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FIFA president Gianni Infantino feels the pain of Qatar’s slave workers, prosecuted homosexuals and unloved disabled people.

In his speech on the eve of the World Cup, Mr Infantino ascribed that empathy to his own experience of egregious suffering: “As a child I was bullied because I had red hair…”

Mercifully, as the photo on the left suggests, that pain didn’t persist into Mr Infantino’s adulthood. However, in spite of the shared experience of woe, he felt obliged to vouchsafe to his listeners the helpful information that: “I am not Qatari, Arab, African, gay, disabled or a migrant worker.” Could have fooled me.

Having clarified his identity, Mr Infantino got to the point. The point is that Western football players and administrators who bellyache about the abuse of human rights in Qatar are being hypocritical.

When I read that, I cracked a smile of recognition. Here was a kindred soul, a man as disgusted as I am at the signalling of woke virtue that has attracted the divided attention of so many ball-kickers and their managers.

Driven by the commercial prods wielded by their agents and PR consultants, footballers parlay their fame based on expertise in one narrow area into a presumed right to pontificate on every faddish theme they fancy. Strikers come out in support of Black Lives Matter. Defenders lecture ministers on racism. Midfielders champion LGBT rights.

As a direct result, their following on social and other media goes through the roof, as do their endorsement opportunities and the size of their contracts. PR chaps and agents are happy, while the ball-kickers joyously launch themselves into photo ops and public engagements, even if that reduces their time on the training pitch.

Qatar, whose selection as a World Cup venue pushed corruption in sport beyond its already cosmic level, provides a useful focus for exertions of remunerative social conscience. It’s a country ruled by Sharia law that takes a dim view of such icons of our modern morality as buggery and equal rights of men and women to have abortions.

Also, since Qatar isn’t known as the hub of the world’s football activity, it had no stadiums in which to hold the event. And neither could the World Cup be held in summer, the traditional season. Summer temperatures in Qatar reach 50C, which would have turned matches into bowling alleys, with the players as ninepins.

The second problem was solved by moving the Cup to colder months. And modern stadiums had to be built in record time, a task for which native Qataris lacked both skills and numbers. The problem was solved by importing migrant workers, whose working conditions made them differ from slave labourers only legally but not substantively.

Many died in the process, with the exact number either uncounted or at least unreported. At a guess, it was somewhere between the 37 that the Qatari government acknowledges and the 30,000 serfs who died constructing Petersburg’s hideous St Isaac’s Cathedral in the mid-nineteenth century.

All things considered, sniping at Qatar’s human rights record from the commanding height of Western probity tinged with wokery is almost unsporting. It’s like using high-calibre machine guns to spray the woods crawling with wild boar.

The best way to express revulsion at Qatar’s inhuman practices would have been to decline participation in the World Cup. The world of sport has boycotted major sporting events, such as Olympics, for similar reasons before. So why not this time?

Conversely, if football federations or their employees have no guts or desire to do that, their only other decent option is to shut up and play footie, while respecting the laws of the host country. No matter how reprehensible these may be.

The England team doesn’t have to go as far as did their ancestors at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, when our players greeted Hitler with the Nazi salute. All that’s required now is passive acquiescence, not active endorsement.

No rainbow armbands, for example, and ideally no genuflecting in commemoration of a drug-addled career criminal killed in a scuffle with the police. Yet even this seems to be beyond our ball-kickers who like taking their social conscience all the way to the bank, and from there to Bentley and Lamborghini dealerships.

Long story short, Mr Infantino’s charge of hypocrisy is irrefutable. When reading it, I was about to applaud, but then my palms stopped in mid-air. For he proceeded to illustrate one of my pet ideas, that it’s not enough to say the right things. One must also say them for the right reasons, which Mr Infantino’s aren’t.

“I think,” he went on to say, “for what we Europeans have been doing the last 3,000 years we should be apologising for the next 3,000 years before starting to give moral lessons to people.”

Mr Infantino must be commended for being able to think on such a lofty historical scale. He starts from the period when the Celts were the dominant European tribe and sweeps over 6,000 years from there.

By the middle of that timeline, Europeans had committed their full complement of atrocities, which now leaves them another 3,000 years to indulge in penitentiary rites. Yet the previous 3,000 years have invalidated any moral judgement any European can ever make.

Finding something morally wrong with, say, cannibalism or Russian brutality or, more to the point in this context, the throwing of homosexuals off tall buildings and the stoning of adulterers is preempted by Mr Infantino’s take on European history.

He didn’t specify the exact crimes committed during that awful period, but there is no need. The mantra is guaranteed to be the same as that mouthed by all progressive people everywhere: colonialism, homophobia, misogyny, slavery – you’ve seen that hymn sheet enough times not to need me to sing from it.

Well, I’m not about to apologise for the millennia during which the greatest civilisation known to man was created. Instead, I’m proud to be part of it.

But there is something I would like to apologise for: my own spineless hypocrisy. Even though I find the whole World Cup show quite disgusting (and made even more so by Mr Infantino’s remarks), I’ll still be watching many matches, including all involving England.

I wish I had the courage of my former colleague who announced on social media his decision to boycott this World Cup – but I’m honest enough to admit that I don’t. So I’ll leave you here: England vs Iran will be kicking off shortly.

Those Islamic perverts don’t know what they are playing with. They think they can ban the sale of beer at or near World Cup stadiums and get away with it.

We’ll see about that, say England’s fans. Not letting an Englishman drink his regulation ten pints during a football match is like not letting a Muslim face Mecca at prayer. A sacrilegious slap in the face.

But not to worry. England fans, such as those in the photograph, are too smart to be thwarted by a bunch of goatherds. They may have to modify their sacred football ritual, but that only means taking a different route to the same destination. They’ll get there one way or another.

The match day ritual, as practised in the absence of Third World constraints, is as rigid as the Order of the Mass, except the spirits involved aren’t exactly holy. This is how it goes.

Get up early in the morning, say around noon, have a restorative half and a bacon sarnie. Ring all your mates, those you think may be already awake. Agree on the choice of pub for the pre-match warm-up session.

Go to the chosen location some two hours before kick-off. Have four or five pints and perhaps a shot or two. Spill out onto the pavement, one hand on the half-empty glass, the other assisting public urination.

Cast a quick glance around, zip up, wave at the cops looking on with an expression of avuncular indulgence. Scan the area for any stray fans of the other team, in the knowledge that their self-preservation instinct will probably keep them away from your usual haunts.

Walk to the stadium, your arms around your mates, your mouth belting out the team song and some stock chants, such as “We win home and away, we win every fucking way” or any other, provided they each contain at least one F-word.

Don’t be a stickler for tune and key – they don’t matter. What does matter is that you and your mates walk in quadruple file, pushing non-football pedestrians out of the way. As you do, say things like “Oi”, “You what, mate?”, “Watcha lookin’ at?” or “Watch where you goin’, you [install your favourite obscenity]”.

Once in the stadium, start on the sacramental ten pints, spacing them evenly through the 90 minutes of regulation time, plus a 15-minute interval at halftime, plus however many minutes the ref (whom you loudly identify as a wanker throughout) adds for the players rolling on the grass in faked agony to get an opponent sent off.

Some five minutes before the final whistle join your mates in pointing at the opposition fans with your arm outstretched in the manner of the Nazi salute, but with the index finger stuck out. Start edging towards the exit to make sure you have the choice of the best battlefield for the subsequent hostilities.

Once you and your mates have closed ranks and vomited excess weight on the ground to make yourselves more mobile, you are ready to engage the opposition fans as they come out.

However, the clash may be delayed by mutual consent, as you agree to proceed to another location where there’s less danger of the ‘filth’ breaking up the fisticuffs. One way or the other, have a nice punch up, leaving blood, teeth and residual vomit on the ground.

Retreat to a pub or, better still, an Indian restaurant. Have another couple of pints and a vindaloo, call the waiter a ‘Paki’, break a plate or two, pay your bill and try to get out before the ‘filth’ arrive. If you are still mobile, that is.

Admittedly, your Qatari hosts (remember to refer to them as either ‘Muzzies’ or ‘towelheads’) have maliciously disrupted your standard routine with their Sharia extremism. But they don’t know what they are in for.

Yes, you’ll have to introduce some changes. Specifically, you’ll now have to tank up fully before the match and top up after it, while staying dry (except inside your trousers) in between.

However, that means you’ll have a score to settle with the locals before the match, and, after a dozen pints or so, you’ll be in the right condition to do so. If the locals hide in coffee houses along your route to the stadium, you can draw them out by tossing outside chairs through the windows.

This knowing that you may be outnumbered in the subsequent mêlée. But the English were also outnumbered in the battles of Crécy and Agincourt, which didn’t prevent their victory. You may not have heard of those clashes, but the same indomitable spirit lives on in your breast.

There the English relied on the longbow, a weapon that caught the French unawares. In your turn, you’ll be able to flummox those coffee drinkers by throwing punches with a clenched fist, a technique rare in the Arab world.

Win, lose or draw, you can wipe your bloodied nose and proceed to the stadium. Once there, start chanting “If it wasn’t for England, you’d all be Krauts”, and – since England’s first opponent is Muslim Iran – “Get your face out for the lads” or “You’re Shiite and you know it”. Don’t forget “Ref’s a wanker”, treat it as a refrain after each new verse.

Then walk back beyond the red line separating the dry area from the boozy one. You may be shedding bodies along the way, lost to drink or scuffles with the locals and the towelheaded filth. But nothing will diminish your pride, patriotism and capacity for beer, even at a tenner a pint.

Go, Ingerland!

The text of Article 5 of the Nato Charter is unequivocal: “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all…” and punished with military force as deemed necessary.

That means that three days ago, when two Russian Kh-101 cruise missiles hit the Polish village of Przewodów, killing two, it wasn’t just Poland that was attacked. The other 29 Nato members, including the US, Britain, France and Germany, were on the receiving end too.

Such was the crime, but the punishment is slow in coming. So slow, in fact, that one gets a distinct impression it isn’t coming at all.

For, rather than choosing an appropriate retaliation, Nato leaders banged their heads together trying to figure out the most credible way “not to provoke Putin”, thereby “escalating” the conflict. A little legerdemain, a couple of aces dealt to themselves from the bottom of the pack, and a solution was found.

They decided to tell the world that there had been one missile, not two. And even that missile was Ukrainian, not Russian. Actually, it was an S-300 AA rocket Ukrainians had fired at an incoming Russian missile, but missed.

Joe Biden, speaking with his customary senile vagueness, played along. A Kh-101 missile, he told a credulous world, didn’t have a “trajectory” to hit Przewodów. The world was so credulous that it didn’t ask the natural question: “How come then that those same missiles have the trajectory to hit targets in the west of Ukraine, just a couple of miles east of Przewodów?”

Yet even if that question had been asked, Nato leaders could have been trusted to sweep it under the carpet. Anything less could have ‘provoked’ Putin into an ‘escalation’.

Actually, it’s not just that trajectory thing. You see, when an S-300 rocket misses its aerial target, it self-destructs and breaks down into fragments, none of which can produce a crater the size of the one visible in Przewodów.

Yes, it’s possible, if unlikely, that the self-destruct mechanism of the S-300 failed. That does happen occasionally, but usually when the rocket is used to do a ground-to-ground job, something it isn’t designed to do but, in extreme circumstances, does.

However, there are no Russian troops within hundreds of miles of the Polish border. Hence there were no targets for such misused Ukrainian rockets to hit – unless some bright Nato spark thinks the Ukrainians aimed at Przewodów specifically. Moreover, no S-300 systems were sited in that part of the Ukraine.

Then of course the S-300 is radically different from a Kh-101 in design, size, type of engine. Even a rank amateur, never mind the Nato experts supposedly investigating the incident, ought to be able to tell the remnants of one from the other.

In any case, no such incidentals are allowed to interfere with the ingenuous Nato narrative. Putin wasn’t ‘provoked’, the conflict didn’t ‘escalate’. The show is over, the audience goes home happy.

Except for one minor detail. That obstreperous, not to say provoking and escalating, Zelensky is refusing to play along. He keeps insisting that there were two Kh-101 missiles, not one wayward S-300, and they were fired by the Russians.

Moreover, that spoilsport has the gall to complain that no Ukrainian experts were given access to the site. We are certain the missiles were Russian, Zelensky maintains. But if you think we are wrong, let our people join yours in examining the site.

Now that really gets the biscuit. Nato has accepted magnanimously that the Ukraine isn’t to blame for that wayward S-300. After all, no missiles would have been launched by anyone in the region had the Russians not invaded the Ukraine.

So no one is planning to drag Zelensky before the Hague tribunal, and neither is he asked to compensate the families of the deceased. So what’s his problem?

The FT has quoted an anonymous diplomat from one of the Nato countries as saying, “This is becoming silly. The Ukrainians are undermining our trust. No one is accusing them of anything, and yet they are lying brazenly. That’s more destructive than that missile.”

Stoutly put. Some Nato countries are clearly running out of patience with Zelensky, the leader of a Western-leaning country subjected to the most brutal attack seen in Europe since 1945. Instead of rolling over and playing dead, the Ukrainians had the audacity to fight back, thereby conceivably provoking Putin into an escalation.

So fine, Nato is prepared to arm the Ukraine, up to a point. The country is like a bull in the ring: it’s allowed to fight, but it’s not allowed to win. Nato is prepared to supply it sufficiently for the former, but not for the latter. Otherwise Putin might feel provoked into unleashing a nuclear Armageddon.

I shan’t comment on the unfathomable rudeness of that comment, nor its craven cowardice. Instead I’ll propose a much more likely version of the incident.

Provocation is Putin’s stock in trade. That’s what KGB officers are trained to do, and not only Putin himself but some 80 per cent of his government cut their teeth in that organisation, the most diabolical the world has ever known.

If you look at the whole history of Putin’s tenure, he has always probed, dipping his toe in the water to see how far he could go. That happened in Chechnya, where he sought accommodation when faced with staunch resistance. It happened in Georgia, twice.

It also happened in the Crimea, where he tested the West’s response to that blatant land grab. Having been hit with nothing heavier than token sanctions and expressions of deep concern, he felt emboldened to launch a full-scale offensive on the Ukraine.

That, he kept saying, wasn’t an attack on the Ukraine. It was a preemptive strike against Nato, which is committed to conquering and dismembering Mother Russia. But not on Vlad’s watch.

Now that his war machine is falling apart in the face of the Ukraine’s heroic fightback, he is talking cease-fire, while looking for easier marks elsewhere.

Hitting a Polish village with missiles bears every hallmark of a little test. Nato bigwigs keep talking about Article 5, but do they have the guts to act on it? Or will they come up with a Catch 22, some cowardly excuse not to act?

If they do, perhaps they’ll respond in the same way to another full-scale attack, say on Estonia or Latvia. And tomorrow, the world.

If that indeed was the test, then Nato failed it. I realise I may be wrong in this assumption, as Zelensky may be wrong in insisting that the missiles involved were Russian. But, considering Nato’s refusal to let Ukrainians examine the fragments of the rocket, the scenario I propose looks more plausible.

P.S. The Chancellor’s budget is a poignant and eloquent obituary for the Conservative Party. RIP.

Call it confirmation bias if you must, but last night’s recital of the Takács Quartet at Wigmore Hall vindicated many of my cherished beliefs.

I commiserated the other day with the plight of our state-funded orchestras that are obligated to hire black musicians on pain of losing their state funding. I suggested that classical isn’t the first harbour for which talented black musicians sail, nor even second or third. Hence that mandated recruitment drive is in for a let-down.

Scanning the 500-strong audience before the first note was played, I espied just one black face. Yet upon closer examination even that turned out to belong to an usher.

Now, extremely talented musicians are like extremely tall trees. They typically grow not in a desert but in a large forest of smaller trees.

By the same token, talented professional musicians emerge out of a much larger group of less talented ones. It wasn’t by accident that, from Haydn and Mozart to Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms, Vienna could boast so much musical genius within a relatively short period. This would have been impossible without the profusion of Picchinis, Salieris, Hummels, Clementis, Eyblers, Süsmayrs and Stamitzes lying thick on Vienna’s ground at the same time.

In their turn, the less gifted professional musicians stand out among amateurs. And amateurs come out of a vast pool of music lovers, those who don’t mind spending their time and money on string quartet recitals at Wigmore Hall.

If we walk up the same path in the opposite direction, the score of 500-0 against blacks in the audience emphasised the sheer impossibility of filling racial quotas at orchestras without sacrificing the quality of what orchestras are supposed to do.

Then there was another telling demographic. Without asking my fellow concert-goers for their ID, I estimated their average age at about 70. There were some young people in attendance, but they were outnumbered by Zimmer frames, walking sticks and hearing aids. The hair of the audience featured 50 shades of grey.

I didn’t need to consult actuarial tables to wonder who’ll be attending string quartet recitals at Wigmore Hall 20 years from now, indeed whether there will remain any such events to attend. Concert-going is, inter alia, a habit cultivated over a lifetime. Those in the audience had obviously cultivated it, but they hadn’t passed the urge on to the next generation.  

Then there was the performance itself. The Takács Quartet is one of the best ones around, and they didn’t disappoint. With their playing, that is.

Yet it took a feat of concentration for Penelope and me to start listening to the music – so irate we were about what had preceded it. As is becoming increasingly widespread, first violin Edward Dusinberre opened the recital by rapping with the audience.

At first he plugged his book, a signed copy of which we were encouraged to buy in the foyer. Then he primed us by saying a few vulgar and condescending words about the music to be played.

None of those words had anything to do with the actual pieces, how they were put together, what unusual harmonies, dynamic shifts or tempi made them interesting. Such recondite stuff must have been deemed to be beyond our ability to grasp.

Instead Mr Dusinberre explained that one composer wrote his quartet because he was happy to return home after a long stay abroad, another was inspired by the sadness of having to leave home and go abroad, and yet another put pen to scoresheet because he loved his Mum and felt guilty about neglecting her.

No one genuinely believing that such are the sources of artistic inspiration will be capable of playing to a high standard. Since Mr Dusinberre manifestly has that ability, he had to know that what he was saying was vulgar bilge pitched down to the presumed level of his audience.

If his presumption was correct, then the future of live classical performance is indeed bleak. One thing I can say for sure is that Penelope and I both whispered “Just play the music” in unison, except that I modified the noun with an adjective of a desemanticised sexual origin.

All told, that one evening summed up some of the core problems of modernity. But since I have no space to tell all, I’ll concentrate on a single theme with but a few variations.

The theme is democracy that has expanded out of its natural political domain into spheres that ought to have been outside its reach. That was predictable.

Democracy is a political statement of equality, one of the founding desiderata of modernity. It stands to reason that, if it’s a self-evident truth that all men are created equal (to quote one of my least favourite documents), they are all equally capable of choosing their governments.

I consider this counterintuitive assumption to be rather divorced from observable reality, and in fact no commercial concern I’ve ever seen determines its policy by a show of hands. But hey, whatever works.

If democracy works better than other techniques of choosing political leaders, fine. What matters isn’t method of government but the kind of society it brings forth.

We all know the key attributes of government we desire: justice, wisdom, courage and prudence are my requirements. If we are satisfied (which I am not) that unrestrained democracy meets our requirements, then we are all happy. If we aren’t, perhaps we ought to consider possible changes – it’s all, or rather should be, sheer pragmatism.

Except it’s not, is it? Democracy isn’t seen as simply a method of government, one of many possibilities. Two-odd centuries of unremitting propaganda has imbued it with a high moral, borderline religious, content.

When the Holy Trinity was declared invalid and nonexistent, another trinity took its place, in which égalité was the central element. Hence democracy, its political expression, couldn’t stay within the narrow confines of its remit. It had to expand into all sorts of other areas, and if they were at first reluctant to accommodate democracy, then they had to be forced.

Democracy of politics thus also became democracy of taste, democracy of thought, democracy of creeds – all this without completely shedding its political skin. That way everything of value became politicised, with a show of hands deciding the choice between good and bad, virtuous and sinful, clever and stupid.

Some of those hands on show clutch wads of banknotes or, these days, packs of credit cards. Commercial consumerism acts in matters of mind and taste the way voting does in democratic politics.

In the arts, it decides who and what will succeed. In thought, what is intelligent and why. In morality, what is virtuous or sinful. In creeds… well, as far as democracy is concerned, it’s best not to believe in anything other than democracy.

All this is camouflaged with the smock of another mendacious shibboleth of democracy – meritocracy, a sort of aristocracy of achievement that has replaced the aristocracy of birth as the dominant social, commercial and political dynamic.

Yet the notion of meritocracy depends on what is widely believed to be meritorious. When that issue is also decided by a show of hands, nothing truly meritorious emerges. Meretricious is what we get.

For any society committed to equality will associate merit with commercial success, a sort of finish line some reach faster than others even though they all start from the same blocks. In effect, meritocracy will become plutocracy, with power measurable in money and vice versa. That stands to reason.

As has been known since the time of Heraclitus, things don’t stand still. Thus democratic majority in large countries is but an icon, not the real wielder of power and authority. The malleable mass of humanity inevitably becomes putty in the hands of expert manipulators, assorted éminences grises spinning the potter’s wheel.

In the West, where the rule of law hasn’t quite become a moot point yet, they’ve had to proceed slowly, watching their step along the way. But they’ve gradually succeeded in putting democracy to work as their instrument of power.

‘Democracy’ itself is a sledgehammer they can bring down on a recalcitrant head, but it’s not the only one. ‘Racism’, ‘homophobia’, ‘misogyny’ and so on all pack a mean punch. And, in arts, education and thought, those greyish eminencies whip out the mallet of ‘elitism’.

Swing that mallet, and – skipping a few incremental steps – genuine artists, such as the Takács Quartet, gradually fade away into extinction. And even before they do, they have to patronise their audience by talking rubbish about the great works they are about to perform.

Ugliness, stupidity and vulgarity are democratic. Beauty, sagacity and subtlety are elitist. And when democratic clashes with elitist, you know who’s going to win in our Panglossian world.

Take my advice, chaps: don’t go to concerts. You’ll end up with a head full of subversive thoughts that can land you in trouble if you aren’t careful.

Back in the 1950s, some southern senator, Strom Thurmond if memory serves, said at a party that Eisenhower was a communist (a popular charge at the time). He was immediately corrected by a colleague, who objected that Ike was an anti-communist.

“I don’t care what kind of communist he is,” said the indomitable senator, thereby unwittingly uttering an exemplar of deep philosophical thought.

I remembered that episode a few hours ago when watching the public response to Trump’s announcement of his candidature in the 2024 presidential elections. His speech contained the usual anaphoric litany of making America safe again, rich again, beautiful again and consequently great again (I don’t remember the exact words except the last ones).

The announcement was met with predictable revulsion by the Democrats and equally predictable exultation by the Republicans, those of the MAGA variety. The latter are tangentially closer to me than the former, at least in some respects.

Hence, if I wished to vote in US elections (I still have a dusty, long overdue American passport in the back of my sock drawer), I’d plump for Trump rather than any Democratic candidate. Such are the demands of our binary world: one or the other, black or white, no nuances need apply.

That’s how the game is set up and one must either sit it out or play it by the established rules. This pragmatic consideration, however, doesn’t alleviate my ennui whenever the subject of political tug-of-war comes up. “A plague on both your houses,” I think, while trying to keep my yawning jaw in joint.

And then I recall Strom Thurmond’s unwitting maxim, how it applies to today’s situation. Both the Democratic socialists and the Trumpist anti-socialists believe that the seminal problems of modern life have a political solution. Like Orwell’s animals, they reduce everything to a single issue. They just can’t agree on the number of legs.

Republicans accuse Democrats of being socialist, with ample justification. Yet socialism is, to use Marxist terminology, only a superstructure erected on the base of statism, a purely modern, post-Enlightenment phenomenon of endowing the state with omnipotent power.

If you divest socialism of its mendacious ‘share, care, be aware’ cant lifted from Christianity and then ripped off its roots, perverted and vulgarised, then that’s all it is: statism run riot.

The state assumes the function of a family, reducing the real one to a quaint irrelevance. It becomes a provider to millions, thereby performing the role of a father, with us as potentially wayward children. It looks after our health. It educates our children. It decides on the size of our allowance, the money we are allowed to keep after taxes. It teaches us what to say and even what to think, punishing us if we go wrong and rewarding us for obedience.

It does all those wonderful things for us – but acquiring in return the licence to do awful things to us. In both parts it’s dramatically different from the traditional state of Western polity, which did little for the people, but then neither did it possess the power to do much to them.

The transition from Western to modern state was effected by a frenzied assault on the very concept of man that was unique to Christendom. That concept was reflected in the explicit or implicit charter of the dominant Western institutions: the church and the state.

Western Man was a creature combining a wholehearted commitment to individual autonomy with a communal spirit springing from the defining concept of Christianity: love.

Reflecting that understanding, the ecclesiastical structure combined two complementary principles: subsidiarity and solidarity. Parishes all over the world enjoyed a great deal of autonomy (subsidiarity) while remaining in communion with all other parishes and submitting to the doctrinal authority of the papacy (solidarity).

The state functioned according to the same understanding. Localism trumped centralism, with local government being the only kind people knew, and local mores the only ones they saw as inviolable (subsidiarity). What brought them together was a shared faith and, usually but far from always, a common language. They only came together in a large group when uniting under the banners of the central state against a common enemy (solidarity).

Every aspect of that arrangement was made possible by the ultimate humility of faith, a realisation that, though man wasn’t nothing, it was God, loving and loved, who was everything. Such was the background against which man judged and measured himself, defined his worth, understood his essence.

The Enlightenment then barged in and turned things upside down. The humility of faith in a supreme being was replaced by the arrogance of belief in man as the be all and end all of existence. If before people knew they were all equal before God, now they were taught they were equal before one another.

That understanding destroyed both subsidiarity and solidarity. Local, parochial government couldn’t be sustained in a country where everyone was presumed to be created self-evidently equal, in the puzzling words of the founding document of political modernity. Equal people might have been, but only under a new entity: the political state, supposedly deriving its power from what Locke disingenuously called ‘consent of the governed’.

That consent was presumed, not actually given. And it was supposed to be given for an eternity: no legal means of revoking it were ever envisaged.

People, in steadily decreasing proportions, would vote for one of two (or sometimes three or four) candidates every few years. The winning candidate, often supported by no more than a third of the population, would then take that vote as a mandate to do anything he wished for the duration of his tenure – with practically no accountability to the people at large until the next election.

Such is the nature of modern politics, such are its systemic problems. The systemic problems may manifest themselves in more or less virulent symptoms. Various politicians promise to alleviate this or that symptom, but without ever diagnosing the underlying disease, much less trying to treat it.

People, arrogantly certain that they are equal to one another in the crude post-Enlightenment sense, look hopefully up to the candidates on offer, hoping their chosen one will relieve the more bothersome symptoms. And he may do just that – until his successor removes the palliative medicine to usher the pain back in.

Both Republicans and Democrats, worshippers of Trump, Biden or any other putative knight in shining armour, believe that their man will ride in on his steed and save the day, like St James Matamoros saving Castilians from the Moors in the Battle of Clavijo.

He won’t, not in the long run. I appreciate that this is how the game is played, but only children take games seriously. This particular one is especially infantile, with the players fiddling with toys while society burns.

No, not that, and I know what you are thinking. The C-word I have in mind is both longer and more pernicious.

It’s ‘Council’, awful just about every time it’s capitalised. I’m sure you can think of an exception or two, but every time I come across the word, I assume I’m looking at an organisation wholeheartedly committed to subverting everything I hold dear.

The UN Security Council, The Council on Foreign Relations, any Council of Ministers, The Equality Council UK, any municipal Council – you name it, it’s committed to reducing the West to a purely geographical concept with no civilisational content whatsoever.

Some 20 years ago I co-owned a magazine funded by the British Arts Council (BAC). When the funding came in, we thought we were in clover. Instead we landed in a considerably more malodorous substance.

To continue to qualify for the funding, we had to appoint a leftist poet as editor who then spiked every article arguing a conservative case. That created unbearable tensions and the publication folded within a few months.

Currently in the news is BAC’s younger sibling, ACE (Arts Council England). Only 28 years old, ACE has brought youthful vigour to its assault on the ‘A’ initial in its nomenclature.

Its published strategy should terrify any sensible person. “By 2030,” said ACE, “we will be investing in organisations and people that differ in many cases from those that we support today.”

They were as good as their word. For starters, they withdrew all funding from English National Opera, London’s second opera house, and the Donmar Warehouse, a lovely and affordable small theatre where I’ve seen some splendid productions.

Those theatres failed to meet the criteria ACE specified as essential to their patronage. Artistic excellence is one of them, but way down the list.

Taking precedence are “inclusivity and relevance” (making sure that “England’s diversity is fully reflected”), “dynamism” (being infantile enough to appeal to aesthetically disadvantaged children) and “environmental responsibility” (self-explanatory).

To reflect England’s diversity fully, as opposed to partially or even predominantly, ACE demands that an institution be multi-culti in its staff, audience and repertoire. No perceived deviation is tolerated, be it in the direction of excessive whiteness or elitism (dread word).

The Britten Sinfonia, an acclaimed orchestra of long standing, failed to meet that criterion and as a result lost its meagre £406,000 annual grant. Actually, purveyors of classical, which is to say real, music find themselves on a losing wicket almost by definition.

This kind of music was created for few by fewer. That’s why it can’t really be wholly supported by box office receipts, not without losing sight of its high purpose. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and so forth all depended on patronage, as did most great 20^th century musicians, certainly in the early stages of their careers.

Patrons, be it private individuals, charities or governments, pay their money and they call their tune, at least to some extent. By choosing the tune and those who play it, they affect public taste and the whole tenor of the musical scene.

Acting in that capacity way back then were aristocratic patrons, who themselves played musical instruments and appreciated those who played them infinitely better. Even then geniuses like Mozart bewailed the pig-headed obtuseness of assorted archbishops, princes and electors.

Yet I wonder what the protagonist of the disgusting play (and film) Amadeus would think of today’s patrons, such as ACE, should he come back to life. My bet is he’d utter one of his favourite scatological obscenities and insist on being taken back, even if that meant being bossed by the Salzburg archbishop Colloredo.

Divesting classical music of elitism (dread word) means reducing it to popular entertainment with pseud pretensions. And seeking predominantly multi-culti staffs presents another problem.

Granted, there are enough reasonably competent Asian musicians floating about to staff every orchestra in the world, with thousands left over for the marching bands and dance-hall combos. But that’s not good enough, is it?

Orchestras can’t fob off their benefactors by hiring mostly Chinese and Korean players, although that would be perceived as a step in the right direction. Yet no organisation is deemed diverse enough without a heavy black presence.

Therein lies a problem. For historical, social and cultural reasons that I shan’t go into, musically talented blacks tend to gravitate to genres other than classical. Such as jazz, which they’ve blessed with countless performers of genius, such as Art Tatum, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker – and I could keep you for hours just listing them.

On the other hand, in my decades of regular concert-going I recall only once having heard a black soloist, and even he was half-Hungarian. Orchestra musicians have to meet less stringent standards, but even so – putting diversity before artistic excellence can only come at a heavy cost to the latter.

ACE vindicates this statement, one I wouldn’t be able to make in any publication other than this one. Having removed its paltry grant for the Britten Sinfonia, ACE then pumped almost five times as much into the Chineke! Orchestra.

To its credit, that setup eschews lofty claims to offering deep musical insights. It’s proud to bill itself as Europe’s first orchestra where most players are black or otherwise ethnically diverse. The word Chineke, explains the group’s brochure, derives from the Igbo word meaning ‘God’.

This must be the deity ACE worships. In the past three years the orchestra’s funding has gone from zero to £2.1 million – this though by all accounts the Chineke! is so beset by internal squabbling that it’s unlikely to survive anyway.

How do those black musicians feel, knowing they just may owe their jobs not to their musicianship but to their race? Some of them may be gifted musicians, but even they may be beset by gnawing suspicions.

They, along with all other cultured people, know that music exists in the ‘ultra’ sphere soaring above petty quotidian concerns, especially politics. Any attempt to pull it down to our infested earth will land music in the putrid quagmire, sucking it into mediocrity.

But then I did tell you that any capitalised Council is out to achieve that very aim – at best. At worst, they all seek to expunge the last vestiges of what used to be history’s greatest civilisation.

We’ve come a long way since the cave life of Victorian obscurantism, so long live progress.

I don’t have enough black paint handy to draw a realistic picture of a 19^th century Britain ruled by an elite lording it over the downtrodden. Workhouses, penury, little urchins toiling as either coal miners or pickpockets and exploited by slumlords in either case.

Oh well, I know I can’t compete with Dickens. I have neither his talent nor his flaming social conscience. But I do have something he didn’t have: the benefit of hindsight and a few telling statistics, specifically in the area of education.

One such datum says that in 1900 Britain could boast a literacy rate of 97.2 per cent. And please remember that in that dark age education was available only to the chosen few. Or so says received wisdom. Oppressed children had to leave school early to make a head start in their careers as coal miners or pickpockets.

Two world wars later progress dawned on Britain. Schools became comprehensive and, until age 16, compulsory. And what do you know, the current literacy level is 87 per cent – exactly 10 per cent lower than in the days of wholesale oppression and elitism.

This is to say that nine million Britons, most, one suspects, young beneficiaries of our comprehensive and compulsory education, are functionally illiterate. (A note to my French friends: don’t feel smug about this. The illiteracy rate in France is even higher.)

This is the kind of tunnel at the end of which no light will shine in any foreseeable future. For 19 per cent of English children between five and eight have not a single book at home. When pressed, their parents explain that books are too expensive, and I can testify from my own woeful experience that they are right.

However, not all books are necessarily bought. Some come down from one generation to the next. Some others are picked up at free public libraries. The first one opened in 1857, also in the oppressive reign of Queen Victoria. Since then they spread like mushrooms after an August rain – but no longer.

In fact, over the past 10 years a fifth of them have closed, which raises the chicken and egg question. Do half of our children hardly ever read outside school because libraries are closing or are they closing because people ignore them?

You don’t need me to tell you that this situation betokens a cultural catastrophe. But that’s not the only kind.

A child growing up in a low literacy area has a life expectancy some 26 years lower than one growing up in, say, a university town. And the life of an illiterate child will be not only shorter but also poorer.

Back in 1900 Britain was heavily industrialised, and industry didn’t run on mainframe computers, automated assembly lines and microprocessors. Hence there was much demand for the kind of labour that didn’t need high levels of literacy.

By contrast, the employment prospects of an illiterate youngster are bleak in today’s post-industrial economy. Whatever jobs are available can’t match the level of handouts generously offered by HM Exchequer as a direct result of widespread illiteracy, at a cost of £37 billion a year.

Some will be tempted to put this calamity down to our multicultural society proudly enforcing the kind of ethnic diversity that didn’t exist in Victorian times. Yet most ethnic groups show a great improvement in school performance. There are only two exceptions: boys of black Caribbean and white working-class backgrounds.

When we talk about education these days, we don’t mean proficiency in languages, living and dead, an easy command of involved philosophical and theological concepts or knowledge of differential calculus. At issue here is the ability to read elementary English texts and add up simple numbers.

Failure to educate children to even such a basic standard has all sorts of deadly consequences, some of which go beyond life expectancy and economic success. For rampant illiteracy leads to democracy of universal suffrage being severely compromised or even downright inoperative.

From Plato and Aristotle onwards, serious thinkers on such matters have been pointing out that an enlightened electorate is a sine qua non of successful democratic governance. That’s why in the past an inability to read and write disqualified people from voting in many Western democracies (such as several American states in my youth). No longer.

How can an illiterate person choose among numerous campaign promises on offer? I don’t know, you tell me. Lee, what’s wrong with a high inflation rate? Or with high taxation, Gavin? Should the House of Lords become an elected chamber, Trish? Oh well, hard luck – for all of us.

Nor is it just black and working-class boys. University-educated grown-ups who write about the plight of the downtrodden masses in our broadsheets do so with the kind of solecisms that wouldn’t have let them within swearing distance of Victorian papers.

In those days basic literacy was an insufficient requirement for journalists, partly because there was nothing special about that accomplishment in a country where practically everyone could read and write. Elegance of style, precision of metaphor, depth of analysis, sterling erudition all had to figure on a columnist’s CV.

These days I can hardly read an article, especially by a young hack, that doesn’t make me cringe at every other paragraph. Many locutions are as grating as the sound of two pieces of glass rubbed together.

I often cite examples of especially awful usages, with one or another attracting my jaundiced attention at different times. My current bugbear is the structure ‘to be sat’, as in “Last night I was sat next to an MP at dinner”.

Any Victorian writer would have known to shun the passive voice unless it was unavoidable. English is a dynamic language propelled by strong, active verbs (this sentence is an example of an unavoidable passive construction). So what’s wrong with ‘I sat’, ‘I was sitting’ or, ‘I was seated?’ Out of which fetid rubbish bin do they pull ‘I was sat’ and, increasingly, ‘I was stood’?

This is no trivial matter for it goes beyond whole herds of hacks suffering from a bad case of tin ear. This aesthetic and educational problem springs from ideologised contempt for aesthetics and education – ugly is the new beautiful for being easily accessible to all classes, ages and races.

Hence a broadsheet columnist writing “I was sat” is as virulent a symptom of cultural malaise as is a working-class teenager who can’t read a primer. They sit (are sat?) on different tiers of the pyramid, but the whole structure is sinking deeper and deeper into the ground.

So let’s end on my lapidary phrase: that’s progress for you.

The sexual assault happened when I was 14, about 60 years ago. The crime scene was the staircase in my Moscow block of flats, permeated by the smell of sauerkraut, sweat and unlaundered clothes. The victim was a neighbour, a dark-haired girl named Natasha, same age as me.

I had known her for 14 years, give or take a couple of months, but it had never before occurred to me to objectivise Natasha, partly because I didn’t know the word at the time. My excuse is that neither did anyone else.

Then again, I had only recently become sufficiently aware of my vague urges to know how how to translate them into concrete actions. That’s what I did on that occasion.

As we were walking up the stairs side by side, I suddenly kissed Natasha on the lips. If I had expected reciprocity, I received none. She pushed me aside violently and called me a word that decorum prohibits repeating here.

That’s as far as it went, but even such a seemingly trivial act leaves deep scars in the psyche of both parties, especially the victim.

Natasha must have spent the intervening 60 years writhing in agony. The trauma she suffered must have been gnawing at her wounded soul every waking moment – which means almost all the time, for she must have suffered acute insomnia ever since.

There, I’m glad I’ve been able to get this off my chest. For I too have suffered, and I too have had sleepless nights, with a piercing sense of guilt keeping me awake. I feel much better now, even though I know there’s the danger of Natasha seeking legal recourse.

On the off chance that she reads this confession, she could either seek substantial compensation in the civil courts or even file criminal charges. Since I have no money, the latter course would probably bring her more satisfaction, especially in the British courts. After all, British jurisprudence has no statute of limitations.

Is she does have me arrested, I’ll feel mortified – but also proud. For 60 years could well be the record-breaking interval between crime and punishment in such cases.

Warren Beatty, for example, has only managed 50 years and, as one hears, for no lack of trying. For it was half a century ago, when he was in his mid-thirties, that he allegedly raped his current accuser, the actress Kristina Hirsh.

One can only admire Miss Hirsh’s patience. It’s only when the empty feeling in her soul, and doubtless also in her bank account, became unbearable that she instructed her lawyers, choosing that course of action over criminal proceedings.

That choice betokens wisdom. For one thing, US criminal law does have a statute of limitations for all crimes except, if memory serves, murder and a few other gruesome acts. Then again, unlike me, Mr Beatty does have money with which he could be forced to part.

Also, the standards of proof are less stringent in civil cases than in criminal ones. And in non-violent sex cases they are laxer still. On rapidly accumulating evidence, the victim’s word usually does the trick.

Miss Hirsh is accusing Mr Beatty of no gruesome crimes. His alleged offence is rape, of the statutory variety. For Miss Hirsh, 14 at the time, was what’s known in the common parlance as jail bait.

It’s not only her patience that I admire, but also her tact and discretion. Reluctant to submit Mr Beatty to trial by tabloids, she didn’t mention the actor by name in her lawsuit. Instead she only identified her rapist as the star who had received an Oscar nomination for his role as Clyde Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde, which every American has seen several times.

Mr Beatty, whose identity was thus securely protected, met Miss Hirsh on the set of The Parallax View. Sparks flew and, according to her, “from the spring of 1973 until the following January of 1974, we carried on a relationship that I thought was something that was special.”

Special or not, “it was a crime that Beatty was committing by raping me, having oral sex with me… and emotionally damaging me for the past 44 years,” she added.

In her lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles on Monday, Hirsch, now 63, claims the nameless Mr Beatty, now 85, groomed her for sex. And if you don’t believe her, you are a misogynist and, by extension, also probably a homophobe, transphobe, global warming denier – and almost certainly a latent rapist yourself.

This seems to be the only case her lawyers can possibly make against my fellow sex offender, the nameless Mr Beatty. After all, given the passage of time, they’ll find it hard to come up with tangible evidence. Thus the case they’ll bring will be not so much legal as political.

It’ll feed off the MeToo campaign that makes it next to impossible for a man accused of sex crimes, especially non-violent ones, to defend himself. His accuser isn’t just the victim but the whole of womankind, presumed to be a collective victim and united in its victimhood.

Now I wasn’t entirely serious about my own sexual offence: it was merely a silly childish prank. The nameless Mr Beatty is accused of something more serious: sex with a minor who is ipso facto unable to give consent, not even to an Oscar nominee.

Admittedly, teenage girls weren’t as thoroughly sexualised 50 years ago as they are now. But I still find it hard to believe that a 14-year-old Hollywood actress didn’t know about the birds and the bees (or, in San Francisco, the birds and the birds).

Still, the law is the law, even if Mr Beatty’s alleged deed only makes it into the malum prohibitum category, sinful only because it’s proscribed. True, it’s tawdry for a 35-year-old man to have an affair with a 14-year-old-girl.

However, I can’t help remembering that 14 is the legal age of consent in seven European countries, Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Portugal. Yet in the state of California, known for its heightened morality, it’s 18, and it’s by California laws that my fellow sex offender will be judged.

Actually, his plight is of no interest to me. I really don’t care if Miss Hirsh manages to get millions in real and punitive damages. In fact, I hope she does, for this will reinforce the point I make so often.

This kind of mockery of justice diminishes not just those on the receiving end but all of us. Politicised justice spells the end of civilised polity.

Cases like Miss Hirsh’s won’t decapitate Lady Justice with one swing of the axe. But their accumulation will eventually kill her by a thousand cuts.

Then there will be nothing left to protect any of us, including young girls, from crimes much worse than one supposedly perpetrated by Mr Beatty. And, well, me.

Yesterday, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, silence fell on the British Isles. The country was remembering those fallen in the First World War that ended on that day, to the minute, 104 years ago.

One casualty was Western civilisation, moribund for a long time, but now put in a coffin with the lid nailed shut. Thus that war was unquestionably evil and yet, paradoxically, its major participants weren’t.

They were misguided, irresponsible, pig-headed, perhaps deranged – but not evil. In fact, they all, with the exception of Russia, practised what is believed to be political virtue: democracy, in its various forms. And even Russia was making tentative steps towards some sort of constitutional arrangement.

Traditionally, on this day Britons pin paper poppies to their lapels, which flower is symbolic in two ways. First, a poppy can only live free. It instantly withers when picked, which makes it a perfect botanical icon of freedom. Second, poppies grew abundantly in the fields of Flanders, where millions paid with their lives for their governments’ folly.

That war was evil not only because it killed 17 million men, but also because it uncorked a bottle out of which three evil spirits burst: Bolshevism, fascism and Nazism.

Had the belligerents known in advance where they were pushing the world, their fingers would have slipped off the triggers. As I said, they themselves weren’t evil and neither were their intentions. Only the results of their actions were.

Compared to that momentous historic event, yesterday’s liberation of Kherson by the Ukrainian army lacks in scale, finality (the war is far from over) and, seemingly, global impact. Yet it’s symbolic that it fell on Remembrance Day, and the floral tribute to freedom is just as appropriate.

All the warring parties way back then depicted themselves as saviours of mankind, while demonising and dehumanising their adversaries. Yet in reality no clearly defined lines of moral demarcation existed.

In this war they do. Russia is a force of evil, and the Ukraine one of good – if only because she has shielded Europe from the triumph of vile hordes.

Free people have an in-built advantage in any confrontation with slaves, political or intellectual. In his 2001 book Carnage and Culture, Victor Davis Hanson builds an irrefutable historical case for this proposition, and the on-going war provides more evidence.

Kherson was the only provincial capital Putin’s bandits managed to occupy in the nine months of the war. This gateway to the Crimea was also Russia’s last foothold on the right bank of the Dnieper, and losing it came as a crushing blow to Putin’s dreams of rebuilding Stalin’s empire.

This is only an intermediate success, significant but not decisive in terms of military strategy. The Ukrainian army clearly has the initiative, but it so far lacks the means of pressing that advantage to an ultimate end.

For, if the Rubicon presented a psychological barrier for Caesar, the Dnieper is a formidable defensive one. Crossing it will definitely require more weapons, and possibly more men, than the Ukraine has at her disposal.

The Russians can entrench themselves on the other side and, if the First World War taught us anything, it’s the appalling cost of futile attempts to storm set defences.

Yes, the very fact that the Russians are preparing for defence spells a great turning point in the war, but it’s too early to tell how the carnage will end.

If the ultimate military aspect of yesterday’s victory is up for debate, its political and psychological impact is indisputable. The Russian propaganda effort can gloss over only so many crushing defeats, and this one just may prove to be one too many.

Putin’s hold on power is shakier now than it was even on 10 November, which may raise false hopes. For the only discernible opposition to Putin comes from the kind of circling vultures who make him look moderate.

They are the ones who call for apocalyptic measures, such as flooding Kherson by blowing up the dam upriver, using tactical nuclear weapons against Ukrainian targets or strategic ones against London and Washington. Putinism, in other words, may survive Putin, and in an even more virulent form.

Western intelligence shows that he himself was ready to escalate to nuclear, but was talked out of it by China, India and Turkey at the Samarkand summit in mid-September. Perhaps forbidden is a more accurate word: Vlad wasn’t the one calling the shots there. The great Asian powers treated him dismissively, not to say contemptuously.

Having said all that, the Ukraine remains heavily, perhaps totally, dependent on Nato support. Ukrainians are capturing a lot of armour from the Russians, a process they jokingly call “the Russian Lend-Lease”. But that’s a drop in the ocean. They need more and better weapons from Nato, along with financial and logistic support.

Referring to Western friends of the Ukraine as Nato implies unanimity among the 30 members of that organisation, a relative parity in the weight they carry. Yet this is far from being the case.

Britain has been the most vociferous and effective supporter of the Ukrainian cause in Europe, but that’s a wobbly frame of reference. For the US has so far contributed twice as much to the Ukraine’s defence as all European countries, including Britain, combined. And some Nato members, notably Hungary, are doing all they can to block supplies to the Ukraine.

This though the combined GDP of the EU plus Britain is slightly greater than America’s. Alas, the same can’t be said for their will to stop the triumph of evil.

The Ukraine’s fate thus depends to a large extent on the vagaries of American politics. In that sense, the mid-term US elections delivered a qualified victory to the Ukraine.

Many isolationist candidates trumpeted by Trump lost winnable seats. That happened largely because Trump had trumpeted them, but also because many of them indulged in rhetoric along the lines of “why should American taxpayers finance that war?”.

Global strategic shifts aside, the short answer to that lapidary question is “because, according to a recent YouGov poll, 81 percent of Americans considered Russia an enemy and 69 per cent support the Ukraine.” Bucking that kind of majority is seldom a promising electoral strategy.

Yet public support is fickle, and there are signs it’s waning. Pari passu, the volume of the shrieks emanating from negotiation-mongers is increasing. Those people coyly pretend not to realise that any negotiation, other than for Russia’s unconditional retreat from all occupied territories and subsequent payment of trillions in reparations, is a non-starter.

God only knows how this will all end, but the last time I talked to Him, He didn’t share that information with me. We know how the First World War ended though: all sides had run out of fight.

Thousands of soldiers wearing different uniforms were sticking their bayonets into the blood-soaked earth of Flanders, saying “No more”. Germany surrendered when her troops were closer to Paris and Petrograd than to Berlin.

Nothing like that will happen to the Ukrainians: their morale is boosted by love of freedom and hatred of Russian invaders. Nor so far are there strong indications that the spirit of pacifism will paralyse Russian troops or dampen the belligerent enthusiasm of Russia’s thoroughly brainwashed population.

However, as Western economies continue to flag, voices shouting “America [Britain, France, Germany etc.] first” will grow louder. But not yet, not today.

Today we celebrate the Ukraine’s victory, repeating Kipling’s iconic slogan “Lest we forget”. That’s what Britons say on Remembrance (formerly Armistice) Day. But the words are just as applicable to the current war.

Lest we forget that the Ukrainians are fighting and dying not only for their own freedom but also for ours. It’s a debt we can repay only with continued and growing support.

P.S. What’s with this ‘Dnipro’ business? When did the Dnieper apply for a name change in Britain?

We should resist the urge to change our language in response to fluid politics in foreign lands — regardless of our support for, in this case, the Ukraine.

Will the Dnieper revert to the English name it has had for centuries should, God forbid, Russia win this war? Will Kyiv? Will Kharkiv? Will the Ukraine and the Crimea regain their traditional definite articles or Odesa its second ‘s’?

I’ll tell you later, after I’ve sailed from Douvres in the general direction of Paree and then Bourgogne. That is, if this time I shan’t end up in Firenze, Roma or, God forbid, Moskva.

Who will police the police? This question is bound to be raised by anyone watching the mayhem created by eco-zealots on our roads.

Mobs can get away with breaking the law as long as they riot in support of an appropriately woke cause. In that case they are called not mobs or rabble, but protesters.

And, if the police are in broad sympathy with the cause, they are more likely to join in than to lash out.

Not only that, but they feel self-righteous about doing that, enough to defy direct orders from their superiors. The other day Home Secretary Suella Braverman found that out.

At issue was the M25, London’s ring road that happens to be Britain’s busiest motorway. It was paralysed for four days by Just Stop Oil fanatics who climb gantries, block the carriageway and in general create perfect conditions for fatal crashes.

Whatever you think of the underlying cause, such actions contravene an unequivocal law. The 1980 Highways Act states: “If a person, without lawful authority or excuse, in any way wilfully obstructs the free passage along a highway he is guilty of an offence.” The punishment is up to a year in prison plus a hefty fine.

Instead of arresting the lawbreakers and clamping them in prison, police officers are displaying the kind of touchy-feely sensitivity that’s normally associated with psychotherapists. They beg the wild-eyed fanatics to get off the road, in some cases offering them a drink and saying: “If any of you have any questions, or need anything, just let us know.”

Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who is my kind of woman, would have none of that. She told the police to “stop humouring” the band of “radicals, road-blockers, vandals, militants and extremists.” (I told you she is my kind of woman.)

Now, since our police are under the aegis of Mrs Braverman’s department, she is their direct superior, institutional and, in this case, otherwise. Yet Chief Constable Noble explained to the jumped-up politician that the police are driven by higher concerns than just law and order:

“There’s a fair challenge about how effectively we are dealing with these particular protests,” he said, “but we operate according to the law, we work within a liberal democracy and the answer to some of the challenges we face is not a policing answer. We’re part of it, but we’re not going to arrest our way out of environmental protest.”

I don’t think it’s part of a cop’s remit to lecture a cabinet minister on the fine points of liberal democracy. Nor especially to use his interpretation of it as an excuse not to do his job, which is to maintain civic order by stopping lawbreakers in their tracks.

Chief Constable Noble is evidently a man whose conscience is informed by political philosophy. However, engaging him on his preferred ground, someone should explain to him that, though Britain may indeed be a liberal democracy, neither the adjective nor the noun is the defining characteristic of our polity.

It’s the rule of law, not liberalism or democracy, that makes Britain British, which is to say civilised. At different times the country may be more or less liberal or democratic. But Britain will remain civilised for as long as it’s ruled by just law and not by individual preferences of variously placed individuals, including high-ranking policemen.

Our law provides ample legal mechanisms to express grievances and launch protests against whatever it is that any group, or indeed any person, finds disagreeable. But ‘legal’ is the operative word.

Anyone who expresses grievances illegally isn’t a protester. He is a criminal, the kind of wrongdoer that law enforcement is there to protect us from. When facing illegal activities, police are expected to stop them by whatever means available – not to ask criminals solicitously whether they’d like some refreshments.

It was even worse during the BLM riots, when, instead of ploughing in with their truncheons, cops were seen taking the knee. At least, this time around cops don’t unfurl Just Stop Oil flags, nor join the criminals on the M25 gantries.

I suppose it would be unrealistic to expect police officers to be immune to the same total, not to say totalitarian, propaganda that’s poisoning impressionable minds all over the country. The media assist that noble effort under cover of the same liberal democracy.

Cretinous youngsters are given every platform they desire to spread their bilge ad urbi et orbi – that’s freedom of expression for you. They then froth at the mouth and scream at TV presenters.

That’s what happened yesterday to Sky News host Mark Austin. He invited one of those eco-zealots on his show and listened sympathetically as she signalled her virtue by spouting typically inane platitudes. It’s only when she screamed “Do you love your children more than you love fossil fuels?” that he objected: “Stop shouting at me!”

In other words, had she delivered the same gibberish sotto voce, it would have been perfectly acceptable, in a liberal democratic sort of way.

Don’t get me wrong: the rot hasn’t penetrated just the police. The whole justice system is creaking at the seams.

Under duress and after much grumbling the police have made some arrests, about 700 of them all over the country. Considering the scale of the disturbances, that figure is risible. But, even worse, only 15 fanatics have been charged. Our liberal democracy says that the remaining 685 have no case to answer.

Mrs Braverman, even though she is my kind of woman, can’t restore order on our roads all by herself. I can’t quite see her climbing those gantries to drag a pimply youth down. But neither can she or any other home secretary do anything else if the police defy their orders.

The Home Office can’t sack the whole police force, much as Mrs Braverman may feel tempted. Perhaps she should start by sacking Mr Noble and other police officers guilty of open insubordination.

Yet, satisfying though such an action could be, it won’t solve the wider problem: identity and cause politics shoving the rule of law aside. Perhaps we should all remind ourselves that, if Britain isn’t ruled by law, she can only be ruled by hatred, resentments and appetites.

The result would be what Thomas Hobbes called bellum omnium contra omnes, the war of all against all.