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This is the second time it has happened. The US has released sensitive intelligence data on Russia in the hope of stopping Putin in his tracks.

The first time was seven months ago, when the US declassified intelligence about the impending Russian attack on the Ukraine. This time it’s about the $300 million spent by Russia to subvert Western politics since 2014.

That sum looks fairly impressive but, according to US sources, it’s merely the first tranche. Hundreds of millions more will soon enter the pipeline pumping blood money into the coffers of Western political parties, think tanks, individual politicians and opinion-formers.

What’s telling here isn’t just the nature of the released intelligence, but the very fact that the US has indeed chosen to release it. By and large the Americans have always tended to reserve embarrassing information about Russia strictly for internal use. Now they’ve decided they can make more hay by shouting “We’re on to you!”

Some facts remain under wraps. For example, it would be interesting to know the specific recipients of Putin’s largesse. As it is, we can only guess, but the guesses are certainly educated.

Combining the forensic principle of cui bono with the biblical “by their fruits ye shall know them”, we can pinpoint the greased palms with a reasonable degree of accuracy. We can also finally ditch the meaningless and misleading political labels of ‘Right’ and ‘Left’.

All Western extremists, whatever tag is affixed to them in the media, are united in their hostility to the West – and hence in the need to look for powerful backers whose hostility is as deep as theirs, but whose pockets are deeper.

Evil gravitates towards evil, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s tinged red, black or brown. Hitler and Stalin eventually fell out, but privately they both expressed mutual admiration. They knew they had more in common with each other than either had with the West.

I’m sure the same realisation – and their shared affection for Putin’s rouble – binds Le Pen’s neo-fascists and Mélenchon’s Trotskyists in France. The former received an $11 million loan from Russia in 2014 and immediately supported the annexation of the Crimea. As for the ensuing Western sanctions, Le Pen pledged: “[If elected] I would envisage lifting the sanctions quite quickly.”

Is Mélenchon just a poor boy with his nose pressed to the shop window where such goodies are on display? I find that hard to believe, especially considering that European Left extremists are matching their Right twins in their quest to become Putin’s clients.

Germany’s Die Linke, the Polish Democratic Left Alliance, the Communist Party of Greece and her governing party Syriza, Spain’s Pedemos party, Hungary’s Jobbik are all fervent, and I suspect not disinterested, friends of Putin.

The European Parliament has had a pro-Putin faction since 2015. Called at the time Europe of Nations and Freedom, it was led by Le Pen and Marcel de Graff of the Dutch Party for Freedom. Since then it has reinvented itself as the Identity and Democracy Group, but its sympathies remain the same.

Extremist parties of every hue are gaining traction all over Europe, and every one of them has Putin’s Botoxed mug on its banners. Some of that $300 million must have added a touch of pragmatism to their heartfelt love of a kindred spirit.

Two of those parties are about to gain power in Italy, a key Nato member, and Sweden, an aspiring one. Both are supporters of Putin and his on-going bandit raid.

In Germany, the extremist Alternative für Deutschland party is so fervently pro-Putin that it’s hard not to detect at least some pecuniary interest. But both the Christian Democrats (‘right-wing’) and the Social Democrats (‘left-wing’) are tainted too.

In their case it probably wasn’t cash on the nail but more subtle emoluments. Those mainstream parties saw a clear political profit in procuring cheap Russian energy. That conferred lustre on their leaders, improving their electoral chances.

This explains Germany’s frankly pro-Putin course under both Schröder (SD) and Merkel (CD). But let’s not discount the more basic motives either.

After the end of his tenure, Schröder has made untold millions in the employ of Rosneft and Gazprom. Would it be far-fetched to suggest that a million or two might have crossed his palm even earlier?

Germany’s new chancellor, Olaf Scholz, inherited such policies. That’s why, when Putin launched his bandit raid, Germany not only was slow in offering assistance to the Ukraine, but did her utmost to sabotage the supplies provided by other Western countries.

However, yesterday Scholz demanded a cease-fire and a complete withdrawal of Russian troops from the Ukraine. That’s fighting talk, but it remains to be seen whether it will be backed up by tangible assistance. One thing for sure – Putin’s client groups in Germany, such as the AfD, will intensify their sabotage to offset the seeming change of Scholz’s heart.

Closer to home, Britain has hardly covered herself with glory. The country has been the staunchest supporter of the Ukraine since the bandit raid began. That redeems many sins, but make no mistake about it: many sins were committed.

It’s a source of national shame that Britain has turned London into Londongrad, a giant laundromat for purloined Russian billions, hundreds of them. Such sums buy political influence, and many British politicians, especially but not only Tories, have accepted contributions in cold Russian cash.

For example, Yevgeny Lebedev, wined and dined Tory politicians with such open-hearted generosity that Boris Johnson made him a peer of the realm. The money for that generosity came from Yevgeny’s father Alexander, a career KGB officer who had bought two British newspapers – and by the looks of it a few British politicians – with the KGB funds purloined from the Russian people.

The Westminster Russia Forum, a Tory think tank, né the Conservative Friends of Russia, was still calling for trying to understand Putin’s concerns the day the bandit raid started. How many roubles had flown into their coffers as either financing or direct bribes? I don’t know. But it would take an exaggerated faith in human goodness to believe that none had.

Russian ‘oligarchs’ used their ill-gotten funds to turn themselves into barnacles attaching to British causes. For example, Putin’s close associate Sergei Yastrzhembsky bankrolled a group lobbying against the ban on big-time hunting.

More worryingly, many Putinversteheren are found within the ranks of Ukip and other anti-EU groups. A few years ago I ill-advisedly accepted an invitation to speak at a conference of one of them, not realising it was both neo-fascist and pro-Putin.

The Brexit cause attracted many activists whose sympathies naturally lay with Putin. Were their hearts made slightly warmer by a few donations? I don’t know. But that $300 million had to go somewhere.

In 2014, Nigel Farage, who then led Ukip, unhesitatingly named Putin as the world leader he admired most, especially for the “brilliant” way “he handled the whole Syria thing.” That was before Putin’s fascists levelled Aleppo, one of the world’s oldest cities, but I’m sure such little incidentals wouldn’t have dampened Farage’s admiration.

Does he also admire the brilliant way Putin handles the whole Ukraine thing, especially the deliberate and indiscriminate bombing of residential areas? I don’t know, but I don’t see why not.

In 2015, after the occupation of the Crimea, Diane James, Farage’s successor, praised Putin’s “nationalism” and expressed her overall admiration. Thus the good cause of British sovereignty I myself support has attracted admirers of (and collaborators with?) the most dangerous fascist regime since Hitler’s.

Were such groups funded by the Kremlin? Possibly. Probably. But even if they never received any direct backhanders, enough of Putin’s manure was spread around to fertilise the soil where such views could be expressed openly by otherwise respectable figures.

And quite a few unrespectable ones as well. For example, Jeremy Corbyn, recent leader of the Labour Party, Seumas Milne, his chief advisor and George Galloway, the former Left-wing MP, are known Putin stooges.

They advertised the Russian propaganda outlets, RT and Sputnik, which Corbyn described as “more objective” than most. And they vigorously campaigned against the Association Agreement between the EU and Ukraine.

Some of our journalists are still acting as loudspeakers for Kremlin propaganda. I’m sure that not all of them are bribed to do so. But I’m equally sure that some are. With a rain of gold coming down, it’s against human nature not to open one’s hands.

Since the sadistic, genocidal nature of Putin’s bandit raid became known, expressing open sympathies for the ‘special operation’ has lost whatever street cred it ever had. Also, some purveyors of Russian cash have found themselves under sanctions, and some of their funds have got impounded.

But that has only happened in the past seven months. The newsworthy $300 million have been spent over the past eight years, and judging by the events spaced along that timeline, the money has been spent well.

It’s sometimes called progress. At other times, paradigm shift. Some prefer talking about evolution.

I call it the onset of schizophrenia, a chronically abnormal perception of reality. A sufferer creates his own, virtual reality that has nothing to do with the actual kind.

Any connection between the two is lost. His own mental images overpower his common sense, experience, even his eyesight. He sees only what he believes, never vice versa.

When this awful disorder afflicts a person, that’s bad news for him and his family. When it plagues a society, that’s bad news for the whole civilisation. For collective schizophrenia is like the individual kind: it’s progressive.

Medicine uses this word more precisely than does the common parlance. For ‘progressive’ doesn’t mean ineluctably getting better. When it comes to diseases, such as schizophrenia, ‘progressive’ means steadily getting worse.

I first wrote about this at length in my 2010 book The Crisis Behind Our Crisis. The subject was specifically our economic ordeal, but I treated it in the context of general decline.

Now, quoting from oneself may be in bad taste, but such quotations have the indisputable advantage of being easy to find. So here’s what I wrote then:

“We have replaced religion with (at best) religionism, Christianity with Christianism, freedom with liberty, wisdom with cleverness, sentiment with sentimentality, justice with legalism, art with pickled animals, music with amplified noise, statecraft with politicking, love with sex, communication with sound bites, self-confidence with effrontery, equality before God with levelling, respect for others with political correctness, dignity with amour propre – in short, everything real with virtual caricatures. We now live in a virtual world – so is it at all surprising that we live on virtual money?”

A dozen years have elapsed since then, and one can’t help noticing that the diagnosed condition has indeed progressed, largely thanks to the self-deception at which modern people excel.

Historically speaking, 12 years is a whiff of air, a fleeting glance, a grain of grit in the Alps. And yet… and yet.

If in 2010 someone had told me, or I am sure you, that people would eventually accept without screwing their index finger into their temple that a woman could impregnate a man, and that this would be treated as a blow struck for human rights, we would have called for the men in white coats.

We would have responded the same way to the view that kindergarten tots should be given a shopping list of every sexual abnormality and encouraged to choose one that particularly appeals to them. We’d even look with genuine concern at someone telling us that there exist over 70 sexes, not the actual two we knew.

Yesterday’s insanities are becoming today’s orthodoxies at an ever-accelerating speed, and not just in matters sexual.

We no longer think we are dealing with a lunatic when a prime minister boasts about the number of women and ethnic minorities in the cabinet, as if such a demographic cocktail were righteous in itself. Or when another politician defines virtue as flinging the country’s doors wide-open to all comers. Or when one can be censured for refusing to accept that, in a realm whose sovereign swears to uphold Christianity, all creeds should be equal not just legally but in every sense.

Those who build our virtual reality piece by piece are indeed schizophrenics for they do so with utmost conviction. I used to think they are simply out to deceive the masses the better to control them. Now I incline towards the view that above all they deceive themselves. They believe their own lies.

Like all progressive diseases, this one showed rather mild symptoms at first. The founding document of modernity, or rather the first triumphant statement of its victory, proclaimed that “all men are created equal”.

That was a symptom of incipient schizophrenia. For the evidence before their own eyes should have convinced the sufferers that all men are created unequal physically, intellectually, morally, socially and in every other conceivable way.

If they meant that all men should be equal before the law, then this is what they should have said. But even that equality isn’t something man is created with. It’s a matter of political consensus, not innate endowment.

Even the paragons of liberal virtue, the US and the UK, set limits on such consensus. In America, no one under 35 or born outside the 50 states can become president. In Britain, a Catholic can’t become king.

As for seeing social and economic equality as a desirable and achievable desideratum, holding this belief is a tell-tale clinical symptom, especially if accompanied by professed attachment to liberty. Because all men are created unequal, social and economic inequality is a natural condition that can only be eliminated by unnatural means.

Since people themselves will never do that, such equality can only ever be imposed and enforced by the state. That state would be despotic, no matter what it called itself.

There have been reasonably successful despotic states. In fact, in the 18^th century ‘enlightened despotism’ became the buzz phrase of absolute monarchs who claimed affection for the ideas of the Enlightenment. That by itself was symptomatic of an intellectual shortcoming, not a mental disorder. But insisting at the same time that despotism was liberty definitely was just that.

Another symptom is a sufferer’s insistence that men and women are not just equal but the same in every faculty of body and mind. Divorce from actual reality is very much in evidence there.

Wise men of the past cautioned against even legal egalitarianism in that area. For example, Dr Johnson once said: “Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.” Today that quip would have him drummed out of polite society. He’d quickly feel tired not only of London but also of life.

Schoolmasters and university professors are being reprimanded or even sacked for pointing out physiological and psychological differences between men and women. The detractors of such intrepid academics are schizophrenics: their perception of reality is warped.

Or look at the global warming madness. Somehow people have been forced to ignore that warm and cold periods alternated throughout history even before man graced the Earth with his presence. And they continued to do so even long before man began to rely on hydrocarbons to make himself prosperous and longer-lived.

Ancient Romans, for example, didn’t have a hydrocarbon-fuelled economy, and yet the climate was then several degrees warmer than it is now. However, most people have now swallowed the global warming canard because a few lunatics screamed about it loudly enough.

It’s an amply described social phenomenon that evil madmen exude powerful psychic magnetism that can get hold of the masses and lead them to perdition. This quality is often described as charisma, but madness is usually closer to the clinical truth.

Trotsky and Hitler were prime examples, but they were different from run-of-the-mill propagandists of today. Those villains preached hatred based on pride in one’s own class or race. Their current equivalents sermonise hatred based on shame of one’s own class (if not low), race (if white), sex (if male) or at least car (if not electric).

And enough people are attracted to such drivel to go along with it and vote such madmen into various public offices. So forget Covid. It’s the pandemic of schizophrenia that’s destroying our civilisation. And so far we haven’t come up with an effective vaccine.

Or rather we had one, but chose to toss it out of the window. The tossers are called Enlighteners. I call them schizophrenics.

P.S. Well-done to Manny Macron, and I thought these words would never cross my lips. He has ordered that all flags in France be flown at half-mast until the burial of our Queen. 

Imagine for the sake of argument that you are in charge of Putin’s propaganda. You know and your boss knows and everybody knows that the bandit raid on the Ukraine has been a resounding failure.

If you two harboured rosy hopes a week ago, the brilliant Ukrainian breakthrough over the past few days has disabused you of any such notions.

You know and your boss knows and everybody knows that only one development could stop the Ukrainian army in its tracks, saving what’s left of Putin’s forces and indeed his very regime. The flow of Western arms to the Ukrainians must slow down to a trickle or, ideally, stop altogether.

You rack your brain and ask yourself how your role model, Dr Goebbels, would approach the problem. A clever man, he would first have assessed what had been done so far.

Putin set high hopes on the energy blockade of Europe. Make those soft Westerners pay through the nose or freeze in the dark and, faster than you can say blackmail, they’ll twist the Ukraine’s arm into surrender, otherwise known as a peace process. Alas, those hopes have so far proved forlorn.

Europeans have not only managed to fill their gas storages to the brim, but they’ve also set in motion the wheels of energy independence. Nuclear reactors and even fracking are no longer seen as the work of the devil, and a stepped-up production at existing hydrocarbon fields no longer appals Western politicians.

What next then? You’ve thought long and hard about this conundrum, you’ve consulted Putin, your girlfriend, your wife, her boyfriend – anyone willing to listen and offer advice. They all agree with your innermost conviction: the only way to make the West back off is to threaten the use of nuclear weapons – first on the Ukrainians and second on anyone daring to interfere.

Sorted. The regime’s USP has been established, and it will now become the hub around which the whole media strategy will revolve. Mind you, Russian propagandists don’t even have to be briefed: they’ve already been sputtering nuclear threats for years.

You know, turning the US into radioactive ash, creating the Stalin Strait between Canada and Mexico, sinking the British Isles, that sort of thing. But those chaps have become a bit of a joke. Nobody in the West pays any attention to them any longer, and even the Russians are beginning to get jaded.

The boss himself has made similar threats, and they carried some weight for a while. At first, the West was in no hurry to arm those bloody Ukies. But when the Russian offensive ran out of steam, Westerners, especially those satanic Anglos, got emboldened. Rather than dwindling away, the arms supplies to the Ukraine grew exponentially.

No, for that threat to be credible it has to come from respectable Western sources, journalists perhaps or, even better, academics or, better still, academics who are also journalists. Let’s see, who’d be up for it?

Enter Mark Almond, Director of the Crisis Research Institute, Oxford. You know Mark well – until such moonlighting lost street cred, he had appeared a few times on your propaganda channel RT, mouthing sweet nothings about an urgent need for peace based on mutual understanding.

Not only does he not mind taking RT’s rouble, but he has also established himself in his own right as a reliable Putinversteher, to use that apt German neologism. Someone who understands Putin, feels his pain.

Easier done than said. You didn’t even have to ask, Putinversteheren get messages from ambient air, osmotically.

Sensitive to such emanations, Almond knocked off an article for The Mail in which he poses the big question: “Will Vladimir Putin go nuclear so that he can save his own skin?”

Back in 1995, I happened to spend a few days with Mark in Minsk, where both of us were British observers at the Belorussian elections. At that time I vouchsafed to him an observation that took our hacks another 10 years to make, and some still haven’t cottoned on.

Nothing, I said, had changed in Russia fundamentally. All those much-vaunted glasnosts and perestroikas were merely a transfer of power from the Party to the KGB.

Mark cast a furtive glance around to make sure no one was listening. “You can’t say that,” he half-whispered. “The most you are allowed to say is that unfortunately democracy in Russia isn’t developing as rapidly as we hoped.” “Allowed by whom?” I sneered, showing how badly I knew the lie of the media land.

At that time I ascribed Mark’s reaction to his unswerving devotion to the middle of the road, so characteristic of the British middle classes. Now, having since seen him on RT and read his articles, I am not so sure.

Having first treated his readers to a few truisms, such as describing the Ukrainian advance as “a brilliant tactical move” and praising the Ukrainians who, in contrast to the Russians, “are willing to die for their country”, Almond delivered the kernel of the message:

“… we may be approaching the most dangerous moment in the war. Schooled in Russia’s history and the ignominious end of so many of its leaders, Putin might be willing to do anything to prevent his assassination – even going nuclear to save his own skin.

“This counter-offensive is hugely significant, then – and we must cheer that Ukraine has gained a crucial military initiative. The risk, however, is that it prompts a far more terrible response.”

Why bother saying that? As you have surmised by now, my suspicion is that Almond is simply echoing the media strategy worked out in the Kremlin (or rather whatever bunker Putin is cowering in – no Zelensky, he). But I am prepared to entertain other ideas.

One idea is that Almond can only ever think in truisms and banalities. For he made no points that any mentally competent 10-year-old couldn’t have made, provided he had been following the hostilities.

Yes, Putin’s war isn’t going according to plan. Yes, the Ukrainian counteroffensive was brilliant. Yes, Putin can’t afford to lose the war. Yes, there’s the danger of him using last-resort nuclear weapons. All true. But why state the bleeding obvious?

A serious analyst would have played out the possible scenarios to decide how likely such a desperate measure was. He should have mentioned, if only for the sake of dispelling it, the rumour that Nato has put a quiet word into Putin’s shell-like that any use of any nuclear weapons, big or small, would lead to a deadly attack not on Russian troops but on him personally.

He should have tried to gauge the possible public reaction in Russia to the use of nuclear weapons. Every indication suggests that the support of the war is waning already. What would happen if the Russians felt they could find themselves under nuclear attack?

Would even the countries tepidly friendly to Russia, such as China, continue to be her friends if Russia resorted to nuclear terrorism? In the likely event that they wouldn’t, how would the Russians like their country becoming the global pariah it has never been in the past, not to the same extent?

Even if the Russians only used battlefield nukes, the neighbouring Nato countries would probably suffer from a deadly fallout. Would that be treated as a sufficient cause to trigger Article 5 of the Nato Charter?

The order to launch a nuclear strike has to circulate through different intermediate stages and can be countermanded at any of them. How likely would that be? Or even, how likely would it be that some high-ranking Russian officer would do a Stauffenberg in response?

At least two Soviet officers, Adm. Vasili Arkhipov in 1962 and Col. Stanislav Petrov in 1983, disobeyed nuclear orders in the past. It’s improbable that Putin enjoys more canine obedience from his officers than, respectively, Khrushchev and Andropov enjoyed from theirs.

Having analysed all such factors, a serious analyst would have come to the conclusion that a Russian nuclear strike in the Ukraine is hard, though of course not impossible, to imagine. In any case, such fears aren’t realistic enough to keep the West from pressing ahead. Supplying the Ukraine with the tools to finish the job isn’t merely our moral duty but, more important, also a matter of strategic necessity.

That’s how I’d write about the Russian nuclear threat. But then my aim would be to understand the problem and then communicate that understanding as best I could.

Almond’s objective seems to be Kremlin-inspired fearmongering, though couched in the vapid terms of mainstream journalism.

My former countrymen tend to play truant when history teaches its lessons. To be fair, they aren’t the only ones. They just happen to be even worse pupils than most.

If history were a school teacher judged by results, it would have been sacked a long time ago. But let’s not anthropomorphise history – it’s merely an inanimate passage of time jam-packed with events. The fault lies not with the teacher but with the pupils.

Each generation believes, wrongly, in its own uniqueness. Hence, contrary to Einstein’s caution, they all do the same things over and over, while expecting to get different results. Logic triumphs; they fail.

The on-going bandit raid is the first traditional war Russia has fought since 1945, and the Second World War was the latest teacher offering lessons to heed or ignore. (As the British can attest to from personal experience, the Afghan war was sui generis for Russia too.)

The rout suffered by the Russians over the past few days shows that their generals chose not to study the Second Battle of Kharkov fought on 12-28 May, 1942. George Santayana must be smiling in his grave: those who do not learn history are indeed doomed to repeat it.

It’s not just history that’s screaming parallels but also geography. Battlefield reports are again bulging with the names of the same cities, towns, villages and rivers as they did 80 years ago: Kharkov, Izium, Balakleya, Kupyansk, Seversky Donets.

Then, in 1942, the Red Army was trying to develop its counteroffensive after stopping the Wehrmacht at the gates of Moscow. The Germans retreated and the Soviet High Command sought to build on its temporary strategic initiative.

Yet the Red Army had suffered appalling casualties in the first 11 months of the war. In fact, until the Battle of Moscow in December, 1941, the casualty ratio was 10 : 1 in favour of the Germans.

That defied the basic tenets of military science, according to which the attacking side usually suffers two to three times as many losses. It’s only in colonial wars, when Europeans armed with cannon attacked natives wielding arrows and hoes, that defenders ever lost ten times the number of men lost by attackers.

Straining every sinew, the Russians stopped the Germans at Moscow, but their regular army had for all intents and purposes been wiped out. The gaping holes were plugged with recruits, hastily armed and even more hastily trained, if at all.

Yet Soviet military doctrine called for offence at all costs, and at first the Red counteroffensive developed rapidly. But its momentum was attenuating.

Vindicating another military cliché, the Red commander, Marshal Timoshenko, was still fighting the previous war. He had been a divisional commander in the First Horse Army wreaking havoc on the Whites during the Civil War. In his mind, Timoshenko was still leading, sabre in hand, a daring cavalry charge.

He was soon taught a lesson about modern war. Using their Izium salient as a springboard, the Soviets launched an attack against the German 6^th Army. Yet on 15 May the Germans managed to stop the huffing and puffing Red forces.

Any wise High Command would have sensed a change in momentum, regrouped and got ready for defence. But Timoshenko continued to attack when his troops had been depleted and such an aggressive strategy was no longer on.

That left his troops open to a devastating pincer attack at his flanks that cut off three Soviet armies. After six days of desperate fighting that army group was wiped out, with the Soviets losing 280,000 men, compared to just 20,000 for the Germans. The theory-defying 10 : 1 became even a more improbable 14 : 1 in favour of the attacking side.

Exactly the same scenario has been played out on almost exactly the same terrain over the past few days. The Ukrainians first launched a strike in the southerly direction, towards Kherson.

They made some modest gains, but the Russians didn’t feel there was real cause for concern – especially since they were redeploying there significant forces from the Kharkov theatre. With those reinforcements, the Russians were ready to handle anything the Ukrainians could throw at them.

They didn’t realise that the attack in the direction of Kherson was to a large extent an exercise in military deception. Having made sure sufficient Russian forces had been diverted from the Kharkov region, the Ukrainians struck.

Fearing a total encirclement, the Russian forces retreated or, to be more precise, fled. Many surrendered, and Ukrainian soldiers ought to be praised for agreeing to take prisoners at all. After the unspeakable atrocities perpetrated by the Russians, one could understand, if not condone, summary executions.

Yesterday the Ukrainians took Izium, the focal point of the 1942 operation. Kupyansk, an important railway hub, was next, and both towns were taken practically without a shot. The Russian Defence Ministry explained that a decision had been made “to regroup the Russian troops deployed in the Balakleya and Izium areas”.

Like their predecessors in 1942, the Russians have finally understood the need to set up a line of defence. Yet this is where the parallel ends.

The 1942 defence line was set on the Volga, over 500 miles from Kharkov. There the same German 6^th Army suffered a crushing defeat at Stalingrad, and the Soviets eventually won the war – with a lot of help from their Western friends.

They have no Western friends now, and the Ukrainians have more modest objectives than the Germans had. The German Nazis wanted to conquer the Soviet Union, annihilate the Soviet state and enslave the Soviet people. By contrast, the Ukrainians simply want to prevent the Russian Nazis from conquering, annihilating and enslaving them.

They have no far-reaching ambitions to capture Moscow. All they want is to drive Putin’s bandits from their territory. Judging by the morale of their troops, the support from the whole population and the military talent of their generals, that goal is well within their reach.

Yet all those factors would go to naught if the supplies of Western arms slowed down or, worse still, stopped. It’s in this area that the current success of the Ukrainian army has secured a crucial victory.

For Western countries have been dreading Afghanistan Mark II, when they poured billions’ worth of arms into the country, only to see them end up in the bloodstained hands of the Taliban.

Now we can see how effectively the Ukrainians are using our supplies, how with their help they are putting the Russian army to flight. It’s possible that the on-going counteroffensive will make the West’s resolve even firmer, and the stream of arms flowing into the Ukraine even mightier.

Generally speaking, I avoid slogans, but I can’t exercise such self-restraint now. Slava Ukraini! (Glory to the Ukraine! – the traditional call of Ukrainian patriotism.)

While paying tribute to the late Queen, Sharon Osbourne nevertheless observed that “many people miss the point of the royal family.”

If she meant foreigners, then what does she expect? If, however, she was talking about Britons, then this is a death certificate issued to our education.

For anyone who misses the point of the royal family, also misses the point of Britain, her constitution, her laws, her history, her religion, her national character – her soul.

This is no mere oversight. It’s the pigheaded ignorance of those who are either proud to be ignorant or too lazy to do something about it. However, on the off-chance that such underachievers really want to learn, here are a few signposts on the route to understanding.

A question first: What’s the point of a military parade? After all, it has nothing to do with the challenges the troops will face on the battlefield.

Soldiers won’t be goosestepping there. Neither will they all be bunched together, marching in formation. There will be no brass band playing. The officer leading them will be carrying a rifle, not a sabre. They’ll be wearing body armour, not lurid uniforms and bearskins. They’ll be hearing explosions and machinegun bursts, not cheering and applause.

And so on ad infinitum. There’s absolutely no point to a military parade, and don’t get me going on the Union Jack flapping in the wind and the accompanying sound of the national anthem.

Would the soldiers shoot straighter if the former were replaced with the Jolly Roger and the latter with a song by Mrs Osbourne’s husband? See what I mean? There’s no point either to the flag or to the music.

At this point any sensible person will disagree. He knows that what makes an army victorious isn’t only the soldiers’ physical combat skills and weaponry, but above all their metaphysical sense of higher purpose, discipline, sense of camaraderie, esprit de corps, patriotism they affirm each time they salute the flag or the anthem.

Agreed? Then what’s true of an army is also true, many times over, of a nation. And in specifically the British nation the royal family embodies its metaphysical essence to such an extent that the nation and the family are one.

But can’t the same be said about the president of a republic or a prime minister wielding executive power? Perhaps it can. But not nearly with the same conviction or the same accuracy.

A useful clue is provided by a dialogue that took place on 2 June, 1953, at Her Majesty’s coronation.

Archbishop: “Will you to the utmost of your power maintain the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel? Will you to the utmost of your power maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law? Will you maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof, as by law established in England?” The Queen: “All this I promise to do.”

This was a reminder that it’s not any political post in the offices of Westminster but priestly service at the altar of God that’s perhaps the closest approximation of the monarch’s mission.

Self-abnegation for the sake of something greater than oneself, offering one’s whole life as a conduit of transcendence, submitting one’s own self to a greater good – that’s what a priest’s job is. And the monarch’s.

Both derive their remit and inspiration from God, and the divine right of kings used to be the basis of Western statehood. That doctrine has fallen into disrepute, but only an obtuse ignoramus will deny that monarchy is not just a secular institution, but also a sacral one.

When the French debated the notion of the divine right of kings, Joseph de Maistre remarked that the origin of royal legitimacy can’t be readily traced back to any other source. It goes so far back that we might as well assume it derives from God.

In the British constitution the sacral nature of the royal remit is a matter of law, not just philosophical speculation. Our monarchs are given the traditional title of defensor fidei, Defender of the Faith, first granted to Henry VIII.

It remains to be seen if Charles III will accept that title: in his pronouncements as the Prince of Wales he hinted he saw himself more as the “defender of faith”, meaning all faiths. I hope he has reconsidered, for dropping that definite article would be constitutional sabotage even worse than anything Blair perpetrated.

After all, our monarch is also the Supreme Governor of the established church, which job ought to make it hard for him to defend, say, animism, Flagellantism or any cult involving human sacrifice.

Defending the faith also means defending the culture and civilisation based on the faith, preventing any unbridgeable fissure appearing among the generations past, present and future. In this the monarch is supposed to be assisted by both Parliament and the established church.

These aren’t just any old institutions. They are all instruments of historical continuity, bodies that protect, define and perpetuate the nation as a cohesive entity, not an aggregate of atomised individuals.

The recent record of both Parliament and the church in this vital aspect of their mission can only charitably be described as mixed. That places an even heavier burden on the monarch as a factor of constancy, the sentinel of the British national soul.

Our world is in flux, with every traditional certitude being replaced at a kaleidoscopic speed. The speed is much greater than ever, but things have never stood still: the wheels of life are spinning and they have always done so.

So much more vital it is then that they spin around a sturdy axle, and that, no matter how much any specific laws change, their constitutional essence remains constant and immutable.

Speaking in a different context, the great missionary Matteo Ricci (d. 1610) said: “Simus, ut sumus, aut non simus” (“We shall remain as we are or we shall not remain at all”). This adage applies, or rather should apply, to the British monarchy, although not with dogmatic commitment to every detail.

The mission of our monarchy isn’t to prevent change. It’s to make sure that, in the midst of chaotic, often irreversible toing and froing, the metaphysical, constitutional and legal essence of the nation remains the same – for otherwise it may not remain at all.

Lest you may think it’s all about metaphysics, it isn’t. There exist a ganglion of intersecting synapses of government, mainly legal, that would all atrophy without the monarchy acting as the cortex.

Tony ‘Anthony’ Blair found that out the hard way, when, in the midst of his orgy of constitutional vandalism, he tried to abolish the post of Lord Chancellor. The post predates that of prime minister, in fact it predates the Norman Conquest, but the patina of historical continuity means nothing to modern barbarians.

However, Blair discovered to his chagrin that abolishing the post would produce an irreparable legal mayhem, bringing down the whole constitutional edifice of Britain. Hence even he had to backtrack and reconsider.

Yet the Lord Chancellor is a mere bolt in the vehicle of our legal system, whereas the monarch is its engine. Remove the monarch, and our legality, which is to say our polity and civility, will sputter to a juddering stop.

This isn’t an attempt at an exhaustive exegesis of monarchy as a key British institution. As I mentioned earlier, it’s merely a few signposts for those who “miss the point of the royal family” to find it by their own efforts. This job should have been done in elementary school but, by the sound of it, hasn’t been.

As I write this, the Privy Council has just proclaimed our new monarch, King Charles III. God bless him.

I’ve never felt anything like this. I’ve never seen anything like this. So much love for a woman most of us have never met.

A public, especially political, figure can be liked, respected, appreciated, worshipped even. Yet in my rather long lifetime I’ve never seen one who could be loved. Except her.

For love, in any other than the Christian sense, is too intimate a feeling to spread around widely. It’s something we reserve for the family, the closest of friends and, of course, God.

What do we love them for? It doesn’t matter. We just do. Because they just are.

How did the head of a state foreign to most people of the world earn such unquestioning, self-evident, matter-of-fact love even beyond her native shores? I don’t know. But I do know she did.

My brother-in-law and his wife are in the South of France now. Strangers – Frenchmen! – are approaching them in the street to say how deeply sorry they are. Our French and American friends have rung or written to us, each word touched with genuine sadness.

None of them have any attachment to the institution of monarchy, not self-admittedly at any rate, and some of them have a historical axe to grind with the British monarchy in particular. Come to think of it, I even know a few misguided Britons who share those sentiments.

But here’s the amazing thing. Many people may have a high regard for an office, but not necessarily for its current holder. (The Papacy springs to mind, as does the Archbishopric of Canterbury.) But with Her Majesty it was often the other way around. Even inveterate republicans and anti-monarchists loved her personally. And now they are grieving with the rest of us.

Obituaries are talking about her dignity, sense of duty, dedication to public service, fortitude and many other things, each of them true, each of them superlative. Singly, each of them is enough to explain respect, all of them together perhaps even adulation. Yet none of them explains love.

I can’t explain it either. It could be that Her Majesty was so much at one with all her subjects, that we now feel that something of us has died. Or else the Queen has become so synonymous with England that people may think that some of England has died.

All that may be true. But love doesn’t die. It hasn’t. And it won’t.

We’ll never see anything like this again. I don’t know what kind of king Charles III will be, although I have my doubts. But even if he turns out to be a sage monarch, he’ll never be loved as much as Her Majesty. Liked and respected, possibly. Loved, I don’t think so.

Obituarists are saying she was the glue that made the kingdom united, and they fear that without that glue the realm will come unstuck. That’s a legitimate fear, and I share it. But all this is for another day, and not very soon either.

Today is about grief, sorrow, mourning – and love.

Her Majesty Elizabeth II, our beloved sovereign, Requiescat In Pace.

Iain Macwhirter, Scottish journalist and rector of Edinburgh University, made a fleeting reference to our “coconut cabinet”. Predictably all hell broke loose.

That pejorative term is usually used by blacks to describe other blacks who have sold out to the white establishment.

Though black on the outside, they are perceived to be white on the inside – hence ‘coconut’. Another similar term is ‘Bounty’, in reference to the cookie with a layer of coconut paste sandwiched between two chocolate biscuits.

These two terms have more or less ousted the old expression ‘Uncle Tom’, whose staying power has been compromised by its literary origin. People likely to resort to such vocabulary are these days unlikely to have read Harriet Beecher Stowe (which is good) or anything else (not so good).

Though Mr Macwhirter himself is gleaming white, as a man of the left he deplores the acts of racial treason committed by the off-white members of the Truss cabinet. They should be dealing crack instead, to assuage his craving for stereotypical racial propriety.

To emphasise the depth to which these racial traitors sank, Mr Macwhirter pointed out that all the three black holders of the great offices of state were privately educated.

To meet his stringent criteria, they shouldn’t have been educated at all, except in the school of hard knockers followed by Screw U. Only then could they enlist as foot soldiers in the class war so dear to every Leftie heart.

And there I was, thinking that racism was the exclusive domain of people who look, talk and dress like Jacob Rees-Mogg. In fact, it’s the Lefties who subsist on racial hatred and class resentments. Such ignoble emotions feed their powerlust.

Following Marx’s lead they also equate capitalists with Jews, thereby merging racism and class hatred into a single ideology. Hence virulent Labour anti-Semitism, which especially came to the fore during Corbyn’s leadership. ‘Virulent’ is the operative word here, for this little bias is by no means alien to the Tories either.

But their anti-Semitism tends to be more snobbish and less febrile. Conservative anti-Semites want to keep Jews out of Pall Mall clubs. Socialist anti-Semites want to kill them.

All in all, I am as grateful to Mr Macwhirter as I am to anyone who helpfully illustrates my observations and vindicates my thoughts. However, the hysterical screams of opprobrium that followed his careless remark show, paradoxically, that his side has won.

But first he himself unwittingly made that point by issuing a grovelling apology: “I have repeatedly applauded the Conservatives for having the most diverse cabinet in British history.

“Indeed, I tweeted earlier that the Truss cabinet made the Scottish Government look ‘hideously white’. I have always championed racial diversity in my columns and I am dismayed that my cack-handed attempt at humour suggested otherwise.”

An appalled Mail columnist issued a ringing endorsement of our new political demographics, while refusing to accept Mr Macwhirter’s apology: “Twelve men and eight women, six of them from ethnic minority backgrounds, they constituted a powerful snapshot of modern, multicultural Britain. A place where your gender or skin colour is no bar to success.”

Is it not? I’d suggest that such incidentals are clearly a bar to the success of white men. After all, not a single one of them has found himself in a great office of state, for the first time in history.

Both Mcwhirter’s apology and The Mail’s rebuke show the calamitous magnitude of the rout suffered by conservative decency. For, no matter which way the pendulum of political debate swings, its terms, vocabulary and premises are all set by the Left.

As the American left-wing radical Saul Alinsky (d. 1972) put it: “He who controls the language controls the masses”. And the language of identity politics is universally coined by the woke Left and accepted as the common parlance even by those who are themselves neither woke nor Left.

In a civilised conservative discourse (excuse my tautology), the issue of race or class shouldn’t even come up. A government should be neither scolded nor applauded for its demographic makeup. This should be seen as an utter irrelevance.

It certainly shouldn’t be used as a criterion of evaluating the government. I wouldn’t care if the cabinet, along with both Houses of Parliament, were staffed exclusively by Kwasi Kwarteng’s clones or Boris Johnson’s – as long as they get us out of the current mess.

If all government officials were selected solely on the strength of their mind, character and morality, I’d be the first to jump up and cheer. Such a policy would pour balsam on my soul tortured by our woke, inane, anomic modernity.

Alas, no such policy is in operation. Neither can it be because the Left has won the language war, thereby acquiring control of the voting masses. Hence our axiomatic assumption that having women and ethnic minorities disproportionately represented in every institution is a Good Thing.

I don’t need to be a fly on the wall to know that the Conservative Campaign Headquarters have instructed – in the rare cases when such instructions were deemed necessary – the local Associations to maintain a selection balance heavily biased in favour of women and ethnic minorities.

That is bound to produce a unisex, piebald Parliament, giving prime ministers a large field from which to pluck woke flowers. If the balance is “hideously white”, the PM will feel duty-bound to redress it by promoting candidates who would satisfy woke sensibilities, even at the expense of other criteria.

If God smiles on Britain, our unisex, piebald cabinet will throw up statesmen to put Pericles or, closer to home, Margaret Thatcher to shame. But the odds are heavily stacked against such luck because extraneous and limiting requirements were introduced into the selection process.

An analogy from everyday life might be helpful here. Let’s say a brilliant, sensitive and successful young woman decides that she would only ever marry a similarly endowed man. The task is difficult but not impossible – after all, such men also tend to look for soulmates, and they aren’t thick on the ground.

But then the woman begins to expand her list of essential requirements. Brilliant – yes. Sensitive and kind – yes. Successful – yes. In fact, she has met a few men who qualify, one or two recently. But the victorious candidate, she decides, must also be tall, handsome and blond, drive a Porsche and prefer Bach to Beethoven.

The task has become overcomplicated with too many variables. Her chances of finding the mate she wants have dropped precipitously. She now relies on a stroke of luck and the odds are against her.

I hope Britain will buck the odds and end up with a government worthy of the name. But that’s not the way to bet – for the same reason that my hypothetical woman may be looking at protracted solitude.

By far the most successful post-war Tory cabinet was led by Margaret Thatcher. She was the only woman in it, and the only discernible ethnic minority was Jewish.

Maggie clearly selected her colleagues on competence and talent only, and, though not everyone in her cabinet turned out fine, enough of them did to make her tenure a success.

Mrs Thatcher, as she then was, kept it simple. Miss Truss didn’t. Let’s pray things work out for her – and for us.

Have you no shame? Just think of yourself as a cold-blooded killer every time you tuck into a burger.

First, of course, you are an accomplice to the murder of the animal out of whose flesh that burger was fashioned. But second and even more heinous is the crime of killing our planet you commit with every bite.

Ignorance of the law is no excuse, so don’t give me the cock-and-bull story about not knowing what cattle husbandry does to the climate. However, to give you a chance to redeem yourself, I’ll have you know that some 14 per cent of all man-made greenhouse gases are produced by agriculture.

And a great part of that poison comes out of livestock. It emits not only that murderous CO₂, but also methane – and if you don’t believe me, just open your car window when driving past a feeding station. The stench you’ll smell will mostly come from hydrogen sulphide, but methane makes up much of the volume of the same gas.

That CO₂ is destroying our planet is a fact universally acknowledged by scientists receiving UN grants and journalists working for progressive media.

Dyed-in-the-wool deniers can scream till the methane-emitting cows come home that CO₂ makes up only 0.0407 per cent of atmosphere by volume. That makes it a trace gas. And anthropogenic CO₂ is only three per cent of that, so call it a trace of a trace.

So bloody what? If the UN says that this trace of a trace is about to incinerate our planet, then so it will. Add to this that animal methane, and unless we do something sharpish we’ll all end up as what Houston firemen used to call ‘charcoal critters’.

So trust the Dutch to answer this desperate call. The charming city of Haarlem is about to ban all meat advertising as a way of saving our planet.

As someone wholeheartedly committed to every UN initiative, especially if designed to prevent a global Armageddon, I welcome this measure. My only regret is that it doesn’t go far enough.

First, it’s not just meat advertising that ought to be banned but, above all, meat production. When our planet is in danger, no palliatives will do.

Since I scoff pounds of ossenworst, the Dutch raw beef sausage, every time I’m in Holland, it pains me to issue this call. But I’m prepared to sacrifice my taste buds to the cause of saving our planet.

(Ossenworst and their unmatched herring are the most visible Dutch contributions to civilisation since the 17^th century. At that time they produced sublime art and great urban architecture. Since then, it has been ossenworst and herring. Whether you see that as progress or decline depends on your priorities.)

Second, it’s not just cattle husbandry, but any kind of agriculture that releases that silent killer CO₂ into the atmosphere. Turning the soil has this effect, which is part of the reason the climate got warmer when people learned to plant and harvest crops (some African countries are still learning). The plough has done more harm to our planet than atom bombs ever have, although that may soon change.

If we are being consistent, all cereals should be banned too, though some fruit and veg could still be allowed, subject to stringent regulations. On second thoughts, scratch that.

We’ll continue to kill our planet until we acknowledge that what’s most destructive to it is man’s befouling presence. But for man (also woman and other!), our planet would be beautiful in its primordial virginity.

The sun would still remain active, meaning that the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere would be almost the same as now, but at least there would be no one else to blame or, come to that, do the blaming. No greedy oil companies, no selfish drivers, no dastardly industry, no aerosol sprays – and no UN to bring them all to account.

And – let’s not forget that – no Dutch government courageously placing its nation in the forefront of the unstoppable march towards progress. The Dutch are holding up high the lantern lighting our path to a shining future.

They’ve pioneered a welcome method of saving the world from the toxic and resource-sapping presence of old people: kill them all. And now they’ve taken the first step towards saving the world from meat advertising first, meat production the likely second and agriculture in general the probable third.

At least we can stop tossing and turning through the night worrying about our planet. It’s in safe hands. We, on the other hand, are in deep trouble.

P.S. To avoid any misunderstanding, whenever I say ‘our planet’, I mean the Earth. And what did you think I meant?

Judging by her victory speech, Liz Truss would have been even happier in a different career – and deep down she knows it.

That secret longing came across in her anaphora revolving around that dread D-word, ‘deliver’:

“I will deliver a bold plan to cut taxes and grow our economy. I will deliver on the energy bills crisis, dealing with people’s energy bills but also dealing with the long-term issues we have on energy supply. And I will deliver on the National Health Service.”

This seems to be the buzz word of the new cabinet. Not to repeat myself, this is what I wrote a month ago, when Suella Braverman, slated to become the new Home Secretary, regaled her TV audience with the same anaphora:

“Someone has misled the poor dear desperately. It’s post offices, obstetricians and Chinese takeaways that deliver. Governments, on the other hand, are supposed to, well, govern.

“Our ‘leaders’ increasingly express themselves in the language of corporate managers, or rather managerial consultants. They don’t govern. They ‘deliver’ markers and outcomes; they hit targets; they facilitate optimisation; they optimise facilitation; they meet goals.”

Miss Truss, aka Mrs O’Leary, also seems to be confused about which party she will be leading. To be fair, she showed no signs of such confusion in her speech. “I campaigned as a Conservative,” she said, “and I’ll govern as a Conservative.”

This only accentuates the inordinate amount of elasticity that the term has acquired. To today’s lot governing as a Conservative means out-Labouring Labour in the hope of winning the next election in the name of conservatism.

In that spirit, having touted her affection for free markets, Miss Truss has promised to freeze energy prices until 2024. Those socialist Labourites only mooted such a freeze until 2023, but hey, what do they know about conservatism.

At the same time, she also reconfirmed her mastery of political contortionism by again promising to ‘deliver’ the unlikely double whammy of both cutting taxes and increasing spending. God has created only two ways of doing that, which on closer examination amount to the same thing: printing or borrowing more money.

Any first-year student of economics will tell you that this measure is inflationary. Since we are already at the threshold of a double-digit rate, flashing through my mind are the Weimar Republic images of people pushing wheelbarrows full of banknotes.

Conservative politicians are good at coining neologisms behind which suicidal borrowing can hide. The Cameron gang favoured ‘quantitative easing’, which I proposed to shorten to ‘queasing’. And the likely in-coming Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, talks about ‘fiscal loosening’, presumably ‘floosening’ for short.

The idea that borrowing boosts growth also lives in the land of ‘delivering’, rather than statesmanship. All depends on how growth is defined and calculated.

Since borrowing is guaranteed to increase inflation, it can indeed ‘deliver’ GDP growth – on paper and in newspaper headlines. Thus, when you buy a loaf of bread costing £2, that’s £2 added to GDP. However, if inflation pushes the price of the same loaf to £4, the GDP tally will grow by £4.

Do that across the board, and you can claim that GDP has doubled. That sounds like good news until people realise that in the same period their income increased by, say, only 10 per cent. Job done: growth delivered, people impoverished.

We are already paying some £100 billion a year to service the existing debt, which is a gift that keeps on giving. When this amount doubles, which it definitely will in short order, more borrowing will be needed, more percentage points will be added to inflation.

Anticipating such policies, international investors have started to dump the government bonds and gilts financing our sovereign debt. As a result, the pound is plummeting towards parity with the dollar. If this trend continues, the pound will soon be worth less than the dollar for the first time in history.

That’s good news for our exporters and awful news for our imports, especially those of energy, whose price is denominated in dollars. Thus the merry-go-round Miss Truss is planning to step on increasingly looks like a vicious circle.

The more she has to borrow to cover the cost of capping energy prices, the higher those prices will soar, which will then necessitate more borrowing. One way of getting off that spinning contraption is to produce all our own energy and stop importing it, thereby indirectly financing Putin’s bandit raid.

(Claiming that we buy very little gas from Russia is disingenuous. For missing in that claim is the operative word ‘directly’. We do, however, get much of our electricity from the French company EDF, which in turn imports oil and gas from Russia.)

Here Miss Truss is making all the right noises. She plans to drop the moratorium on fracking, increase oil drilling and production in the North Sea, continue to build new nuclear power stations and renovate the old ones.

If she actually does all that, rather than merely delivering it, then things will ease up greatly. But I’ll have to see it to believe it. For the time being, my suspicion is aroused by Miss Truss saying that, yes, she’ll start fracking, but only if the local communities agree.

Much as I prefer localism to centralism in politics, it’s the national government that has to respond to a national emergency, not the mayor of a village in the Midland Valley of Scotland. My sceptical mind detects Miss Truss’s attempt to leave herself an out.

My sympathy is with her, though. Not since 1979, when Margaret Thatcher inherited a shambles of an economy left by Labour, has a new prime minister had to step into such an excremental disaster produced by the previous administrations. The difference is that this time the previous administrations were all Tory, and she has been a member of them for eight years.

One woke, which is to say socialist, perversion she inherits (and lovingly fosters) from the previous Tory governments is the commitment to out-Labour Labour in diversity.

If her choices for the great offices of state go as planned, then Kwasi Kwarteng will become the fourth consecutive non-white Chancellor, Suella Braverman the third minority Home Secretary in a row, and James Cleverly the first non-white Foreign Secretary ever.

I’m beginning to miss the silly belief that any institution should reflect the demographic makeup of the population at large. This way an outsider may look at a photograph of our cabinet meetings and get the impression Britain has floated south to merge with Kenya.

As I keep repeating, competence alone should be the sole qualifying characteristic of a government official, not his/her/its/their race or sex. Yet I realise that my concept of equal, unbiased opportunity is terribly outdated.

Campaigning as a Conservative was easy. Governing as one is impossible in today’s world. Still, if Liz Truss genuinely wants to try, I wish her every success, while fearing that she is doomed to failure. The conservative boat, with or without the initial capital, has sailed for destinations unknown.

Ségolène Royal is back in the news. Last week she accused President Zelensky of “fear-mongering war propaganda”, which finally got her name in print again, after a hiatus of many years.

Yet back in 2007 she ran Nicolas Sarkozy close in the French presidential election, as I recall. Her activists were spreading leaflets around, and a middle-aged woman tried to thrust one into my hand at a local market.

Now, I have no voting rights in France but, if I had, I’d be more likely to vote for the devil incarnate than for a Socialist candidate. My face must have reflected that bias, for the woman asked me, angrily and derisively, if I was going to vote for Sarkozy instead.

No, I said. “Who then?” Now the woman was perplexed for there were only two candidates in the runoff round, and neither seemed to appeal to me.

“Les Bourbons,” I said. My tormentor’s expression changed from confusion to such a genuine concern for my mental health that I felt she was owed an explanation. “Je suis plus royal que Ségolène,” I said, in a weak attempt to make a pun on the candidate’s surname.

The joke didn’t work, either because of my accent or due to the woman’s inability to appreciate jokes. Socialists do tend to take themselves and their cause with an unsmiling seriousness bordering on solemnity.

Having lost that election, Ségolène also lost much of her news appeal and only became a hot item some five years later, when her long-term lover François Hollande succeeded where Ségolène had failed.

Having sired four children with Ségolène, Hollande still never married her. As a true socialist he probably didn’t believe in heterosexual marriage. However, he was less sceptical about the homosexual variety, which he promptly legalised when becoming president.

He then dumped Ségolène for the journalist Valérie Trierweiler, whom her friends affectionately called ‘rottweiler’, proving that the French aren’t after all averse to puns based on surnames. I’m not sure whether this particular nickname referred to Valérie’s character or her amorous technique.

She too got dumped, having first thrown a wobbly at the presidential palace and smashed a lot of publicly owned dishes. Hollande then started a passionate affair with his scooter, but enough of this frivolity.

Ségolène’s recent diatribe shows that she still harbours political ambitions. The route she chose is promising for in a few short sentences she established ideal credentials for modern politics: wickedness, ignorance and stupidity.

In reality, Zelensky is courageously rallying his nation to resist fascist aggression against terrible odds. If the French president had done the same thing with the same heroic resolve, perhaps France could have repelled the Nazi offensive in 1940, or at least held out for longer than 40 days.

But trust Ségolène to see through the Ukrainian’s knavish tricks. “Zelensky’s fear-mongering propaganda has two goals,” she said on TV. “The first goal is to motivate his army. When the Ukrainian president talks about torturing soldiers, it should affect the Ukrainian servicemen, mobilise them. It also serves as an obstacle to the peace process.”

So Zelensky is trying to motivate his army? Crikey. How low can one sink. Instead, he should demotivate the army, surrender and start collaborating with the fascist invaders. Do a Pétain in other words.

Also, getting back to my old translating trade, I want to make sure you understand the meaning of ‘peace process’. When used by Putinistas, it’s synonymous with the Ukraine’s surrender – exactly the same thing French socialists and communists agitated for in 1940, demoralising the army.

The peace process, aka surrender, is essential because in its absence Ukrainians will continue to suffer, continued Ségolène. Actually, for all their suffering, Ukrainians themselves are ready to fight the Russians to the bitter end, but Ségolène knows what’s best for them better than they do.

Somewhat incongruously she then suggested that, when all is said and done, Ukrainians aren’t suffering all that much – and certainly not as much as that dastardly Zelensky claims.

Mariupol hospital airstrike? Didn’t happen. The Bucha massacre? Ditto. Rape of children? Ditto. Genocidal bombing of residential areas? Ditto. Mass looting? Ditto.

Zelensky made it all up for his nefarious purposes. Such pernicious propaganda should be outlawed, and who better than the UN, assisted by international hacks, to put the foot down. “It is necessary that the UN and the journalistic community establish a ban on the instrumentalisation of fear,” said Ségolène.

I wasn’t aware that “the journalistic community” has institutional powers to ban anything. And the UN’s powers exist only on paper, fit exclusively for lavatorial use. But perhaps Ségolène is privy to her own sources of information.

I shan’t sputter much spittle commenting on the evil cretinism evinced by such remarks. What’s more important – and worrying – is why this objectionable woman saw fit to make them.

Whatever politicians say is said for political reasons. So what is Ségolène after?

She is enunciating the Kremlin line word for word, something that until now has been the privilege of only the fringe parties, whichever tag they bear, left or right. However, in France the fringe is getting wider, including as it does both Le Pen’s neo-fascists (pretending to be more neo than fascist for PR purposes) and Mélenchon’s Trotskyists.

In this year’s presidential elections, Le Pen got 23.2 per cent of the vote and Mélenchon 22 per cent. These candidates, together with another extremist, Zemmour, polled at 52.3 per cent. All of them have close links with Putin, regularly stating their support for Russian fascism, repeating Kremlin propaganda and, in Le Pen’s case at least, even benefiting financially from such loyalty.

Meanwhile, the mainstream candidates, the eventual winner Macron, Valérie Pécresse of The Republicans and Anne Hidalgo of the Socialists, garnered a mere 34.5 per cent put together.  Their parties are lukewarm supporters of the Ukraine, with Macron having made a few ‘peace process’ noises, but then realised the error of his ways – until next time.

I’d suggest that, when the margins are wider than the mainstream, they are no longer the margins. Ségolène, for all her mental deficiencies, seems to have cottoned on to this simple observation. It’s likely she feels that, by jumping on Putin’s bandwagon, she could vault over Hidalgo to reclaim the leadership of the Socialist Party.

We may also be witnessing the results of the frenetic activity of Putin’s agents and stooges throughout Europe. They work overtime, cajoling, lying, bribing and threatening to pave the way to a sort of pan-European, pro-Putin fascist International. And Ségolène is an ideal recruit.

She is ambitious, frustrated in her ambitions, susceptible to extremist rhetoric, not excessively bright, lacking in principles, possibly in need of funding – any KGB officer worth his salt would have talent-spotted her long ago.

One way or the other, Ségolène is in what these days is called a win-win situation. If she fails to scale political heights, she can always get a job on The Mail on Sunday. She seems to be in tune with its editorial policy already.