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President Trump described his long phone chat with Putin as “very good and productive”. ‘Good’ is a matter of taste, but ‘productive’ means something specific: delivering a tangible result.

True enough, the 2.5 hours the two men spent on the phone did produce a positive outcome. They agreed to hold an ice hockey match involving American and Russian players plying their trade in the NHL and KHL.

Now I’ve heard of jolly hockey sticks, but this is ridiculous. What the puck?

First, even mentioning such trivia is beyond crass when at stake is the future of a nation (the Ukraine) or even a continent (Europe). Second, neither league had been asked if the idea appealed to them.

The KHL is run by Russia, so its agreement can be taken for granted. But the NHL is an independent organisation, not a poodle at Trump’s beck and call. Should its bosses say no, I’d be curious to see how Trump can manage to twist their arm.

Sorry to take up your time with such nonsense. I doubt you have much interest in ice hockey, and I know for certain I don’t. I am, however, keenly interested in translation, especially the kind that involves my two main languages.

The press offices of both presidents have issued statements summing up the exchange. The Russian version is three times as long, and Putin is the subject of almost every sentence, as in “President Putin expressed…”, “President Putin agreed…” or “President Putin declared…”

By contrast, the White House press release prefers going plural: “Both leaders agreed…”, “The leaders spoke…”. “They further discussed…” and so on.

This conveys the impression of two minds in perfect accord, two hearts beating as one. So they must have been, on a subliminal level. Yet such imponderables are beyond me and I’d guess you as well. So let’s concentrate on the substance of what came out, shall we?

The next day The Times ran a headline to the effect that a ceasefire had been agreed. That’s the kind of waste that’s made by haste. Had the editors taken a minute to read the two statements, they would have known that no such agreement had taken place. What did then?

Here I invite you to compare two statements on the only concrete understanding reached. Both refer to exactly the same thing, with the first one coming from the White House and the second from the Kremlin, in my word-for-word translation.

Statement One: “The leaders agreed that the movement to peace will begin with an energy and infrastructure ceasefire…”

Statement Two: “During the talk Donald Trump put forth a proposal on the mutual agreement between the two sides to cease… strikes on energy infrastructure targets… Vladimir Putin responded to that initiative positively and immediately issued an appropriate order.”

If you compare the two highlighted phrases, they differ in only one tiny word, the conjunction ‘and’. Yet that’s a world of difference.

The American version talks about a ceasefire covering all infrastructure targets, including the energy ones. The Russian version talks about energy targets only.

Granted, this is just useless pedantry because the Russians weren’t going to abide by any such agreement. And, if Putin indeed “issued an appropriate order”, it wasn’t obeyed.

The very next day, Russian missiles hit civilian targets, killing several people and destroying a hospital at Sumy. Come to think of it, they were following the letter of the agreement, as they interpreted it. A hospital may be part of infrastructure, but not of energy infrastructure. For want of a conjunction a hospital was lost.

The Ukrainians’ response showed they knew exactly what that statement was worth, with or without the conjunction. They immediately struck at a Russian oil refinery and set it alight.

The German defence minister Boris Pistorius sarcastically pointed out that attacks had “not eased at all in the first night after this supposedly ground-breaking, great phone call”. After that the Bundestag commendably voted for a massive rearmament programme, something I’ll believe when I see it.

The Kremlin press release also mentioned Putin’s conditions for a full ceasefire, something that the American version tactfully omitted.

First, opting for the passive voice the Russian version said: “Also pointed out [by whom?] were the serious risks springing from the untrustworthiness of the Kiev regime that had sabotaged and broken numerous prior agreements. Attention was also drawn [by whom?] to the barbaric crimes of a terrorist nature committed by Ukrainian militants against the civilian population of the Kursk region.”

It’s beyond my modest talents to comment on the cynicism of this remark, coming as it is from a country that has broken every treaty she has ever signed, and one whose troops have cut a murdering, looting, torturing and raping swath through the Ukraine. And if Ukrainian soldiers are ‘terrorists’ and ‘militants’, what are the Russian troops? Peacemakers?

So let’s just continue to read those passive-voiced remarks: “It has been stressed [by whom?] that the key condition for preventing the escalation of the conflict and working towards its politico-diplomatic resolution must be a total cessation in the flow of foreign military aid and intelligence data to Kiev… [and also of] Ukrainian rearmament and press-ganging…”.

This long sentence can be summed up with a single word: capitulation. That’s exactly what a 30-day ceasefire would amount to if only Russia were allowed to use it for rearming and remobilising, while the Ukraine patiently waited for a new assault on her sovereignty.

In general, the effusive Russian soul was more generous with information than the taciturn Yankee character. Thus, “The President of Russia also reacted positively to Donald Trump’s proposal on implementing the initiative concerning the safety of navigation in the Black Sea.”

That’s big of Putin. You see, his Black Sea Fleet is bottled up in the Novorossiysk harbour. Whenever a ship ventures out, she is immediately sunk by a Ukrainian drone boat. What the Kremlin thus means is that Trump’s “initiative” would provide safety specifically for Russian navigation. That’s another key word omitted, and I hope Putin thanked Trump for that idea.

You’ll notice that I often focus your attention on translation issues. This is valid because the two chaps don’t speak each other’s languages and hence have to rely on interpreters.

As the Russian journalist Babchenko pointed out the other day, Trump’s interpreters often fail to convey certain intonational nuances. Whether they do so deliberately or because their understanding of Russian isn’t good enough is immaterial. The important thing is that Putin’s habitual sarcasm towards Trump doesn’t come across.

For example, at the 2019 G-20 summit at Osaka, Putin bragged about his hypersonic missiles. Trump replied: “Oh I’d love to get those”. Putin commented with a sly smile: “Yes, they’ll be coming your way for sure.” That came across as a promise to share military technology.

Then the conversation veered towards the Middle East. True to character, Trump boasted, “No one has done more for Israel than I,” and then proceeded to list his accomplishments. Putin listened and then remarked with the sarcasm that would have been caught by any native speaker of Russian: “Well done, Donald. Perhaps the Israelis should rename their country after you?”

Yet the interpreter conveyed the text but not the mocking subtext. Hence Trump replied in all seriousness: “No, that would be too much”. One could sense though that the idea appealed to him.

One other thing is worth mentioning. Committing the NHL to hockey diplomacy without prior consultation is tactless but not scandalous. Deciding the fate of the Ukraine in particular and Europe in general without either party participating in the discussions is both – and quite a few other things besides.

I wish the West were represented in such negotiations more comprehensively and by someone with a less rebarbative personality than Trump’s. But my wishes are as likely to be considered as my interpreting services.

This sounds like a truism not worth mentioning. But of course things like, say, family, health, inner peace, perhaps even a search for truth are more important than money.

And even the crassest of materialists may hold something so dear that he’d put it before riches. Yet for some institutions money is their raison d’être, and they don’t even bother to pretend otherwise.

You don’t expect, for example, a local branch of your bank to exhibit the slogan “Neither a lender nor a borrower be”. But then Polonius offered that advice to Laertes, not Shylock. And St Paul’s statement that “the love of money is the root of all evil” isn’t likely to be inscribed on NatWest’s mission statement either.

Advertising is another institution solely dedicated to commercial gain. When I ran creative departments at various agencies, I kept telling my younger charges that we weren’t paid to keep the sales message secret.

If you do nothing else, I’d say, just state the reason to buy your product. If you can do so in a catchy and interesting way, so much the better. But don’t sacrifice the selling proposition for the sake of being cute.

Had I quoted St Paul’s comment to my unhappy clients, they wouldn’t have remained my clients. Their own jobs hinged on profits, and hence so did mine.

However, like every advertising creative in history, I hated research. I kept telling my clients that after decades in the business I didn’t need a focus group of old women to tell me if my ads were any good. That was an argument I never once managed to win.

Clients wanted to cover the lower part of their anatomy with more than just trousers. If a campaign researched well but then bombed, they had a ready excuse. There would have been none had they trusted my instincts and they proved unreliable.

So they pumped untold millions into first researching their choice of target audience, then the message the audience would find persuasive, then the best ways of communicating that message.

Each stage cost more money than they had left in the budget actually to produce the campaign, but they didn’t mind. When I screamed that advertising wasn’t an exact science, they’d reply that it bloody well should be – and would be on their watch.

Choosing the right target audience was vital of course. If you advertise, say, Big Macs to an A+ group, you might as well pile up a few million quid and have yourself a nice bonfire. Conversely, trying to sell £100,000 cars in the commercial breaks during a darts competition would be tantamount to tossing money into the bin.

Hence, if an ad was to show ecstatic customers whose lives acquired a whole new meaning due to their choice of toothpaste, one could be sure that the demographic breakdown of the models reflected hundreds of thousands spent on research. Race was one characteristic investigated to death.

If research showed that 75 per cent of the target audience were, say, white B+ and the rest black or Indian, then three out of the four happy faces shown were unmistakably Anglo. Yet it wasn’t always straightforward.

Back in New York I once worked on a hygienic product whose buyers were predominantly black women. Yet research showed that a white model would work better because the target audience would see that choice as aspirational. In the end, we backlit the model so severely that her race was indeterminate.

That, however, was an exception. Typically, I was able to cast a quick look at a TV commercial and give you the exact demographic breakdown of the target audience, as determined by marketing research.

Notice that I used the past tense: I can no longer boast that ability. Advertisers don’t seem to base their choice of target audience on strictly commercial or otherwise rational factors. They’ve abandoned their crass materialism, at least when it comes to advertising.

That’s why about 60 per cent of the models shown in TV commercial and print ads are black – irrespective of the advertised brand. Now, blacks make up 3.7 per cent of the UK population, and I for one find it hard to believe that their purchasing power is so Herculean that they make up 60 per cent of every market.

They don’t. Therefore advertisers forgo vulgar commercial concerns for the sake of higher, which is to say woke, values. After all, I can’t imagine that white audiences find black models aspirational, and racism has nothing to do with that. It’s just that by and large blacks tend to belong to an economically lower demographic group.

The upshot of this is that these days woke ideology trumps even filthy lucre: St Paul’s first reaction would be to rejoice. However, his jubilation would quickly give way to gloom when he realised how low mankind has sunk.

P.S. Celia Walden, poor Piers Morgan’s wife, has written a perceptive article on woke ideology applied retrospectively to giants of the past, including the man who put those wise words into Polonius’s mouth.

Yet she undid all her good work by using the word, or rather non-word, ‘flammable’. This locution doesn’t exist in literate speech. The correct word is ‘inflammable’, based on the verb ‘to inflame’, not on the noun ‘flame’.

That non-word, along with many others, originated in the US decades ago, when it was deemed that the largely illiterate population would mistake the ‘in’ in ‘inflammable’ for a negative prefix and decide that no danger of conflagration existed. Then someone would strike a match next to a barrel of petrol and – kaboom!

Instead of improving the level of English teaching at schools, the powers that be decided instead to mangle the language yet again. And, while good American traits find few takers in Britain, American perversions are gobbled up with alacrity, especially by our own illiterate population.

Yet one would still expect that a graduate of Westminster School and Cambridge writing for the upmarket Daily Telegraph, not a vox populi rag like The Sun, wouldn’t stoop to prole usage. Wrong expectation, wrong time.

Back in my advertising days I tried to fight a rearguard action for good usage, usually losing the argument to either my colleagues or clients. And don’t get me going on the pronunciation of ‘lived’, as in ‘short-lived’. This word derives not from the verb ‘to live’ but from the noun ‘life’. Thus it should rhyme with ‘jived’, but this is another argument I’ve never won.

Back in the 1850s Lord Kelvin took a look at the Second Law of Thermodynamics and decided that the universe was heading for energy death (otherwise known as the Big Freeze).

In terms so simple that they take me out of my depth, he hypothesised that sooner or later the universe would reach thermodynamic equilibrium, when there wouldn’t be enough free energy left to sustain entropy. The universe would then turn into one giant icicle, and everyone and everything in it would die.

That’s a harrowing prospect if I’ve ever heard one, even though I don’t know enough physics to judge how likely such a calamity is. In any case, even if the universe does freeze over, it’s not going to happen soon. Even physicists who accept this theory talk in terms of millions or even billions of years in the future, which is too long for us to worry about.

A less cataclysmic and much more immediate death by hypothermia is likely to occur in Britain long before then, and it will be self-inflicted. Next time you see a photograph of Ed Miliband, keep this in mind: he is trying to kill you after first making you destitute.

The suicidal net zero policy – and if there’s one thing I like about Trump, it’s that he has no truck with that madness – must have acquired its name because it’s based on net zero data, net zero intellect and net zero morality. All those good things have been overridden by one bad perversion: ideology.

That’s why Miliband bears the oxymoronic title of Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, which is like having a Department for Public Safety and Mass Murder. Commitment to the ideology of net zero is idiotic intellectually, ruinous economically and potentially disastrous civilisationally.

Starting on Monday, Miliband’s energy stormtroopers will start filling the few remaining shale gas wells with cement. The intention is to eliminate fracking in perpetuity, while also phasing out gas production in the North Sea.

However, even covering every square inch of our green and pleasant land with solar panels and wind turbines won’t eliminate the vital role gas plays in the energy mix. And if we don’t produce our own, we have to buy it elsewhere, mostly from Norway.

Since Norway happily continues to drill in the North Sea, the task of saving ‘our planet’ doesn’t advance at all: ‘our planet’ doesn’t care whether it’s Norway or Britain that’s trying to kill it with carbon emissions. Our economy, however, does.

Britain’s energy costs are already the highest among developed countries, and the reason is the foolish consistency that Ralph Waldo Emerson described as “the hobgoblin of little minds”. Ed Miliband and other milibandits in our government consistently try to starve our economy of domestically produced energy.

We currently spend more on importing energy every year than we do on either education or defence. Domestic energy production has decreased by 65 per cent between 2000 and 2023, and by the 2030s we’ll be importing 80 per cent of our energy.

The milibandits cite phony science in support of their socialist, West-hating ideology. However, when it comes to nuclear power, even such bogus data are missing: it remains the cleanest source of energy, and one relying on practically infinite resources of raw materials.

But never mind the data, feel the ideology. Hence HMG is busily decommissioning nuclear power stations just for the hell of it. Dungeness B, Hunterston B and Hinkley Point B are scheduled to stop generation by 2026, Hartlepool and Heysham 1 by 2028, Heysham 2 and Torness soon thereafter.

We are already importing two thirds of our natural gas in liquefied form, and its production, liquefying and transportation make ‘our planet’ less rather than more green. Optimistic commentators believe that sooner or later the milibandits will have to come to their senses and abandon this suicide attempt by net zero.

Alas, I think it’s more likely that the impending catastrophe (and the already exorbitant cost of heating our homes) will make them look for some sort of accommodation with Putin. Much of Europe’s gas still comes from Russia, and you didn’t really think her KGB government would be unable to bypass sanctions, did you?

Nevertheless the cost of natural gas will rise by a third this year, and all of Europe including Britain will bear the brunt of that. This, while sloshing underneath our green and pleasant land is enough shale gas to keep all of the UK and Europe warm for decades.

Yet European governments, including ours, prefer to talk tough about fascist Russia, while rapidly slipping again into her energy vassalage. Now, if we can’t get rid of Starmer and other milibandits, there’s only one solution that comes to mind.

They should be made to take a fortnight off their duties, which by itself would have a healing effect on society and its economy. During that enforced break, they must be made to study every sentence in Ian Plimer’s book Heaven and Earth, the most comprehensive debunking of the bogus science involved in the climate swindle.

If they still emerge at the other end prepared to destroy our lives in the name of wicked ideology, there is nothing else we can do. Barring, of course, the kind of things a civilised man should never countenance.

So spoke Dickens’s Mr Bumble, and he had a point, up to a point.

At the height of the Industrial Revolution, Victorian London was overrun with slums. Crawling out of them were thieving guttersnipes run by crime lords like Fagin and murderous thugs like Bill Sykes.

Poverty and squalor were so widespread that workhouses proliferated, with street crime providing the only alternative for orphaned urchins. A bleak picture any way you look at it, and Dickens painted it poignantly with his masterly pen.

Crime was rife, and in 1874 alone there were over 10,000 indictable offences committed in London. Are you shuddering with revulsion? I certainly am… but hold on a moment.

Fast-track 150 years, and last year Londoners found themselves on the receiving end of 270,000 violent crimes. Not all indictable offences, let me point out, just the violent ones.

Add to this non-violent crimes, such as theft, burglary, financial offences. While you are at it, add also crimes that were indictable in Victorian London but aren’t really any longer, such as shoplifting, and you’ll realise that crime has gone up by two orders of magnitude, while the population has grown by only one.

That means, and sorry about such obvious calculations, that the per capita crime rate in London is now 10 times higher than it was at the time of Fagins, Sykeses, Artful Dodgers and workhouses.

And there I was, thinking that crime is caused by poverty. I don’t want to bore you with more statistics, but take my word for it: London is much more prosperous now than it was then, and prosperity is spread much wider.

Discounting the subversive thought that it’s not poverty but wealth that causes crime, we have to toss Marxist tomes into the bin and look for explanations elsewhere. And that’s explanations, plural, because it would be too simplistic to ascribe such a huge disparity to any one cause.

Doing so may brand one as what the Swiss thinker Jacob Burckhardt (d. 1897) called a “terrible simplifier”, and I don’t wish to add my name to the already extensive list of such intellectual charlatans. That’s why I’ll single out one cause not because I think there are no others, but because it’s perhaps the most telling and overarching of all.

Jurists used to distinguish between malum in se and malum prohibitum. The former reflects an immutable injunction against attacks on life, liberty and property going back to Biblical commandments. The latter encompasses transgressions like swearing in public or not wearing a seat belt, and the two types exist in a morally hierarchical relationship.

For example, stealing a car is a worse crime than parking it on a double yellow line, and beating one’s wife is more reprehensible than making love to her without permission. But no malum is really in se; evil and good are meaningless in the absence of a detached moral arbiter whose rulings can sometimes be interpreted but never questioned.

Take that arbiter away, and we’ve erased the absolute line of demarcation, making moral distinctions relative, which is to say inoperative. Indeed, we find ourselves beyond good and evil, in a space where things are distorted to a point at which malum prohibitum can be punished more surely and often more severely than malum in se. 

When God died, and I didn’t mean to wax Nietzschean, law in the West suffered the fate of a clock smashed to pieces: all the bits are still there, but they don’t add up to much any longer. Gone is the fundamental premise of Western legality: the primacy of the individual derived from the ultimate primacy of God.

When there is no God, the secular state will enforce its own primacy, and the law will sooner or later become its pliant servant, rather than a martinet called upon to restrain its excesses. Without God, laws can fall prey either to evil design or to ill-conceived political expediency. Which is another way of saying that, without God, law is tyranny.

Western laws used to be obeyed because they were a reflection of higher laws, their secular expression. Western jurisprudence was put together by sage men over many generations, and its ability to protect both society and the individual was tested over time.

Whenever a law couldn’t pass such tests, the ruler and the ruled alike knew it was enforceable only by arbitrary force. When such a realisation sank in, the transgressor was in trouble sooner or later, and even Charles I couldn’t save Strafford.

Modern laws, by contrast, are tyrannical because our political state has usurped the power to decide which of the ancient laws should and which shouldn’t be enforced. The law has thus stopped being a complex bilateral agreement between the people and the state, becoming instead something the state can grant or withdraw at its discretion.

Most links between generations past and present have been severed, and the law no longer has the authority of millennia behind it. Intuitively aware of this, people treat laws as mere statements of intent, and break them without much fuss about morality. There is no morality in law any longer, only expediency as defined by the state.

The letter of the law hasn’t changed much but the spirit has largely evaporated. In its absence, the letter is but a collection of hieroglyphics.

By exempting themselves from obeying the spirit of the law, modern political states find it increasingly more difficult to make their subjects obey even the letter. Crime statistics in just about every major modern country bear this out, with a traditionally law-abiding Britain having overtaken even the United States in most crime categories. Britons no longer venerate laws because they know the state doesn’t.

Law enforcement becomes difficult in the absence of an absolute criterion with which to distinguish between malum prohibitum and malum in se. Without this distinction law becomes amoral and runs the risk of becoming arbitrary.

More important, when God’s law is no longer recognised as an authority superior to man’s regulations, the law loses its link with human nature, becoming instead an instrument of coercion. As a result, people treat it with fear but without respect, and fear alone isn’t a sufficient deterrent. That’s why a high crime rate is an automatic levy modernity imposes, and the more modern the society, the higher the crime rate.

This is the overarching cause of the huge disparity that caught my eye. But, as I mentioned earlier, it’s not the only one.

For example, Victorian London was ethnically and culturally homogeneous, while today’s London has relegated the same group to a minority status. Much as it pains me to admit this, diversity and crime rate exist in a symbiotic and directly proportionate relationship.

Another factor is illegitimate births, which term has itself become illegitimate. Yet whatever the terminology, if only between four and five per cent of all children were born out of wedlock in Victorian London, today that’s way over half – the same 10-fold difference as in the crime rates. That’s the kind of correlation that betokens causation.

Yet the cause I singled out, the disintegration of traditional order, is indeed overarching. All the others can be traced back to it without much difficulty. But do let’s leave that for another time, shall we?

Yesterday, Aston Villa (a Birmingham football club, for the outlanders among you) made it to the quarters of the Champions League, much to the delight of the Brummie fans in the stadium.

Yet at least one wildly cheering fan wasn’t a Brummie at all. He was our heir to the throne, His Royal Highness William, the Prince of Wales.

HRH was screaming, jumping up and down, embracing everyone around him and giving every impression of a man on his way to at least a dozen celebratory pints. I don’t know whether HRH was prepared to uphold the fine tradition of such triumphs by punching anyone less enthusiastic. If he was, I’m sure his bodyguards would have stepped in.

Since I like football as much as the next man, I can’t possibly think there is anything wrong with such an innocent hobby. Neither is there anything wrong with supporting a particular team: this adds frisson to watching a match, sort of like making a side bet without putting money down.

Problems start when such support becomes an obsession, when fans begin to identify themselves with – and by – their team. An alarm bell should sound each time a fan begins to refer to his favourite club as ‘we’ in the spirit of unabashed tribalism.

This, at least to me, compromises our humanity, based as it has been on individual choice ever since that episode in the Garden of Eden. And tautologically speaking, individual choices are made by individuals, not baying herds on their way to those 12 pints.

Man is an individual, but fair enough: he isn’t just an individual. We all, unless we are sociopaths, identify with some corporate entities, from our family all the way up to the nation and a few in between. Catholics refer to such duality as subsidiarity and solidarity, but any terms would do.

However, focusing one’s solidarity on a football club is a sign of a small mind incapable of making distinctions between trivial and important, high and low, transient and transcendent. I’d venture a wild guess that no one who refers to a team as ‘we’ has ever had tears in his eyes listening to Bach’s fugues, reading Shakespeare’s sonnets or looking at Sienese paintings (currently exhibited at the National Gallery, by the way).

Such forfeiture of any spiritual heights to which only man can ascend is unfortunate, but not tragic. Not everyone is endowed with the requisite ability, and those who aren’t shouldn’t be despised for their display of primitive tribalism at football terraces.

We are all God’s children, and he made us all different. Yes, if grownups choose to act in a simian manner every time a tattooed chap kicks a football into the net, they represent a lower order of humanity. But logic suggests that, if the lower orders didn’t exist, neither would the higher ones. We are all, including football fans or for that matter players, arranged in a vertical hierarchy, and thank goodness for that.

Yet hierarchies aren’t just spiritual, intellectual or cultural. They are also social, and Prince William sits at the apex of one. One day he will reign, meaning HRH will act as the embodiment of our ancient constitution and its link with God.

This isn’t a metaphysical statement but a factual one. Unlike their European counterparts, British monarchs are crowned and anointed, as the world was reminded of during last year’s coronation of Prince William’s father.

Judging by his pronouncements when he was the Prince of Wales, King Charles’s personal instincts were quite ecumenical, not to say secular. Yet he put them on hold to accept the pomp and circumstance of a lavish Christian ceremony because he understood something I’m not sure his son does.

Pomp and circumstance, along with some air of mystical exclusivity, are essential to the survival of the monarchy. People don’t want their kings to act like regular blokes next door any more than they want regular blokes next door to act like kings.

Our princes are driven around London in state cars, Bentleys and Rolls Royce bearing the royal escutcheon. They don’t cycle through the streets in the manner of their Dutch counterparts.

Their traditional sports are shooting, hunting, polo and other equestrian competitions, rugby when in school. Not darts, bowling or, for that matter, football. There is nothing wrong with such sports for the rest of us. But our princes must cultivate, and be seen to cultivate, princely habits – or they may not remain princes for much longer.

I’m not privy to the inner workings of the royal family, but I suspect that heirs to the throne don’t just act as they please – that prerogative belongs to their lesser relations, within ever-expanding limits. Hence there must be people, King Charles certainly one of them, gently guiding William to the kind of conduct that’s likely to perpetuate the well-being of the monarchy.

An heir to the throne must walk the royal walk and talk the royal talk because, if he doesn’t, the republican hand will be strengthened. Yet William’s walk takes him towards Villa Park, and he certainly doesn’t talk like our future king. Whoever is advising him to take his image down a few pegs is, I think, making a strategic mistake.

Things HRH says certainly don’t betoken aristocratic sensibilities. Why, for example, does he support Aston Villa, if he has to support any team? Usually, such affections are based on geography, yet William has no obvious links to Birmingham.

He was born in London, educated at Eton, which is in Berkshire, then at St Andrews University, which is in Scotland, he served as helicopter pilot mostly in Wales and has lived in London or Windsor ever since. Where does Aston Villa come in?

Apparently, this obsession started at Eton, where most of his classmates supported Chelsea or Manchester United. Yet William wanted to stand out: “I wanted to have a team that was more mid-table that could give me more emotional rollercoaster moments.”

There was another option: just enjoying the game without going out of his way to be a fan. But that would have meant missing on something important to him: “It was fantastic, I sat with all the fans with my red beanie on, and I was sat with all the Brummie fans and had a great time. It was the atmosphere, the camaraderie and I really felt that there was something I could connect with.”

Note the prole diction “I was sat”. I find it hard to imagine William’s grandmother saying, “One was sat with one’s husband at supper last night.” His father, aunt and uncle are also more likely to sit than to be sat. Nor does one expect to see them wearing beanie hats with football insignia.

Things do change, and Whig historians will even insist they always change for the better. Be that as it may, so much more important it is that some things remain constant, acting as adhesives binding our past, present and future together.

Only the monarchy and the church can perform this function in Britain, two isles of stability in the maelstrom of turbulent life around them. These institutions can’t escape some change either, but when they try to march in step with modernity, they betray their mission and jeopardise their survival.

Perhaps William ought to ponder this next time he feels like putting on a red beanie hat and a Villa scarf. Then maybe he won’t put them on, much to my delight.

It’s better to be right inadvertently than wrong deliberately. While escalating his trade war against Canada (and the rest of the world), Trump stumbled on an incontrovertible truth.

“The only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State,” he wrote. “This would make all Tariffs, and everything else, totally disappear.”

Trump loves his capitals so much, he must know what the capital of Canada is, educated fellow that he is. It’s Ottawa, but what would happen if that status were transferred to Washington DC?

Trump put his finger right on it: everything would “totally disappear”. Canada’s sovereignty. Her position in the Commonwealth and NATO. Her national pride. Above all, whatever residual affection Canadians have for America.

Since neither the Canadian nation nor its government shows the slightest inclination to be incorporated into the US, the only way to achieve that result would be by military invasion. Is that what Trump has in mind? He has pointedly declined to rule out a military solution.

For the time being, Trump has hit Canada with additional tariffs and again regaled us with his elegant prose: “Based on Ontario, Canada, placing a 25% Tariff on ‘Electricity’ coming into the United States, I have instructed my Secretary of Commerce to add an additional 25% Tariff, to 50%, on all steel and aluminum coming into the United States from Canada, one of the highest tariffing nations anywhere in the world. I will shortly be declaring a National Emergency on Electricity within the threatened area.”

Quotes around ‘Electricity’ suggest that there is in fact nothing electrical about it, while capitalising Tariffs confers on them a sort of divine status. I feel strongly that any candidate for public office must pass an English test, command of language being a reliable indicator of intellect. As for a National Emergency, Trump is it.

Swinging like a yo-yo between imposing madcap tariffs and removing them, Trump has injected uncertainty and panic into the markets. Alas, he is finding them harder to bully than even Zelensky.

Markets react to personalities but they have none of their own. They respond in a dispassionate manner typical of computers. When they detect instability, their inner switch is flicked, they go down, and you can’t even send the boys over to make them toe the line.

Thus the stock market has dropped over 500 points, and there is (possibly premature) talk of recession. Especially worrying is the plight of the Nasdaq, a tech-focused index. It fell an impressive four per cent in one day, the first such drop since Covid.

Markets all over the world followed the US on its way down. They plunged in Europe, Asia and Britain, wiping trillions off the world’s wealth. China, Canada and the EU have retaliated with tit-for-tat tariffs, which among other things creates strong inflationary pressures.

Wall Street analysts are predicting that the US inflation rate may soon climb to as high as eight percent, followed by a similar rise in unemployment, with economic growth going in the opposite direction. Four out of five experts have a grim view of America’s economic prospects under Trump.

The latter relies on that time-honoured trick, blaming the previous administration. As Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, explained: “We are in a period of economic transition … from the mess created under Joe Biden”.

The first part of the statement is irrefutable: economic transition is indeed well under way. From what to what, however, is open to debate.

Yet the second part of Leavitt’s explanation is simply wrong, but then we don’t expect any members of the Trump administration to be responsible for what they say. “Like priest, like parish,” as the Russians put it.

Biden’s administration was indeed abysmally, some will say criminally, poor, but its economic performance was surprisingly not so bad. At almost three per cent, last year’s GDP growth in America was by far the greatest in the G7 group. Inflation stood at three per cent, and unemployment at four. The subsequent – and forthcoming – debacle in all these indicators is Trump’s doing and no one else’s.

The US president has been called all sorts of things over the past few weeks: “unprincipled charlatan”, “Putin’s agent”, “gangster”, “bully”, with many of these epithets accompanied by unflattering and variously unprintable modifiers. I’m sure he is all those things, although I think he is Putin’s agent only de facto, not de jure.

Yet none of those pejorative terms explains Trump’s concerted effort to destroy the US economy. I’m sure he’ll fail in this undertaking because America has many underlying economic strengths that can prop her up at a time of crisis. However, there is little doubt that a crisis is exactly what Trump is brewing.

Moreover, anyone with a modicum of economic education could have predicted the chaos into which Trump’s policies would plunge the economy. Incidentally, Trump’s fanatics point to his wealth as proof of his profound understanding of economics.

That’s a category error. A midwife doesn’t have to understand the origin of life. A car mechanic may not necessarily be well-versed in the nuances of thermodynamics. A cleaning lady doesn’t necessarily know the chemical composition of detergents. And a property developer, especially in Atlantic City, needs a grasp of economics much less than he needs the kind of interpersonal skills immortalised in The Godfather.

I’m a rank amateur in economics and investment, but I’ve read serious books by the yard. Yet even one inch, the thickness of Smith’s Wealth of Nations, would have sufficed to know that a trade war never claims any winners. Everyone loses, especially the aggressor.

Unlike me, Warren Buffett isn’t just a professional but one of the best in the business. Correctly anticipating that Trump’s ignorant bungling would crash the shares market, Buffett has quietly but resolutely moved much of his wealth into cash.

In the process, he presciently got rid of such blue chip assets as shares in Apple, Bank of America and Citigroup. And sure enough, the stock market plunged, with the only silver lining provided by a 44 per cent drop in the value of Tesla owned by hideous Musk.

(While Trump commendably attacks climate-change madness, his right hand has a vested interest in people driving not cars but electric appliances. I smell a contradiction.)

Trump’s pronouncements on economics show a primitive mind untouched by any educational, intellectual, cultural or civilising influences. However, he does vindicate Ralph Waldo Emerson’s aphorism, “A foolish consistence is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

For Trump is nothing if not consistent. The ignorant idea that all the world’s economies conspire to “screw” America has been cherished by him for decades. Thus in 1987, following his first visit to Russia, Trump began to toy with the idea of running for president.

To dip his toe into water, Trump took out full-page ads in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. Written as an open letter to the American people, the ads criticised the Reagan administration for wasting money to protect allies who “can afford to defend themselves”.

“There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure,” wrote Trump, implicitly accusing Ronald Reagan of lacking such spinal strength. Putting aside Reagan’s unwavering steadfastness that led to the collapse of what he correctly called the “evil empire” (you know, the one Trump is desperately trying to bring back to life), that view is economically illiterate.

No sensible person will argue against European countries arming themselves sufficiently to repel any aggression. It’s foolhardy to rely too much on the US, which Trump proves by leaving Europe to its own vices and devices. However, contrary to what he claims with his cracker-barrel public appeal, America’s investment in NATO isn’t a net loss — quite the opposite.

Her post-war position as the leader of the free world has entrenched the dollar (now being weakened by Trump’s policies) as the world’s reserve currency. This has allowed the US to run up a 34-trillion debt, which is after all denominated in the currency controlled by the Federal Reserve.

In plain terms, this has enabled America to consume much more than she produces. Hence it would be just as accurate (or rather just as inaccurate) to say that America is “screwing” the rest of the world, not the other way around.

All this is the economic primer, and it’s worrying to see the world’s greatest economy falling into the hands of an ignoramus who apparently hasn’t read even that book. Five gets you ten Trump played truant throughout his time at Wharton.

Some stained glass windows are beautiful, but others are offensive. One example of the latter is, or rather was, a window at St Mary Redcliff church in Bristol.

It depicted Edward Colston (d. 1721), a sea merchant and philanthropist who endowed numerous schools and other institutions. He was also a Tory MP, which was offensive enough by itself because, as we know, only the Labour, LibDem and Green parties confer moral rectitude on their members. You might say that those parties didn’t exist at the time Colston lived, but that’s a lame excuse. He should have anticipated modern politics centuries in advance.

More damning, he didn’t anticipate modern sensibilities either. That’s why Colston not only endowed schools but also engaged in a spot of slave trade, which outweighed all his philanthropy in the eyes of that church. Hence the window showing his likeness had to be removed, that went without saying.

But since leaving a blank windowpane would have been unsightly, it had to be replaced with an image more consonant with today’s morality. As a result, the window now shows the Holy Family in an inflatable boat carrying illegal migrants, contextually Muslim, across the Channel.

Yes, everyone knows that, like the Labour, LibDem and Green parties, Islam didn’t exist at the time (neither did inflatable boats, come to think of it). But since Jesus is part of the divine Trinity, he is outside time. Thus any chronological argument against him being, say, a Labour MP for Galilee South or, for that matter, an illegal Muslim migrant is irrelevant. Jesus belongs in that illegal boat metaphysically, as the term is misunderstood at that church.

If you think this is insane, brace yourself. For anything Somerset can do, Norfolk can do worse.

The Norfolk diocese ordered its parishes to strengthen their commitment to DEI and kindly issued an “anti-racist” toolkit to help vicars and lay communicants to steer clear of “Eurocentrist” prayers.

The toolkit states that clergy should “ensure that intercessions are aligned with the concerns of the congregation and are not entirely Eurocentric”. Now, Norfolk is a largely rural county whose population is 95 per cent ‘Eurocentric’, which here means white.

As for the concerns of Norfolk’s Anglicans, one assumes they are basically Christian. That is, they must be “aligned” with pleas for individual salvation, repentance for sins and intercessions on behalf of those in need of God’s help. If some parishioners cast their intercessory net wider, they may also ask God for less parochial assistance, but I doubt they highlight the race of those who deserve it.     

That, according to the guidance, isn’t good enough. Priests should lead and encourage prayers to “include different languages and topics”. One such prayer would ask God to “open our hearts, that we may be bold in finding the riches of inclusion and the treasures of diversity among us”.

We, the congregants, O Lord, continues the blueprint prayer, “come before you, a holy family, a rainbow people”. The toolkit also suggests a Sunday “Collect for Racial Justice”, kicked off with a prayer begging God Almighty to: “Stir the hearts of your people that, rejoicing in our diversity, we may repent of the wrongs of the past.”

Such as those committed by Edward Colston in another county and another century. Let’s not forget, continues the guidance, that Christianity was spread with the help of “racist European ideologies”.

Quite. Paul might have written “neither Jew nor Greek”, but what he really meant was “and especially not Muzzie-Wuzzies”. It’s that kind of implicit racism that accounted for the spread of Christianity.

And of course, during Ramadan, that equivalent of Lent according to the Archbishop of New York, Norfolk Anglicans should “pray for Muslims”. If parishes wish to have any pictorial representations of divinity, they should  “display images that reflect diversity in the Body of Christ”. Such, one assumes, as that of the Holy Family trying to evade British immigration services.

The toolkit enjoys episcopal support, with both the Rt Rev Graham Usher, the Bishop of Norwich, and the Rt Rev Dr Jane Steen, the Bishop of Lynn, endorsing it enthusiastically. The latter, that living argument against the consecration of women, wrote a foreword to the guidance, in which she explained that prayers should reflect DEI because “our counties are becoming more ethnically diverse”.

The aspiring sociologist in me rejoices: religious observance is now put on a solid demographic basis. Extrapolating on that logic, the dioceses of Leeds or Leicester, whose populations are much more diverse than Norfolk’s, should be chanting “there is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet”, followed by a resounding “Allahu Akbar!”.

If you are still wondering why the pews in Anglican churches are empty, wonder no more. People don’t need to go to churches for a torrent of woke effluvia. They can get that sort of thing from profane sources whose name is legion.

What Christians expect in a church is a glimpse of the kingdom that is not of this world, certainly not of the ugliest manifestations of this world. Do Norwich parishioners realise that their diocese’s guidance isn’t just woke and stupid but also heretical? Or have they been sufficiently brainwashed already to think they celebrate mass to atone for the sins of “white supremacists” like Edward Colston?

One wonders if this is what Henry VIII had in mind when he tore the English Church away from the Roman communion. He was by all accounts an intelligent man, but evidently not enough to realise that, when a church becomes an extension of the secular state, it will sooner or later reflect its current policies – including those that are un-Christian or even anti-Christian.

I’d suggest immediate disestablishment, but that would have unpredictable social and constitutional consequences. In any case, the Church of England may be too far gone to be helped even by such radical measures.

Lest you think this is just confessional chauvinism speaking, that New York prelate who sees little difference between Ash Wednesday and Ramadan is Catholic. So perhaps it’s not establishment that’s to blame for the plight of the C of E.

It may be just something in the modern air, and let’s pray for those toxic miasmas to dissipate. Or else you can pray for DEI virtue, whichever you prefer.    

Such is the circuitous route I followed trying to analyse the cultish adulation of Donald Trump, which I find anthropologically more interesting than any of his policies. Some of them I like, others I don’t, but that’s not my subject today.

In any case, a real, especially religious, conservative may like or dislike a politician or, more common, tolerate or despise him. In some cases, the feelings may be stronger, encompassing such extremes as love or hatred.

But under no circumstances can such a man worship a politician, see him – or, for that matter, any political doctrine or method of government – as the cure for all of life’s ills.

That such quasi-religious veneration is widespread across the entire political spectrum of modernity proves yet again that real, especially religious, conservatives have no place in modern politics.

This brings us to Bléneau, a village in my neck of the French woods. Sitting in the middle of it is a medieval church that, like many other French churches, was converted into a Temple of Reason during the Revolution. That saved the building by tempering the destructive zeal of the revolutionaries who strove to erase every vestige of Catholicism.

Many of them weren’t atheists. Like most of their American revolutionary colleagues, they were deists who professed faith in some nebulous clock-winding deity and therefore detested apostolic religions preaching God’s continued interest in His creation.

Hence exhibited on the lovely façade of that Bléneau church is a directive issued by Robespierre: “The French People recognise the existence of the Supreme Being and the Immortality of the Soul.” Lip service thus paid, inchoate modernity could proceed undeterred to worship at the altar of a secular, political religion, following the precedent set by the American Founders and their precursors.

One such precursor was the Puritan lawyer John Winthrop, who in 1630 delivered an oration in which he alluded to Matthew 5: 14 by describing the new community as a “city upon a hill”. The full text of that verse left his audience in no doubt that the nation they had set out to build was ordained by God: “Ye are the light of this world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.”

The Mayflower Puritans believed in God and they also believed in the new nation they were creating. Their descendants conflated the two and eventually produced history’s first political religion that made perfunctory references to God while deifying their country, variously described as a republic, a democracy, a liberal democracy, but always serving as an object of neo-pagan adulation.

That inaugurated a widespread sacralisation of politics now divorced from traditional religious constraints. The development was revolutionary and, like all revolutions, it was claimed finally to have come to grips with the meaning and fundamentals of human life.

Though lacking God, the new cult possessed the outer aspects of a religion: scripture (the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Founders’ exegesis thereof), rituals, mythology, commandments, sacraments and symbols.

Moreover, already at that early stage the impression was conveyed, for the time being obliquely, that America’s founding documents were binding not just for the country but also for the unsuspecting outside world. If all those countries didn’t realise what was good for them, it was up to America to teach them – and chastise them if they proved recalcitrant.

(In 1895, for example, HMG had to remind US Secretary of State Richard Olney that the Monroe Doctrine fell far short of being international law.)

In the 1840s the journalist John L. O’Sullivan coined the term ‘manifest destiny’ to describe America’s messianic mission in the world. Said manifest destiny was according to him “divine”: it was incumbent upon America “to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man”.

Never in the history of the world had there existed another nation so bursting with such sanctimonious arrogance. The world had to wait until the twentieth century for America’s antithetical doppelgänger to appear: Soviet Russia on her own messianic crusade.

The differences between the two are obvious enough, but the similarities are just as telling, if less commented upon.

To reinforce the quasi-religious aspects of their political self-worship both countries borrowed their iconography from various creeds, either pagan or faux Christian. In ghoulish mimicry of Christian relics, for example, the ‘uncorrupted’ body of Lenin still lies in its Red Square mausoleum.

Rumours used to be spread that Soviet scientists were working on ways to bring Lenin’s body back to life, and every Soviet city, town or village was adorned with posters screaming “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will always live!”.

Many have commented on the perverse references to religion in Bolshevik iconography, but few have noticed that the same mimicry is just as robust in America.

Hardly any speech by American leaders from the eighteenth century onwards has omitted quasi-religious references to canonised historical figures, whose deeds are routinely described in Biblical terms. “Fellow citizens, the ark of your covenant is the Declaration of Independence,” pronounced John Quincy Adams, and he meant it exactly as it sounded.

Sacral visual imagery also abounds, as do the mock-religious shrines to past leaders. One such, Mount Rushmore with its 60-foot likenesses of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln carved in granite, is an obligatory site for American pilgrimages.

George Washington in particular is worshipped in a religious manner as ‘Great Father of the Country’. The interior of the Capitol dome in Washington displays a fresco entitled The Apotheosis of Washington where the sainted Father is surrounded by Baroque angels and also representations of other Founders in contact with various pagan gods, such as Neptune, Vulcan and Minerva.

In the same vein, the Lincoln Memorial is designed as a Greek temple and is actually identified as such in marble: “In this temple, as in the hearts of the people, for whom he saved the Union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.”

The Jefferson Memorial, not far away, is also a replica of a pagan shrine, with various quasi-religious references inscribed. Cited, for example, is a quotation from Jefferson’s letter to Washington preaching: “God who gave us life gave us liberty…”

To emulate the God of the Scriptures, the American political deity had to claim creative powers. God Mark I may or may not have created the world, but it was definitely up to God Mark II to recreate it. In that sense, America fulfilled the prophesy of one of her spiritual fathers, Thomas Paine.

In his revolutionary gospel Common Sense Paine thundered off his pulpit that, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand…”.

America and Russia signpost the two poles in politics elevated to a cult. It’s easy enough to trace both back to truly religious antecedents, Puritan Protestant in the US, Byzantine caesaropapist in Russia. But in reality such links have long since receded into a distant genetic memory, something of mainly antiquarian or, if you will, anthropological interest.

But the sacralisation of politics has survived this severance of its religious roots, and it’s noticeable throughout what used to be Christendom. The four principal post-Enlightenment political trends, socialism, communism, fascism and liberal democracy, converge in their propensity for making far-reaching eschatological claims – and eliciting similar cultish adulation.

One can’t escape the impression that modernity desperately seeks another conduit into which to channel the inherent human need for worshipping something higher than self. No longer able to worship God, it engages in the ghastly mimicry of worshipping politics.

From there, it’s but a short step to worshipping politicians – cults demand a figurine to sit at the top of the totem pole. At some point, the general political cravings demand a personalised expression – and find it in variously charismatic leaders.

Some of them may be downright evil, such as Lenin, Stalin or Hitler. Others, the Thatchers and Reagans of this world, may be rather virtuous. Others, like Gandhi or Trump, somewhere in between. But all are equally telling illustrations of the same idiosyncratically modern tendency: sacralisation of political power.

It’s only in this context that I can begin to understand the hysterical adulation of Trump evinced by even some people I know to be intelligent and well-informed. They all display symptoms that Gustave Le Bon described in his seminal book on crowd psychology as “impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgement of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of sentiments, and others”.

Arguing with them is as useless as trying to prove to a Muslim that there is a God other than Allah, and Mohammed isn’t his prophet. Cultish idols are there not to be analysed but to be worshipped. One can only hope that there is no apocalypse at the other end.

Yet again I’m going to act as a translator, not a writer. Two days ago, the French centre-right senator Claude Malhuret delivered a rousing speech that somehow escaped the attention of our press.

I hereby rely on my modest translating skills to correct this oversight:

Mr Prime Minister, esteemed ministers, dear colleagues, Europe stands at a critical crossroads of its history. The American shield is collapsing, the Ukraine risks losing her support, Russia is getting stronger. Washington has turned into the court of Nero: incendiary emperor, docile courtiers and a ketamine-befuddled buffoon responsible for purging the civil service.

This is a tragedy for the free world, but above all for the USA herself. Trump’s message is unequivocal: it makes no sense to be America’s ally because she won’t protect you, she’ll introduce tariffs against you in excess of those imposed on her enemies, and she’ll threaten to invade your territories while supporting the dictators attacking you. “The king of deals” is in fact practising the art of capitulation.

He thinks that, by kowtowing to Putin, he will scare China but, as he looks on this debacle,  Xi Jinping is definitely accelerating preparations for invading Taiwan. Never in US history has a president capitulated to an enemy. Never before has a White House resident supported an aggressor against an ally.

Never before has a president abused the Constitution so blatantly: illegal orders, sacking of judges capable of resistance, summary purge of high military command, undermining of all checks and balances, usurpation of control over social networks. This isn’t just an ‘illiberal slant’ – this is an attempt to usurp democracy. It’s good to remember that it took only a month, three weeks and a day to destroy the Weimar Republic.

I believe in the strength of American democracy, and protests have already begun in that country. Yet Trump has caused more harm to America in barely a month than he did in the whole four years of his previous tenure. We fought against a dictator – now we are fighting against a dictator abetted by a traitor.

Eight days ago, as Trump was patting Macron on the back in the White House, the US voted with Russia and North Korea – against Europe demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops. Two days later in the Oval Office, Trump the ‘draft dodger’ hectored Zelensky, the moral and strategic hero of the war, and then sent him away like an inept servant, saying: “Submit or get out.” Last night he went even further by stopping the supplies of weapons already promised.

How should we respond to this treachery? The answer is simple: by resisting. Above all, make no mistake: defeat of the Ukraine will spell defeat of all of Europe.

The Kremlin’s hit list already includes the Baltic countries, Georgia, Moldova. Putin’s goal is a return to Yalta, where half of Europe was delivered to Stalin. And the countries of the global south are awaiting the resolution of this conflict, to decide whether Europe is still to be respected or trampled on.

Putin strives to destroy the order introduced 80 years ago by the US and her allies, whose main principle was a ban on conquering territories by force. This principle lies at the foundation of the UN, but today’s America votes for the aggressor and against its victim because ‘Trumpism’ coincides with Putin’s view of the world. The idea is going back to spheres of influence, with great powers deciding the destiny of small countries.

“I’ll have Greenland, Panama and Canada; you can have the Ukraine, Baltics and Eastern Europe; he can have Taiwan and the South China Sea.” That’s what Mar-a-Lago oligarchs call ‘diplomatic realism’. In reality this means only one thing: we are on our own.

But insisting that it’s impossible to resist Putin is a lie. Quite the opposite, contrary to Kremlin propaganda Russia is getting weaker. In three years ‘the world’s second army’ has managed to grab only a few crumbs from a country that has a third of Russia’s population.

Interest rates of 25 per cent, depletion of currency and gold reserves, demographic collapse – Russia is teetering at the edge of an abyss. The US support of Putin is the greatest strategic error in the history of warfare. However, this shock has brought Europe to its senses.

Over just one day in Munich, Europeans realised that the Ukraine’s fate and Europe’s future are in their own hands. Now we face three urgent tasks:

1. To compensate for America’s treachery by accelerating arms supplies to the Ukraine, strengthening her defences, and insisting on European presence in all negotiations. This is costly but necessary. It’s time to abandon the taboo and use the frozen Russian assets, while also creating a coalition of resolute countries in defiance of the pro-Russian saboteurs within the EU.
2. Any treaty must include the return of all kidnapped children, the release of all POWs, and absolute security guarantees. After Budapest, Georgia and Minsk we know the true worth of ‘agreements’ with Putin. Therefore Europe must have enough military might to prevent another invasion.
3. To create European defence, abandoned after 1945 and further undermined after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is a giant task, but it’s on its success or failure that future generations will judge today’s leaders of Europe.

Friedrich Merz has said that Europe needs its own military alliance – this means France has been right all these decades in defending her strategic autonomy. Now it needs to be strengthened.

Large-scale investments, a European defence fund in excess of the Maastricht limitations on debt, unification of weapon systems, fast-tracked admission of the Ukraine into the EU, Europe’s greatest armed force. A new nuclear strategy based on French and British forces. Development of anti-missile defences and satellite systems. Ursula von der Leyen’s plan is a good beginning, but more will be required.

Europe can again become a military power only if she reclaims the status of an industrial superpower. Hence we need Mario Draghi’s plan, and this time we must act on it.

But the main factor of European rearmament is moral mobilisation. We must convince society to overcome fatigue, the fear of war and the resistance of Putin’s allies, both extreme right and extreme left. Yesterday, Mr Prime Minister, they again spoke at the National Assembly against European unity, against European defence.

They say they want peace. But what they are really working for is capitulation. Their ‘peace’ is defeat. It’s replacing Gaulle-Zelensky with a Ukrainian Pétain obedient to Putin. This is the peace of collaborators who have been sabotaging any aid to the Ukraine for three years.

The end of the Atlantic alliance? The risk is great. But over the past few days, the humiliation of Zelensky and a series of insane decisions have caused indignation within the USA herself.

Trump’s ratings are going down, Republicans face hostile crowds in their constituencies, even Fox News has begun to criticise the president. The Trumpists are still controlling the executive branch, Congress, the Supreme Court and the social networks, but those fighting for freedom have always emerged victorious in American history. And they are raising their heads.

The Ukraine’s fate is being decided in the trenches. But it also depends on those fighting for democracy in the US and also on us, our ability to unite Europe, create its defence shield and recover its status of a great power.

Our ancestors defeated fascism and communism at a cost of great sacrifices. Our task is to defeat the totalitarianism of the 21st century.

Glory to a free Ukraine! Long live democratic Europe!

I might have worded a few things differently, and my faith in the EU is less robust than Mr Malhuret’s. But by and large I have only two words to add to this inspiring message: hear, hear!

A young German man has been sentenced to two years and nine months in prison for incest with his half-sister.

I take my hat off and have to make a conscious effort to resist the urge to genuflect. It’s wonderful to see that modern Western states outdo the Bible in imposing moral strictures.

After all, the Old Testament is part of the Christian canon, and that book took a rather permissive view on what is a felony in Germany. For example, Abraham married his half-sister Sarah, and the Bible looks upon that union with benevolence.

Abraham’s brother married his niece, Lot did the dirty with his two daughters (he was the worse for wear at the time, but I doubt today’s German court would see that as extenuation), King David’s son had sex with his half-sister and, well, it’s a long list.

Eventually the Hebrews had enough, and the third book of the Bible, Leviticus, issued a compendium of prohibited relationships, providing for every permutation of kinship. However, perhaps in deference to Lot, sex between a man and his daughter was left out, which one has to treat as acceptance by omission.

As for marriage between cousins, something banned today in many Western countries, including 30 out of the 50 American states, rather than being proscribed that practice was actively promoted in Biblical times, and not just among Hebrews.

Part of the reason was endogamy, the desire to keep matings within a kindred group to hold outsiders at bay. But scriptural permissiveness also had a role to play in such social arrangements: what wasn’t explicitly prohibited was deemed to be implicitly condoned.

Still, before we go out of our way praising the Germans for their probity, we must consider its unlikely cohabitation with permissiveness. For, while holding the line on incest, German and other Western governments are firm in protecting, inter alia, the right of a man who used to be a woman to be impregnated by a woman who used to be a man.

It’s true that the Bible issues no injunction against that rather unorthodox possibility, but probably only because even God couldn’t envision anything quite like that. As for copulation between people of the same sex, it has now passed being accepted on its way to becoming compulsory.

Great pagan thinkers, such as Plato, saw nothing particularly wrong with homosexuality. But they saw plenty wrong with the family, as the concept is understood in Western tradition. Whenever private happiness was in conflict with public good, that latter had to prevail.

Plato described this pecking order with helpful honesty and unmatched mastery in his Republic and especially in Laws. The polis was everything; the individual qua individual, next to nothing.

The same went for that extension of the individual, his family, which was to be reduced to more or less the state’s breeding farm. For example, according to Plato, who can be credited with the invention of eugenics, it was up to the polis to pair off couples on the basis of the potential usefulness of their offspring to the common good.

Before Cleisthenes’s reforms created the polis around 500 BC, such views would have been unthinkable to the Greeks. Their society, like that of the ancient Hebrews, had revolved around the family, clan, kinship and other personal ties. But by Plato’s time the variably democratic polis had made the family redundant in every sense other than the good of the polis.

This is the first intimation in history of the relationship since then amply proved: democracy and family are at odds. They aren’t friends, nor even allies, but competitors: the stronger the one, the weaker the other.

Sensing this, John Locke, who laid out the groundwork for the liberal democratic state, countenanced not only divorce but even polygamy: “He that is already married may marry another woman with his left hand…” It is reassuring to see how solicitously our Lockean modernity is trying to make sure his prophesy can come true – if in Locke’s time hostility to marriage was still inchoate, by now it has grown to full maturity.

Inhaling the zeitgeist, society responds with alacrity. As late as in 1978, more than 90 per cent of British babies were born to married parents. Today, it’s only about half, which is over ten times less than the rate seen in the early parts of the 20^th century.

This is of course an outrage, but someone rummaging through the New Testament would find some justification for a dim view of marriage. St Paul’s injunctions against homosexual relations are well-known, but it’s less often mentioned that he wasn’t an enthusiastic advocate of straight sex either.

Marriage, especially when including a physical element, reduces man’s ability to serve God, according to Paul. “It is good for a man not to touch a woman,” he wrote to the Corinthians. Then, recognising the realities of life, he added: “Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband.” Still, even if married they should refrain from how’s your father.

I’m not sure how Paul reconciled his views with Jesus’s implicit elevation of marriage to a sacrament. After all, it was at a wedding that he performed his first miracle.

Jesus also issued an injunction against divorce: “And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery.”

Nevertheless, the church found Paul’s attitude to marriage to be a development of Jesus’s commandments, rather than their denial. Marriage is now a holy sacrament in the church, but due to vigorous rearguard resistance it acquired this status only in the late 12^th century.

However, having acquired it, marriage began to be treated with the deference befitting a sacrament. Even now most Catholic churches refuse to marry divorcees who dissolved their marriage in civil courts. In the eyes of the state they are free to remarry; in the eyes of the church they are still married to their original spouses.

All this goes to show that new morality is neither moral nor especially new. Mankind has done much trial and error, mostly the latter, and one can use that experience to make sense of the hodgepodge of facts I’ve thrown together.

Different civilisations had their own views on sex, marital or otherwise. All of them tended to be consistent and cogent on their own terms, although not necessarily on other people’s terms. All of them recognised the social, spiritual and religious aspects of marriage, although their relative weight varied from one epoch to the next.

You may like or dislike our epoch, but one thing is undeniable: consistency and cogency aren’t its most salient characteristics. Statism is, and it doesn’t sit comfortably with a strong family as the core unit of society.

The operators of modern states sense this viscerally even if they don’t perceive it rationally. That’s why everything they do in the area of intersex relations promotes licence as a weapon against the family.

Easy divorce, abortion on demand, pre-teen girls on contraception, obsession with sex, equalising all sorts of perversions in status with heterosexual marital sex – all these systematically undermine the family.

The family fights back by setting up a demographic catastrophe: the current birthrate in most Western countries is well below that required for population renewal. Totalitarian countries like Russia and China use dictatorial fiats for demographic control, but with little success.

Rather than offering resistance, most churches treat this moral, social and demographic disaster with acquiescence if not approval. Most governments pay lip service to family values while continuing to act according to their innate imperative of treating the family as an adversary.

In light of all that, sending a chap down for some hanky-panky with his half-sister seems illogical. But then if you can find logic in modernity, you are a better man than I am.

P.S. Speaking of churches, Cardinal Dolan, the archbishop of New York, has kindly elucidated the meaning of Ash Wednesday. The first day of Lent is, according to him, “a kind of our Catholic Ramadan.” Thank you, your Grace, for explaining this so that the general public can understand.