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In many such contexts, ‘American’ can be replaced with ‘modern’ without much detriment to the meaning. That takes American conservatism out of its parochial confines and makes it worth pondering wherever we live.

Any such reflection should start from the discipline many Anglophone conservatives hold in low esteem: philosophy. These congenital empiricists are making a mistake, for any polity is a physical embodiment of a metaphysical fact.

The organic states of Christendom derived their legitimacy from dynastic succession going back so far that we might as well assume it comes from God. (I owe this thought to Joseph de Maistre).

The metaphysical premise of the post-Christian political state is easier to make out. After all, it’s usually laid down on paper in the founding constitutional documents. Rejecting the legitimacy that comes from the patina of age, modern states have to seek it in a set of principles, usually traceable back to the Enlightenment.

The purveyors of the civilisational shift from one to the other dealt in stolen goods. The Enlighteners pilfered Christian furniture from its ancestral home and tried to furnish their own house with it.

Thus Christian freedom derived from free will became political liberty derived from some mysterious ‘consent of the governed’. Christian equality of all before God became egalitarian levelling of all before the state. Christian charity was perverted into a provider state.

And the doctrine of natural law, evolving from the pre-Socratics to Aquinas via Aristotle, was turned into the mythical notion of natural political rights arbitrarily derived from fashionable secular theories.

All of this comes across in the Declaration of Independence, making a political case for independence from England on the basis of “Laws of Nature”. That was an Enlightenment fallacy served neat.

Regardless of what Locke and Paine had to say on the subject, “separate and equal station” for countries can’t be derived from ‘Laws of Nature’. There is no law of nature that says a colony is entitled to independence from the metropolis. There exists, however, a modern tendency to pass aspirations as rights.

A “separate and equal station”, desirable though it may be to some, can only be achieved either by agreement or by force. No group has equality built into its reclaimable biological make-up. Portraying independence as a right that somehow supersedes the law was modern demagoguery at its most soaring.

Add to this other larcenous Enlightenment fallacies, such as all men being “created equal”, and you begin to understand the problem facing those Americans who are intuitively inclined towards conservatism.

The problem is basic: conservatism is at odds with the country’s founding documents, especially the Declaration. Yet repudiating them is impossible for American conservatives, who’d otherwise find it hard to explain what it is they are trying to conserve.

Some, such as Russell Kirk, Willmoore Kendall and Frank Meyer, realised this, which made them pessimistic, not to say despondent. Yet some others, such as Harry Jaffa, tried to shoehorn conservatism into the Declaration – only to find that a Size 7 shoe will never fit a Size 11 foot.

These thoughts crossed my mind the other day, when a good friend sent me an article by a young scholar from The Claremont Institute. This think tank, inspired by Jaffa’s thought, defines its mission as restoring “the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life.”

Its secondary, if unstated, objective is to reconcile those principles, as laid down in the Declaration of Independence, with conservatism, and that’s where the problem starts.

I must admit to a soft spot for Harry Jaffa, something I always have for men with a talent for spiffy epigrams. One such damaged Barry Goldwater’s campaign in 1964, when Jaffa was his speech writer.

“Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice,” said Harry through Barry. “Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.” I remember American lefties still squirming about this adage 10 years later, but in 1964 they rallied the electorate by portraying Goldwater as an unapologetic extremist.

Another memorable aphorism by Harry Jaffa was: “We were baptised in the Jordan, not in the fiery brook.” That was a bilingual reference to the materialist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, acknowledged by Marx as a source of his inspiration.

Jaffa brought his sharp mind to bear on the impossible task of somehow finding a conservative kernel in the shell of natural rights, as expounded by Leo Strauss. Strauss was a major influence on that romantic strain of American conservatism, most of which eventually gravitated towards neoconservatism.

The young Claremont scholar tries to dance around the obstacles, but he lacks Jaffa’s agility of foot. For example, he correctly states that the USA was constituted as a republic, not a democracy, and, unlike so many of his compatriots, he does know the difference.

But he ignores the dynamics. For a republic constituted on the principle of natural rights and expressly devoted to the advancement of the common man (“created equal”) will ineluctably degenerate into a democracy-run-riot – this, regardless of the founder’s original intent.

Many of them, John Adams specifically, were horrified when observing the chicken hatched by the egg they had laid. In 1806 Adams wrote, “I once thought our Constitution was a quasi or mixed government, but they had made it… a democracy.”

This, by his correct if belated judgment, had a disastrous effect not only on America but on the whole world. In 1811 Adams rued: “Did not the American Revolution produce the French Revolution? And did not the French Revolution produce all the calamities and desolation of the human race?”

I sympathise with the young author’s predicament. He rummages through the Enlightenment haystack hoping to find the needle of conservatism. But the search is in vain: the needle is simply not there.

He stubbornly repeats Lockean ideas about consent and social compact, but they are not so much unconservative as anti-conservative. Rousseau put them into his Du contrat social, and nobody has ever accused him of conservatism.

I have many problems with those seminal concepts, too many to discuss here. I’ll just mention one: it’s unclear how that consent can be withdrawn or that social contract revoked.

For example, less than three per cent of the American population voted to ratify the Constitution in 1788. Did they thereby issue consent and enter into a contract on behalf of the remaining 97 per cent and also every subsequent generation?

Much of Locke’s thinking was self-contradictory. For example, protection of property rights was the cornerstone of his political philosophy. Yet at the same time he insisted that representation was the sole legitimising factor of taxation (that came across as “No taxation without representation” during the Revolution).

The two notions are in conflict. For by transferring all sovereignty to a representative body, the people will eventually make its power absolute. When unchecked, this power extends to confiscating as much of personal income as the representatives see fit – in effect trampling over property rights so cherished by Locke and the Founders.

The young Claremont scholar didn’t solve those problems because they are unsolvable. It’s impossible to swear by “the principles of the American Founding” and be a political conservative at the same time. That’s like a dipsomaniac preaching teetotalism.

We’ve seen it happen. A fat woman decides enough’s enough. She starts a punishing regimen of diet and exercise, shedding first ounces, then pounds, then stones.

Within a year or so she becomes quite svelte, but she can’t stop. And what do you know, a few months later she develops anorexia and dies, or damn near.

Or look at Bruce Lee. The poor chap learned that hydration is an essential part of conditioning. So he started drinking gallons of water – and died of overhydration. And unlike a real man who dies of drinking too much booze, Lee didn’t even enjoy drinking too much water. Give me C2H5OH over H2O any day.

By the circuitous route of such analogies, I’ve managed both to identify the reason for the deadly cold spell paralysing North America and to come up with the solution before frost does the same to us.

Deadly is the right word to describe it. At least 34 people have died so far, killed by blizzards, power cuts, road accidents, river ice giving way, tree branches falling down and so on.

Millions of people are left without electricity, thousands of flights are cancelled every day. Shops can’t sell off all the carloads of useless trinkets they’ve stocked up for the season, lorries can’t deliver goods, the economy is taking a huge hit.

This is the coldest spell for decades, some meteorologists say ever. And you know what’s to blame? Global warming, or rather overreaction to it.

Like that fat woman eating too little food and Bruce Lee drinking too much water, Americans have overdone their commitment to net zero carbon emissions, that’s what I think. Instead of happily driving those house-sized 8-cylinder boats powered by real juice down the I-10, they’ve switched to Teslas and are now freezing to death. Thanks a whole lot, Elon bloody Musk.

It’s not just those murderous Teslas either. Wind farms, solar panels, all other forms of green energy have conspired to eliminate carbon out of the atmosphere or at least to get it down to a level that would make Greta happy.

As a direct result, the greenhouse effect has been replaced with the icehouse defect. About 60 per cent of the US population are facing weather warnings. They are shivering in the dark, shining their phone lights at thermometers and watching the mercury speeding downwards.

Instead of being fried by global warming, ‘our planet’ is about to turn into an icebound wasteland, and Newton’s Third Law explains why: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. (I often cite this law because it’s the only one I remember from secondary school. I drank my way through it, and it wasn’t too much water – I’m not suicidal.)

The action was the ill-advised assault on atmospheric carbon. The reaction is the snowy hell into which America has plunged.

You may think that my analysis of the situation lacks forensic rigour and relies too much on conjecture. Perhaps. After all, I’m neither a meteorologist nor a climatologist. But, as an old ad once said, “Noah’s Ark was designed by an amateur. The Titanic was designed by a professional.”

Perhaps an amateur unbiased by any excessive knowledge or indeed corporate solidarity can detect some obvious truths that escape professionals. Remember it was accredited doctors who told our hypothetical woman to eat less food and advised the very real Bruce Lee to drink more water.

If you are willing to accept my diagnostic hypothesis, the solution to the problem offers itself. Americans – and Europeans! – should turn every Tesla, Prius, wind turbine and solar panel into a bonfire.

In the immediate term, this will provide much needed warmth and light for the stricken areas. In the long run, this measure will ensure a steady supply of carbon dioxide to keep us all warm throughout the year.

As a side benefit, the aesthete in me would love to toss Greta Thunberg into one of the pyres, but the humanist in me balks at such cruelty. So I’ll settle for a version of the Jeremy Clarkson treatment: marching Greta naked through the streets of Buffalo, with people tossing snowballs at her.

On a serious note (something I find hard to strike on the crest of the festive wave of booze), perhaps we should accept that the weather is sometimes warm, sometimes cold and always out of our control.

So let’s stop playing silly games that are certain to beggar us all – even if they aren’t directly responsible for freezing us to death.

Yes, I know envy is a cardinal sin. But I’m sure you’ll be absolved this once – just tell God I sent you.

Myself, I’ve never envied anyone in my life. But if I were you and someone showed me the same picture of the church where he celebrated the midnight mass yesterday, I’d be envious for sure.

Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire is an 11^th century basilica housing a Benedictine abbey and indeed the relics of St Benedict. Every Christmas eve the monks put on their plain white vestments and sing psalms in Gregorian chant.

People come from as far afield as Paris, a two hours’ drive away. Our own drive was some 45 minutes shorter, but even if it weren’t it would have been worth it.

In theory, the celebration of mass, especially on Christmas eve, shouldn’t depend on the physical beauty of the site. After all, early Christians made do with candle-lit catacombs, where snitches like Pliny grassed them up to Trajan. And the ‘Galileans’ still managed to capture the grandeur of the moment.

But in practice, a beautiful church with its pomp and circumstance somehow makes the occasion even more elevating. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t have so many beautiful churches.

And Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire is one of the most beautiful in France, which is another way of saying in the world. A trained eye would date it at a glance. For it was in the 11^th century that church architecture made its first tentative steps from Romanesque, mainly associated with the Cluniac order, to Gothic, pioneered by the Cistercians.

Saint-Benoît was clearly built from the altar out, and you can see perfectly round Romanesque arches in the back of the basilica. Yet as you move towards the nave, the slightly pointing Gothic arch begins to emerge.

Another century or two and the Romanesque arch will disappear, while the Gothic one will come to a much sharper, more structurally sound, point. That will enable builders to make their churches loftier and with more, larger windows.

That’s why St Bernard, the founder of the Cistercian order, fell in love with Gothic. He wanted more light coming in, for to him light could only come from God. Yet both the Cluniac and Cistercian orders preached unadorned interiors, with plain stone walls, clean lines and symmetrical layouts.

The subsequent development of architecture proved the old maxim: if something can be done, sooner or later it will be done. The structural Gothic advances liberated architects, builders and stonemasons to express themselves, and they didn’t always use that freedom wisely.

Churches were becoming more and more ornate, glorious stained glass became a dominant feature of great cathedrals like Chartres and Bourges, new tiers were added to the naves, and the whole structures began to fly off to the sky.

So far so good (or in this case so sublime), which cautionary phrase should always offset any joy one feels about any kind of progress. For step by step Gothic gave way to Renaissance and Renaissance to the variously vulgar Baroque.

Gone was the laconic, streamlined, ineffable beauty of Romanesque and early Gothic churches. Coming in instead were disfiguring variations on the theme of a wedding cake complete with tasteless figurines, stone squiggles and ostentatious polychrome ornaments.

Baroque vulgarity was even forced into many great Romanesque and Gothic churches, turning them into stylistic competitors with Turkish seraglios.

I remember looking forward to visiting the Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran in Rome, which used to be the principal cathedral of Western Christianity before the hideous St Peter’s was built.

However, when I finally found myself inside, I couldn’t stay there for more than five minutes. The interior, remodelled in the early days of Baroque, is a towering monument to gilded excess, bad taste and general ugliness.

Now, if all beauty comes from God, is one allowed to ask whom ugliness comes from? I didn’t stay long enough to ask that question. Instead Penelope and I fled across the river to rest our eyes on the aesthetic glory that is the basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere.

But that was in the distant past. Last night we rejoiced in one of the best settings for the midnight mass anywhere in the world. One can almost forgive the French everything.

Merry Christmas!

P.S. Every town and village around us is fighting the night off with a profusion of brightly lit Christmas decorations, trees, life-size Nativity scenes, doorways and windows framed in garlands of 500-watt bulbs. Wonderful to see, but aren’t we supposed to have an energy crisis? Someone must have forgotten to tell that to the good people of Burgundy and Loiret.

The best wishes come naturally: Merry Christmas to all my readers!

But the worst fears aren’t far behind. For, just as we celebrate the Incarnation of Our Lord and thus the birth of history’s greatest civilisation, we remind ourselves that a new, surrogate, civilisation has taken over.

It’s animated by various passions, but the principal one is the urge to erase Christmas from public consciousness. Barring that, the new lot are willing to settle for merely vulgarising Christmas, ridding it of any sacred meaning and reducing it to a combination of shopping spree and drinking bout.

Many deeds, both great and wicked, were done in the name of Christ. He redeemed original sin but He didn’t expunge it, thereby turning people into little angels. Doing so would have eliminated free will, turning people not so much into angels flapping their wings as into puppets jerking at the end of a string.

Freedom to make choices presupposed the possibility that some choices would be good, some bad and some downright evil. Yet at least man still retained the ability to know the difference – absolute standards of virtue existed, and they were recognised, if not always followed, by all.

Our relativist, anomic, materialist modernity consigned such absolute standards to oblivion. As a result, it has undone most of the great deeds of Christendom and outdone most of the wicked ones.

Some wicked deeds were justified by mock-Christian demagoguery, along the lines of liberté, égalité, fraternité. Modernity served those beautiful things on a platter, except that, on closer examination, that dish turned out to contain piles of severed heads.

The 20^th century, the first completely atheist one in history, continued the tendency to invoke such mock-Christian allusions as millenarian happiness, while ratcheting up hostility to actual Christianity. Severed heads began to number in millions, not thousands.

The gurus of the new order, from Marx and Engels to Lenin and Stalin, sputtered hatred of Christianity so profusely that the toxic spittle engulfed continents. Whole groups, social, racial or ethnic, were now slated for destruction irrespective of any individual wrongdoing.

This was what Prof. Rummel called democide, murder by category. Modernity might not have invented that evil, but it certainly raised it to a level never seen before.

Democide may or may not equate genocide, murder by specifically ethnic or racial category. In that sense, all genocide is democide, but not all democide is necessarily genocide.

Anti-Christian modernity excelled at both. In the name of universal equality, communists murdered all sorts of categories equally: social, cultural, religious, professional and also sometimes ethnic. The Nazis eschewed even mock-Christian demagoguery, replacing it with straight racism justified by unapologetic paganism wedded to national, or rather racial, self-interest.

They replaced all-encompassing democide with more narrowly targeted genocide, an attempt to eradicate whole ethnic and racial groups, mostly though not exclusively Jews. Unlike the Bolsheviks, the Nazis didn’t persecute Christians specifically. But, like the Bolsheviks, they didn’t bother to conceal their hatred of Christianity and its every tenet.

As we celebrate the birth of Christ, Europe is again witnessing genocide at its very heart. Putin and his acolytes have been unequivocal in their stated goal: unless the Ukrainians overthrow their government, ditch their sovereignty and surrender, they’ll all be exterminated.

The methods have changed since communist execution cellars, Nazi gas chambers and concentration camps favoured by both. In fact, they are more reminiscent of Holodomor, the artificial famine of 1931-1932 that killed by starvation some five million Ukrainians, conservatively estimated.

Those murders, however, were committed in the grey area between democide and genocide: it was mostly Ukrainians who were killed, but not specifically for being Ukrainian. Their crime was their love of freedom and consequent refusal to submit to collectivised agriculture in particular and communist despotism in general. Those who repudiated their opposition were allowed to live.

Putin, on the other hand, targets the whole population, just like the Nazis did with the Jews. But it’s cold, not gas chambers, that the Russians have chosen as their genocidal weapon. Unable to stand up on their hind legs and defeat the Ukrainian army like fighting men, they instead fight like mass murderers.

Russian rockets are aimed at the Ukraine’s infrastructure, especially her capacity to keep her civilian population warm during the typically inclement winter. Destroying power stations and dams in no way degrades the fighting capacity of the Ukrainian army. It merely kills civilians, in their thousands at the moment, in what the Russians hope will become millions soon.

If this is substantively different from the Holocaust, the difference escapes me. In fact, if anything, the Nazis had an advantage over Putin’s murderers, that of honesty.

They didn’t claim to be the Jews’ brothers. They didn’t insist their mission was Christian charity towards the Jews. They honestly said the Jews were sub-human vermin who had to be exterminated to preserve the racial purity of the Volk.

Top marks for both honesty and monstrosity then. However, while scoring high on monstrosity, the Russians fail honesty altogether.

In a recent TV address, Putin said: “There’s nothing to accuse us of. We’ve always seen Ukrainians as a brotherly people and I still think so. What’s happening now is a tragedy, but it’s not our fault.”

Just imagine, if you can, Hitler declaring that, as a pious Christian, he had always seen Jews as brothers and continued to do so in spite of the unfolding tragic events that weren’t his fault.

Yet Hitler didn’t and couldn’t claim anything of the sort. That’s why he was only monstrous, while Putin with his Christian pretensions is also emetic.

Christ warned against such people: “For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ, and shall deceive many.”

This is my worst fear this Christmas: that many shall be deceived, and the will to thwart evil hiding under a Christian mask shall dissipate. But on the eve of one of our most sublime events, I can’t leave you on this frightening note.

So, at the risk of repeating myself, a very merry Christmas to all of you. And perhaps, as you raise a glass of festive champagne, you’ll spare a prayer for those who are dying for their freedom – and yours.

Sometimes I wonder if Fox News’s Tucker Carlson is our own dear Peter Hitchens in disguise.

The same unwavering devotion to Putin, barely camouflaged with spurious denials. The same hatred of the Ukraine for daring to resist their idol. The same mendacity in supporting their animus. The same commitment to reciting Kremlin propaganda word for word. And, perhaps most damaging, the same false-flag appeal to ‘conservative values’.

Carlson condenses all that wickedness into personal attacks on President Zelensky, the most heroic wartime leader since the Second World War.

The day before flying to America to meet President Biden and address Congress, Zelensky had visited the front yet again, that time at Bakhmut, currently the site of the fiercest fighting. He had form.

When Russia’s bandit raid started, most observers – including those of Nato and the Ukraine herself – were sure the country would be overrun, and Kiev captured, within days. Spearheading the offensive, Putin sent out hit squads to murder Zelensky.

Though they were neutralised, Zelensky knew, and said publicly, that his days were numbered. “This is probably the last time you’ll see me alive,” he told the journalists.

Nevertheless, when Nato leaders offered to fly him to safety, Zelensky refused. “I need ammunition, not a taxi,” he said. Thank God he survived, as did his country.

Since then Zelensky has led the Ukraine’s desperate fight with unmatched bravery and wisdom. In fact, a credible claim can be made that, morally at least, it’s he and not whoever happens to be the US president who is the true leader of the free world.

I don’t know where this former comedian has found the reservoirs of courage so demonstrably missing in his Western counterparts. But he has definitely earned the respect and admiration of all decent and sensible people.

That category demonstrably doesn’t include such faux conservatives as Carlson. If he were just a crazed idiot, one would be well-advised simply to ignore his lying, ignorant harangues. But he isn’t.

He is an exponent of an ideology that assorted Lefties call conservatism, but which is in fact a craving for right-wing totalitarianism as a replacement for the ascendant left-wing kind. That makes fascisoid leaders like Putin and Brazil’s Bolsonaro their allies both intellectually and viscerally (Carlson admires both).

Hence Zelensky is Carlson’s bête noire – or rather, in this case, verte. For the hack chose to attack Zelensky from the sartorial angle, for wearing his trademark olive green sweatshirt throughout his visit.

Zelensky “dressed like the manager of a strip club”, said Carlson, showing intimate familiarity with such facilities. How dare that Putin-hater show such disrespect for America’s august institutions.

In fact, the Ukrainian president simply kept in mind Polonius’s advice that “apparel oft proclaims the man” – and his mission. Zelensky has vowed never to shed his paramilitary clobber till the end of the war, to remind the world that Ukrainians die in their thousands manning the ramparts of civilisation.

Had that been just an offhand remark, it would have been simply tasteless, not frankly sinister. But it’s just one of many.

For Carlson continued his attack by making a lying, and slyly anti-Semitic, statement that Zelensky is waging an “ongoing war on Christianity”. He didn’t directly attribute that fiendish scheme to Zelensky’s Jewishness, but the subtext was unmistakable. In fact, judging by their gloating comments, some of his viewers got it loud and clear.

This lie is spread by Putin’s agents. The basis for it is the Ukraine’s minor restrictions on the subversive shenanigans of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under the aegis of the Moscow Patriarchate.

Since that institution is effectively a department of the secret service, its activities in the Ukraine go well beyond ministering to the spiritual needs of its flock. In fact, the Ukrainian government would be justified to ban it altogether.

But it has done nothing of the sort, this though less than 10 per cent of Ukrainian Orthodox Christians have anything to do with the Moscow Patriarchate. For, unlike Russia, the Ukraine has always been, and emphatically remains, religiously pluralistic.

Two other Orthodox churches are active in the Ukraine, with the autocephalous church under the Constantinople patriarch by far the most populous. Also important is the Greco-Catholic church, mainly in the west of the country, along with various Protestant creeds.

Zelensky’s “ongoing war on Christianity” is an FSB disinformation canard that Carlson and his ilk avidly gobble up and regurgitate. But that sort of thing has never stopped any ideologised demagogues, Left or Right.

I don’t know how intimate Carlson’s links with the Kremlin are, but he definitely uses the Ukraine as a cudgel to beat Biden with. Now, the idea of spanking Biden is appealing. But doing so with moronic logic is off-putting – yet this is what Carlson has done for months.

Tucker’s syllogism would put his IQ into the middle two-digit range: Tucker hates Joe; Vlad hates Joe; ergo, Tucker loves Vlad.

This is how he once put it: “Putin’s never called me racist. Threatened to have me sacked. Never manufactured a lockdown-inducing pandemic. Never taught my children critical race theory or made fentanyl or attacked Christianity. So why does the Washington, D.C. establishment hate him so much?”

Could it be because he is threatening to turn the USA into a strait separating Canada from Mexico? Pouncing on Russia’s neighbours like a rabid dog? Endangering America’s Nato allies? Waging genocidal war and threatening a nuclear holocaust to anyone daring to interfere? Vowing to rebuild history’s most evil empire?

Oh sorry, Putin is doing none of those things, says that jammy Tucker. He is merely trying to settle a “border dispute” with “a nation called Ukraine” led by a “shadow president”.

“Why do I care what is going on in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia?” Carlson once said. “I’m serious. Why do I care? Why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Which I am.”

The rooting isn’t muted by any aversion to lying. Thus: “America and the UK demand total war with Russia, regime change war with Russia and of course, the Ukrainians caught in the middle had no choice but to concede.”

America and the UK are falling over themselves trying to avoid total war with Russia and a regime change there. That’s why they’ve refused to introduce a no-fly zone to protect Ukrainian civilians from genocidal attacks. That’s why they have so far refrained from arming the Ukraine with weapons that would enable her to win the war, not just to stay in it.

That’s not how Carlson sees it. Instead he dutifully parrots Putin’s speeches, saying, for example: “They [Nato countries] just do not need a big and independent country like Russia around.” The Ukraine’s government is a “puppet” of the West, “managed by the State Department.” I’m disappointed. I thought it was the CIA.

Recently Carlson treated his audience to a geopolitical insight so staggeringly cretinous that one wouldn’t expect even him to say something like that: “We don’t arm Ukraine so we can help the Ukrainians. They are merely unfortunate pawns in all of this. We arm Ukraine so that we can punish Russia. Why? For stealing Hillary Clinton’s coronation.”

Excuse me? Hasn’t Tucker’s idol Trump always denied that the Kremlin was instrumental in his election (otherwise known as “stealing Hillary Clinton’s coronation”)? And isn’t Tucker duty-bound to support Donald every step of the way? The chap is too dumb to realise that his statement indirectly confirms Trump’s complicity with Putin, real or not.

No falsehood is too big or too small for Carlson. Thus he has repeated Russian lies that the USA runs bioweapons laboratories in the Ukraine. And of course, as far as he is concerned, imposing sanctions on Putin’s gangsters constitutes illegal seizure of property.

One can only regret that the likes of Carlson have let the increasingly awful Democratic Party claim as their own the noble cause of helping the Ukraine thwart Russia’s attack on civilisation. And that “conservative values” are touted by those who don’t even know what conservatism means.

And now, by all means, let’s discuss Zelensky’s dress sense.  

The other day the laddish journalist Clarkson wrote a column in which he owned up to detesting Meghan Markle “on a cellular level”.

He was “dreaming of the day”, Clarkson added, when Meghan was “made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while crowds chant, ‘Shame!’, and throw lumps of excrement at her”.

Commentators more securely plugged into popular culture than I am detected a reference to a scene from the TV series Game of Thrones, of which I haven’t seen a single episode. Whatever its cultural antecedents, however, Clarkson’s remark is highly objectionable.

It shows most lamentable insensitivity to Meghan’s personality and her mission in life. For she’d welcome this chance to play the role of an excremental, dismounted Lady Godiva. Where onlookers would see shame and humiliation, she’d see a golden rain of Netflix dollars coming down to cover her nudity.

Both in her previous incarnation of a B actress and her present mission of building a capital of money and notoriety on the ruins of the royal family, Meghan has always lived or died by publicity. The worst possible fate for her isn’t being shamed. It’s being ignored.

There would be little chance of that in a scene spun out of Clarkson’s vivid imagination. Anyway, public nudity is no big deal for a B actress, and hardened excrement wouldn’t even sully her unduly.

But imagine the publicity value of such a stunt. Why, Netflix executives and their competitors from other services would be racing one another to add zeroes to Meghan’s already bloated fees.

Think of TV rights, photo rights, book rights, interview rights and you’ll realise that Meghan would see no wrongs in that little performance. She’d be thanking Jeremy Clarkson all the way to the bank.

Now Jeremy, for some subliminal reasons known only to our nattering nabobs of wokery, is perceived as a man of the right. I suppose they’ve arrived at that nomenclature by a process of elimination: he who isn’t conspicuously Left has to be Right.

That’s how, for example, Hitler got to be known as a right-winger the moment he attacked Stalin. Stalin was undeniably and commendably left-wing; Hitler started out as Stalin’s ally but then became his enemy; ergo, Hitler was extreme right-wing.

Later the same tag was attached to people like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, whose similarity to Hitler wasn’t immediately obvious to those untouched by ideological afflatus.   

Clarkson made his journalistic bones as a petrol-headed host of an entertaining car programme on TV. In the eyes of the woke brigade, his fanatic devotion to automotive transport alone would be sufficient to stigmatise him as an inveterate conservative.

Clarkson can detect a deep metaphysical significance in a powerful engine driving four wheels. That, his irrepressible laddishness and an innate gift of the gab make him a good watch, for a programme or two.

After that, that petrol-headedness grows a bit tiresome, but Clarkson remains good value for a snappy phrase and the odd putdown that makes the pinkish fringe see red. That’s precisely the effect his fantasy of Meghan has had.

Unlike sensible people, our woke mavens don’t mind Meghan. In fact, they see her as a comrade-in-arms, a sort of ideological Parteigenosse. By knocking lumps out of the royal family, she is fighting their fight too. And her half-caste origin adds much welcome frisson to her trenchant attacks launched from the beachhead of solipsistic narcissism.

Her and Harry’s obscene show has broken all Netfix records, in the UK at any rate. That makes her a successful media personality, another feather in her cap (and in her arrow aimed at the monarchy). In short, Meghan is one of them, and Clarkson isn’t.

That’s why his crude comment caused an outburst of hysteria completely out of proportion with the gravity of the offence. And what do you know, it’s not Clarkson’s misreading of Meghan’s personality that his detractors object to. It’s his rudeness.

He has committed a hate crime, they scream. And specifically? Never mind specifically. A hate crime’s a hate crime. Fine, if you insist: misogyny, at least. And at most? Oh well, possibly racism as well.

And perpetrators of hate crimes are, well, criminals. Clarkson must be arrested, tried and sent down for a long stretch, ideally for life. He is guilty of a felony, not just a boorish remark.

I can confidently predict that, if he says something similar about any woke icon a couple of years from now, Clarkson will indeed have his collar felt. Yet evidently we aren’t quite at that point yet.

Hence Sir Mark Rowley, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, ruled out a criminal probe into Jeremy Clarkson’s misdeed. Police officers, he explained, were “not there to police people’s ethics”.

“The legal lines are only crossed, generally, when things are said that are intended or likely to stir up or incite violence,” continued Sir Mark. But then a sinister overtone crept into his statement: “I don’t think this is one of those cases but of course we will keep a close eye on it.”

Since ‘we’ isn’t a royal pronoun but a collective reference to the police, Jeremy Clarkson should watch his step. Another intemperate remark, and he may indeed be charged with a hate crime. As it is, he is likely to be punished only professionally, by losing some of his lucrative engagements.

Pity the same exacting standards aren’t applied to woke mouthpieces screaming hatred for those they see as their enemies. When the comedian Jo Brand publicly wished that someone threw battery acid into Nigel Farage’s face, she suffered no censure, much less a police promise to keep an eye on her subsequent utterances.

Labour politicians screaming “Rejoice!” when Lady Thatcher died received no opprobrium. Guardian and Independent journalists routinely describing as ‘fascists’ anyone who voted Leave aren’t censured in any way.

On the contrary, they are welcome guests at academic events, such as those at the Oxford Union, from which conservatives are banned as a matter of course.

Back in the late 80s, my son spent a couple of terms at the LSE. On his first day there he was stunned to see a lobby poster announcing a university debate. The theme was: “Resolved – this house will assassinate Thatcher.”

This sort of thing could have been treated as incitement to violence in some quarters – but wasn’t. Vituperative attacks on anyone perceived as even remotely conservative are an exercise in free speech. The shoe on the other foot makes it a hate crime, something for the Met to “keep a close eye on”.

As to Jeremy Clarkson, he ought to learn how to wield a rapier rather than a bludgeon. And a course in psychology wouldn’t go amiss. If he took one, he’d refrain from giving Meghan ideas for self-aggrandisement.

Dennis McGrory, who 47 years ago raped and murdered a 15-year-old girl, was arrested, charged and tried a few months later. The case was strictly circumstantial, and the jury cleared McGrory on the directions of a judge.

Yet recently swabs from the victim’s body produced a DNA match. McGrory’s original verdict has been overturned. He has been retried, convicted and is now likely to spend the rest of his life in prison. This is the oldest double jeopardy case in England, and there’s jubilation all around.

Top policemen, judges, prosecutors and of course the victim’s family say triumphantly that justice has finally been done. Quite the opposite, I’d suggest.

I think justice has been abused, which in no way implies sympathy with that evil monster. It’s only fair that he should rot in jail, and even the gallows would be called for if that were still an option. But I’d argue that fair and just are two different things.  

Now, if you were to name one defining feature of a civilised Western polity, what would it be?

I’m sure many Britons and more Americans would vote for democracy. But, according to the influential American think tank Freedom House, as recently as in 1900 the world boasted not a single democracy.

Considering that Freedom House’s list of today’s 120-plus democracies includes Columbia and Venezuela, one suspects its criteria, which 19^th century Britain and USA fail to satisfy, are purely formal. Still, it’s hard to insist that civilised polity is coextensive with democracy of universal suffrage.

What then? For me the answer is indisputable: the rule of just law. That alone serves as the reliable hallmark of a civilised country, which 19^th century Britain and USA were, and today’s Venezuela and Columbia aren’t.

The Anglosphere, which is to say Britain, her former colonies and territories, bases its jurisprudence on the English Common Law. That, as any schoolchild knows, is based on a careful accumulation of precedents over centuries.

The precedents form the flesh of the English Common Law, but no body can live by flesh alone. It requires a skeletal structure holding the flesh together. And that is provided by several ancient principles that until recently were held to be sacrosanct and immutable.

One of them was the defendant’s right to keep silent and refuse to give self-incriminating evidence. Exercising that right wasn’t to be taken as an ipso facto admission of guilt.

Notice that I’m using the past tense here. For Margaret Thatcher’s government stipulated an exception to that principle in cases of terrorist offences.

I argued at the time and still maintain today that this did more harm to society than any terrorist bomb ever could. The skeleton of our justice lost a load-bearing bone, leaving much flesh saggy and unattached.

I’m not suggesting that legal casuistry should act as a suicide pact. On the contrary, when the lives of His Majesty’s subjects are at stake, I wouldn’t be horrified by any extra-judicial protective measures the government might be compelled to take. But subverting due process at trial should be off limits.

If Thatcher’s government broke one bone, Blair’s vandalism took a sledgehammer to the very spine of Britain’s ancient constitution. And one of the most vicious blows struck at the double jeopardy principle going back 800 years.

The Criminal Justice Act of 2003 stated that a defendant convicted of a serious crime could be tried again for the same crime if corroborative evidence of his guilt came to light. This is what put McGrory behind bars to the accompaniment of hosannas from all the expected quarters.

A typical sample came from Acting Detective Superintendent Rebecca Reeves, who said: “This was an extremely brutal attack on a young girl and my thoughts are with her family, with her siblings and the other members of her family who are still alive today. I hope that finally, the outcome at court has brought them some element of comfort.”

A beautiful sentiment, that, but not one I’d like to hear from a top law-enforcement officer. This, however, is a recurrent motif in all such cases: finally, the victim’s family can get justice and ‘closure’.

Much as I sympathise with everybody who has lost a relation to a brutal crime, this isn’t about a family getting closure. That sort of thing is the domain of vendetta, the rough justice of seeking vengeance on a murderer.

Admittedly, should something like that happen to someone close to my heart, taking the law in my own hands would be the first thought to cross my mind. This is a normal human impulse, and one I’m not entirely sure I’d be able to resist.

But that’s not what we are talking about. For, in a country ruled by just law, it’s not just the victim’s family that’s wronged by a murder, but society at large. That’s why indictments are passed down by the Crown in Britain and the People in the US — not by a Mr and Mrs John Doe.

Much as our hearts go to the victim’s family, it’s above all the whole country that has suffered egregious damage. Murder sends destructive seismic waves throughout society, and their amplitude can only be attenuated by justice done.

“Above all” are the operative words in the paragraph above. In criminal cases the collective interests of society take precedence over any individual grievances, no matter how agonising.

And these collective interests are better served by keeping the skeleton of justice intact even at the cost of letting the odd monster off the hook. For, if history teaches anything at all (which it probably doesn’t), it’s that any crack in the edifice of justice will continue to widen ad infinitum.

Give constitutional vandals an inch, and they’ll eventually take a mile. Before we know it, the sage laws organically developed over centuries will no longer be there to protect us.

In fact, it’s hard not to notice that most new laws passed over recent decades protect not so much the individual against the state as the state against the individual. And our state increasingly allies itself with the ethos of lachrymose, touchy-feely sentimentality, that simulacrum of sentiment and replacement for thought.

I just wish those modern vandals left the English Common Law alone. Take that away, and the line separating Britain from, well, Venezuela and Columbia will become so blurred as to be unnoticeable. And the climate is much better there. 

Gary Neville, former full back turned TV commentator, used the opportunity kindly provided by ITV to address 4.5 million viewers before the World Cup final.

Those football lovers got more than they bargained for. Rather than just being regaled with penetrative insights into overlapping wingbacks and some such, they found themselves on the receiving end of a deranged rant.

Neville is so indignant about the plight of our striking nurses that he compared them to migrant workers brought to Qatar to build the facilities for the World Cup. Those imports from the low-rent parts of Africa and Asia indeed had to labour in appalling conditions, reminiscent of slavery.

Some 6,500 of them died, whereas the others were squeezed dry and sent on their way, as poor as they had been to start with. While one can legitimately believe that our nurses are also overworked and underpaid, equating them with Qatari slaves is typical leftist hysteria.

One can also detect an attempt at overcompensating for Neville’s side activity: controversially accepting a six-figure fee to do commentary on a Qatari-owned network. That drew a great deal of criticism, with some pundits accusing him of hypocrisy.

That’s like accusing a politician of not keeping campaign promises or a prostitute of not being a virgin. Politicians lie, prostitutes have sex for money, Bollinger Bolsheviks mouth leftist platitudes just as they rake in millions from whatever source is willing to oblige.  

Now Neville, nicknamed Red Nev, is known as one of the leftmost left-wingers among footballers, which is saying a lot. For most ball-kicking pros tend to hug the left end of the political spectrum.

That stands to reason. Given the dominant bias of both schoolteachers and TV broadcasters, young people are inundated with a deluge of woke, socialist propaganda. This forms a pervasive ethos, signposted by mindless bien pensant clichés.

Some people are capable of bucking the mandated trend, but what kind of people? It’s impossible to keep mass propaganda at bay without a highly developed capacity for independent thought. That faculty is partly innate but mostly acquired.

Acquiring it takes a sustained effort going by the name of education. And I don’t mean a school graduation certificate or even a university degree. These may or may not help but, when you get right down to it, there’s no education but self-education.

Only a dedicated effort can hone one’s ability to analyse information, filter it though one’s critical mesh, separate true from false, draw conclusions and form ideas impervious to vox populi. That takes much thinking, reading, debating, submitting one’s thoughts to destructive testing, both internal and external.

It would be fair to say that most people don’t take the trouble. They pick up their ideas pre-packaged and untouched by free thought. Some may be lucky to receive those packages from thoughtful parents, unusually good teachers or perhaps – though increasingly seldom – their parish priests.

Such luck evades most people these days, and your typical professional footballers hardly fit the profile of an independent thinker I’ve drawn. Hence they are likely to go with the flow, whose current is moving in one direction only.

Then there’s the money, as there so often is. These lads mostly come from impoverished council estates, often from broken homes. Then, when they are barely out of their teens, if that, they start making millions, sometimes in one month.

Their childhood playmates are still stuck in poverty, often etched with drunkenness, drug addiction and the odd arrest. But ball kickers aren’t trained to believe in individual responsibility for one’s life in any field other than that on which balls are kicked. They know it has taken them years of training to get where they are, but they can’t relate their own success story to their family and childhood friends.

“It’s all society’s fault” is a thought blown into their minds by the zeitgeist. And when it first appears, they become putty in the hands of propagandists. Witness, for example, that not a single England player refused to take part in the obscene pre-whistle genuflection honouring a black criminal accidentally killed while resisting arrest.

Admittedly, not every player becomes a fire-eating agitator like Red Nev, who is a card-carrying member of the Labour Party and a vociferous shill for every plank of its electoral campaign. He is also a natural, passionate hater.

In his days of playing right full back for Manchester United, Red Nev openly admitted to hating Liverpool (his exact words). Now that he often has to share commentating duties with former Liverpool players, he has found a new object for his hatred: the Tory Party, which he calls “cold-hearted”.

Neville’s rant yesterday amounted to a party political broadcast, which I assume wasn’t the mission specified in his ITV contract. Essentially he tricked his way to a vast audience by promising to talk football and instead spewing leftist political spittle.

His party is trying to force the Tories into a snap election, which Labour would win by a wide margin. Communist-run unions are unleashing misery on the whole country to that very end.

They don’t want to wait another two years. God forbid the Tory government will use the time to make things better for everyone. They know and I know and everyone knows that’s unlikely to happen, but forcing a general election now will guarantee victory, rather than almost guaranteeing it.

I wonder if Red Nev would countenance some obvious ways of freeing up NHS cash to pay the nurses more. Such as sacking, effective immediately, 90 per cent of the non-medical personnel and 100 per cent of all those directors of diversity and ‘lived experience’.

Yes? No? Thought so. He and his ilk don’t care about nurses, railway workers or postmen. All they care about is indulging their hatred and half-baked misanthropic ideology. The cant of “share, care, be aware” is a means to that end – as are the parasitic administrators syphoning funds away from doctors, nurses and ultimately patients.

Oh well, it’s a free country – especially for people like Red Nev. If he wishes to campaign for Labour, by all means he should do so. But our TV channels will be in default of their charters if they don’t withdraw their screens from that effort. At least during sports broadcasts.

P.S. Speaking of footie, French papers are pouring scorn on Manny Macron and his unsuccessful attempt to engage in foreplay with the France star Kylian Mbappé.

Manny, who evidently has nothing better to do, graced the World Cup final with his shirt-sleeved presence, only to see France lose. Having gone into jubilant paroxysms each time France scored, he then decided to explore the PR potential of trying to console the distressed players.

Yet Mbappé brought back the bitter memories of my youth, when so many girls wiggled out of my hopeful attempts to embrace them. He did exactly the same to Manny, who then did what I used to do: trying to find, without much more success, more willing marks. Bien joué, Kylian!  

The Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal, recently published a paper analysing the country’s deaths caused by sub-optimal temperatures between 2000 and 2020.

It turns out that extreme cold was responsible for 80 times as many deaths as extreme heat.

Several other papers analysed similar data worldwide. There the difference was smaller but still impressive: cold killed 17 times more people than heat did.

When a friend of mine, who is a regular reader of, and occasional contributor to, The Lancet, told me about this, I was amazed – not so much by the facts themselves as by the complete lack of publicity they’ve received even in the medical press, never mind general interest publications.

Some Lancet readers commenting on the paper doubted the trial methodology involved, which is fair enough: medical researchers have been known to play fast and loose with data subsets. One can still wonder whether the same readers would be as ready to scrutinise the methodology had the results been opposite.

Others mentioned that the findings shouldn’t lead to any far-reaching conclusions. They were in no doubt that, as ‘our planet’ continued to overheat, the situation would reverse.

In other words, what may hypothetically happen in 100 years is more real to them than what is actually and demonstrably happening now.

As to the popular press, its loquacity on the research matched the dinnertime din at a Trappist refectory. Not a word was breathed, which is why the bet offered in the title above is safe.

I shan’t try to offer any conjecture on the likely frontpage headlines should the paper have shown it’s extreme heat that kills 80 times as many Britons. I’ll leave that to your imagination – mine isn’t fecund enough.

What interests me is the subtle ways in which propaganda can work. The tools it employs can vary from ear-splitting noise to pin-drop silence, and sometimes it’s the latter that can have the greater effect.

Ever since the anti-capitalist animus was first channelled into the conduit of the global warming fraud, activists have routinely blown certain data out of proportion while hushing up some others. For example, they’d select a short recent period that showed a steady rise in temperatures, while eschewing the proper method of analysing climate historically.

Thus the general public remains blissfully unaware of long periods in the past when global temperatures were considerably higher than now. The Roman and Medieval Warming Periods are prime examples, and not many people drove diesel-powered SUVs in those days.

The techniques involved are familiar to every adman, a group I happen to know rather well, having been one myself for 30 years. The advertising profession has a code of practice that makes it impossible to lie, which is to cite false information in support of promotional claims.

Yet the same code says nothing about deceiving: failing to disclose information that contradicts the claims made. On the contrary, admen who do so successfully are widely praised for their professional acumen (look up such terms as USP and Preemptive Benefit, both prime examples of such laudable trickery).

Then again, one expects nothing less from chaps trying to flog their wares. Hoping that a salesman will highlight the downside of his product would be presuming too much on human goodness. But in the not so distant past we did expect our mainstream media to present a balanced view of any serious subject.

That expectation has gone the way of all flesh. Nowadays our papers practise all the same tricks that are so profitably used in advertising. But if admen act according to their remit, journalists betray theirs.

Propaganda has replaced much of the reporting and most of the commentary. And people lap it up like thirsty puppies. The more energetic among them read about the imminent death of ‘our planet’ being slowly fried by greedy capitalists and join the ranks of Just Stop Oil and other such saboteurs.

The same friend who told me about the research paper also mentioned that a former editor of The Lancet was among the 30 people arrested for blocking Lambeth Bridge last October.

I wonder what the editors of The Guardian and The Mirror were doing. Slashing car tyres?

You are in pain. It’s something internal. Could be your gall bladder. Or liver. Or kidney. Or appendicitis. You don’t know what, you’re not a doctor.

That’s why you must urgently see one, but that’s easier said than done. At least seven million Britons are on the NHS waiting list, and some of them are hurting as badly as you are. Or worse.

They (and you) will have to bear it with characteristic British stoicism. For the NHS is desperately short of frontline medical professionals – and that was the case even before nurses and ambulance paramedics went on strike.

But not to worry – help is on its way, even though almost half (47 per cent, to be exact) of the NHS staff aren’t medics. Yet they have other vital functions to perform, which is reflected in their job descriptions: director of diversity, facilitator of optimisation, optimiser of facilitation – and “director of lived experience”.

It’s this last job that’s currently advertised on the NHS website, with an annual salary of up to £115,000 on offer. That’s enough to pay four newly qualified nurses, but let’s face it: directors of lived experience are much more valuable.

In case you wonder what constitutes “lived experience”, the NHS is happy to clarify. It’s having experienced racism or discrimination, and thereby learned to recognise “white privilege” when you see it.

The ad identifies the job’s priorities as seeking out “seldom heard” minority groups “who may experience health inequalities.” And health inequality is a serious problem, much more so than the pain driving you up the wall.

That’s why the successful candidate must be “interpersonally talented” and a “strategic bridge-builder”. He may not know his appendicitis from his haemorrhoids, but he knows how to create “brave spaces”, presumably helping you to brave your agony with a nonchalant smile.

“The director will broker psychologically safe environments that allow people to co-produce and become equal partners in their care,” says the ad.

You can almost feel your pain go away, can’t you? You may not be able to see a doctor, but you can become an equal partner in your care. Even if you get no care at all.

Please don’t throw your hands up in horror and lament that the NHS is diverting funds and resources from its core business. It isn’t. All those directors of lived experience and diversity (the NHS advertised £700,000 worth of such jobs in October alone) are in charge of the NHS core business: serving its paymaster, the state.

Such is the ineluctable law of all giant socialist concerns: whatever their ostensible remit, they pursue what ultimately is a political – and socialist – objective. And while their remits vary, the objective never does: ensuring the growth and power of the state.

It so happens that inculcating wokery happens to advance the current interests of the state, as it defines them. This makes it the core business of the NHS, to which doctors and nurses are extraneous.

So what if they have to toil round the clock trying to make up for the chronic shortages of clinical professionals? So what if millions of patients continue to writhe in pain, checking their progress through those endless waiting lists?

Their physical agony may be ignored, but at least directors of diversity will make sure it’s ignored equally and without prejudice.

One can only remember wistfully those unsophisticated times in the past, when a hospital was run by the head doctor and the head matron. And the only non-medical employee was the accountant keeping the books.

Nor is it just the NHS. It’s another ineluctable law that the dominant institution, in this case the state acting as the conduit of the zeitgeist, corrupts all other institutions, shaping them in its image. Including institutions not under its immediate aegis.

It used to be that bridge-building companies were run by people who knew how to build bridges, car-making companies by people who made cars and, well, hospitals by doctors and nurses. No longer – and so much for the line that separates the public and private sectors.

Sooner or later, parasites had to move in and take over, just as they have done in the NHS. At first, production people were ousted by those in sales and marketing. That wasn’t so bad, because such chaps usually had some production experience. They knew exactly what they were selling and marketing.

Then they too had to give way to another breed: accountants and financial managers. Those professionals came from a totally different background, and they knew nothing about their company’s output. They knew how to count beans, and they didn’t care whether the beans were fava, lima or haricot.

Yet even that group didn’t hold sway for long. Taking over instead were professional managers with MBA certificates on their wall – and in their minds.

This sounds downright sinister to anyone who had the misfortune of observing the Soviet nomenklatura in action. That was the managerial, bureaucratic class offering membership for life. Its members could be shifted up, down or sideways, but they never lost their privileges.

A nomenklatura chap could run a factory today, a department store tomorrow, a symphony orchestra the day after – it didn’t matter. As long as he knew how to run things for the benefit of the state, he stayed in.

In a spooky parallel, the MBA class is similar. Its members spend years learning recondite mumbo-jumbo that’s supposed to equip them for whatever task life throws their way. They too can manage anything – often into the ground.

The core of MBAs comes surrounded with other parasites, not dissimilar to all those directors of diversity in the NHS. The bigger the company, the larger, proportionally, is its parasitic class – and the greater the damage it does to the core business, if only by diverting its resources into unproductive areas.

One can only marvel at James Burnham’s prophetic powers. In his 1941 book The Managerial Revolution, he foresaw the arrival of a new class that managed and controlled the capital it didn’t own and in which it therefore had no vested interest.

One good thing about modernity is that it reliably makes dystopic prophesies come true. That’s a constant source of headache for me, and it’s getting worse. Perhaps I should call for an appointment with a director of diversity.