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Though he puts a brave face on it, it appears increasingly likely that Harry will have his royal titles taken away. That must rankle, even when weighed against Netflix millions.

Harry did put his titles on hold when he served in the army. Then he was known as simply ‘Captain Wales’, but that was just a short hiatus. He knew and everybody else knew that he’d go back to being HRH once the shooting stopped.

Now he risks losing those initials for ever, and before long the sense of deprivation will begin to gnaw at the pit of his stomach, to use Carlyle’s phrase. And no amount in Netflix currency will alleviate that pain.

But not to worry: another title is just round the corner. Following his nostalgic recollection of having killed 25 Afghani militants during his time as Captain Wales, Harry should henceforth be known as Matamoros, Harry the Moor-Slayer.

The original title belonged to St James, who distinguished himself in the 9^th century Battle of Clavijo. The fight broke out following an unreasonable demand the Moors imposed on Ramiro I of Asturias.

The libidinous Arabs demanded a tribute of 100 virgins, 50 of them noble. It’s telling that even in those days Arabs dreaded comparison so much that they put a high premium on virginity.

Although finding so many virgins in a Western country presented less of a logistic problem then than it would today, Ramiro rejected the demand out of hand. Instead he rode into battle.

Initially, the hostilities didn’t go his way, but then St James, the patron saint of Spain, appeared on a white steed, sword in one hand, white banner in the other. He turned the battle by personally slaying 5,000 Muslims (or ‘muzzie-wuzzies’, as Harry probably calls them – he likes the odd racial putdown, though perhaps less so these days than in the past).

Hence the proposed title of Matamoros, a share of which Harry now merits even though he falls somewhat short of the original holder’s saintliness.

Harry explains that he got his shot at the Matamoros title as a result of the childhood trauma he simply couldn’t let go. His ‘mom’, as he calls her in the American fashion, died when Harry was 13.

To dull the pain of the loss he tried every controlled substance known to man, but the analgesic effect was negligible no matter how many years went by. Booze, al fresco sex behind the pub, dressing up as a Nazi stormtrooper – nothing worked.

But then Harry decided to “turn his pain into a purpose”, which was to go to war and kill Muslims. And sure enough, taking his anguish out on the infidels worked out much better than the magic mushrooms, peyote, cocaine and whatever else Harry had snorted, smoked or mainlined.

There is nothing wrong with serving in the military, and in fact doing so is noble – provided it’s done to a noble end.

Following an honourable family tradition qualifies as such, and our princes have always served in the armed forces, often with distinction. So does patriotism, a sense of duty to one’s country, especially when it’s at war.

Yet Harry cites neither of those as his motives. The way he explains his urge to fight, it amounts to a sort of therapeutic bloodlust, the desire to kill his own pain by inflicting it on others. Here we enter the domain of psychiatry, for people who feel that way are known as psychopaths.

By all accounts, whatever his motivation, Harry served bravely and well, specifically when flying Apache helicopters for four months in 2012-2013. “The only shots I thought twice about were the ones I hadn’t taken,” he says, and it’s good to see a man whose conscience is clear.

Now fairness demands mentioning that, during the period when Harry honed his sharpshooting skills, not a single Apache helicopter was lost to hostile fire, although a few crashed for other reasons. Still, while some of his detractors may question Harry’s sportsmanship, none should doubt his courage.

His mental health, however, is something else again, and this goes beyond the questionable inspiration for his valour. For Harry suffers from a prevalent modern disorder: an exaggerated propensity for delving deep into his own psyche. That’s the modern attempt to reach the superpersonal without rising to the supernatural.

Once such digging starts, it usually doesn’t stop until the spade (sorry, shovel) hits the hard surface of some childhood trauma. All of us, those who grew up in a palace like Harry or in a smelly communal flat like me, had a fair share of those.

Some traumas are like pinpricks, others more like dagger thrusts, and Harry’s was closer to the latter: he lost his ‘mom’ to a freak accident at a young age.

Yet men, especially Englishmen, used to know how to handle traumatic experiences with stoicism. It was almost an article of faith that grown men had no right to keep reliving their childhood pains onanistically.

Notice the use of the past tense here. For the age of psychobabble dawned on the world, and men were encouraged to become touchy-feely hermaphrodites, each wearing his wounded heart on his sleeve. As an inevitable result of such exhibitionism, that organ tends to be caked in grime.

Not blessed with the strength of either character or intellect, Harry never learned that there is more to being a man than the odd roll in the dirt behind a pub – more even than martial courage. No one taught him. On the contrary, the whole ethos of modernity demanded he get in touch with his feelings.

Hence his tendency to throw his toys out of the pram whenever he can’t get his way. Hence also his sadistic, petty vindictiveness, characteristic of someone who, unable to come to terms with his problems, lashes out at whomever is close enough to blame.

Hence also the tendency to be henpecked, by the first strong woman sufficiently versed in the dark arts of manipulation. And, since his henpecker happens to be American, she grew up believing in the curative effect of letting it all hang out in public.

It’s not for nothing that group therapy is more widespread in the US than anywhere else. Though grown in Europe, the tree of psychobabble reached its true height only when transplanted onto American soil.

However, most attendees of such tasteless spectacles have to pay for it. Harry, on the other hand, gets millions for sharing his self-inflicted, or at least self-cultivated, problems with all and sundry.

As a bonus to his paymasters he can also brag about killing 25 Muslims, whom he self-admittedly saw not as human beings but as chess pieces to be swept off his board. His comrades-in-arms are aghast: that sort of braggadocio breaks the code they live by.

But Harry is no longer Captain Wales, nor even HRH in anything but name. He now lives by different codes, and he merits different titles, ranks and honorifics. Such as my suggestion of Matamoros, which I hope is taken as seriously as it’s offered.

There’s really nothing I can say about Harry’s evil attempts to destroy our monarchy that hasn’t already been said about double incontinence, syphilis and post-nasal drip.

Ideally, Harry’s effluvia in various media should simply be ignored with dignified silence. But the din has become too loud for that: the lad, ably assisted by his professionally manipulative wife, has continued his mother’s vindictive crusade .

The royal family can’t stay silent much longer. It must defend itself, and, as the ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu said in his much-misquoted maxim, “Attack is the secret of defence”.   

One way of turning the tables would be to cast another glance on the photographic juxtaposition above and consider anew the persistent rumours that Harry is really the son of Diana’s lover, Capt. James Hewitt.

Harry was born in 1984, and both his mother and Hewitt himself have insisted that their five-year affair didn’t start until two years later. However, since veracity wasn’t the most salient virtue of either of the star-crossed lovers, a large grain of salt is in order, possibly washed down with a shot of tequila.

Both lovers used their adulterous liaison for other than purely erotic purposes. Diana opened up about it in that infamous 1995 BBC interview, when she flapped her eyelashes histrionically, hamming up her lines: “Yes, I adored him. Yes, I loved him…”

That interview served a dual purpose. Her most immediate aim was to force a divorce from Charles, retaining many of the royal privileges with none of the royal responsibilities. The second, and most important, aim was to take revenge on the institution that refused to accept that perfidious, empty-headed girl on her own terms.

Hewitt’s objective was more straight-forward: money. He wrote (or rather had ghost-written) two books on the affair, having received a £300,000 advance for the first one. He also got £1,000,000 for a tabloid interview, which he doubtless saw as only a good start.

The next step was selling Diana’s letters to the highest bidder, and the high bids were rumoured to be greater than his previous fees by an order of magnitude. Our guardians of public morals screamed bloody murder, but Hewitt was undeterred. “These letters,” he told an interviewer, “are important historical documents” and the gasping public shouldn’t be denied vital knowledge of historical import.

Judging by the only quote I’ve been able to glean from those missives, they are a matter of gossipy rather historical interest: “I have lain awake at night loving you desperately and thanking god for bringing you into my life… I just long for the days when we finally will be together for always, as that is how it should be.”

Be that as it may, all of a sudden Hewitt announced he wouldn’t sell the letters after all. By then his reputation as a “love rat” was so firmly entrenched, that he got few praises for that seemingly noble act of self-denial.

That, I think, was an oversight. For it’s hard to believe that Hewitt suddenly had a Damascene experience and found God. After all, until then he had been trading on his affair with Diana quite shamelessly. Call me a cynic, but I don’t believe he’d suddenly developed qualms on the verge of the biggest payoff of his life.

Moreover, even though he was already flush then, he certainly isn’t now. Reports say Hewitt has since squandered his penile fortune, had a heart attack and a stroke, and is now working as a £4,000 a year gardener in Devon.

This though he is still sitting on the instantly reclaimable treasure of Diana’s epistolary output. Now, I don’t fancy myself as a psychologist, but such restrained self-abnegation is glaringly out of Hewitt’s character.

There must exist a more practical reason for his suddenly acquired reticence, and that can only be some pressure put on him either by the Palace directly or through the mediation of our security services. They must have something on Hewitt, enough to force him to forgo millions and settle into a life of penury.

I shan’t try to speculate on what that might be: the range of possibilities is broad. Whatever it is, it has worked: Hewitt kept those precious letters to himself. The question is what else that leverage has forced him to do.

This brings us back to Harry’s paternity. Rumours about it began to circulate immediately after Diana’s affair became public knowledge. It was hard not to notice that the older Harry got, the more he looked like Hewitt.

It wasn’t just the red hair, for that tint exists in Diana’s family. As I can testify from personal observation, her brother, Earl Spencer, is a redhead too. However, his eyes are hazel, not blue like Harry’s and Hewitt’s. And in general, Harry doesn’t look at all like Earl Spencer.

He may look more like the young photographs of his paternal grandfather, but that facial resemblance is still not as close as between Harry and Hewitt. That’s why those ugly rumours just wouldn’t die.

At some point Hewitt dispelled them in yet another interview. He hadn’t met Diana until 1985, he said, when he became her riding instructor. Harry was already one at the time.

However, Nicholas Davis, the author of many books on the royals, contradicts that claim. Both Davis and Hewitt used to play polo with Charles, and Davis was his friend.

According to him, “Hewitt was seen inside Charles and Diana’s Kensington Palace home on several occasions in 1983 – 12 months before Harry was born.”

And then: “Only Charles, a few close friends and the Royal protection police were aware that Diana was Hewitt’s lover before Harry’s birth. And the reality is, she wasn’t sure who was Harry’s father. In her heart, she wanted it to be Hewitt, and she suspected that it was more likely to be him than her husband.”

Perhaps. But one way of putting paid to those rumours would be to do a simple DNA test. A drop of saliva, and Andrew is your uncle – and, more important, Hewitt isn’t your father.

Yet no one has even suggested that little exercise. It’s as if the parties involved would rather not know the possible result.

That leaves an opening for a counterattack that could damage Harry’s earning potential and possibly even his marriage. If Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex and sixth in line of succession, becomes Harry Hewitt, born on the wrong side of the blanket to a louche officer, would Meghan be as smitten as she so expertly shows?

I don’t know. But I do think it’s time for the Palace to fight back – before those two objectionable spouses do irreparable damage not just to the royal family but to our whole constitution. As they appear hell-bent to do.  

Looking at the four countries I know well, Russia, America, Britain and France, I appreciate the distinction drawn in German philosophy, one between culture and civilisation. Many people use these words interchangeably, but that, I think, is a mistake.

The two concepts may not even inhabit the same breast: we all know civilised individuals who aren’t cultured and cultured individuals who aren’t civilised. Broaden your focus to encompass a nation, and a similar dichotomy may well appear.

The culture of a nation comes across through the top five to 10 per cent of the population, if that. Our British friends call that group PLUs (People Like Us), well-educated, well-read highbrows, either professional or artistic.

The corresponding French term is les bobos (bourgeois bohemians). The Russians use their own Latin-based coinage intelligentsia. The Americans, ever bashful about social categorisations, may eschew the tag, but they are well aware of that group’s existence.

Now, as an exercise in homespun comparative ethnography, I find few and mostly trivial differences among these four elite groups. (It is indeed homespun for I’m in no position to conduct rigorous sociological studies. I have, however, accumulated heaps of anecdotal evidence over a long and peripatetic lifetime, and made certain general observations on that basis.)

They all place a slightly heavier emphasis on their own culture, but not to the exclusion of others. They are civil, multilingual and well-behaved. I’d say that the British and especially the French tend to have better table manners than the Americans and especially the Russians, but all in all it’s much of a muchness.

Typically, members of those elite groups feel more comfortable with their foreign counterparts than with the uncultured masses in their own country. Cultural commonality tends to trump national and ethnic identity.

By contrast, civilisation can never be elitist. While culture thrives on esoteric exclusivity, a civilisation can’t last unless it includes most members of society. Some may drive it, some may snooze in the back seat, but they must all be inside.

Civilisation is the opposite of militarisation, and not only semantically. It’s an unspoken compact of unifying mutual respect that enables different people to coexist without stepping on one another’s toes or settling their disputes outside the law. Culture is only one aspect of civilisation, one of many.

It’s the lower reaches of any society that provide a reliable indication of its civilisation. If the masses are civilised, one can confidently assume that so are the classes. And there the differences among the four countries stop being trivial and become instantly apparent.

Walk through the centres of provincial towns or villages in the downmarket regions of the four countries and watch how the locals interact with you and one another. Get a drink at a bar, buy something in a shop, ask for directions – above all, keep your ears open and your eyes peeled.

Russia will immediately stand out. Her uncouth masses treat one another – and will treat you – with suspicion rather than amity, rudeness rather than courtesy, selfishness rather than altruism, a scowl rather than a smile.

Even long before the arrival of endlessly corrupting and dehumanising bolshevism, foreign visitors already pointed out those little idiosyncrasies. Thus a Dutch ambassador remarked in the 18^th century that: “The Russians don’t need bread. They eat one another and that keeps them fed.”

You’ll notice how eagerly Russians in all walks of life speak ill of one another. Put four Russians together, and within a couple of days you’ll know who wouldn’t piss on whom if he was on fire. People push, shove and jostle their way through crowds, they jump queues and at the slightest provocation (or even without one) call one another oedipal names.

Casual street violence is commonplace, with universal drunkenness a contributing factor. These days one seldom has to step over drunks in the centres of Moscow or Petersburg, but a weekend stroll down the street in the provinces will still feel like an obstacle course.

No trust seems to bind people together – the recent memory of millions of friends and families denouncing their nearest and dearest to a murderous secret police has never been expunged. Nor will it be soon, what with those happy times descending on Russia again.

An innate code of behaviour has never reached the Russian masses – and even their classes are often wanting in that department.

The contrast with our area in France is startling. This is one of the poorest parts of the country, with most locals subsisting on social handouts. The bars fill up in the morning, and rivers of rouge never stop flowing throughout the day.

Bright youngsters up sticks and go somewhere else where jobs exist. Those who stay guzzle their rouge by day and copulate with their next of kin by night. Incest is rife, and the locals refer to it as le cinéma des pauvres (poor man’s cinema). That entertainment genre produces rather stunted development, and our Parisian friends who have second homes here describe the locals as les monstres.

And yet they are impeccably civilised. I’ve never been treated with anything other than politeness and respect, and the locals also treat one another with amiable, chatty joviality.

After dark, the streets of our village empty out. But I don’t feel tense when walking past a group of disreputable-looking youngsters, who’ve all had a glass or two. I know that all I’ll get from them will be a chorus of “bonsoir, monsieur”.

America isn’t far behind. When I lived in Texas, I wasn’t long out of Russia and could appreciate the contrast. I saw something I had never seen back there: the presumption of civilised kinship.

Teenagers opening doors for one another, old people treated with respect, polite forms of address – the people were utterly civil across the board. The same held true in the Midwest, and, while Los Angeles and especially New York had more rough edges, one could see that civility had trickled down to those hectic places as well, if in a thin stream.

Britain, I’m afraid, is getting to be closer to Russia (still a long way to go, but nevertheless) than to America and France. Walking through our town centres at night, especially upcountry, is an unpleasant, and occasionally dangerous, experience.

I remember once a friend of ours played a Friday concert in Chester (one of the most affluent British cities, by the way), after which we popped into an Indian restaurant for a late supper. When we came out, there wasn’t a single sober person anywhere to be seen.

Next to the restaurant door, a young man was slowly sliding down the wall. A trickle of vomit was dripping down his chin, which didn’t deter his equally drunk girlfriend from kissing him on the mouth. Other drunk girls were screaming: “Kevin, get a fooking taxi!”, but taxi drivers knew better than to stop for Kevin.

I suspect that the locals here in France drink as much, in average annual consumption, but I’ve never been treated to such spectacles anywhere in France. However, in Britain that show never closes.

Then again, though I’m not a stickler for ceremony, I don’t like it when strangers younger than my grandchildren call me by my first name. Yet polite forms of address have disappeared.

Not long ago, a young tradesman rang us up, and Penelope answered the phone. “May I speak with Mrs Boot?” “This is she.” “Oh good morning. What can I call you?” “You can call me Mrs Boot,” suggested Penelope. “No, what can I call you?” insisted the perplexed youngster. “Mrs Boot will be fine.” He genuinely couldn’t understand what she was on about.

In France, I’ve played tennis with the same group of people for years, but it took me much insistent effort to make them stop calling me monsieur Boot. Egalitarian familiarity hasn’t quite corrupted the French as much.

A rapid decline in civilisation is observable in the three Western countries, especially among the young. By and large, the older the group, the higher its level of civilisation. Parents and grandparents in the Anglophone countries are failing to pass it down the generations, and within another decade or two barbarism will reign in America as widely as in Britain.

I still hope the populations of the three countries close to my heart will never become as thoroughly brutalised as Russia is. Their civilisational capital is being frittered away, but they still aren’t quite bankrupt. Yet.

Having had their Christmas ruined by the hours spent queuing up at the chargers, many drivers are cursing the day they opted for electric cars.

Since my own car is diesel-powered, no curses came to my mind. But the words in the title did, even though they were inspired by a Leftist politician.

Mapping the strategy for Clinton’s presidential campaign, James Carville famously instructed his staff to focus on the main thing. “It’s the economy, stupid,” he said.

Perhaps it is, in the free-for-all of US electoral skirmishes. Yet such econocentrism doesn’t easily extrapolate onto life in general.

For people aren’t always, and never merely, economic creatures. Belief that they are is Marx’s fallacy shared by both his followers and, bizarrely, many of his detractors. The two groups diverge in their conclusions but converge in their premise: Herr Marx, meet Herr Hayek.

In fact, the economy tends to play second fiddle to ideology. However, when the latter wreaks havoc on the former, it’s usually the economy that takes the blame.

Just look at the dire state of the economy today. Very little of its plight is self-inflicted; it’s various ideologies that are the culprits.

One of many examples: economists are attributing the soaring cost of energy to Putin’s war on the Ukraine. But Putin didn’t push the button because he thought he’d thereby improve the state of the Russian economy.

On the contrary, he knew there would be an economic price to pay, although he didn’t quite anticipate how steep the price would be. Yet even now, with the Russian economy lying in ruins and only a speedy retreat offering a sporting chance of revival, he persists. It’s the ideology, stupid.

But why did sanctions on Russian hydrocarbon exports hurt the West so badly? An averagely clever schoolboy could have predicted that an economy heavily dependent on importing a vital commodity would be courting disaster. Especially if the commodity is imported from an unfriendly power.

Now, while I don’t rate the intellectual faculties of our leaders very highly, I do give them credit for being as smart as an averagely clever schoolboy. So why didn’t they develop alternative sources of energy, ideally all the way to energy independence? It’s the ideology, stupid.

Actually, more than one ideology. The less culpable kind was their refusal to see Russia as a hostile power. Different factors contributed to that failure, ignorance being a prominent one. But wishful thinking based on the liberal ideology was even more damaging.

It proceeds from the innate philistine assumption that the whole world either is like us already or desperately wishes to be. That turns the West into a dupe ready to be fleeced by clever disinformation.

Assorted tyrants have learned that if they scream democracy loudly enough and often enough, the West will smile smugly and close its eyes on what they actually do. It’ll then start raining credits and technology on them faster than you can say ‘the end of history’.

Yet one would think that even if we weren’t aware of Russia’s strategic menace, it would have made purely economic sense to produce all of our own energy. Not only are the known reserves of uranium sufficient to keep us in nuclear power until the Second Coming (not that I presume to know its timing), but we also have huge deposits of oil and gas sloshing underfoot.

So why have we spurned the huge economic payoff of energy independence? It’s the ideology, stupid.

Nuclear power stations didn’t spread widely enough because we chose to accept at face value the scaremongering screamed by anti-nuke campaigns, including our own CND. Most such groups were financed by foreign powers with a vested interest in our reliance on hydrocarbon imports.

The Soviet Union, in particular, busily cultivated various anti-nuke front setups, such as the CND. They somehow managed to peddle the lie that nuclear power is as lethal as nuclear weapons – this though not a single Western life had been lost to an accident at a nuclear power station, and still hasn’t.

Having succeeded in degrading, and in some Western countries destroying, nuclear energy, the same group shifted sideways into the massive fraud going by the name of global warming. At the heart of their animus was the same hatred of what Marx so loosely termed capitalism. It’s the ideology, stupid.

Fast-forward a couple of decades, and Western governments, including our own, are racing one another to the altar of ideology at which they can sacrifice the economy.

Perhaps that metaphor is inexact. For those practising human sacrifice to pagan deities killed others, not themselves. By contrast, Britain and other ideologised nations are avidly committing economic suicide.

This gets us back to those interminable queues at the chargers, with electric car owners cursing Elon Musk’s name and nominating various portions of his anatomy as their preferred receptacle for charging nozzles.

The spread of electric cars is outpacing the proliferation of the infrastructure required to keep them on the road. And at present, Britain only boasts 500,000 such vehicles, or thereabouts.

The stated goal of our successive governments is to replace all internal combustion (IC) engines with batteries. Since there are over 33 million cars in Britain, it takes a morbidly credulous person to believe that the situation will ever improve.

Moreover, our grid is already straining at the seams, even with France’s EDF taking in some of the slack. What will happen if, say, 10 million cars are plugged in at the same time, which will be likely at peak times, such as at Christmas?    

True enough, transportation produces some 28 per cent of all anthropogenic carbon emissions. But percentages are often liars. So let’s deal in the more truthful absolute numbers, shall we?

Carbon dioxide makes up only 0.04 per cent of the atmosphere. And 95 per cent of it comes from natural sources that have nothing to do with human activity. Thus anthropogenic CO2 accounts for 0.0016 per cent of the air we breathe. It’s a trace gas of a trace gas, having no effect whatsoever on climate change.

Yet even assuming against every bit of available evidence that ‘our planet’ is being shallow-fried by IC cars, electric vehicles aren’t the answer.

Quite apart from the burden they put on the grid and the infrastructure, they have intrinsic problems that appear unsolvable. These start with making such vehicles in the first place.

The typical battery in an electric car weighs about 500 kg. To make it, you need to process 10 tonnes of salt for the required lithium, 15 tonnes of ore for the required cobalt, two tonnes of ore to get enough nickel and 12 tonnes of ore to get enough copper.

Add all that mining and processing together, and they pollute more than an average IC car does in 20 years. And we seldom keep our cars for that long.

Since most of that mining is done in tropical regions, environmental groups are already screaming bloody murder about the damage being done to the rain forest.

Myself, I’m more concerned about the damage being done to the miners’, which is to say minors’, health. Many of them are children working in slave-like conditions for starvation wages, but when do ideologues ever care about such incidentals?

Then there numerous technical problems with electric cars, and I’m not qualified to judge whether they’ll ever be solved. Let’s just say that so far they haven’t been.

To begin with, electric cars are fair-weather vehicles. They either misbehave or quit altogether in extreme temperatures.

Most electric cars have a risible range between charges to begin with, but freezing conditions reduce it by up to 40 per cent, especially when the heater is on. That is, if they can be charged at all. One owner, for example, recently spent 15 hours trying to charge his car in a -7°C temperature, only to have the same 19-mile range still displayed.

According to experts, electric cars are like humans: they prefer moderate temperatures between 60F and 80F. Once the temperature drops below 40 or rises above 100, they fall far short of their peak performance.

Then there are safety issues. At present, an electric car is 50 per cent more likely to create an accident, but that’s the drivers’ fault: they aren’t used to the much greater acceleration, and much quicker response, of such vehicles.

Yet some problems are intrinsic. If an electric car is rear-ended, or scrapes its bottom (where the battery is located) over a speed bump, it can catch fire. And that fire is extremely difficult to put out. Fire brigades have been known to immerse burning electric cars in water for days – only to see them catch fire again the moment they are taken out of the tank.

Some of those problems will probably be solved eventually. Some won’t be, but our governments will still insist on pressing on with their economically suicidal policies.

Because it’s not the economy, stupid. It’s ideology that inspires modern countries to drive their electric cars all the way to catastrophe.  

All Christians are called to be in communion with Christ, but very few are chosen to be in direct two-way communication with Him.

The Rev Bingo Alison, C of E vicar in Liverpool, is one of the chosen few. He had the rare privilege of being blessed with an appearance of Our Lord, as he (Bingo, not Our Lord) was reading the Book of Genesis.

Suddenly, the skies opened and Jesus materialised before Bingo. “Is this really thee, Lord, in all thy glory?” asked Bingo, trembling all over and falling down on his knees.

“It is I, God thy Lord,” said Jesus. “And I am glad thou got my prepositions right. Now, Bingo, let’s work on yours.”

“What dost thou mean, Lord?” asked Bingo. “What’s wrong with my prepositions?”

“What’s wrong,” explained the Saviour, “is that thou readest Genesis 1:27, but without understanding one jot or one tittle.”

“But it says clearly, black on white: ‘Male and female created he them,’”objected Bingo, both awed and perplexed. “What’s there not to understand?”

“Verily I say unto you, Bingo, thou art one dumb vicar. There is plenty to understand. For behold, I said ‘male and female’, not ‘male or female,” explained Our Lord. “What dost thou think I meant?”

“That we can be both at the same time?” asked Bingo tentatively, scales falling from his eyes.

“Bingo!” cried the Lord. “Thou art not as dumb as thou looks.”

Then He spake unto Bingo, saying: “Verily I say unto you, thou canst be both, either simultaneously or consecutively. The choice is thine own, but from now on thou art non-binary. And thy prepositions are they/them.”

Actually, I’ve had to fill in the blanks, for the Rev Bingo hasn’t vouchsafed the verbatim content of the exchange he had with Jesus. He has only revealed that the conversation indeed took place and as a result he – or rather they – now identify as ‘gender-queer’.

That part was easy, but, according to Bingo, breaking the news to his wife and three children proved “difficult”. After all, “obviously you marry what you think it a straight guy and obviously things are more complicated than that.”

Complicated is one way of describing it. For the Rev Bingo didn’t just identify as gender-queer. He went the whole hog, as it were and, as you can see in the photograph, developed quite a fetching cleavage.

Mercifully, the Church of England “was open to me coming out”, which says more about that institution than about Bingo. “On the outside you might think ‘oh, they’re quite a traditional church so they might have traditional views’, but I’ve always been treated as a person and as a priest.”

Traditional church? Traditional views? Perish the thought. No one who has ever seen today’s C of E in closeup would have formed that impression. Accepting non-binary priests is a logical next step from having female (and often lesbian) bishops.

The time when the Anglican Church was called the Tory Party at prayer is long since gone. These days it’s more like a combination of the Labour Party and PinkNews, ready to compromise on the prayer, but never on its commitment to woke perversions.

After that original tête-à-tête, Bingo’s chinwags with Jesus continued. In the aftermath of one such session, he (Bingo, not Jesus) posed a selfie with a caption saying Jesus “loves sparkly eyeshadow”. And by the sound of Him, He simply adores blasphemous freaks.

The Rev Bingo won’t hide his (their?) light under a bushel. In Matthew 5:16, Jesus expressly said, “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”

In that spirit, the vicar travels the country, speaking to various panels on how to make the Church more inclusive. Christianity, he explains, has historically been guilty of favouring the views of “rich, white, straight, cisgender, able-bodied, neurotypical men”. 

One doesn’t necessarily get that exact impression from reading the Gospels, but then reading is one thing and getting the info straight from the original source is quite another.

Since I am no longer a communicant in the Church of England, I don’t think it’s my call to suggest that this sideshow be unfrocked. And in any case, should that garment be removed, I wince just thinking what we might find underneath.

But as a subject of His Majesty, the Supreme Governor of our established Church, I lament its plight. Rather than leading men and women to salvation, it does a good job leading lemmings to the precipice.

The only question I’ve got is whether the Rev Bingo is one of the leaders or one of the lemmings. A bit of both perhaps – after all he is (they are?) non-binary.

When in 2013 Benedict XVI became the first pope in six centuries to resign, he made his resignation speech in Latin.

Many took that choice of idiom as a gesture of defiance, the pope’s parting shot at the modernising Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) he had always despised. Perhaps that’s indeed what it was.

Yet major thinkers like Benedict seldom make public gestures devoid of didactic significance. They don’t just speak, they teach. And the style of their lessons is sometimes as telling as the content.

Vatican II represented a triumph of modernity over tradition, which had implications going far beyond the internal politics of the Catholic Church. After all, contempt, often hatred, for tradition of any kind is the dominant feature of our time.

That is masked by pronouncements about progress, popular appeal, inclusivity and whatnot. Such things are seldom treated in this space with the reverence they tend to attract elsewhere, but that doesn’t mean they are inherently wrong.

Christian proselytism, for example, presupposes a steady widening of popularity, drawing more people in and keeping fewer out. Yet Christianity – or any other sublime celebration of God in man – should never buy popular appeal at the price of vulgarisation. If it does, the outcome may well become the opposite of the one intended.

For example, playing Benedict’s beloved Mozart the way he is so often played today, as a rococo trifle devoid of any spiritual content, may put more bums on concert hall seats. That would have a positive effect on the box office – but a shattering one on the music. And in the end people seeking light musical entertainment wouldn’t bother listening to Mozart at all.

Vatican II (1962-1965) is another case in point. It emphatically discouraged the Latin Mass, opting instead for the vernacular. The hope was that greater accessibility would encourage wider access, but that’s not how it has worked out.

The first, relatively minor, problem was the divisive effect of the vernacular Mass. If in the past a Catholic could have moved from Peru to Poland and still celebrated Mass in the same language, now he found himself at a linguistic disadvantage.

Then there were translation issues. Anyone who has ever attended vernacular services in different countries is aware of some scriptural passages coming across slightly modified, which may affect the meaning.

Off the top, in the KJV Luke quotes Jesus as saying, “The kingdom of God is within you,” and indeed the original Greek preposition entos can mean ‘within’ or ‘inside’. However, it can also mean ‘among’ or ‘in the midst of’.

The difference between ‘inside’ and ‘in the midst of’ is important: the former internalises God completely and unconditionally; the latter doesn’t. The kingdom of God could thus be within some people, but only among some others.

Which did Christ mean? Different translations of the scripture disagree – and that’s just within the same language. (Contextually, since Jesus was talking to hostile Pharisees, He was probably referring to Himself as the kingdom of God that was among them, but entos leaves room for interpretation.)

Yet vernacular Mass has more serious problems than linguistic variances. For a liturgical language different from one spoken in the street confers mystical grandeur on the service, lifting it high above the morass of daily life.

Conversely, biblical personages talking in everyday colloquialisms have a demystifying effect, which can turn off more people than it draws in. So yes, the Church must appeal to the masses – but only for the right reasons and in the right ways. Populism for its own sake can diminish popularity, and so it has proved.

Looking at the dire state of the Church in France, one of the core Catholic countries, one would find it hard to argue that Vatican II has been a success. In the provinces, one priest often has to cover 30 churches or more, making the Mass largely unavailable – and those looking for it increasingly fewer.

As a parish priest, Ratzinger had some leeway even after Vatican II: the Church practises the principle of subsidiarity, devolving power to the lowest sensible level. But as he climbed up the hierarchy, he found his freedom diminishing. And when Ratzinger became Benedict XVI, he really had to watch his step.

Even as cardinal and head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), he could still describe pop music as “a vehicle of anti-religion” or homosexuality as “a tendency ordered towards intrinsic moral evil”.

But when, as pontiff, he dared to quote a Byzantine emperor’s uncomplimentary view of Islam (“Show me just what Mohammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”), Benedict faced such public outcry that he had to apologise profusely.

The walls of modernity were closing in, with Benedict pushing against them as hard as he could, but finding himself unable to keep the roof from collapsing. The Church he saw in his mind’s eye wasn’t one before his physical eyes, and the contrast eventually wore him down.

The greatest theologian among the modern pontiffs, Benedict wasn’t the most fleetfooted politician. But both outside the Vatican and increasingly inside, the demand for politicised wheeler-dealers trading in voguish platitudes far outstripped one for deep thinkers and upholders of tradition.

So Benedict stepped aside, citing his advanced age and failing health. Yet he was neither too old nor too infirm to be an outstanding pope. It’s only when he had to take on modernity that he had to admit defeat.

Thus not only the Church but indeed the whole world was robbed of another 10 years of Benedict’s spiritual leadership. Both are the less for it.

His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, RIP.

The comparative adjective is, I’m afraid, all we can hope for in 2023.

The all-out war thundering on in Europe and threatening to engulf the world makes unqualified happiness unlikely – especially with the domestic situation going from bad to worse.

The aftermath of Covid possibly apart, our internal wounds are self-inflicted. But what about the external threat, one posed by a criminal regime pouncing on some neighbours, endangering others and threatening the world with nuclear annihilation?

There we may not be the ones directly twisting the knife. But Western countries, including Britain, are accomplices to those crimes, both before and after the fact.

Our contribution to the rise of evil in Russia came in a package of ignorance, greed, acquiescence, ideological bias and cowardice. None of those is of especially recent vintage.

Western opinion-formers always misread the Soviet Union as badly as they are now misreading Russia. I reminded myself of that last night when chatting with a friend on Skype.

He recommended the Hungarian film Son of Saul, which he described as one of the most powerful Holocaust films he had ever seen. And my friend’s recommendations aren’t to be dismissed lightly, since he is a man of taste and discernment.

However, I dismissed that one, on general grounds. I’ll start watching Holocaust films, I said, no matter how powerful, when they are matched by the same, or at least remotely approaching, number of films about the GULAG.

He smiled ruefully: the problem was familiar to him as were the reasons for it. For the Holocaust provides a useful emollient for the West’s troubled conscience. It both externalises and concentrates evil, squeezing it into the narrow confines of Nazi genocide.

Compared to that, the coverage of Soviet crimes always got a free ride, although communist atrocities outscored the Nazi equivalent by an order of magnitude. Can you remember offhand a single film about mass murders in the GULAG? I can’t, even though I’m sure one or two must be gathering dust in the Hollywood archives.

What does that have to do with Putin?, I hear you ask. Well, just about everything.

He is drawing on the reservoir of residual goodwill towards Russia that never seems to be exhausted in the West. In the good tradition of Western glossocracy, the mendacious slogans proffered by the Russians are taken at face value, while the awful deeds hiding behind them are ignored.

Different segments of Western opinion-formers respond to different slogans, but the Russians have always been able to fashion a menu to suit current tastes. Thus the left traditionally jumped up to salute every Soviet lie about universal social justice. The dying moans of the skeletal victims of the GULAG, millions of them, somehow got muffled by the propagandistic din.

And even when the news of monstrosities like the Holodomor genocide seeped through into the mainstream Western press, they were explained away as the unfortunate fallout of an intrinsically noble exercise.

By the same token, it was – and to a large extent still is – ignored that Stalin started the Second World War as Hitler’s ally. During the Blitz, Nazi planes flew on Soviet fuel and rained Soviet-made bombs on British cities – that fact was then and later overlooked or dismissed.

In the dying years of the Soviet Union, the transparently bogus glasnost and perestroika were hailed as a global victory of liberal democracy and even, in a particularly asinine gasp of trimphalism, the end of history. In fact, what was under way was a transfer of power from the Party to the KGB, with organised crime claiming crumbs off that table.

That created history’s unique government, a fusion of secret police and the Mafia into a single criminal entity. And still the West refused to notice what was going on, responding instead to the lying sloganeering, along the lines of ‘traditional values’.

Lenin’s rearmament and especially Stalin’s industrialisation owed so much to Western capital and technology as to owe them practically everything. Western banks and manufacturers lovingly suckled with their short-sighted greed the evil baby of bolshevism, weaning it on its favourite sustenance of congealing red liquor.

Bolshevism might have disappeared, but the same tendency didn’t. When the crimes of the post-Soviet regime could no longer be hushed up, Western leaders still sang hosannas to Putin and his gang.

Putin, cooed Tony Blair, “deserves a seat at the table” for his “patriotism”. Once he got his feet under that piece of furniture, he’d embrace Western values and end the long history of Russia’s confrontation with the West, if not quite history tout court.

Credits and technology poured into Russia; purloined trillions flowed in the opposite direction; another monster was allowed to grow to maturity. And now Europe is ablaze.

Even where ideological bias is absent, ignorance ably works towards the same end. For example, in today’s article Jenni Russell thus describes a protagonist of Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate: “He has been an orthodox Christian, a Tolstoyan, a man who believed communist agriculture would create the kingdom of God on earth.”

Which of the three is he, Miss Russell? For this is a flagrant case of a double (triple?) oxymoron: no one can be all those three things at the same time, nor even a combination of any two. Any knowledgeable and conscientious commentator would have pointed that out, but such overachievers are in short supply wherever Russia is concerned.

The tradition of ignorance perseveres. Layers upon layers of misinformation overlay a solid base of ideological bias and wishful thinking to create a towering structure of opinion that overshadows reason and morality.

Even now Putin’s genocidal war on the Ukraine, though it has few fanatical supporters like Carlson or Hitchens, is largely portrayed as an unfortunate aberration, a deviation from an otherwise straight course chartered to Western-style goodness.

Our mainstream media refuse to acknowledge that a succession of evil regimes have moulded the Russian nation in their own image. Watching Ukrainians dying for the imperial fantasies of their KGB rulers, most Russians react with enthusiastic support barely leavened with inertia and indifference.

It’s not just the Russian government but Russia that has become a cancerous growth on the world’s body. Yet where in the mainstream media have you seen this point argued or even broached?

For that reason alone, it would be hard to look forward to 2023 with any degree of optimism. Yet there are many other reasons for pessimism as well.

After the appalling game of musical chairs at Westminster, we’ve effectively ended up with a single-party state, and the single party in question is unapologetically socialist.

The results are predictable: taxes and inflation shooting up, living standards speeding in the opposite direction as they are being overtaken by an accelerating collapse in public morality. Strikes and incompetence are paralysing the country, with every public service rapidly becoming a barely available luxury rather than a confidently expected entitlement.

And yet – and yet the Christian in me refuses to abandon hope, even as the realist struggles to see any grounds for it. So forget all those comparative adjectives and have a happy, healthy, productive New Year. Who knows, you may buck the odds, with me rooting for you every step of the way.

The title is both accurate and untrue. It’s accurate because Pelé was both famous and a tennis player. It’s untrue because he wasn’t famous as a tennis player. But that’s how I remember him.

The year was 1984, a few months after I moved from Houston, where I had played tennis almost every day, to New York, where the game was unaffordable, at least for me.

That created a serious problem for I have an emotional dependence on exercise, and tennis is the only exercise I’ve ever known as a grown-up (this side of something I’d rather not talk about). Driven to desperation, I widened my search to the low-rent boroughs and finally stumbled on a small club in Astoria, Queens, where the hourly fee was a third of Manhattan’s.

The pro hit with me for a few minutes and was satisfied that I could hold my own at the exalted Astoria level. He then told me that three chaps needed a fourth for doubles. Would I be interested?

By that time I was getting so stir crazy that I wouldn’t have turned down a game of wheelchair tennis. Okay then, said the pro and led me to the adjacent court where the knock-up had already started.

“This is your partner,” he said, and my jaw dropped. I was about to find myself on the same court with Pelé, my childhood idol. We shook hands, and I said: “Sir, I don’t know who you are but I still remember that goal you scored in 1958.”

He flashed a megawatt smile and asked me to be patient with him: he had only been playing for a few months. Fair enough, as it turned out Pelé hadn’t yet mastered the finer points of doubles strategy. But on a purely athletic level he was astounding.

For example, I’ve known many experienced players who, after years in the game, never learned to hit a volley way in front. Yet Pelé did that naturally, with an ease that put me to shame.

He humbly begged my forgiveness whenever he missed a shot. I myself missed more than my usual share – it’s hard to be consistent when, instead of watching the ball, you can’t take your eyes off your partner.

I don’t remember how the game went and who won. But I do remember the perfect gentleman playing next to me, with a shy yet radiant smile never leaving his face. I’m not a professional physiognomist, but one thing for sure: a man whose smile can both light up and warm up a whole tennis club has to be kind and good.

We shook hands at the end, with me hoping that some of the stardust would rub off on my palm. It didn’t, but the memory has survived.

I lied to Pelé: I hadn’t seen any of the goals he scored at the 1958 World Cup. But I had heard them. Because we had no TV set (few families had them in Moscow at the time), I appreciated the man’s genius aurally, through the wireless.

Suddenly, instead of just a profusion of names ending in ‘-ov’ or ‘-in’, the radio waves flooded our room with exotica like Vavá, Garrincha, Didi, Santos – and Pelé. “Look at that!” screamed the commentator. “Pelé stopped the ball dead with his instep! Chipped it over the Swedish defender’s head! Caught it in mid-air! And half-volleyed it in! Goal!!!”

My 10-year-old imagination was excited by the audio picture so vividly drawn. As years went by, the excitement abated. But it never disappeared completely: the idols we worship as children never quite leave us.

A few years later we did acquire a TV, and I got the chance to see Pelé’s magic, not just to hear it. For example, in 1965 he singlehandedly destroyed the USSR team in a friendly. The score was 3-0, with Pelé scoring two and making the third.

At that time I had grown up enough to go in for self-analysis. Specifically, I wondered how it was possible that a trivial spectacle of 22 men kicking an inflated leather balloon could be so aesthetically pleasing even to someone who knew the difference between Bach and Beethoven and had tried to read, if without understanding a word, The Critique of Pure Reason.

There was a simple, single-word answer to that long-winded question: Pelé. For few human pursuits, no matter how trivial, are incapable of growing an artist in a field of artisans. For what is art if not an argument for man’s vicarious divinity? And what is an artist if not walking proof of the argument?

The argument can be made and won even in areas not ostensibly conducive to such debates. And even a game largely dominated by unsmiling chaps with nicknames like ‘Chopper’ or ‘Razor’ is still occasionally lit up by a true artist touched by God. Di Stefano, Cruyff, Maradona, Best, Messi, Ronaldo. And the greatest of them all, Pelé.

True art elevates, makes us better, regardless of where it’s practised, including on a football pitch. Beauty always comes from God even if it’s not explicitly created in His name.

Football is an intensely tribal game, with rivalries on and off the field often touched with rancour, borderline hatred. However, not only opposing fans but even opposing players sometimes applauded Pelé’s touches – his genius helped their spirits soar above tribal rivalries and quotidian concerns.

His actions were indeed trivial in the general scheme of things. But their effect on millions wasn’t.

They sensed Pelé wasn’t just a ball-kicker. He was an envoy from, or at least a reminder of, another world, one of pure beauty divorced from the drab reality of physical life.

I mourn the death of my one-time tennis partner and an all-time artist among footballers. Whatever his human failings mentioned in so many obituaries, I’m sure God will recognise His own when welcoming Pelé to eternity. RIP.   

Generally speaking, cancer is no laughing matter. So much more welcome should be the rare occasions when it is.

Having said that, I don’t think mirth was the overriding emotion of hundreds of patients at Askern Medical Centre in Doncaster.

On 23 December, just as they were hanging the last tinsels on their Christmas trees, they received a text message from that GP surgery.

The message must have killed the festive spirit stone-dead. It said: “From the forwarded letters at CMP, Dr [NAME] has asked for you to do a DS1500 for the above patient. Diagnosis – Aggressive lung cancer with metastases.”

That sort of diagnosis, as I know from personal experience, can really bugger up one’s mood, even at Yuletide. However, as I recall, I didn’t emote – even when a consultant imaginatively called Donald McDonald told me, 17 years ago, in his broad Glaswegian, “Your prognersis is puer.” (“Your prognosis is poor”, in English.) “I can still beat you at tennis,” I said.

Some of the recipients, especially those who were genuinely awaiting results of lung cancer tests, reacted more effusively. They hugged their kin and burst out crying. Others rushed to the phones, only to find all lines full, as they always are at NHS surgeries.

Their anguish lasted 22 minutes, when another text message arrived: “Please accept our sincere apologies for the previous text message sent. This has been sent in error. Our message to you should have read: We wish you a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.”

Oh well, an easy mistake to make, I suppose, especially in the NHS. Unless, of course, that was a prank pulled by a nurse with a black sense of humour to match my own.

Now, as Penelope will confirm, I like a practical joke as much as the next man. Once, for example, when she was running for a bus, I shouted after her: “Did you think of what this is doing to the children?” Her fellow travellers looked at my long-suffering wife with derision.

You may think that sort of thing is infantile, and you are probably right. But it’s reassuring sometimes to keep one’s younger side alive, hoping it won’t vanish altogether.

Some of the pranks I’ve pulled on my friends, family and the odd stranger have been less innocent than that one, but they were all funny, at least to me. And I don’t think any of them was vicious.

It would be the easiest windup in the world to ring a stranger and say something like: “This is your GP surgery speaking. Bad news, I’m afraid: you’ve got an aggressive lung cancer with secondaries.”

Half the time such a joke would work, but a moron who does that sort of thing is guilty of something far worse than puerile humour. Still, you may disagree, but I’d rather our medical service were guilty of occasional cruel jesting than of endemic incompetence.

Also, I’m disappointed with those cry-babies in Doncaster. What’s with all that weeping and hugging? What happened to those traditionally hardy Northerners? Are they now trying to get in touch with their feminine side?

Chaps, even in our woke times it’s still not against the law to be men. That breed is supposed to be distinguished by stiff upper lip, not just stiff upper lap.

While we are on that subject, Russian soldiers called up to fight in the Ukraine will have the chance to have their frozen sperm stored in a cryobank for free. That way private Ivanov can have his head blown off by a Ukrainian shell and still continue to comply with the Genesis commandment of “be ye fruitful and multiply”.

I understand the attraction of the idea: since Russia will always need a steady supply of murderers, looters and rapists, it’s important to keep the reproductive cycle uninterrupted. Yet the country shouldn’t go to all that unnecessary trouble and expense.

Considering the winter temperatures on the front line, ill-equipped Russian soldiers don’t even have to ejaculate to have their sperm frozen. The inclement weather will turn most of them into walking (and then falling) cryobanks in no need of expensive equipment. Once they are down, it will be an easy enough matter to…

I’ll leave that macabre image to your imagination, and I’m sorry about evoking it. The story of that accidental prank at Doncaster must have got me in this kind of mood.

I have to admit to a personal idiosyncrasy: whenever any group claims authority to speak on behalf of the people, I look for a place to hide or, barring that, to throw up.

With no notable exceptions, I detect therein the workings of a small group of demagogues lacking real legitimacy and hence seeking its simulacrum.  

The US Constitution, which opens with the words in the title, is a case in point. The other day I mentioned that it was ratified by less than three per cent of the people in whose name it supposedly had been drafted.

That set an example for all post-Enlightenment states to follow. Governments voted in by, say, a third or even a quarter of the people, claim a ringing popular mandate. That, they insist, empowers them to do whatever they like, including playing fast and loose with the constitution. Hey, the people have spoken. So you, Mr Sceptic, might as well shut up.

The opening passage of the US Constitution was lifted almost verbatim from the constitution of the Iroquois nations: “We, the people, to form a union, to establish peace, equity, and order…”.

That wasn’t a case of simple plagiarism. For the framers obviously lacked any examples of prior republican charters. Hence they asked John Adams, who at that time was drumming up support for the new state in Europe, to write an overview of all existing forms of government.

He responded by producing a three-volume work that remains a seminal text of political science to this day. It took Adams some three weeks to write, making one rue wistfully that few contemporary politicians would be capable even of reading such an essay in that time, never mind writing it. (Joe Biden, ring your office.)

Among other polities, Adams specifically investigated the experience of American Indians whose tribes often ran themselves along proto-democratic and proto-federalist lines. He evidently found the opening words produced by the Iroquois Confederacy sufficiently inspiring to suggest a version of them for the preamble to the US Constitution.

Every American schoolchild knows (or rather used to know) that. But the words “we the people” also had a more immediate and less exotic provenance in the works of Denis Diderot, one of the key figures of the Enlightenment.

Diderot was perhaps the greatest French writer of his time, much admired by the other men with a claim to that distinction, Voltaire and Rousseau. Yet he illustrates the depth of the abyss into which even a supremely gifted man can fall when he lacks sound metaphysics to hold on to.

Diderot’s novels, The Nun, Rameau’s Nephew and Jacques the Fatalist rival Voltaire’s Candide for coruscating brilliance, but his fiction isn’t what he is mainly known for.

As the editor of, and principal contributor to, The Encyclopaedia, he laid out the blueprint for the coming civilisational mayhem. It’s his ideas, and not just his words, that worked their way into the formative documents of both American and French Revolutions.

Diderot is often misquoted as saying, “Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” Pedantic readers notice the inaccuracy and gleefully say that Diderot said nothing of the sort. But he did.

For the benefit of such erudite readers, here’s the exact quotation from his poem: “La nature n’a fait ni serviteur ni maître;/ Je ne veux ni donner ni recevoir de lois./ Et ses mains ourdiraient les entrailles du prêtre,/ Au défaut d’un cordon pour étrangler les rois.” [“Nature created neither servant nor master;/ I seek neither to rule nor to serve./ And its hands would weave the entrails of the priest,/ For the lack of a cord with which to strangle kings.”]

(At this point, kaleidoscopic scenes starring King Charles and Archbishop Welby flash through my mind, but I make an effort to chase them away.)

So never mind the exact wording, feel the spirit. And it was the spirit that animated the Enlightenment.

Like any modern revolutionary movement, it accommodated two salient human types I call the Nihilist and the Philistine. The Nihilist seeks to destroy the old order; the Philistine, to build some sort of eudaemonia on the resulting rubble. The two types coexist symbiotically in every revolution, but their relative weight differs from one to the next.

Thus both the American and French revolutions sought to destroy, with the Nihilist’s voice clearly discernible in the discordant political choir. But the Philistine claimed his own share of voice too, offering some vision of what he wished to create.

If the two types were more or less balanced in the American Revolution, the Nihilist was the dominant voice in the French version of the Enlightenment oratorio. And Diderot was both the choir master and the preacher.

Bizarrely, his sermons reached all the way to the Russian court of Catherine II, that most absolute of monarchs. Catherine liked to flirt with fashionable ideas and often described herself, against all evidence, as a republican. Hence she sought Diderot’s advice on how to weave the ideals of the Enlightenment into the Russian political fabric. (That didn’t prevent her from extending serfdom to the Ukraine.)

When she found out that Diderot was struggling to make ends meet, she appointed him caretaker of her vast library and paid him a princely (revolutionary?) sum of 50,000 livres in advance. Diderot then spent five months in Petersburg, swapping platitudes with the Empress every day – against the background of the screams coming out of the torture chamber run by her secret police chief Stepan Sheshkovsky.

On his deathbed, Diderot bequeathed his political will to Catherine, and it was his dying wish that she should follow it to the letter.

The Empress not only should abdicate, wrote Diderot, but she should also exterminate any future pretenders to the throne. He left it to her imagination whether or not to use priestly entrails to that end.

“There is no true sovereign other than the nation, and there can be no true legislator other than the people,” taught the dying man.

Catherine ought to bestow on her grateful subjects a constitution, added Diderot, starting with the words: “We the people, and we the sovereign of this people, swear conjointly these laws, by which we are judged equally.”

To her credit, the Empress didn’t follow Diderot’s prescriptions. But other people did.

That’s why I’m always amused (and bemused) when fire-eating American patriots deny any philosophical and political links between their country’s founding and the Enlightenment. But then ideologies of any kind are impervious to facts – and reason.