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From what little I’ve read of Dan Wootton’s work, he is an upstanding young man with his heart in the right, which is to say conservative, place.

Hence there is no doubt which side he supports in the war of the princes. Time after time, Wootton tears Harry and Meghan to shreds, saying all the right, which is to say conservative, things.

Yet I’d still like to take exception to the last sentence in his latest article: “No matter how much he [Harry] deludes himself that he’s Princess Diana’s representative on earth, his mother would be ashamed of how Harry has thrown his own brother under the bus for commercial gain and revenge.”

Wootton is spot on (couldn’t resist the half-rhyme) on Harry, but I think he gives Diana much too much credit. Assuming he isn’t simply proceeding from the old principle of nil nisi bonum, he misreads the late princess badly.

Harry is precisely that, Diana’s representative on earth, and he has picked up the baton in the relay race to the greatest damage to be inflicted on our monarchy. I’m sure Mummy is smiling with pride from wherever she is.

The moment Diana realised that Buck House wasn’t the best setting for a young woman with romantic ideas about ‘lurv’ and solipsistic ideas about her own personal, as opposed to institutional, worth, she declared war on the royals.

Diana was acting in character, for she was modernity’s envoy to an inherently traditional institution. The House of Windsor exists to serve its realm by linking the past with the present and the present with the future. It’s the axis on which Britain’s constitution revolves – and little else.

That doesn’t mean the royals aren’t entitled to normal feelings. But they are supposed to subjugate them to their mission, which is serving the nation. And by and large this is what they’ve always done.

The job isn’t easy, which is why it requires some innate understanding and extensive training. That’s partly why royals have always tended to choose their consorts from a class similar to their own.

The first modern example of a British prince marrying a commoner provided a useful illustration to, and an awful exception from, that principle. In 1937 Edward VIII defied his government and, in a spooky harbinger of today’s scandal, married Wallis Simpson, a twice divorced American of, putting it kindly, a rather adventurous amorous past.

Not only that, but Wallis had dubious political affiliations as well and, by recent accounts, encouraged the king’s own pro-Nazi leanings. However, British governments of the time were made of sterner stuff than today’s lot.

Baldwin’s cabinet told the king in no uncertain terms to choose between the throne and Wallis. The king chose “the woman I love” and became the Duke of Windsor. The loving couple were then exiled from the country and never came back again, except for the odd flying visit.

Things went smoothly then, until Princes Charles and Andrew married, respectively, Diana and Fergie. The latter came from a gentry family, but that didn’t matter very much for Andrew was too far down the pecking order of succession.

Diana’s family, on the other hand, while not royalty, was high aristocracy. They were a decent match dynastically, but Diana was a terrible mismatch personally. When her “I want to be me” entreaty predictably went unheeded, she started taking lovers from all walks of life, but mainly choosing her swains for their offensiveness to the royals.

Since Charles was heir to the throne, those actions constituted high treason. Anne Boleyn was beheaded for less, and some dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries (well, I) advocated at the time that Diana should suffer the same fate.

One scandal followed another, though the royals desperately tried to keep a lid on Diana’s shenanigans. That’s why she decided to bare all (alas, only figuratively) in that notorious BBC interview.

Diana was flapping her eyelashes in an histrionic attempt to curry sympathy. Of all her affairs she admitted only the one with Captain Hewitt (“I loved him, I was besotted with him…”), a man described by those who knew him as a “walking penis”, to use the more decorous noun.

That way she forced through her divorce and went to town with no holds barred, and I use the word ‘holds’ advisedly. Her last affair, with the son of an avowed enemy of the royal family, ended badly – as did her life.

Had Diana lived longer, I’m sure we would have been regaled with a few more TV projects and possibly a few books of memoirs. Her ghost writers would have milked her ‘tragedy’ for all it was worth.

There she was, a thoroughly modern young woman whose husband didn’t love her, and whose ebullient personality was frozen out by that cold-blooded family bent on service and protocol. Who wouldn’t have sympathised with her plight?

Very few, judging by how the public responded to Diana’s war on the royal family – and especially to her death. For all her high birth, she came across as one of them, endowed with all the same instincts.

By then, the people had been brainwashed with egalitarian bilge. They wanted the royals to be just like them fundamentally if not in every detail. The royals could be more glamorous, richer, better-dressed – all that was forgiven as long as the mob detected essential kinship underneath.

When the Queen expressed her condolences in her characteristically restrained and dignified manner, the mob bayed “Show us you care!!!”, and Her Majesty was forced to do her best.

At the same time that revolting Tony Blair described Diana as “the people’s princess”, which was meaningless on any reasonable level but resonant subliminally. That’s what the mob wanted to hear, and it put on the requisite mask of inconsolable grief (with variable success).

Harry was severely traumatised by his mother’s death, as any normal son would be. We all have our share of tragedies, and a child losing his mother ranks right up there.

Yet we all learn to cope sooner or later, and I’d suggest that the 30 years elapsing since his Mummy’s death ought to have been enough time for a 38-year-old boy to come to terms with the tragedy.

Instead Harry obviously inherited his mother’s grudge against his family, and today’s answer to Wallis Simpson has shown him how to turn rancour into pecuniary gain. And today’s mob, weaned on psychobabble, is lapping up the vengeful, mendacious rubbish vomited up by the Sussexes.

However, some signs of a backlash are appearing. Mrs Simpson Mark II is nowhere near as popular as Diana was, and, for all her thespian training, she doesn’t hide her manipulativeness as well as her late mother-in-law did.

More and more people are demanding that the couple be stripped of all their titles, and I happily add my vote to that campaign. But that’s not enough.

I think every room in Harry’s house should be equipped with a wall-size plasma screen, continuously showing a looped video of Meghan’s sex scenes in Suits. Should more candid films be found (as they usually are with B actresses), they could be mixed in for Harry’s viewing pleasure.  

Speaking at an Abu Dhabi conference modestly called “For a Reasonably Open World”, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew fired a salvo at the Russian Orthodox Church.

But did he also hit the Anglican Church by ricochet? For Bartholomew castigated the Russian Church from the standpoint of Gospel universality.

The Patriarch condemned the very idea of a church circumscribed by ethnic culture and language. While his verbal shells exploded in Moscow, the fragments reached London too, or so it seemed to me. But let’s take things in turn.

His All-Holiness Bartholomew I is the spiritual leader of Eastern Christianity that, unlike the Catholic Church, has no single institutional head.

It’s structured as a number of independent (autocephalous) patriarchates, of which the senior ones are those of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. The Constantinople patriarch, currently Bartholomew, is known as primus inter pares (first among equals), whose spiritual authority is recognised universally.

Or almost so: the Moscow Patriarchate severed its ties with Constantinople after Bartholomew granted autocephaly to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in 2018.

However, the relations between Constantinople and Moscow haven’t been especially cordial since 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks. Since then the Moscow Patriarchate has been claiming leadership of Orthodox Christianity with ever-increasing clamour and persistence.

A century later Moscow began to describe itself as ‘the Third Rome’, political heir to the Byzantine Empire and spiritual heir to Constantinople. Officially the claim was based on a dynastic link: Tsar (or rather Grand Duke) Ivan III was married to the last Byzantine princess Sophia Paleologue. But in reality Moscow’s claim to ecclesiastical supremacy was increasingly linked to its imperial ambitions.

That came to the fore in the early 18^th century, when, under Peter I, Russia indeed became an empire. At that point, the state hugged the Church close to its chest, but there was a kiss of death implicit in that embrace.

Step by step, the Church, its hierarchy at any rate, became an extension of the state, practically its Department for Religion. As such, it was turned into an instrument and promulgator of state policy, with imperialist expansion at its core.

Russia used her Third Rome rhetoric to appoint herself as the leader of the Slavic world, its Orthodox part for starters. Orthodox doctrine was fused with the ideology of pan-Slavism, and the former played second fiddle to the latter.

In 1872 the Constantinople Patriarch denounced that travesty as a heresy, that of ethnophyletism, a form of ecclesial racism. Yesterday Bartholomew reiterated the message: “It is in flagrant contradiction with the universalism of the Gospel message, as well as the principle of territorial governance which defines the organisation of our church.”

The Russian Church, its clergy and parishioners, suffered unimaginable persecution during the first 25 years of Soviet rule. It was only during the Second World War that Stalin sought to reverse the initially catastrophic setbacks suffered by the Red Army by drumming up support for traditional patriotism.

To that end, the Church was taken out of its collective concentration camp and co-opted to serve the cause of Stalin’s victory. Alas, though it agreed to sup with the devil, the requisite long spoon stayed in the drawer.

From then on, the Church hierarchy fell under the aegis of the KGB, whichever moniker it went by. For example, the current Moscow Patriarch, Kirill, is a career operative, known in the KGB archives by his codename ‘Agent Mikhailov’. When he stood for the post in 2009, his two rivals were also his colleagues in the secret services.

Given that affiliation, the Russian Church naturally has issued a blanket blessing to every aggressive foray of the Putin regime, including its current genocidal raid on the Ukraine. And yesterday Bartholomew didn’t pull punches when condemning the splinter patriarchate playing lickspittle to an evil regime:

“It actively participates in the promotion of the ideology of Rousskii Mir, the Russian world, according to which language and religion make it possible to define a coherent whole encompassing Russia, Ukraine, Belarus as well as the other territories of the former Soviet Union and the diaspora.

“Moscow (both political power and religious power) would constitute the centre of this world, whose mission would be to combat the decadent values of the West. This ideology constitutes an instrument of legitimisation of Russian expansionism and the basis of its Eurasian strategy.

“The link between the past of ethnophyletism and the present of the Russian world is obvious. Faith thus becomes the backbone of the ideology of Putin’s regime.”

Just so. The shell of patriarchal wrath was aimed at Moscow, and it exploded with a bang reverberating throughout the world. But what about the ricochet?

Far be it from me to draw a direct parallel between the Russian Orthodox and Anglican Churches, and Bartholomew certainly didn’t mention any such similarity. The ROC has become an instrument of evil, while the Church of England is still, despite everything, a force for good.

Yet isn’t it too guilty of parochial ethnophyletism? The argument that Anglicanism is practised all over the world has always struck me as somewhat disingenuous.

Its spread is so wide because Britain used to be “an empire on which the sun never set”, so called in the wake of the colonial expansion following Britain’s victory in the Seven Years’ War. Anglicanism is now practised almost exclusively in the Anglophone world, the fragments of the Empire that may or may not belong to the Commonwealth.

And of course in Britain herself the C of E is the state religion, of which the monarch is the Supreme Governor, secular head. That, to me, constitutes a problem – similar to the one the Constantinople Patriarch had with the Russian Church in the 19^th century, when he condemned it as heretical.

How can any denomination be a state church? In John 18:36, Jesus says: “My kingdom is not of this world.” And the synoptic gospels quote Jesus as saying: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.”

These were unequivocal statements of separation between the sacred and profane realms. And the sacred realm, as Paul explained to the Galatians, was universal, transcending all secular incidentals: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”

This was what Bartholomew had in mind yesterday, when he yet again condemned the ROC for the heresy of ethnophyletism, as expressed through an evil secular regime. Can’t we, with equal justification, apply the same thinking…

I’d better stop here, for fear of losing all my English friends. So let’s keep it strictly personal, without drawing broad theological conclusions: this is one of the reasons I left the Church of England.

As to the ROC – well-done, Your All-Holiness! Now let’s do something about your environmentalism, which clearly needs work.

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Published by the Cambridge University Press, the Cambridge Dictionary is designed for learners of English.

I’m sure learners opening that dictionary can feel, with trepidation, the patina accumulated by that venerable institution rubbing off on them. After all, the University was founded in 1209, which makes it one of the world’s oldest.

Its most illustrious alumni include Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, John Milton and too many others to mention. An example of its grandeur I often cite is that Cambridge’s Trinity College alone has produced 33 Nobel winners for science – as opposed to four for the whole Islamic world.

Such a sustained history of cultural and intellectual achievement has to be reflected in the University’s contribution to lexicography as well. Since in my impetuous youth I studied such things academically, I was eager to find out how the dictionary’s new edition defined woman (another subject of more than passing interest to me).

So here is its entry: “an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth”.

One feels humbled by so much scholarship going into what would appear to be a simple definition. But then one can always rely on academics to correct one’s woeful misconceptions. In this case, mine are glaring:

Scientifically, a woman is a specimen of Homo sapiens whose DNA features XX chromosomes. Poetically, a woman can be compared to a summer’s day preceded by the darling buds of May. Empirically, a woman is a person who looks like Penelope.

Or so I thought. Actually, so I’ll continue to think, what with all such fundamental notions so deeply implanted in my mind that they aren’t subject to change. Nor do I believe I’m a target reader the compilers saw in their mind’s eye.

Though I do regard myself as a lifelong student of English, I don’t think I’m the learner they envisaged. A good job too, for such learners will be getting a lesson in so much more than just the meaning of English words.

They’ll learn that Cambridge University Press has turned its pages into a cultural and political battlefield. For its entry doesn’t define woman scientifically, poetically or empirically. Its definition is strictly political – and insidiously political too.

An example cited by way of illustration leaves one in no doubt on that score: “Mary is a woman who was assigned male at birth”.

In other words, Mary is a male freak who was born with XY chromosomes but was deranged enough to submit to castration in the delusionary hope of becoming something he could never be: a woman.

Even the grammar of the entry pulls in the same direction. Following the singular antecedent “an adult” with the plural pronoun “their” is also a political statement issued by the most radical wing of cultural saboteurs.

The spokesman for the Cambridge Dictionary explained the situation: “Our dictionaries are written for learners of English and are designed to help users understand English as it is used. We regularly update our dictionary to reflect changes in how English is used.”

That’s bollocks (n. vulgar slang, British: nonsense, rubbish). The only people who use English that way are crazed ideologues getting high on their wokery and febrile commitment to destroying our culture.

Lest you may think it’s just British universities leading the onslaught on sanity, the American dictionary, Merriam-Webster, isn’t far behind. However, one must admit mournfully that the parent organisation of its publisher is British, Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Merriam-Webster defines a woman as “having a gender identity that is the opposite of male”. This at least has scholarly connotations to it. In rhetoric, defining something by what it isn’t is called ‘antiphrasis’. A theology that defines God by something that definitely can’t be said about Him is called ‘apophatic’.

So there I was, getting the warm feelings I usually have for kindred spirits inhabiting the same rhetorical universe. However, it dissipated almost instantly.

A woman isn’t a “gender identity”. She is a female human being, born as such and remaining that way for life – whatever psychiatric disorder she may suffer from as she goes through life. She may, for example, think she is a nightingale, but that won’t make her sing beautifully.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary describes itself as ‘synchronic’. Using its own taxonomic method, that means something that’s not diachronic. In plain language, Merriam-Webster purports to record English as it’s used currently, not the way it has been used historically – or indeed correctly.

The dictionary withdraws or, to be more precise, repudiates judgement. There are no correct or incorrect usages – just current or obsolete ones. Fine, if that’s what the compilers want to preach, it’s their privilege.

As it is my privilege to describe such anodyne permissiveness as cultural vandalism. All that ‘gender identity’ business doesn’t belong in a mainstream dictionary.

Its natural domain is Trans Unite rants and similar effluvia. Should some lexicographers wish to record perverse usages in dictionary form, then by all means they should do so – in an addendum to the dictionary designed to help people learn English. Putting it into the main body of the dictionary doesn’t help anyone, while hurting many.

By the same token, a dictionary of slang may include a reference to the song You Ain’t Nuthin’ But a Hound Dog. But it would be misplaced in a textbook on English grammar.

P.S. Speaking of cultural vandalism, even peers of the realm aren’t above indulging in it. Thus Daniel Finkelstein delivered himself of a view on Kayne West in The Times: “I find the rapper’s antisemitic assertions repugnant, but unlike his tweets his pioneering art should not be censored.”

I’ve vaguely heard Mr West’s name, mainly in the context of his ex-wife’s gluteus maximus and indeed of his “antisemitic assertions”. But his “pioneering art” has passed me by. Still, since Lord Finkelstein is a cultural force to be reckoned with, I felt duty-bound to fill that gap.

So here, for example, is a verse from Mr West’s pioneering song Get Em High (Merriam-Webster would approve of this usage):

“N-now, th-th-throw your motherfuckin’ hands/ (Get ‘em high)/ All the girls pass the weed to yo’ motherfuckin’ man/ (Get ‘em high)/ Now I ain’t never tell you to put down your hands/ (Keep ‘em high)/ And if you’re losin’ your high then smoke again/ (Keep ‘em high).”

Verily I say unto you, His Lordship must be following the cultural pioneer’s recommendation. As, come to think of it, are the compilers of our dictionaries.

This is my, admittedly radical, solution to the labour mutiny [sic] that has combined with the heavy snowfall to bring Britain to a standstill.

Trade unions in general are an anachronism, a throwback to the days of the Industrial Revolution. Actually, when they were first legalised, some 200 years ago, they did have a useful role to play.

Most of the economy was either industrial already or heading that way. And industry in those days relied heavily on unskilled – and therefore interchangeable – labour.

Under those conditions, the balance of power was slanted too heavily towards owners and management, creating a perfect environment for exploitation. Hence it was logical for workers to pool their interests and present a united front in any kind of dispute.

Collective bargaining sprang from a realistic assessment of the social and economic dynamics. What with little difference in individual skills and qualifications, workers should all have received the same pay and benefits.

They were all on the same career path and were therefore entitled to act as a monolith group. And indeed, the unions were useful in improving not only the workers’ pay but also their working conditions, things like reasonable hours, paid holidays, workplace safety, sick days, pensions and so on.

The unions were lifeboats of socialism in a raging sea of industrial expansion, and they provided refuge for the workers, keeping them afloat. But things have changed since then.

Skipping many intermediate phases, today’s economy doesn’t resemble even remotely the days of the Industrial Revolution. Industrialisation that came to Britain in the late 18^th century has since left.

Most of the labour in every walk of life is highly skilled, and skills of any kind are never spread evenly across a wide swathe of humanity. It stands to reason that those with greater skills should be paid more, which presupposes individual contracts.

And individual contracts would obviate the need for labour unions. However, that’s where a paradox came into play. Just as the legitimate need for the unions diminished, their importance grew.

As with any other socialist Leviathan, their leadership acquired inordinate power. Union bosses pretended to look after workers’ interests, while pursuing in fact their own ideological agenda that gradually became out-and-out Marxist.

The Marxists’ professed mission, that of standing up for workers’ interests, is only a mendacious slogan, or else camouflage designed to mask the destructive animus lurking underneath. Marxists really care only about Marxism, which is concentrating power in their hands and then using it to enslave society.

Today’s unions use strikes the way terrorists use hostages: to blackmail society into surrender. And, following Lenin’s strategy of combining strong-arm tactics with legitimate political action, the unions have turned the Labour Party into their own bailiwick.

This year, for example, 58 per cent of the party’s financing has come from the unions, which effectively turns every Labour MP into a poodle to the Trade Union Congress, including its more toxic constituents.

This enables the unions to hold the country to ransom, which is exactly what they are doing now. Some 1.1 million working days have been lost to strikes this year, the greatest number for a generation.

Like all blackmailers, the unions look for the moments when their marks are at their most vulnerable. As the country is now, what with Covid, a general slowdown, a dire energy situation and soaring inflation rates. The unions saw their opening and they’ve effectively written a note to society: “If you ever want to see your economy again…” and so on, ending with, “and no cops, or the economy gets it.”

The most disgusting part of this terrorist offensive is the strike of the public services: ambulances, fire brigades, postal services, transport and so forth. Banning such strikes would be the first thing I’d do, reminding the employees that the word ‘services’ actually means something.

Public services are there to serve the public, and those employed there have no moral right to withdraw their labour, putting the public at risk. Each ambulance driver, paramedic or postman should be on an individual, annually renegotiable, contract stipulating his pay, benefits and the corporate charter by which he must abide.

Any Briton paid by the Exchequer (and I do mean paid, not supported) exchanges prospects of great enrichment for security: his is a job for life, barring some unspeakable misdeeds on his part. His pension is also guaranteed, which is more than can be said for pensions in the private sector.

The health of society demands that all labour engaged in public services be deunionised. That will remove at a stroke most power from the TUC and its more pernicious members, such as Unite.

That ought to be the first step, but not the last one. Strikes in general ought to be outlawed, as a recognition of what the economy is, rather than what the Marxists think it ought to be. The range of skills necessary for competing in today’s economy is wider than ever, which puts a stress on individual excellence, not collective security.

Take teachers, for example, who are unionised in Britain. But unionised means homogenised – it’s as if we can assume that all teachers are equally good. But they aren’t, are they?

Anyone who has ever received any formal education at any level, will recall some of his teachers with warm gratitude, some others with revulsion, and still others he wouldn’t recall at all.

For example, at my university I had several professors of English grammar, but only one (Tatiana Vasilyevna Frolova, if you must know the name, a kindly old woman with her hair in a bun) made me not just learn but understand the structure of the English language. That has stood me in good stead ever since.

Yet in that communist country Prof. Frolova was paid exactly the same as her inept colleagues with the same seniority. One would expect Britain to eschew communist practices, in the economy and everywhere else.

Any employees going on strike should be summarily sacked, as they would be in a City firm, an IT company or an ad agency. One strike and you are out – this principle should be universally applied.

That would defang the Marxist cabal going by the name of the TUC – which is why it’ll never be done. The people have been brainwashed into sacralising unionism, the way they sacralise all things socialist, such as the NHS.

One can only wish that Margaret Thatcher rise from the dead to visit her wrath on those Marxist saboteurs. Alas, that’s as unlikely as our present ‘leaders’ being able to act in the same just and decisive fashion. She was the last statesman at 10 Downing Street – and I do mean last, not just the latest.

A hasty disclaimer is in order: corrupt politicians are tawdry, and I in no way condone things like bribery, pilfering or cheating on expense accounts.

However, we ought to acknowledge that boys will be boys (or, these days, possibly girls). For the sake of argument, if you were offered a million pounds to advocate publicly something you know is wrong, would you do it? No, of course not. But you can probably understand those who would.

Another personal question, if I may. Would you prefer an honest but dim politician driven by ideological fervour or an outstanding statesman who takes the odd backhander? To name one juxtaposition, Robespierre was nicknamed ‘Incorruptible’, whereas Talleyrand was notoriously venal. Yet I know which one I’d rather have running France today.

Here we are getting to the crux of the matter. Deplorable though fiscal corruption is, it’s extraneous to a politician’s day job (always provided he isn’t so crooked that corruption actually is his day job).

Moreover, our standards of fiscal corruption in politics are highly transient. The sort of things that make us gasp with horror these days used to be considered par for the course in the past – and, critically, vice versa.

Take two seminal figures of British political history, Edmund Burke and Benjamin Disraeli. Burke (d. 1797) is justifiably regarded as a founding philosopher of modern political conservatism. Disraeli (d. 1881) is equally justifiably regarded as a founder of the modern Tory Party.

Yet they were corrupt by our exacting standards of today.

Both Burke and Disraeli coincidentally owned large estates in Buckinghamshire. Burke’s 600-acre property was in Beaconsfield, Disraeli’s 1,500 acres in High Wycombe, some eight miles down the road. Confusingly, it was Disraeli and not Burke whose title was the Earl of Beaconsfield, but that’s a different matter.

Since Burke was a man of modest means, he had to take out a huge mortgage he could ill-afford and never managed to repay in full. All his life, most of which was spent in Parliament as a leader of the Whigs’ conservative faction, he had to scramble to make ends meet.

Remember that MPs were unpaid at the time, and so they remained until 1911. So Burke had to scratch out a living wherever he could find it.

As a major source of his income he was routinely paid – bribed, in today’s parlance – to pose specific questions in Parliament. There were also suspicions of his involvement in the dubious business schemes run by his close relations, including his brother.

None of this prevented Burke from becoming one of the greatest parliamentarians of his time and one of the greatest political thinkers of all time. And anyway, compared to Disraeli, Burke was pristine.

When Disraeli became known as the most talented man in the Tory Party, the powers that be wanted to make him its leader. Yet, as one of the grandees pointed out, theirs was a party of gentlemen, which Disraeli wasn’t.

“So let’s make him one,” suggested another benefactor. And Disraeli was given his estate, worth tens of millions today, with the title – but no strings – attached.

Now imagine that sort of thing happening today: a party leader being bought lock, stock and barrel by pressure groups and contributors. Why, if that became public knowledge, the papers wouldn’t run out of front-page headlines for weeks.

Before long the shamed politician would be hounded out of public life and made to give the estate back. Even if he had the philosophical genius of Burke combined with the political genius of Disraeli, he’d be reduced to making a killing on the speaking circuit and introducing assorted sheiks to his former colleagues.

By contrast, the three most evil politicians in European history, Lenin, Stalin and Hitler, were never touched by any fiscal scandal, not a personal one at any rate.

Before the revolution Lenin encouraged what he called ‘expropriations’, ‘exes’ for short, and what you’d call bank robberies. And Stalin, ever the hands-on man, masterminded and led such raids personally.

But they didn’t use the money to buy gaudy palaces or yachts the size of a football pitch. The ‘exes’ and other criminal activities were used to finance the Bolsheviks’ way to power, something they needed to put their ideology into practice.

Having won their victory, the two honest men combined to murder some 60 million people and enslave hundreds of millions around the world. Yet even in office neither Lenin nor Stalin was besmirched by any whiff of personal fiscal impropriety.

Their typological German equivalent, Hitler, wasn’t motivated by money either. But don’t you wish he had been?

For example, Zionist organisations saved thousands of Hungarian Jews by trading 10,000 trucks for their lives. What if that practice had been more widespread, reaching all the way up to Hitler himself?

A villa on the Mediterranean for 1,000 lives, a yacht for another 1,000, a million or two in cold cash for a few thousand more and so on. And, the crowning achievement, twenty big ones for repealing the Nuremberg Laws and tearing up the Wannsee Protocol.

Another, more up-to-date, typological equivalent runs today’s Russia, in ways that seem to undermine the theory of beneficial corruption. After all, both beastly Putin and his ruling gang are as corrupt as they come.

Putin is reliably rumoured to be the world’s richest man, and his whole coterie would dominate the Forbes 100 list if all their assets and income streams were publicly known. And yet under their tutelage Russia remains an evil, aggressive country pouncing on her neighbours and threatening the whole world.

What comes to mind here is my favourite anecdote of the writer Nancy Mitford asking her friend Evelyn Waugh why he was so nasty in spite of being a pious Catholic. “But, my dear,” replied Waugh, “you don’t know how nasty I’d be if I weren’t a Catholic.”

I maintain that it’s the corruption of the Russian regime that’s holding it back (if murdering thousands can be so described). If the criminals in the Kremlin were driven by febrile ideology alone, nuclear mushrooms would already be growing in Europe and elsewhere.

As it is, their fear of losing everything they stole in the sweat of their brow puts dampeners on their bloodlust, applying some method to their madness. And it’s their corruption that shines a ray of hope through the darkness descending on Europe. One way or another, with Putin out of the way sooner or later, this lot can be bought – not today, perhaps not tomorrow, but eventually.

I don’t know if I’ve made an airtight argument to justify the title above – but I’ve made some. The public damage done by personal venality, if any, is so infinitesimal compared to the damage done by ideology or stupidity that it can be dismissed as an irrelevance.

Our problem isn’t that some of our politicians are corrupt fiscally but that almost all of them are corrupt fundamentally, as individuals trusted to work tirelessly for the common good – and, critically, to know what it is and how it can be served.

Fiscal honesty is a virtue, but it only matters in public life if allied to other virtues, those germane to a politician’s remit. In the absence of such, I’d prefer for him to be feathering his own nest – rather than devoting his undivided attention to governance.

He’d do less harm that way.  

If you accept this logical transposition of a well-known proverb, then the US has been robbed blind. Its government has also gone back – yet again – on its commitment never to negotiate with terrorists.

These melancholy observations follow from the prisoner exchange between the US and Russia. America got back her heavily tattooed basketball star Brittney Griner. Russia reclaimed the international arms smuggler Victor Bout, affectionately nicknamed the “Merchant of Death”.

I have to admit to a personal interest in Mr Bout and his illustrious career, for he is my namesake, one of the few in Russia. Though spelled differently, his is the same name. (When issuing passports for foreign travel, the Russian Interior Ministry insists on spelling all names the French way, whereas mine is spelled phonetically in English.)

The name is so rare that I once used it to get an otherwise unavailable booking at a Petersburg restaurant. “My name is Boot,” I intoned on the phone in an uncharacteristically weighty manner. A table materialised miraculously: they assumed I was either Victor himself or his close relation.

Bout’s name is such an instant door-opener in Russia because he is a local hero. A high-ranking officer in the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence, he began to be used by the post-Soviet government as its shadowy deniable operator.

Bout ‘bought’ several transport planes and started his own arms smuggling company. I put ‘bought’ in quotes because a Soviet officer’s salary didn’t quite stretch to a fleet of airplanes. Bout bought his planes in the same sense in which Russian mafioso oligarchs bought up Russia’s natural resources – as a practically free transfer of assets in exchange for unwavering loyalty and some unspecified future services. (If you’ve seen The Godfather, you are familiar with the transaction.)

The strategy of both the Soviet and post-Soviet governments has always been to stir every malodorous substance in every part of the world, creating troubled waters in which evildoers can then profitably fish.

Instigating and conflagrating regional conflicts is an essential part of that strategy, especially in vulnerable parts of the world. The Soviets armed various wicked regimes and splinter groups more or less openly, whereas their heirs initially tried to keep up a civilised façade. That’s where my namesake came in.

He became known as both a sanctions-buster and a gun-runner, arming murderous gangs and rebels in Angola, Zaire, Liberia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Columbia and anywhere else where bloodstained chaos could be fomented.

In the process, Bout accumulated an endless list of charges, including for forgery and money laundering, on every continent except perhaps Antarctica. The chickens finally came to roost in 2008.

In a sting operation led by the US DEA, an agent posing as a representative of the Columbian terrorist group FARC negotiated with Bout for the supply of 109 surface-to-air missiles and armour-piercing rocket launchers. (You didn’t think he was just flogging AKs, did you?)

He was lured into Thailand, arrested by the local police, tried and convicted for terrorism and conspiracy. Two years later Bout was extradited to the US and sentenced to 25 years for conspiracy to kill US citizens.

Russia protested all along, claiming Bout was an upstanding individual, a paragon of virtue and a man incapable of committing the heinous crimes of which he was so unfairly accused. He was, after all, a GRU officer and hence a gentleman.

Putin’s bloodhounds were so incensed that they even declared that the US judges and officials involved in the trial would be for ever denied entry visas should they wish to visit Bout’s birthplace. And of course the Russians never stopped trying to get their boy back.

In addition to pursuing normal diplomatic channels, they resorted to their more natural terroristic methods: arresting US citizens and sentencing them to long prison terms in the hope of exchanging them for Bout and other agents.

One of those Americans was the businessman and former marine Paul Whelan, sentenced to 16 years on a trumped-up espionage charge in 2020. Another was Miss Griner, who pleaded guilty to having a few hashish oil ampules in her luggage and was sentenced to nine years for smuggling.

While Whelan was innocent of the charges and Griner wasn’t, we aren’t going to get bogged down in the fine points of Russian jurisprudence, are we? Whatever the two Americans did or didn’t do, they were in fact hostages, to be used as bargaining chips by a state internationally recognised as terrorist.

And the US played along, pretending not to recognise the terrorist nature of the situation. At first American officials wanted to swap the Merchant of Death for both Whelan and Griner, correctly claiming that Bout was a more important figure than either of them.

Say what you will about my namesake, but he was indeed a heavy hitter, with expertise going far beyond Miss Griner’s dribbling and jump shots and even Mr Whelan’s knack at managing corporate security.

In the end Americans had to settle for Griner only. I don’t know if they were given the choice but, had they been, I’m sure they would have chosen Miss Griner anyway.

After all, she ticks many more boxes. First, Griner, 6’9’’, is a star, known to everyone who follows women’s basketball (I don’t know what sort of numbers we’re talking here). Second, she is black. And third she is an open lesbian, ‘married’ to another woman. You must agree that such credentials are both unimpeachable and unbeatable.

But swapping this heroic woman for Bout is tantamount to succumbing to terrorist demands. You don’t need me to tell you why such surrender is ill-advised: it encourages further acts of terrorism.

The Russians are in effect given an invitation to kidnap any Western citizen and use him as a blackmail weapon, securing the release of criminals like Bout. Since Russia is self-admittedly waging war on the West, this is a legitimate ruse de guerre.

But then equally legitimate would be response in kind. Many children of Russian government officials live in the West, and most of them – including our newly hatched Lord Lebedev – subsist, directly or indirectly, on the proceeds of their parents’ criminal activities.

That provides sufficient legal grounds, especially in wartime, to pick them up and use them the way the Russians use their Western hostages. Yet anyone who thinks Western governments are capable of protecting their citizens in that manner holds an unjustifiably optimistic view of Western politics.

Hence I can confidently predict that the Russians will persist with their terrorism, which we’ll refuse to recognise as such. And they’ll continue to be as successful as they were with this lamentable swap.

P.S. I fear for Peter Hitchens’s mental health: the man clearly suffers from what psychiatrists call ‘perseveration’, the urge to repeat the same things over and over again. Thus in today’s column he repeats for the umpteenth time that Russia was ‘provoked’ into her genocidal raid on the Ukraine, which Mr Hitchens professes to regret.

That claim would be more credible if over the past two years he hadn’t talked our ear off about “conservative and Christian” Putin, the strong leader Hitchens wished we had and the last bastion of traditional values.

That was the official line peddled by the Kremlin propaganda – as is the current one, about Russia having been provoked into mass murder, torture, rape and looting. Vlad has no better friend in the West than our perseverated hack.

Many counties are supplying arms to the Ukraine but, according to The Wall Street Journal, one of them is more generous than any other: Russia.

That country has boosted the Ukraine’s heroic resistance with $2 billion’s worth of heavy armaments.

These include over 500 tanks worth about $800 million, 1,163 armoured personnel carriers (almost $700 million), 200 artillery pieces ($154 million), 209 AA systems ($175 million), 51 multiple rocket systems ($46 million), 503 military vehicles ($50 million) and even an attack helicopter ($10 million).

These supplies didn’t come from the Russians’ generosity and sense of fair play. Rather they were abandoned intact as the Russian troops hastily retreated from Kiev, Chernigov, Kherson and especially from the Kharkov region.

Ukrainians refer to such donations as the ‘Russian Lend Lease’. They gratefully pick up the armaments and, since they are familiar with them, instantly turn them against the former owners.

Some of those weapons are the latest vintage, such as the T-72B3 tanks, up-to-date mines and also the Orlan-10 drones. The tanks in particular are most welcome since Nato isn’t especially generous with weapons construed as primarily offensive.

Putin and his people aren’t taking this technology transfer lying down. Anticipating the possibility of Russia’s whole arsenal gradually falling into the Ukrainians’ hands, they are hatching farsighted plans.

The plans focus not on gaining victory, which they know isn’t going to happen, but on mitigating the consequences of defeat. According to reliable intelligence sources, the Kremlin gang is working on a project codenamed ‘Noah’s Ark’.

The name telegraphs the nature of the project: they are establishing escape routes and destinations where they can shelter from the wrath of victorious Ukrainians, frustrated Russians and vindictive international tribunals.

At first they set their hopes on China, but the Chinese evinced little enthusiasm for providing such hospitality. They are understandably unwilling to burn their hands by handling the hot potatoes that Putin and his coterie will become after they lose their war.

The Russians then switched their attention to Latin America, especially Venezuela, whose dictator Maduro they see as a kindred soul. Apparently the first approach was made by Igor Sechin, chairman of Rosneft, Putin’s confidant and Maduro’s friend.

Does this remind you of anything? Historical parallels are never 100 per cent accurate, but some 77 years ago Latin America also gave refuge to another group of evildoers who had lost their aggressive war.

Countries like Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru and a few others didn’t mind all those Heinrichs becoming Enricos, Richards turning into Ricardos and Karls into Carloses. Now it’s Venezuela’s turn, although I can’t see immediate Spanish equivalents for Vladimir, Dmitry and Igor.

But who says the names have to be the same? If the Russian Patriarch Kirill didn’t mind being called ‘Agent Mikhailov’ for decades, his former runners can easily turn into Diegos or Manuels. Vitorio Putin does have a certain ring to it, doesn’t it?

The Noah’s Ark project will have a side effect of guaranteeing long-term employment for the Ukrainian secret services. Emulating Mossad, they’ll definitely continue to search for Russian war criminals, bringing them to justice, institutional or otherwise.

I wonder how much security all those billions the Putin gang has purloined from the Russian people will buy. Not an awful lot, would be my guess.

The Sussexes were hailed last night at an awards ceremony in New York for their “heroic” stand against “structural racism” in our monarchy.

While in no way doubting either the couple’s heroism or the royals’ structural (also superstructural and infrastructural) racism, I still have to marvel at how words, like money, can suffer from inflation. Don’t get me wrong: I realise this is part and parcel of progress, which, as we know, is, well, progressive.

Still, fossils like me can’t help remembering the pre-inflationary times, before the word ‘hero’ expanded its meaning to include Harry and Meghan. For example, it was used to describe Group Captain Douglas Bader.

He joined the RAF in 1928 and three years later lost both legs in a crash. Nevertheless, Bader rejoined the RAF when the war started. Piloting his Spitfire, he won 22 individual victories plus several shared ones.

In 1941 Bader was shot down over occupied France and taken prisoner. Despite his disability he made several attempts to escape from the Nazi POW camp. When eventually freed by the US army, Bader was feted as a hero – as Harry and Meghan are now.

Since the couple have all of their combined eight limbs emphatically intact, they evidently haven’t suffered injuries similar to Bader’s. Nor have they risked their lives fighting against evil, unless you think they take chances every time they board a private jet to fly to yet another social function.

That realisation reinforced my suspicion that heroism means something else these days, though I still wasn’t sure exactly what. Kerry Kennedy, the daughter of Robert F Kennedy and president of the foundation awarding the accolade, set me straight:

“They’ve stood up, they’ve talked about racial justice and they’ve talked about mental illness in a way that was incredibly brave.” The word ‘incredibly’ suggests that the couple’s bravery, unlike Bader’s, went beyond human imaginings.

As a parenthetical aside, I marvel at the staying power of the Kennedy family. Member after member succumbs to assassination, disease, accident or old age, and yet we never seem to run out of Kennedys. One after another keeps popping out, ever ready to serve mankind – in this case by clarifying terminological conundrums.

So talking about racial justice and mental illness (and presumably knowing where one ends and the other begins) constitutes an act of heroism that no human brain can fathom. Fair enough, speaking your mind is indeed tantamount to risking life and limb in oppressive countries, like the one I grew up in.

By inference, Britain is also one such country. You utter one word about structural racism in the royal family, and there comes that knock on the door in the middle of the night. Off you are dragged, never to be seen again.

This doesn’t quite tally with my observations of Britain, but then I’ve never lived in a palace. Harry’s experience is different, and he generously vouchsafed it to the audience: “Ultimately we live in this world now where sharing experiences and sharing stories has an enormous impact.”

No doubt. Yet the happy couple stopped short of claiming that telling such stories was all their lives were worth. Apparently they didn’t risk what used to be called ‘dancing the Tyburn jig’. And even incarceration in the Tower for lèse–majesté wasn’t a real prospect.

So what makes the Sussexes such “incredible” heroes? This is where that lexical inflation comes in.

Words take on new meanings, while sometimes shedding the old ones and sometimes keeping them, to confuse fossils like me even further. The word ‘liberal’, for example, used to mean commitment to individual liberties, free trade and a small central state.

That’s what it still designates in books on the history of the 19^th century and in some articles on current Australian politics. Yet in the rest of the Anglophone world it now means, not to cut too fine a point, socialism: suppression of individual liberties, regulation of trade and an ad infinitum growth in the power of the central state.

In parallel, the word ‘heroism’, while still applicable to the likes of Douglas Bader, can now also accommodate “sharing stories”, especially mendacious ones. Always assuming the stories thus shared seamlessly fit into the ‘liberal’ narrative.

The guests at the ceremony reportedly paid $1,000,000 for the privilege of listening to Harry’s insights into the nature of heroism. I hope he and Meghan got their cut of the receipts. After all, Bader got paid for his heroism. So it’s only fair that they should be paid for theirs.

Or, to turn it around, your language is your mind. This is a far-reaching statement, and one I know I can’t prove or disprove scientifically.

My only consolation is that neither can anyone else – and for no lack of trying. Neurophysiologists, psychologists and practitioners of God only knows how many other disciplines have been trying, and failing, for yonks to establish an ironclad link between language and thought.

Billions have been pumped into all those Genome Projects, Decades of the Brain and similar megalomaniac undertakings – all for the scientists to find out that some parts of their scanner displays sometimes light up and sometimes they don’t.

However, leaving the realm of forensic proof for that of observation and speculative inference, one can’t help noticing that native speakers of different languages think differently.

I don’t mean the destination of their thought process, but the process itself: its structure, directness, accents, emotional colouring and so on. And even in the absence of a scanner with its blinking display, I am still certain that one’s thinking technique is inextricably linked with one’s native (or first) language.

(The parenthetical phrase above points to a distinction. True enough, I can testify from personal experience that one’s mother tongue doesn’t necessarily remain one’s first language for life.)

It’s even possible to generalise that a nation’s language shapes its character. Or it may be the other way around, but a strong link exists in either case.

The two languages I know best, English and Russian, provide useful material for comparative study. They are as different as two European languages can be, and, as anyone with first-hand experience of the English and the Russians can testify, the same goes for the way they think.

Comparing an Englishman and a Russian of equally high intelligence, one is struck by how differently they shape their thoughts. Borrowing art terms, an Englishman is likely to be a classicist, while a Russian will be leaning towards impressionism at best, abstract expressionism at worst.

If an argument between the two occurs, they’d both be frustrated with each other.

The Russian will think that the Englishman can’t see the forest of ultimate truth for the trees of coldblooded casuistic detail and disembodied sequential reasoning. The Englishman will feel that the Russian can irresponsibly say anything that comes to his mind, colouring it with misplaced, effusive emotion and ignoring elementary logic.

Both will have a point, although neither may ascribe the difference to his mother tongue. Yet I’m convinced that’s where at least some of the problem lies.

The complete lexicon of English has roughly three times the number of words as Russian. Even if we make allowances for the many technical areas with their recondite terminology being more advanced in the Anglophone countries, the disparity is still vast.

That enables an educated Anglophone to fracture concepts into finely nuanced fragments, each precisely defined. But that doesn’t necessarily mean a Russian won’t be able to communicate most of the same nuances.

But where an Englishman can hit the bull’s eye with one accurately aimed word, a Russian will have to look for a roundabout, descriptive route to the same target.

That makes him too verbose and vague for the English taste, while the Russian will deplore his interlocutor’s obsession with desiccated precision. The Russian will also be more likely to fill the lexical gaps with emotive inflection, making the Englishman wince.

All in all, and I know the skies will open and the god of wokery will smite me with his lightning, the English language and hence thought tend to be masculine, and the Russian, feminine. This isn’t to suggest that one is superior to the other — only that they are different.

The same goes for the two grammars.

Russian is a morphological language, whereas English is an analytical one. In linguistics, a morphological language relies on adding affixes to the same root to convey both nuances of meaning and the word’s relationship with other words in the same sentence. An analytical language, on the other hand, keeps the words stable while relying on other words, such as particles and prepositions, to do the same job.

The Russophones among you will know what I mean, but for the benefit of others this is what a Russian can do by adding different suffixes to the sacramental word ‘vodka’. Talking to those who indeed hold that word as sacred, one can hear vodochka, vodchishka, vodchishechka, vodchyonka, vodchyonochka – and I’m sure I’ve left some possibilities out.

All those suffixes convey different degrees of emotional attachment, something that an Anglophone will struggle to do within the confines of a single word. We can say drinkypoo, but something like whiskykin would be stretching it.

To borrow a term from yet another field, the molecule of a Russian root has a greater valence, which goes some way towards making up for the lower number of words.

It’s not just words, it’s also sentences. An English speaker has to have a good reason for inverting the lapidary structure of subject-predicate-object and will only do so for stylistic emphasis. (Compare “I like vodka” with “Vodka I like”.)

A Russian sentence, on the other hand, has no lapidary sentence structure, no prescribed word order. That enables Russians to play fast and loose with their sentences, although it wouldn’t be quite accurate to say their word order is entirely arbitrary. Still, Russian grammar isn’t nearly as structured as the English equivalent, which allows for greater freedom – but also for greater slackness and sloppiness.

The combination of profuse suffixes and free sentence structure make Russian a better language than English for writing poetry, especially rhymed verse. Even Russian poets of modest talent can produce excellent poems, whereas it takes a great poet to do so in English.

In the hands of a lesser artist (some of the Lake poets come to mind), English rhymed poetry often sounds like doggerel. That’s why, unable to rely on affixation to produce interesting rhymes, English poets have always gravitated to blank or free verse much more than their Russian colleagues ever have.

At the same time, Russian doesn’t even come close to English in the genre of the essay. This may explain why Russia has only produced a couple of internationally recognised philosophers.

English enables its practitioners to achieve the ultimate freedom of expression, something for which a rigid discipline is a sine qua non. At the same time, the terminological precision of English is a valuable tool in the hands of an adept user.

Russians, on the other hand, don’t recognise discipline as a precondition for freedom, a failing that transcends language, going all the way to thought in general and political thought in particular. The old Russian word for freedom, volia, is etymologically related to ‘will’, and indeed freedom for a Russian is the ability to do as he will, not to have his rights protected by the discipline of just law.

In poll after poll, the Russians opt in overwhelming numbers for a strong leader in preference to any legal system – something unthinkable for an educated Englishman (or anyone else raised under the aegis of English Common Law). A scholar will identify, correctly, any number of historical, social, cultural and economic reasons for that difference.

Yet language is unlikely to rate a mention as an important factor, which is unfortunate. I thinks it merits pride of place among the dynamics forming a consciousness, both collective and individual. In the very least, this link deserves serious attention.

You know what happens to a compass placed next to a metal bar? It goes haywire, pointing this way and that – anyone who then uses it as a navigational aid will go nowhere fast.

The same goes for the moral compass placed next to the secular modern ethos. People can no longer orient themselves in a kaleidoscopically changing landscape, especially when the landscape becomes a battlefield.

This brings me to TV Rain (Dozhd’), the independent Russian channel thrown out of Russia and now licensed to broadcast out of Latvia. (And there I was, thinking that all those former Soviet republics suppress everything Russian, including the language. Wasn’t that the point, Vlad?)

The channel’s current mission is to exonerate the Russian people from the crimes committed by the Russian government. Dozhd’ founder, Natalia Sindeyeva put it in a nutshell: “Putin isn’t Russia, Russian people aren’t Putin. And it’s not the Russian people who are bombing the Ukraine.” Well, it’s certainly not Bolivians.

I could write a plump tome on that subject, but in this abbreviated format I’d rather draw your attention to another statement by Miss Sindeyeva, one that has created a maelstrom of comments in the émigré press. She expressed empathy for “our poor mobilised boys, freezing in the woods, having nowhere to live, no food, no proper clothes…”

Liberal Russian journalists, most of them now in exile, have joined forces to accuse Miss Sindeyeva of every mortal sin. Prime among them is “universal humanism”, a term they use in the sense of indiscriminate empathy. The Russo-German columnist Igor Eidman has thus summed up the prevailing attitude:

“I am on the Ukraine’s side, wish her victory and look at the situation from the Ukrainian perspective. That’s why I can’t pity Russian soldiers, feel empathy for them. One can pity POWs, but not armed invaders. Even if they are hungry, cold and went to war not of their own accord.”

I unequivocally agree with the first sentence and just as unequivocally disagree with the subsequent ones. But in order to make a cogent argument, I have to remove the moral compass from any proximity to the iron bar of the modern ethos.

The lump of metal in question goes by the name of ‘humanism’. The word has been forced to do so many jobs that its real meaning has fallen by the wayside. For most people, including those Russian journalists, the word has got to mean love of man. Yet the full stop is premature there.

I’d suggest that the true, historical meaning of humanism is professed love of man as a way of cocking a snook at God. Humanism yanked morality out of heaven and tossed it to the ground, where it shattered into an infinite number of fragments.

Human beings, now empowered by their cognate ism, were each freed to pick up whichever fragment they fancied and use it as their moral guide. Except that a closer look revealed that newly acquired wasn’t so much freedom as anarchy. The demise of collective morality left people to their own devices – and vices.

As humanism gathered pace, it predictably proved to be rather inhuman. The 20^th century, the first humanist one from start to finish, produced more violent deaths than the previous five millennia of recorded history combined.

People were being taught a lesson: morality can’t conquer on earth unless it comes from heaven. But they didn’t heed the lesson – they could no longer think in those terms.

Trained to believe that every man is his own judge, they failed to detect the incongruity of being both player and referee in the game of morality. They didn’t notice that the arrow of their moral compass was spinning around faster than the second hand of a stopwatch.

Hence the muddle in which those Russian commentators found themselves: their sights were set wrongly. Attacking Miss Sindeyeva’s “indiscriminate humanism”, they targeted the adjective instead of the real culprit, the noun.

In pre-humanist times, the argument wouldn’t have arisen. It would have been nipped in the bud by this imperative sentence: “But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you…”

This commandment is often misinterpreted as a statement of pacifism. So it would be, if expressed by someone like Tolstoy, his disciple Gandhi or any of their current followers. When expressed by Christ, it was a statement of higher, divine morality reflecting the new understanding of man vouchsafed to an uncomprehending world.

Men were told to love one another not because they were all equally lovable, but because God loved them all equally. And He loved all human beings not because they were angelic but because they were indeed human, creatures made in the image of God and endowed with life everlasting.

That kind of love didn’t mean awarding identical marks to every deed men commit during their earthly life, far from it. But it did mean a promise of salvation in eternity, which is an act of love at its most sublime.

That’s what loving one’s enemy means: a hope for his eternal salvation. Each person, including our mortal enemy, is entitled to this core love based on the respect for his humanity, as created by God.

Feeling for his earthly suffering is corollary to that. This shouldn’t stop a soldier from shooting an evil invader point-blank or eviscerating him with a bayonet. That type of violence is just when it stops or deters violence that’s unjust. But it doesn’t preclude love – and even empathy.

I support the Ukraine’s resistance to Russian fascism as strongly as Mr Eidman does. And I’m not even as ready as Miss Sindeyeva is to exculpate the Russian people in general from the evil war they are fighting against the Ukraine.

I too hope the Ukrainians will drive the Russian invaders out, which has to mean wishing they kill more thousands of the soldiers Miss Sindeyeva describes as “our boys”. And yet that bloodlust doesn’t prevent me from feeling empathy for those youngsters, freezing and starving in the icy, brick-hard Ukrainian mud.

You decide whether this makes me a moral relativist or a moral absolutist. I’m sure it’s the latter, but those ‘liberal’ journalists might disagree.

P.S. Early this morning, Ukrainian drones hit the Engels base of Russian Tu-95 strategic bombers near Saratov on the Volga. Two of the bombers used for terrorist missile attacks on the Ukraine were destroyed.

Apparently, the new drones, designed and manufactured by the Ukraine herself, carry a 75 kg payload to a range of up to 1,000 km. Since Moscow is but 500 k from the Ukrainian border, this gives Putin yet another headache. Well done, Ukraine!