exports of steel, aluminium and pharmaceuticals will suffer a greater levy. But it is indeed better than the agreement Trump reached with the EU, personified by Ursula von der Leyen.

If at the start of the year the average US tariffs on EU exports were five percent, under the new deal they’ll triple to 15 per cent (with steel, aluminium and pharmaceuticals again up in the air). When Trump declared trade war on the world, he threatened 30 per cent, but even 15 will be crippling for many European industries, such as the German motor trade.

Incomprehensibly, the deal isn’t reciprocal: American exports to the EU will face no tariffs at all. If Ursula gets to keep her job after signing her name to this daylight robbery, I’ll be surprised.

In addition, the EU has also undertaken to spend $600 billion in America, including the purchase of armaments for the Ukraine. And, to complete the humiliation, the EU agreed to buy $750 billion-worth of US liquefied natural gas over the next three years.

Trump is openly and justifiably contemptuous of what he calls ‘windmills’, a word I myself use occasionally. One of the truisms I mentioned earlier is that it’s impossible to run a modern industry without fossil fuels and nuclear energy. Wind, water and sun did a marvellous job keeping medieval Europe afloat, but energy needs have grown since then, and windmills can’t satisfy them.

Yet, as I’ve said a thousand times in this space if I’ve said it once, ideology triumphs over reason. Socialists – which all European leaders are – hate fossil fuels because they fired up capitalism, and they hate nuclear energy because the Soviets told them to do so when they wanted the West to be dependent on Arab oil.

Hence they are shutting down nuclear reactors, either completely, as in Germany, or partially, as in France, and they are disfiguring European skylines with those prohibitively expensive monstrosities. Domestic production of fossil fuels is being phased out, with only Norway so far standing firm in her commitment to the principal source of her wealth.

And now they are going to buy almost a trillion’s worth of American LNG, paying through the nose and thinking through the, well, you know. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

On his own terms, Trump’s foray into Europe has been a success. He bullied the EU into signing up to the kind of terms it usually takes a military victory to impose. He overshadowed all European politicians, including Starmer, whom Trump also humiliated with his uncivil didacticism. And he still had time to get a few rounds of golf in.

Yet international relations aren’t all based on tangible, material gains. There are many imponderables involved, the prime of which is trust. That’s what Trump has destroyed, for the duration of his presidency certainly, for a long time thereafter possibly.

These are fraught times, and America needs not only trade partners she can bully, but also allies she can count on.

Riding roughshod over Europe and blackmailing her with the threat of a ruinous trade war may get considerable short-term benefits.

But it’s hardly conducive to fostering respect, friendship and trust, the three commodities that are more indispensable during conflicts than a positive balance sheet. I just hope this statement won’t be put to a test, not soon at any rate.

If you want to understand today’s socialist governments, including our own, study your Marx.

For people can change their opinions, their tastes and even their convictions, but one thing they can’t change is their DNA. And Marxism is encoded into the chromosomes of all socialists, including those who oxymoronically call themselves ‘democratic’.

Once you’ve realised this, you’ll have no trouble identifying the word that grates on socialists’ ears more than any other. That word is ‘private’.

You know, as in private healthcare, private income, private pensions, private enterprise – private anything, except private parts to which socialists pay rather morbid obeisance. That exception is courtesy of Freud, that part of the unholy trinity they worship, which also includes Darwin and Marx.

The other day Boris Johnson wrote an apologetic column about his having gone private to take care of a kidney stone. He probably doesn’t think it’s apologetic. After all, he makes an argument for private medicine, and he rebukes Starmer for hating it.

But Johnson’s argument is wholly based on the need to help the NHS out by relieving the pressures rendering it less marvellous than everyone knows it is. He doesn’t for a second question the wisdom and morality of creating a rapacious, egalitarian Leviathan raised to a socialist cult by decades of rampant propaganda.

In fact, his article makes all the appropriate sacrifices to that cult: “our beloved NHS”, “We love the NHS, and we want to protect it”, “We must fund it properly and cherish it properly”.

Now, the NHS is a method of financing medicine, that’s all. It’s not, as so many Britons believe, either a deity or even free medical care.

‘Free’, to a semantic rigourist, used to mean something one didn’t have to pay for. But someone does have to pay for all those CT scans and ECGs. Such things are expensive; and the more inefficiently provided, the dearer they get.

If patients don’t pay for them directly or through insurance policies, the payment comes from the state, which can only make money the old-fashioned way: from taxes. ‘Free’ thus means that the transfer of money from patient to hospital is mediated by the state acting as a general contractor with megalomania.

We may argue the pros and cons of this method, but any such argument should properly revolve around a dispassionate analysis of costs and benefits, as compared to other methods. What’s there to “love”, “cherish” and “protect”, other than Boris’s chances of a political comeback? Such emotive words seem out of place, but not to modern glossocrats.

They love, cherish and protect the triumph of public over private or, in other words, the steadily accelerating transfer of power from the individual to the state. This is the essence of socialism and more or less its sum total, as bequeathed by Marx and his subsequent accomplices.

All the bien pensant phraseology that essence hides behind can be safely disregarded. It’s just camouflage designed to conceal the true nature of socialism.

If you can’t accept this as gospel truth, and there’s no reason you should, then accept it as a working hypothesis. I maintain that this understanding of socialism is the only one that explains the entirety of empirical evidence before our very eyes. And if you end up agreeing with that, then the hypothesis becomes a fact – or is there something I misunderstand about the scientific method?

Consider the visceral hatred socialists feel for private pensions. An article in today’s Mail bemoans that “Britain is facing a pension poverty ‘time bomb’ after Rachel Reeves’ punishing tax grab helped plunge retirement savings by 20 per cent in six months”.

The authors make all the good points about this tendency leading over time to a vast increase in the number of people dependent on the state for their livelihood and therefore ending up impoverished. The point the authors don’t make is that such is exactly the desired effect.

I never tire of saying that the more the state does for you, the more it can do to you. Hence, the more dependents the state acquires, the further it advances its core desideratum: increasing its own power over the individual.

It would be a mistake to think that Rachel in Accounts can’t do the sums as well as the authors of the article. Of course, she can – as can any owner of a calculator.

It’s just that she and the authors embark on their intellectual journeys from different starting points. And Rachel’s path leads her to seeing that destination as desirable. There is that dread word, ‘private’, stamped into the dirt again.

That’s why, when the supposedly ‘more conservative’ Labour government of Blair and Brown took over, the first thing they did was launch a five-billion raid on private pension funds. Since then, Labour and Tory governments have been competing with one another as to who can rob private pensions better. Labour still holds a narrow lead, but it’s only a matter of degree, not substance.

Or take inherited private income, something socialists describe as ‘unearned’. That was Marx’s bugbear, and so it remains for his descendants. Yet no such income is ever unearned — it can always be traced back to someone who indeed earned it.

And that successful individual paid taxes on that income, contrary to what many socialists claim. In fact, the top one per cent of UK earners provide 29 per cent of all tax revenues, and the top 10 per cent twice as much. (These proportions are much higher in the US.)

However, the state insists on taxing inheritance again, which any sensible person would see as terribly unfair. The British government imposes a 40 per cent tax on any estate above the tax-free threshold of £325,000.

So let’s say a middle-class Londoner lived and died in a house he bought in 1975 for £20,000. That sum came out of his taxed earnings, and he continued to pay property levies on the house, and also probably interest on the mortgage, his whole life.

He then bequeathed the house to his children, but after several property booms, the same dwelling now costs £1.325 million (both amounts are close to available statistics). This means the man’s heirs must pay £400,000 in inheritance tax on the house alone, not including any other assets passed on.

Do socialists realise this is unfair? They probably would if they thought in such terms. But they don’t, and the only thing fairness means to them is anything that increases their power. That’s why they’d rather the heirs went broke than gained a measure of financial independence.

The same goes for the socialists’ treatment of private enterprise, which they detest with wholehearted passion. That’s why they nationalise whatever they can and try to suffocate everything else with taxes, both overt and hidden.

The present Labour government is no exception. It took over on 5 July 2024, and in the first nine months of its tenure, a staggering 203,000 UK businesses went under. And some 16,500 millionaires fled the country, taking with them the tax revenue they generated and the jobs they created.

At the same time, the government is strangling farms with death sentences, jeopardising the country’s self-sufficiency in food production. Again, there is no rational explanation for this self-harm, but there is an irrational one: Marx’s hatred of farmers, that most individualist of breeds.

Only urban socialism, wrote Marx, could rescue “a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life”. The Bolsheviks tried to put this dictum into practice, but succeeded only in murdering millions of peasants and permanently starving the country. Our Labour Marxists haven’t done anything quite so drastic yet, but the mindset is the same.

We are living through the worst period for British enterprise, both urban and rural, in decades, but the data only go to 29 March. If the same trend continues, and there’s no reason to think it won’t, before long the government won’t have to bother nationalising the economy. There won’t be much left to nationalise.

Those kinder than me ascribe all such outrages to the unintended consequences of socialist policies, but they are wrong. The consequences are very much intended, if only intuitively. What’s bad for the people is good for the socialist state, and the good of the state means greater power in the hands of its administrators. QED.

All this proves my hypothesis, at least to my own satisfaction. Things like incompetence and stupidity don’t begin to explain socialist depredations. No one is as stupid and as incompetent. But some people are as fanatical, as self-serving, as rotten and as, well, socialist.

P.S. In the same article I mentioned, Boris Johnson writes: “Given my circumstances, anyone in the NHS would have been given exactly the same treatment, and with no undue delay.”

He should read the piece I wrote in 2012 about my experience in similar circumstances: http://www.alexanderboot.com/how-the-nhs-tried-to-kill-me/

Manny Macron has pulled off the improbable feat of recognising something that doesn’t exist, namely the Palestinian state.

Established nations do sometimes take a while to recognise new-fangled states, especially unsavoury ones. Thus, though the Soviet Union was formed in 1922, it took the US 11 years to recognise it. And the People’s Republic of China, formed in 1949, had to wait 30 years for the same honour.

In both cases, diplomatic recognition amounted to acknowledging the status quo. Exactly what status quo is Manny recognising with Palestine? This is how he announced it, on X, where else:

“Given its historic commitment to a just and sustainable peace in the Middle East, I have decided that France will recognise the state of Palestine. The urgent priority today is to end the war in Gaza and to bring relief to the civilian population. Peace is possible.”

Peace is indeed possible, it always is. But it takes a blithering idiot to think that recognising something that doesn’t exist, nor can be realistically hoped ever to exist, is a way of achieving that objective.

But do let’s decorticate Manny’s statement. The first sentence isn’t worded precisely, although it’s clear enough that Manny thinks “a just and sustainable peace in the Middle East” is a jolly good idea, and one to which ‘it’ is committed. But the way he expressed himself, it’s not obvious whether it’s France or “the state of Palestine” that’s thus committed.

Even Manny can’t possibly mean the latter: in a recent poll some 95 per cent of Palestinians expressed quite a different commitment, to wiping the state of Israel off the map. And 65 per cent said they had no interest in a two-state solution whatsoever.

Thus one has to hope Manny meant France, not Palestinians. It’s France, as personified by Manny, that is committed to “a just and sustainable peace” – and hopes that recognising the non-existent state is a way of achieving it.

Since neither side directly involved agrees, that hope seems forlorn. The situation appears to be quite different from what Manny fancies.

The two sides converge in not wanting to create a Palestinian state. Other than that, their interests diverge: Palestinians want to kill every Jew in Israel, for starters. And Israeli Jews would rather not be killed by Hamas.

Sorry, did I say Hamas, not Palestinians? A forgivable slip though, considering that, politically speaking, Palestinians and Hamas are synonymous. The only election ever held in the West Bank and Gaza, in 2006, delivered a Hamas landslide. Since then, no need for another election has arisen.

Hamas is a terrorist organisation, as even Manny must have heard. And the purpose of terrorism, as Lenin kindly explained, is to terrorise. In today’s context, it means that any Hamas state that, hypothetically, could be carved out of Israel’s territory would concentrate all its energies on massacring Israelis in the style of 7 October.

At the time, incidentally, more than two-thirds of Palestinians supported Hamas’s bestial brutality, although that proportion has somewhat gone down since, after Israel didactically demonstrated that actions have consequences.

Manny’s idea is somewhat lacking in novelty appeal. For on 29 November, 1947, the UN General Assembly passed its Resolution 181, recommending the creation of two independent Arab and Jewish states.

Jewish organisations happily accepted the Resolution, but Palestinian Arabs boycotted it. On 15 May, 1948, Arab states invaded Palestine to nip the nascent Jewish state in the bud. The Arabs lost that war, as they have lost every other war they’ve started since.

The situation hasn’t changed one iota. They still don’t want two states. They want one: Hamasia, “from the river to the sea”, with what used to be the State of Israel turned into a mass grave of seven million Jews, going Hitler one million better.

Not seeing that testifies to a schizophrenic divorce from reality, which psychiatric condition was evinced by a statement from Manny’s Foreign Ministry: “The best contribution that France and the UK can bring is to restart the process by bringing all stakeholders around the table, making commitments to the state of Palestine and the security of Israel.”

The UK appeared in that statement because Manny is trying to twist Starmer’s arm into going along with that schizophrenic notion. The latter finds himself squashed between two jaws of the same vice: France, with her traditional anti-Israeli bias, and Labour’s own backbenchers, anti-Semites almost to a man.

Sir Keir is holding them at bay for the time being, but, if I were a betting man, I’d wager that he won’t last long. Israel, after all, is the bulwark of Western civilisation in the Middle East, and no one can accuse Sir Keir of such a civilisational bias.

His bias is quite different, which Starmer proved with his statement the other day: “We are clear that statehood is the inalienable right of the Palestinian people. A ceasefire will put us on a path to the recognition of a Palestinian state and a two-state solution which guarantees peace and security for Palestinians and Israelis.”

“Guarantees”, no less. On what basis, historical, current or logical, have these people reached the conclusion that a terrorist organisation granted a statehood would guarantee anything other than mass murder? Ask them, I haven’t a clue. One thing I’m certain it won’t guarantee is peace and security. Or is it two things? Whatever.

Deducing the specific from the general, one wonders how Manny and Keir envisage the practicalities involved in contriving a Hamas state. Have they even considered them?

At present, Israel supplies all of Palestine’s (Hamas’s) electricity and water. Something tells me that, should Hamas exercise its “inalienable right” to statehood, that supply will be cut off. How would the terrorists replace it?

And where would they work (digging tunnels for murderers to creep into Israel doesn’t qualify as work)? At present, about a third of their working-age population are unemployed, and the rest mostly do part-time work in Israel. Which domestic industries would attract their talents? None is discernible at the moment.

What currency would the new state use? Would Hamasians continue to use Israeli shekels, as they do now? And where would their capital be? Ramala? The idea mooted in Hamas circles is that the capital of their nascent state will be in Jerusalem, but I’m sure the Israelis will have something to say about that.

How will the new state handle its imports and exports? The West Bank and Gaza have no access to the sea, and all their trade goes through Israeli ports, just as all their human traffic goes through Israeli airports.

These and a myriad other factors show that no Arab state could possibly be created in that territory without Israel’s wholehearted cooperation. And no such thing is forthcoming without Hamas’s renouncing its intention to obliterate Israel, something they aren’t planning to do.

So what is it that Manny wants to recognise, and coerce Starmer into doing the same? Why is he making those asinine noises?

First, 10 per cent of the French population are Muslim, a proportion giving that alien group a considerable political weight. That can be thrown around both electorally and through direct action, aka terrorism and mass rioting. Most of those people support Hamas and hate Jews in general and Israelis in particular.

The reason Starmer hasn’t yet gone along is that Britain’s Muslim population is six per cent, not ten, although in London that proportion is 15 per cent. That’s not big enough for Starmer to jump the gun, but big enough for him to want to give a sop to our domestic Hamas fans.

The second reason is the uncontrollable knee-jerking urge to signal virtue, meaning in this context commitment to any cause aiming to destroy the very civilisation that Israel represents in the Middle East.

Both France’s president and our PM are leftists, meaning they are as virulent of ideology as they are feeble of mind. Their ideology demands a support for Third World fanatics with their inalienable right to massacre Jews (or anyone else who has the misfortune of displeasing them). Jews, on the other hand, are equated in their minds with capitalists, a link established as a scriptural truth by Marx.

I have an idea. I think Manny should next recognise whatever state inhabitants of other planets might want to establish. You may say that no such state exists, and you’ll be right. But then neither does the state Manny will recognise in September.

France doesn’t deserve that spineless nonentity, but then neither does Britain deserve Starmer.

P.S. Speaking of France, our local supermarket sells just four kinds of cognac but 11 kinds of Japanese malt whisky. And yet in the past 25 years I’ve never seen anyone drink any Japanese whisky, offer it to guests or order it in restaurants. Do you sometimes get the feeling that there’s a parallel reality out there, where people prefer Japanese malts to Scotch – and a Palestinian state exists?