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William Joyce, aka Lord Haw-Haw, came back as Graham Phillips, a Putin propagandist in the guise of a British journalist.

When Joyce disseminated Nazi propaganda, Britain was officially at war with Germany. Hence he was tried for treason and hanged in 1946.

(Actually, what really hanged him was one Latin phrase: protectio trahit subjectionem, et subjectio protectionem – ‘protection entails allegiance and allegiance, protection’. Joyce had dual Irish and US citizenship. Yet he travelled to Germany on a forged British passport, meaning he enjoyed the protection of the Crown and hence owed allegiance to it. Since he offered none, he was a traitor. Joyce should have paid attention in Latin classes.)

Britain isn’t officially at war with Russia, but that’s strictly a technicality. Russia is at war with Britain’s ally, whose army has been largely trained and equipped by us. Moreover, hardly an hour goes by without a senior Russian official threatening to annihilate Britain with nuclear weapons.

Hence, though we may not be at war with Russia, Russia is indisputably at war with us. In other words, Russia is our enemy, her propaganda is enemy propaganda, and any British subject disseminating it is a de facto enemy agent.

If Joyce was hanged on a technicality, the technicality of supposed peace between Britain and Russia protects Phillips from prison. But that doesn’t mean he should be allowed to poison the air as he sees fit.

Hence HMG has sanctioned Phillips, even though it had every moral right to try him for treason. But since civilised countries are ruled by law, not moral right, one has to accept that this undeservedly humane punishment is as far as we can go, for the time being.

Actually, Phillips has outdone Joyce, who limited himself to merely broadcasting enemy propaganda. Phillips has also recorded his interrogation of the British-Ukrainian POW Aiden Aslin and other British-born Ukrainian POWs.

He called that video an interview, which it wasn’t, considering that Aslin was in handcuffs. Phillips openly mocked him throughout and called him a mercenary, which Aslin demonstrably wasn’t.

He was a Ukrainian citizen enlisted in the Ukrainian army, and hence subject to the Geneva convention. Phillips’s interrogation of a POW under duress violated that convention, which made it a war crime. In another video, Phillips also jeered a Ukrainian civilian wounded by a Russian landmine and then taken prisoner, or rather hostage.

For eight years now, Phillips has been demonstrating his linguistic prowess by producing verbatim translations of Kremlin propaganda and spreading it in every print and broadcast medium he can get his hands on.

Russia, as unfailingly portrayed by him, is out to liberate Europe from fascism, personified by whatever country Russia pounces on, such as Georgia and the Ukraine. Having said that, Russia is a peaceful country that only resorts to force when sorely provoked by her (and Phillips’s) enemies, specifically Nato and the West in general.

Phillips’s activities have led to his numerous arrests, not only in the Ukraine and Estonia, but also in London, that other hotbed of Russophobia. Those Russophobe bobbies nabbed Phillips for violently disrupting a Georgian Embassy exhibition commemorating the 2008 Russian invasion.

One would think that no decent British journalist would spring to Phillips’s defence, and one would be right. For the British journalist who does defend him is Peter Hitchens.

He describes HMG’s sanctions on Phillips as “spiteful [and] despotic”, since they “rip up his most basic freedoms under Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, which forbid punishment without a fair trial before an impartial jury.”

Phillips, according to Hitchens, “has been punished without trial for expressing views which the state does not like.”

Does the British government do that sort of thing? I’m quaking in my Timberlands, for hardly a day goes by that I don’t express views the state doesn’t like. I expect you to bring me food parcels when I end up in gaol.

I’ve looked up the documents so dear to Hitchens’s heart and found no stipulation that they should act as a suicide pact. I’ve also looked at Britain’s history and discovered that fundamental liberties, such as due process, are always put on hold at wartime.

An enemy propagandist is as dangerous as an incoming enemy missile, sometimes even more so. He must be stopped by any means available, and if that can only be done by purely administrative methods, then so be it. I do hope that, after the war is over, Phillips will find himself in the dock.

Hitchens’s affection for British legality is deeply touching, and it would be even more so if it weren’t merely a smokescreen for his devotion to the same cause Phillips is devoted to: Putin’s fascism. Just scan my pieces over the past 10 years and you’ll find a whole Thesaurus of quoted protestations of Hitchens’s love for what he calls “the most conservative and Christian country in Europe.”

Basically, he has been saying exactly the same things as Phillips (see above), but taking care not to froth at the mouth as violently as his protégé does. He is, after all, a mainstream hack.

Logically then, since Hitchens doesn’t regard Russia as an enemy, he describes Phillips’s effluvia not as enemy propaganda, but as a courageous expression of dissident views. Implicitly that confers reflected glory on Hitchens himself, who likes to portray himself as a maverick bravely swimming against the tide of majority opinion.

However, when majority opinion is anti-fascist, compulsion to be original is morally defunct and intellectually feeble. In wartime, it may also be illegal, and both Phillips and Hitchens should pray that Britain is never at war with Russia officially – as she already is unofficially.   

No, the word in question isn’t ‘socialism’. It’s not ‘capitalism’ either. Nor is it ‘economy’. It’s not even ‘atheism’. And no, it isn’t ‘government’. I’ll give you a hundred guesses and you still won’t come up with the right answer.

I’m sure each of the words I’ve mentioned will have its champions, as will any of the hundred guesses you may make. But none of them will have the impact and poignancy of the simple preposition ‘despite’.

This unprepossessing word, as used by The Times, is worth a thousand pictures. But I shan’t hold you in suspense any longer. Here’s the sentence, or rather the sentence fragment, in which this voluminous word appears:

“… Jacob Rees-Mogg, once considered for levelling-up secretary despite [!!!] his Eton education and southwestern constituency…”

My emphases may be a bit over the top, but I can’t let your attention wander away from the two syllables spelling one civilisational disaster.

The implication is Mr Rees-Mogg would be a good candidate for a cabinet post if he had better educational and geographical credentials. Now, any British reader would be alert to the implications, but the outlanders among you may want some elucidation. A quick look at Wikipedia won’t help.

It’ll simply tell you that Eton is one of the oldest and best public (meaning private) schools in Britain. As my friend Will Knowles, who was sacked by Eton for teaching that some differences between men and women do exist, will testify, the school has gone woke.

But then what school hasn’t? In relative terms, Eton still has a good claim to being the best boys’ school in the country.

Moving on to the geographical reference, Wikipedia will probably tell you that Mr Rees-Mogg’s constituency is in a rather upmarket rural part of Somerset. At the risk of venturing a guess unsupported by statistical evidence, I’d suggest that most Britons would rather live there than wherever they reside at the moment.

So where does ‘despite’ come in? If anything, one would think ‘because’ would be the more appropriate preposition.

Anyone who’d think that is deaf to the triumphant shouts of a victorious modernity. The word ‘despite’, as used here, is the smirk on the face of a victor accepting his enemy’s capitulation in the class war.

Had Mr Rees-Mogg grown up at a council estate in the depressed Toxteth area of Liverpool, gone to the local comprehensive and ended up representing some inner-city ghetto in Parliament, he’d be unobjectionable. As it is, he may be considered as a candidate only ‘despite’, not ‘because’.

It has to be said that Mr Rees-Mogg does nothing to offset his unfortunate CV. He looks as if he was born with a Savile Row suit grafted onto his skin, and he sounds the way a Savile Row suit would sound if it could talk.

Even worse, he doesn’t bother to conceal his pious Catholicism, which is wrong on more levels than one finds in a Toxteth tower block. You see, it’s perfectly fine – possibly even preferable – for a government official to be an atheist, provided he is a Protestant atheist.

Of the 55 prime ministers Britain has had, just one was a Catholic, and Boris Johnson only converted because he was besotted with his latest bride. (Tony ‘Anthony’ Blair converted to lapsed Catholicism only after the end of his tenure.) Unlike Rees-Mogg, he isn’t known as a devout Christian of any kind.

So yes, going to Mass every Sunday ushers in another ‘despite’. Doesn’t Rees-Mogg know that a church is strictly for hatching, matching and dispatching? No, evidently he doesn’t.

I am pretending to have fun here, but this is only what Gogol described as “laughter through tears of sorrow”. A nation is moribund where a well-educated, cultured and wealthy politician is deemed suspect specifically because he is well-educated, cultured and wealthy.

One would think that our political class is so teeming with talent that it can afford to introduce any idiotic selection criteria and still have an effective government. It can’t.

In the recently published list of the prospective candidates for the likely Truss cabinet, Rees-Mogg was the only white man. The rest were women, ethnic minorities or both.

I’m not saying that such groups can’t produce great statesmen – of course they can. But the likelihood of this heads down towards zero if they are chosen strictly, or even mainly, because of their sex or race.

Since Mr Rees-Mogg is untested in a top cabinet post, I don’t know if he has the makings of a statesman. He may or may not, and there is only one way to find out.

But if I knew nothing about British politics and still had to appoint a cabinet on general principles only, I’d say that men like Rees-Mogg are a better group to choose from than any other.

But then I’d choose my leaders because of their culture and education – not despite it.

Russians are these days adding a literal meaning to normally figurative expressions. The two I have in mind are ‘falling out’ and ‘Did he jump or was he pushed?’.

This linguistic rumination is prompted by the news that yet another critic of Putin fell out of a window to his death.

According to Russian state media, Ravil Maganov, chairman of Lukoil, Russia’s second largest oil company, committed suicide. Considering that no note was found and there was no evidence that Mr Maganov had ever contemplated such a drastic act, one has to commend the Russian police on the lightning speed with which they solved the incident.

Neither they nor the journalists were deterred by the rather bizarre method chosen by Mr Maganov. First he checked into a hospital for a routine medical, obviously wishing to make sure he was in good enough health to negotiate the pearly gates.

Having been reassured on his medical condition, he then jumped out of a hospital window. Such are the vagaries of the mysterious Russian (or, in his case, ethnically Tartar) soul. A pragmatic Westerner would have spared himself the trouble of bureaucratic check-in and instead found a window closer to home.

Just a fortnight earlier, Maxim Rapoport, another Russian businessman critical of Putin in general and of the bandit raid on the Ukraine especially, fell out of his apartment window in Washington DC. Could it be that both he and Maganov took the honourable way out because they could no longer bear the guilt of their opposition to the sainted leader?

Rapoport’s case stands out among the recent defenestrations and other suicides committed by Russian businessmen. After all, he had nothing to do with the hydrocarbon industry.

Maganov, on the other hand, was the sixth major energy executive shuffling off this mortal coil by a daring jump in recent months. Some of the others took their whole families with them, on the fair assumption that they too were guilty by association.

The burden of guilt is one possible reason for suicide. The other is the burden of too much knowledge. This dovetails with the topic of my yesterday’s obituary for Gorbachev.

When ‘Micky Envelope’ presided over the demise of the Soviet Union, he was busily monetising all the Party assets. They were hastily converted into roubles and then into wagonloads of US dollars – exchange rates no object.

The mechanics of the op were handled by the KGB, specifically its financial wizard Col. Veselovsky. But the overall supervision was provided by Nikolai Kruchina, head of the Central Committee administration, reporting to Gorbachev personally.

Kruchina’s principal Western liaison was Robert ‘Cap’n Bob’ Maxwell, whose little girl is currently doing time for sex trafficking. Between them those two operators accumulated a wealth of knowledge, the burden of which, to quote loosely from the Book of Common Prayer, proved intolerable.

As a result, Kruchina fell out of his office window in August, 1991, and Maxwell fell out of his yacht two months later. Suicide was the ruling in both cases, naturally.

A sense of fairness compels me to acknowledge that Russia doesn’t hold exclusive rights to defenestration. The Czechs have a fine history of it too.

Thus both the Hussite War in the 15^th century and the Thirty Years’ War in the 17^th were triggered by defenestrations in Prague. (In fact, the second episode gave rise to the word ‘defenestration’.) But to give the Czechs credit for honesty, neither incident was put down as suicide.

More recently, the Czech foreign minister Jan Masaryk fell out of his office window in 1948 to ease his country’s transition to the dictatorship of the proletariat, or specifically Stalin. Since Masaryk was slow on the uptake when it came to grasping the attendant benefits, he fell out with the communists, to continue our journey through the land of puns.

Even in the Soviet Union defenestration has a distinguished history, especially as a method of dealing with defectors. Thus the celebrated naval commander Fyodor Raskolnikov first fell out with Stalin in 1938 and then, having defected to France, out of a Paris window in 1939.

Lest you may think Vlad is merely an epigone, a great statesman isn’t necessarily one who comes up with a wealth of original ideas all the time. As often as not, he merely evaluates historical experience, chooses its best parts and adapts them judiciously to current needs.

Current needs must call for a spate of suicides among Russian energy executives and other uppity moguls, and Vlad’s ears are finely attuned to hear the clarion calls of the Russian grassroots.

A word of advice though. Whatever you do, don’t apply for a top position with a Russian energy company. The job seems to be too taxing by half, especially if you fall out with Putin.

When Mikhail Gorbachev, who died at 91 on Tuesday, was First Secretary at Stavropol, he was known by the nickname above (Mishka konvert in Russian).

That was a reference to the way he did business in one of the most corrupt Soviet provinces, the clearing house for the contraband flowing from the Caucasus to Moscow. His wife Raisa was different: she liked her bribes in the shape of egg-sized gems, not densely stuffed envelopes.

The criminal operation was so massive that it had to be underwritten and largely run by the KGB, with whom Gorbachev had to work hand in glove. That’s how he must have come to the attention of Yuri Andropov, then KGB head.

Andropov liked what he saw: a former collective farmer with the gift of the uncultured but contagious gab. Gorbachev could drive his platitudes home with the same skill he had applied to driving a combine harvester in his youth.

The boy had a bright future, and when Andropov became General Secretary he brought the largely unknown provincial apparatchik to Moscow. There Gorbachev was quickly hoisted to the post of a Central Committee secretary. Thereby he filled a vacancy left by the sudden and untimely death of Fyodor Kulakov, his predecessor at Stavropol.

Moscow buzzed with rumours that Kulakov, 60, a young man by Kremlin standards who had never had a day’s illness in his life, had a little help on the way to his maker. But then the rumour mongers would look at Andropov’s steely eyes peering at them from his photographs, shudder and shut up.

Clearly chosen as heir apparent, Gorbachev continued to do the KGB’s, and personally Andropov’s, bidding. Thereby he steered Russia onto the road eventually leading to Putin and the current carnage in the Ukraine.

Yes, I’m familiar with the nil nisi bonum adage. But it shouldn’t apply to historical figures, especially those who undeservedly enter Western hagiography.

Historical figures belong, well, to history. They aren’t your friend Nigel, your colleague Kevin or your neighbour Tony. Gorbachev’s personality skewed his actions, his actions skewed history and, amicus Plato and all that, his career must be properly analysed and understood. If as a result of that exercise he emerges closer to demon than saint, then so be it.

Gorbachev means different things to different people. But for me his salient point is the illustration he provides to the West’s chronic inability to understand Russia, accompanied by ignorance and refusal to learn.

Thus the nausea I experienced in the late 1980s, early 1990s as a result of the emetic Western triumphalism still hasn’t quite subsided. Nor will it do so soon, aggravated as it is by the panegyrics for Gorbachev gushing over the past 30 years and especially now, in the fawning obituaries.

Gorbachev delivered Western victory in the Cold War. Liberal democracy triumphed, which – according to a particularly inane neocon – effectively ended history. Gorbachev saved the world from a nuclear Armageddon. He was a true champion of liberty, democracy, humanism and marital love. He set Russia on the road to freedom and prosperity. He ended the Afghan war. He single-handedly demolished the Soviet Union and pulled down the Berlin Wall. He enabled the West to get fat on the peace dividend. HE WAS THE ONE MARGARET THATCHER COULD DO BUSINESS WITH.

And look, he and his wife were refined, cultured people, so much unlike the previous Soviet leaders and their lumpy spouses.

This claim was first made the moment the Gorbachevs graced the West with their presence, leaving a trail of Raisa’s American Express receipts behind them. When the din reached Russia, educated people couldn’t believe their ears. The Gorbachevs were about as cultured as Coronation Street characters, and Mikhail couldn’t string two grammatical sentences together.

That’s about the size of it, although I haven’t read every obituary and hence must have left out some of Gorbachev’s towering achievements. All of them are as bogus as his supposed refinement.

True enough, some dramatic things happened on his watch. But we must avoid the well-known fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc – after this, therefore because of this. Most of those things happened not because of Gorbachev, but in spite of him, in spite of his desperate attempts to preserve the Soviet Union.

Much as I hate the I-told-you-so style of prose, so popular with a certain Mail columnist, over the past 30 years I’ve been writing that the much-vaunted glasnost and perestroika, both associated with Gorbachev, merely amounted to a transfer of power from the Party to the KGB.

In fact, the whole operation was charted by Beria, who, though as evil as his Politburo colleagues, was smarter than all of them. In fact, Beria was arrested and summarily executed after he tried to explain the facts of life to his doctrinaire partners in crime.

The Soviet Union, he said, couldn’t keep up with the West economically and therefore militarily. Yes, Lenin was right that sooner or later we’d hang the capitalists, but we can’t do that unless the capitalists give us the rope – in other words, help us modernise our economy to make it more competitive.

To make sure they do so, we must paint a rosy picture of liberalisation. How far can we go down that road? As far as it takes. Disband collective farms. Allow some private enterprise. Even encourage some free speech, naturally under our control. Let Germany reunite. In short, launch another gigantic disinformation op for which the Cheka has always been famous. And then, once the capitalists have strengthened our economic and military muscle – then, comrades, and only then we’ll strike.

That soliloquy was delivered just a few months after Stalin’s death, and his geriatric heirs almost suffered apoplexy there and then. Where was Marxism-Leninism in that plan? Where was ideological purity? Beria was arrested on the spot and hastily dispatched to kingdom come.

But, as the standard Bolshevik eulogy went, our comrade is dead, but his cause lives on. Beria’s cause survived within the KGB, an organisation staffed with people trained to express their evil pragmatically, rather than ideologically.

Andropov picked up the relay baton and passed it on to Gorbachev, whom he nominated as his dynastic successor. And so, after a short-lived interim tenure of another senescent apparatchik, Gorbachev took over as General Secretary in 1985.

He was a clever man by the abysmal standards of his Kremlin accomplices. So was Andropov. So was Beria. But even clever men can make stupid mistakes, and the KGB relay baton proved too slippery for them to keep hold of.

What they didn’t realise was that the Soviet system was too ossified to survive any reform. The blood of the 60 million people murdered by the Bolsheviks in their own country, and many more elsewhere, was coursing through the hearts of survivors and their families.

The moment Gorbachev began to loosen the reins, the horse started bucking. There was a real danger it might bolt.

Gorbachev felt perplexed. He was a career communist apparatchik, not only trained but viscerally predisposed to act the type. Thus, when the Chernobyl meltdown happened, he reacted the way any of his predecessors would have done: he lied.

Had the winds not blown radiation towards northern Europe, he would have denied the tragedy to his dying breath. As it was, Swedish Geiger counters caught Gorbachev red-handed, and he owned up.

When the Soviet Union began to creak at the seams, unable to keep pace with Reagan’s arms race, the constituent republics smelled their chance. Popular uprisings broke out, and again Gorbachev reacted true to form – with punitive Spetsnaz raids.

Hundreds of people were killed in Vilnius, Tbilisi and Baku – and the world rejoiced. Just hundreds? Not hundreds of thousands? Not the millions Stalin would have killed? Hail Gorby the humanist.

When the Baltics turned westwards, Gorbachev did all he could to prevent Georgia and Moldova from going the same way. To keep those republics on a leash, if a longer one than before, he systematically provoked internecine conflicts there, in Transdniestria, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In fact, Putin’s 2008 attack on Georgia was a continuation of Gorbachev’s policy.

Having squeezed the toothpaste out of the tube, Gorbachev desperately tried to push it back in. But that proved impossible. Control slipped out of his hands: nations at the outskirts of the evil empire rose in revolt.

By 1989 the bandwagon had gathered so much momentum it could no longer be stopped. When the Romanian dictator Ceaușescu tried to push a stick into the wheel spokes, he and his wife were riddled with bullets. Gorbachev got the message: if he wanted to keep himself and Raisa in one piece, he had to jump on the bandwagon, rather than trying to put the brakes on.

This he did with so much alacrity that the West was taken in. In the process he had to relinquish his power to the KGB, first de facto and then de jure. The KGB was the only Soviet institution flexible and farsighted enough to know that the First Law of Thermodynamics hadn’t been repealed.

The evil Soviet energy hadn’t disappeared. It had merely transformed into something else. And they, KGB officers, could channel it into new conduits. Yes, Beria, Andropov and their underlings had miscalculated. But even their miscalculations had worked out fine – that’s what genius is all about.

Russia might have lost her empire, but those marginal nations aren’t going anywhere. Let the West pour billions into Russia, making her great again – meaning inspiring universal fear. Meanwhile, the new ruling class made up of KGB officers, organised crime figures and the former Komsomol nomenklatura, will enjoy the best the West has to offer.

By accepting Beria’s and Andropov’s relay baton, Gorbachev sent Russia on a mad race to the finish line, with Putin running the last leg. In his last years, Gorby assumed the role of senior statesman, living in Florida, running his multi-billion foundation, occasionally offering mild criticism and avuncular advice to the new lad.

And the odd gesture of support, naturally. Thus Gorbachev supported the Russian invasion of the Crimea in 2014, the first act in the ongoing bloodshed. That hardly made the news in the West. Gorby was after all the Liberator, the Democrat, the star of the Pizza Hut ad.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” wrote George Santayana. But remembering the past is no use in the absence of a proper understanding of it. Gorbachev proves that this understanding is sorely lacking in the West, certainly as far as Russia is concerned.

That could be his important legacy, but only if the lesson were properly learned. But it isn’t. Instead Gorbachev is mourned as the man who handed the West victory in the Cold War. Doesn’t seem like a great victory now, does it?

P.S. Down below there is a link to my piece of 23 May, 2016. Having re-read it, I’ve realised I said many of the same things then. One can only hope that repetition is indeed the mother of learning, not of senility.

Ever since Augustine taught that war must be condoned if it’s just and condemned it if it’s not, Christian doctrine has frowned on indiscriminate pacifism.

However, the present Pope has revived it to justify his implicit support for Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine and his explicit hostility to the West.

After all, any influential person who claims that aggressor and victim are equally to blame for bloodshed is effectively working for the aggressor. This, no matter how many bien pensant shibboleths he lays as a smokescreen.

Alas, the pontiff is barely visible through the billowing smoke of his empty words full of moral equivalence (which is an oxymoron if I’ve ever seen one). For example, this is what he had to say last Wednesday about Russia’s aggression in general and the death of Darya Dugina in particular [the emphases are mine]:

“I think of the children, of the many dead, of the numerous refugees – many of them here in Italy – of the multitudes of the wounded and the multitudes of the orphaned children, Ukrainian and Russian. Orphanhood has no nationality, they have lost a father or a mother – Russian or Ukrainian… I think of that poor girl killed in Moscow by a bomb exploding under her car seat. It’s the innocent, the blameless who are paying for the war. Let’s ponder this reality and say to one another: war is madness. And those who profit from the war and arms trade are criminals murdering mankind.”

I’m not aware of any, or at least many, Russian mothers killed in the current war, which is fought exclusively on Ukrainian territory. It’s not Russian cities, hospitals, schools, churches, theatres and residential areas that are being indiscriminately bombed – only the Ukrainian ones. Nor do I think the invading Russian army has in its ranks many women with children.

Russian fathers are indeed dying, but only because they’ve come to conquer, murder, rape and loot their peaceful neighbours. Their demise is tragic for their children, but it takes moral blindness to equate their plight with that of the Ukrainian children left orphaned in their thousands and homeless in their millions by a savage aggressor.

Saying under such circumstances that “orphanhood has no nationality” is crass to the point of being cynical, an effect multiplied by the munificent cant. And “that poor girl” Darya was far from “innocent” and “blameless”.

Whatever we may think of the manner of her passing, she and her father (who probably was the intended target of that car bomb) have agitated for war over the past decade at least. To quote from the book His Holiness must be familiar with, they have sown the wind and are now reaping the whirlwind.

Any Christian is duty-bound to pray for the salvation of Darya’s soul, but that’s a far cry from mentioning her in the same breath with those orphaned Ukrainian children. They are the ones who are truly blameless and, if we disregard original sin for a moment, innocent.

The statement that “war is madness” is factually incorrect, intellectually shallow and morally suspect. Considering that there has hardly been a year in history without a war raging somewhere in (or all over) the world, I’d say war is the norm rather than a psychiatric deviation from it.

But lumping all wars together means that His Holiness doesn’t differentiate between, to use a random example, Argentina attacking sovereign British territory and Britain defending it. Or, closer to the matter in hand, between Russia’s bandit raid on the Ukraine and the Ukraine’s heroic resistance to it.

Such indiscriminate, blanket humanism is in fact moral relativism masquerading as moral absolutism. One expects better from the Vicar of Christ.

As for the last sentence in the pontiff’s soliloquy, this, I’m afraid, is his recurrent theme. Its overtones are unmistakable.

Since Russia is using arms of her own manufacture, it’s Western countries who have to be the criminals profiteering from selling arms to the Ukraine. But, unless His Holiness possesses information denied to us poor mortals, we are giving arms to the Ukraine, not selling them.

That makes it an act of charity rather than a commercial transaction, and this charity costs the West a lot, both directly, in the face value of the supplies, and indirectly, in the skyrocketing cost of some commodities. If the West has selfish motives, they certainly aren’t commercial in nature.

And how is that “murdering mankind”? Those weapons are targeting Russian invaders only and, contrary to the claims made by Putin’s propagandists, the world isn’t exactly co-extensive with Russia.

The theme is indeed recurrent, but at times His Holiness improvises some variations. Asked a few months ago how he felt about Western supplies of arms to the Ukraine, the Pope said he didn’t really know because the Ukraine is “too far”.

One would have expected his moral judgement to leap over the 800 miles separating the Vatican from the Ukraine, but the Pope did know one thing for certain: “What’s clear is that the country is used as an arms testing site. Wars are fought to test the weapons we have created.”

Right. So the Hundred Years’ War was fought for the sole purpose of testing swords, lances and longbows. One wonders how widely His Holiness has studied such matters, how deeply he has thought about them  – and how well he is familiar with the true reasons for the on-going conflict.

Yet West-baiting comes from the soul, not the mind. Hence the Pope once vouchsafed to Corriere della Sera his view that Russia’s attack on the Ukraine was caused by “Nato barking at Russia’s doorstep”. His Holiness wasn’t sure that “Putin’s wrath was provoked”, but he had no doubt that it was “facilitated”. The difference is too subtly nuanced for my understanding.

Christians, especially Catholics and most especially Ukrainian Catholics, rely on the Pope for moral and spiritual guidance. In view of his comments on Russia’s bandit raid, I’m not sure how long this reliance will last.    

Traduttore, traditore, goes the old Italian saying. To translate is to betray.

This phrase both identifies and illustrates the immensity of a translator’s task. Its English version conveys the meaning of the original, but misses out on the alliteration and rhythm.

Now imagine a coruscating novel of 142,000 words, where every sentence is written in idiosyncratic vernacular and every page teems with untranslatable aphorisms. Add to that countless cultural allusions making little sense to foreign readers, and you’ll know why Gogol’s Dead Souls can never be properly rendered into English.

Nor can Dickens easily go into Russian. Back in the early 1960s, every self-respecting Russian family had (if not necessarily read) a 30-volume collection of his works adorning their bookshelves. The translation was practically word for word, which rendered the books dull and barely readable.

That showed the shortcomings of the so-called ‘literal school of translation’, which is so faithful to verbatim phrasing that it ignores its style and often even its meaning. The other school preaches ‘adequate’ translation. Its aim is to produce in the target language the stylistic effects of the original. On balance this is a better idea, provided it works, which it doesn’t very well with many books and not at all with some others.

So far I’ve been talking strictly about prose. Multiply the difficulties by any factor you choose, and you’ll begin to grasp the problems of translating poetry – or for that matter poetic prose.

There have been notable successes, such as some translations of Pushkin into English and French. Also, Bunin’s translation of Longfellow is one of the few examples of every original word preserved without damaging the poetry. Neither does Pasternak’s Shakespeare lose much in Russian, which isn’t to say it loses nothing. (For the sake of rhythm, the Russian Richard III offers merely half his kingdom for a horse, not the whole shebang.)

This brings me to the hardest task of the genre: translating Scripture. Enter Lancelot Andrewes (d. 1626), bishop, scholar and poet, who during the reign of James I oversaw the translation of the Bible into English.

His team didn’t work in a vacuum: they relied heavily on the earlier work by William Tyndale (d. 1536). He had translated good chunks of the Bible before being burned at the stake for his trouble – his effort was indeed a burning offence at the time.

Tyndale worked from Hebrew and Greek originals, and also from the Latin Vulgate translation. His work formed the basis of Myles Coverdale’s first complete English translation of the Bible, which in turn acted as reference for Andrewes and his friends.

What they produced is in my view the finest translation of the Bible into any language I know. I’m also willing to take a stab in the dark and bet that the King James Version is also the finest such translation even into the languages I don’t know.

It’s also a sample of the most beautiful, poignant and poetic English prose ever. Which is why C. S. Lewis thought it’s no good.

His arguments against using the KJV, and in favour of using modern translations, in today’s churches are so persuasive that I find myself nodding even though I disagree.

I could paraphrase his arguments, but C.S. Lewis was perfectly capable of speaking for himself: “The truth is that if we are to have translation at all we must have periodical re-translation. There is no such thing as translating a book into another language once and for all, for a language is a changing thing.”

Beautiful and solemn? Of course the KJV is. But that’s why “we must sometimes get away from the Authorised Version, if for no other reason, simply because it is so beautiful and so solemn. Beauty exults, but beauty also lulls… we may only sigh with tranquil veneration when we ought to be burning with shame or struck dumb with terror…”

The original Greek of the New Testament, writes Lewis, was the language of the streets, not of sublime poetic prose. That stands to reason, considering that of the four evangelists only Luke was an educated man, and of the epistle writers only Paul.

Hence rendering the New Testament in the language of sublime poetic prose is bad precisely because it’s so good. This also runs the risk of misunderstanding.

“Does the word ‘scourged’ really come home to us like ‘flogged’?” asks Lewis. “Does ‘mocked him’ sting like ‘jeered at him’?”

In other words, wonderful though the KJV is as literature, it, according to C.S. Lewis, is a bad – what my Russian professors would have called ‘inadequate’ – translation. We must have new translations from time to time, to keep up with a changing language and a diminished capacity of modern worshippers to understand archaic words.

Now, I regard C.S. Lewis as one of my teachers of both English style and Christian apologetics. Yet in this case I disagree with him, or rather both disagree and agree.

It’s true that a translator’s task isn’t to improve the original but to render it ‘adequately’, to use the term of my professors of literary translation. If the original speaks in a rough-and-ready dialect, then so must the translation.

And yes, language is indeed a living thing and words often swap their old meanings for new ones. However, living, especially these days, comes precious close to dying.

Thus we have versions of the Bible aimed exclusively at particular groups. One renders the commandment “honour thy father and thy mother” as “don’t dis your mum and your dad, it ain’t cool.” In the same version “thou shalt not kill” comes across as “don’t waste nobody”.

C.S. Lewis didn’t see this version but, had he lived another 30 years, would he have condoned it? If not, where did he draw the line in his quest for up-to-date, easily understandable Scripture?

Would he have abandoned the Book of Common Prayer phrase “with this ring I thee wed” for the modern version “this ring is a symbol of our marriage”? His own ear for English was so finely tuned that I find that hard to believe. But he also had such a splendid mind that his arguments are hard to dismiss.

But they can be countered. Yes, language changes, as does everything else. Yet, to borrow the logic of the argument from contingency, this both necessitates and proves the need for a factor of immovable constancy.

Language changes, writes Lewis irrefutably. But that doesn’t mean that liturgical language must follow suit and keep pace. Lancelot Andrewes realised that, which is why the KJV speaks in an English people didn’t speak in the streets of Jacobean London.

The way I was taught to translate was to look at a paragraph and keep looking until I’ve memorised it. Then I was to push the book aside and write down what that paragraph meant for me, the effect it had produced. That done, on to the next paragraph.

Scriptural translation requires more textual precision, granted. But is it possible that Lancelot Andrewes, and Tyndale and Coverdale before him, did precisely that? They kept looking at the Greek (and Hebrew) text until their eyes hurt. Then they pushed it aside and wrote down what the text meant for them.

The effect was so explosive that they could only express it in a prose of sublime and solemn poetry, thereby rejecting the prescriptions of my professors of literary translation and, alas, C.S. Lewis. Then again, God is the first and last source of all beauty, and those men were so close to Him that His Book must have lived within them as eternal truth, not just text.

A personal lament if I may: having converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism years ago, I desperately miss the KJV (and the Book of Common Prayer). This is the version I always quote from – not just because it’s the most beautiful one, but also because that was the first Scripture I knew.

If I can’t have it, I’d rather have St Jerome’s Latin Vulgate than any of the modern translations into English. But that choice is as scarcely available as, these days, the choice of the KJV in Anglican churches.

I don’t think the beauty of the KJV has ever lulled me into complacency, although I’m sure that C.S. Lewis was right to say that it had such an effect on others. Nor have I ever had any trouble understanding any of the archaisms. Adding beauty to a translation is a sin, but it’s more forgivable than subtracting beauty.

Lewis’s view, expressed whenever he spoke to novice priests, was that Scripture shouldn’t be instantly accessible only to educated people. That’s true, but surely it’s a priest’s task to educate his flock, regardless of the educational qualifications of every parishioner?

Scriptural texts should unite, not put asunder (which is one reason I’m in favour of Latin Mass). Yet people can come together at different levels, and my preference is for it to be as high as possible. Having said all that, Lewis made some good points that are worth pondering at length.

The rumour that, should Liz Truss become our next PM, Sir John Redwood may enter her cabinet is the best political news I’ve heard for a long time.

He would add something to our frontline politics that has been missing for decades: strength of character and intellect. Sir John is often likened to Margaret Thatcher, but the past politician I think he most closely resembles is Enoch Powell, if perhaps in a lighter version.

The same logical mind, a similar education (Redwood holds a PhD in history), the same passion breaking through the veneer of intellectual aloofness, the same slightly wild glimmer in his eyes – sometimes it sounds as if Enoch Powell came back as John Redwood.

Just like Powell, Redwood is staunch in defence of his principles, which by itself makes him different from his colleagues, most of whom don’t seem to possess any discernible principles whatsoever.

Sir John lacks the lightness of touch that many consider de rigueur for popular appeal. The assumption people are supposed to make is that a great statesman lurks behind the mask of louche flippancy. In fact, there is usually nothing behind it but louche flippancy.

We aren’t going to have a real conservative government no matter who moves into Number 10. But at least we’ll have one real conservative in it, should Sir John get into the inner sanctum.

The only other cabinet post he has had before was that of Secretary of State for Wales in John Major’s government. There he committed a bit of a gaffe at the Welsh Conservative Party conference, where he tried to mime singing the Welsh anthem whose words he didn’t know.

Well, at least Redwood made an effort to pretend, which isn’t his core strength. More important, in 1995 Redwood returned to the Treasury the unspent £100 million of Wales’s block grant. I can’t think offhand of any other politician who would voluntarily relinquish his budget for public good.

Sir John is a consistent Thatcherite who, as far as I know, has never deviated from that allegiance. Thus he fought tooth and nail against Britain’s entry into the EU under Major, and just as passionately for her to leave it under Cameron.

Unlike so many Brexiteers, Redwood objects to the very concept of the EU, not just Britain’s membership in it. He correctly regards that contrivance as an artificial construct bound to implode sooner or later, burying its members under the rubble. That’s why Redwood once remarked that leaving the EU was “more important than which party wins the next election or who is the prime minister.”

Again, that’s not a typical politician speaking, is it? That statement was a pledge of allegiance to the national good even at the expense of his own career. Would Boris Johnson ever say something like that? Would Sunak? Would Truss?

Sir John stood for Tory leadership a couple of times in the 90s. He would have been my first choice hands down, but no one asked me.

Those who were asked were put off by exactly the same qualities as those that appeal to me: substance over charisma, commitment to principles rather than to populism, conservatism barely diluted with compromises to socialism, some deficit of flexibility, the tendency to speak about serious matters seriously, without adopting the persona of a jolly-hockey-sticks Englishman.

Perhaps Sir John doesn’t appeal to our thoroughly corrupted electorate – he is too different from others to come across as a modern politician. But God knows we have enough politicos happy to offer voters change for a £9 note, all in threes. They are so ready to steer the country towards disaster that a heavy foot on the brake wouldn’t go amiss.

It’s perhaps an indication of the lamentable state of our politics that someone like John Redwood comes across as an exception. His standard should be about average in a government of statesmen. In a government of self-serving spivs, it’s way above top drawer.

P.S. One hears shrill calls for peace in the Ukraine, mostly coming from people who had salivated over Putin for years until realising that such excretions would peg them as either madmen or Russian agents. But translation is in order: when these chaps talk about peace in the Ukraine, what they really mean is surrender of the Ukraine.

When Liz Truss was asked whether France’s president Macron was friend or foe, she replied, “The jury is still out”.

That predictably got Manny’s culotte in a twist and he said testily that “the United Kingdom is a friendly nation, regardless of its leaders, sometimes in spite of its leaders.”

Friendly, yes. But with reservations, which go beyond Manny treating Brexit as a personal affront to be avenged, annoying though that is.

I often tell our French friends, some of whom are politicians, that I like everything about France except her politics.

They dismiss such statements with indulgent, good-natured smiles, as if both expecting les anglo-saxons to be slightly eccentric and at the same time not minding such quirks. But the way I use the word ‘politics’, it transcends the mechanics of putting together and running a government.

Politics to me defines the power balance between the government and the governed, which in turn defines the amount of liberty in the country. And French liberté isn’t quite like our liberty – just like their argent isn’t exactly like our money.

All modern states have a claim to our income that would have been unthinkable in times pre-modern. At base, they believe that our money really belongs to them, and it’s up to them to decide how much of it we should be allowed to have.

When he was Chancellor, Gordon Brown inadvertently expressed that philosophy in so many words. “Our government,” he said, “lets the people keep more of their money.” You can let someone keep anything only if it belongs to you. So thank you, Gordon, for spelling it out.

This approach is common to all modern states, but there exist individual differences in how much the central state can get away with. And in France it can get away with a lot more than in Britain or America.

That goes to the core of the country’s political history and the mentality that history has produced. Without exceeding the scope of a short article, let’s just say that the French accept more power on the part of the central state than the British (or Americans) will countenance.

The word ‘statism’ conjures up largely negative connotations in the Anglo sphere, especially among conservatives. By contrast, the French word étatisme, while not always laudatory, is hardly ever pejorative.

You may think that all this is theoretical. So it is, until the theory is put into practice to affect your life. Two examples, one having to do with friends of ours, the other with us personally, illustrate this point well.

Our friends had a house in the South of France and paid about €3,000 a year in property tax. Then some five years ago, the authorities began charging them an extra €500 as tax on some garden structure that didn’t in fact exist.

Rather than refusing to pay, our friends dutifully coughed up the money, and then asked the local notary what they could do to get it back. He did some research and informed them that the tax authorities would only stop the charge if they investigated the matter. However, they preferred just to have the money rather than spending precious man-hours on superfluous groundwork.

The wrangle went on for five years, as did the annual €500 shakedown, and finally our friends refused to pay. Not a problem: the government simply took the money out of their account. That extortion only stopped when they sold the house and closed the bank account.

What happened to us is as typical – and as hard to imagine happening in Britain. We’ve had an account at the branch of BNP-Paribas in our village for 22 years. As happens with all local tradesmen, we’ve established personal ties with our bankers, making life more pleasant (agréable).

Then a couple of months ago, BNP informed us that the accounts of all British homeowners in France were being transferred to a central Paris branch. It’s all for our own good, we were told. Now we’ll be able to talk to English-speaking bankers, and isn’t that wonderful.

Well, no, it isn’t. We have no difficulty transacting all our business in French, although we realise that not all Britons in France feel the same way. In that case it’s good for them to have the choice of moving their money into the hands of Anglophone clerks – just as it’s good for us to have the choice of keeping our account where it has been for 22 years.

Except that we haven’t been given the choice. We were simply told where our money was going, and thank you very much for doing business with us. Penelope, in her incarnation as Pénélope, has fired off an indignant letter to BNP, knowing in advance that we have no recourse whatsoever.

No big deal one way or the other, you might think, and on some level you’d be right.

Yet both examples I’ve chosen illustrate something that goes deeper than the exact location of our bank account or even the extra tax our friends were unfairly made to pay. The two stories point to the kind of relationship between the state and the individual that’s fundamentally alien to les anglo-saxons.

What bright spark decided that Britain and France could comfortably snuggle up together within a single state? Whoever it was, and one could name several culprits, knows little about the two countries’ political history – and understands even less.

Vive la différence, for sure. But let’s never forget that la différence does exist – and that it’s fundamental to the point of being irreconcilable.  

Fr Pavel Florensky, the polymath philosopher murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1937, wrote a remarkable book The Pillar and Ground for the Truth.

In it he argued that thinking in trinitarian categories is an ontological property of the human mind. The argument is long and involved, featuring things like the three spatial dimensions, three basic grammatical tenses, three phases of biological life, three movements of the sonata form and so forth.

I like to apply this argument to the observation that most political slogans of modernity are tripartite, consisting of three words or phrases rhythmically arranged. Since the wielders of such lines were intractably secularist (we are talking about modernity after all), they couldn’t have been accused of appealing to the religious feelings of their flock.

Of perhaps they did, cynically. But Florensky’s observation is more plausible. The one-two-three view of life – including political life – indeed has to be an intrinsic, innate property of the human mind.

Thus, American “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness”, French “liberté, égalité, fraternité”, Russian “vsia vlast’ sovetam” (all power to the Soviets), German “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer!”. And even a less prominent modern regime came up with “work harder, produce more, build Grenada”.

Florensky’s argument was of course that this tendency was an unconscious mimicry of the Holy Trinity, and I am sure he was right. But some regimes consciously mimic not the Trinity but one another, as a way of establishing an ideological lineage.

This brings me to Leonid Slutsky, the Russian politician who is the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party. That is one of those political misnomers that never cease to amuse me.

For rather than being either liberal or democratic, the party, whose founder Zhirinovsky died earlier this year, has been downright fascist from its first days. Zhirinovsky’s pet idea was for Russia to sprawl all the way to the Indian Ocean. Ever since the Ukraine proclaimed its independence, he agitated for an invasion, ideally facilitated by a nuclear barrage.

The party has always drawn about 20 per cent of the electorate, but until recently it was regarded as strictly loony fringe. Its function was to enunciate and promulgate extreme ideas that Putin’s ruling party felt too cautious to proclaim openly.

Now the Russian LibDems are in the ideological mainstream of Russian politics, which paradoxically makes them redundant. Who needs marginal parties when Putin himself has adopted the same ideas and put them into practice? Hence Slutsky has become, even more than Zhirinovsky was, strictly a Putin lackey, an underling to a boss.

Consequently, though Slutsky inherited the leadership of the party, he has little political weight of his own. It remains the same party, though, and that Slutsky emphasised the other day at the memorial service for Darya Dugina.

He delivered a speech of which both Vlads, Putin and Zhirinovsky, would have been proud. He ended it by shouting: “One country, one president, one victory!”

Fr Pavel Florensky vindicated. The tripartite form is very much in evidence, as is the implied mimicry. Yet I very much doubt, for a variety of reasons, that Slutsky’s inspiration came from the Holy Trinity. He took his cue from more secular antecedents.

Here I’d like to refer you to any documentary footage of Nazi rallies, especially Leni Riefenstahl’s masterly 1935 film Triumph of the Will. If you’ve seen it, you must remember Rudolf Hess screaming hysterically, “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer!” – one nation, one state, one leader.

It’s obvious that Hess, second only to Hitler in the Nazi party, is Slutsky’s role model. That raises an inevitable question: Who performs the same role for Slutsky’s boss?

The only PM readily associated in my mind with dancing, dirty or otherwise, is the acronym for evening – not for prime minister.

It turns out my mind with its association is hopelessly misogynistic. Or at least that’s the natural inference to draw from the coverage of Sanna Marin, the Finnish prime minister.

That good-looking married woman of 36 caused three contiguous viral outbursts on social media. The first was a few days ago, when a video of her dancing at a night club made the rounds.

Miss Marin, otherwise known as Mrs Räikkönen, was doing a creditable, and credible, imitation of a pole dancer, except she was writhing around muscular young men, not a chrome stake. In between two sessions of fully clothed vertical intercourse, she was also photographed sitting in the lap of some of those men, none of whom was Mr Räikkönen.

Then a photo was leaked, showing two bare-breasted women French (Finnish?) kissing at the prime minister’s official residence in Helsinki. They were covering their breasts with the ‘Finland’ sign that normally sits on Miss Marin’s desk. It was hard not to detect a touch of mockery in their modesty, something I’m sure the fiercely patriotic Finns must have found distressing.

One of the semi-naked women was the model Sabina Sarkka, a former Miss Finland contestant. She also co-starred in another video, showing her dancing with Miss Marin at a different night club, their legs intertwined, their crotches grinding against each other.

When the scandal broke, Miss Marin admitted that perhaps the lesbian kiss at the Finnish equivalent of the White House or Number 10 was “not appropriate”. However, “nothing extraordinary happened.”

She meant she didn’t have affairs with any of the male poles she rubbed against, nor indeed with Miss Sakka, with whom the rubbing was even more suggestive. Moreover, Miss Marin even volunteered to take a drug test, which came back negative. That’s all right then.

Anyway, those pieces of visual entertainment caused a bit of a stir in Finland and elsewhere. Doubts were raised about the propriety of such behaviour by the leader of a Western country soon to become a Nato member.

Before I tell you what I think about it (as if you didn’t know already), let’s see the comments by two young female journalists in The Times.

The title of the first article, by Charlie Gowans-Eglinton, Dirty Dancing? Yes, We Millennial Women Party Like Sanna Marin!, is as self-explanatory as her take on the same-sex dance is predictable.

Anyone who finds anything wrong with it has to be a rank misogynist. “If the Finnish prime minister were a man,” she writes, “swaying arm in arm with a male friend, I doubt it would be such big news.”

Unlike, evidently, the cosmopolitan author, I don’t know enough about Finnish mores and hence can’t take exception to her comment about them. However, my imagination is vivid enough to extrapolate into a more familiar environment.

So let’s imagine Mr Biden on the dance floor at a Washington disco, grinding his primary sex characteristics against those of a Chippendale stripper. Yes, I know the image doesn’t come naturally, but please make an effort. And while you are at it, also picture Mr Johnson doing the same thing with the same male stripper at Annabel’s.

Splendid. Now imagine that stripper French-kissing another man in the Oval Office, his nether regions covered with the official US roundel – or, if you’d rather, the same scene occurring at Number 10, mutatis mutandis.

Miss Gowans-Eglinton is confident that such hypothetical scandals would be taken by the gaping public in stride, as no big deal. Clearly, her imagination is nowhere near as vivid as mine.

For I can just see those screaming 100-point front-page headlines in our newspapers, and that’s just the broadsheets. Either gentleman’s tenure would last approximately 10 minutes after the first headlines broke – which is how long it would take their speech writers to draft a hasty resignation statement.

Would Miss Gowans-Eglinton then be complaining about misandry? Would anyone?

Certainly not Olivia Petter, the author of the second article. Why, she herself behaves like Miss Marin, so there can be nothing wrong about it: “My friends and I always dance intertwined at nightclubs, with arms flung around necks and waists, bums bumping.”

Naturally, only international Colonel Blimps can take issue with such innocent fun: “The reactions to Marin’s night out feel wildly misogynistic… The sad truth is that the criticism of Marin is just another symptom of our sexist culture, one that is obsessed with policing female behaviour.”

Not guilty, m’lord. I suffer from no such obsession because my fixations tend to have a touch of realism about them. If young women choose to act like that, they are entitled to do so – tempora mutantur and all that.

All I can offer is a regret that even solidly middle-class girls see pole dancing and lesbianism as sufficiently cool to imitate aesthetically, if not physically. I also regret that even their everyday clothes leave little to imagination, thereby switching off the most erogenous of all zones. Then perhaps times are so hard that even previously wealthy women can’t afford enough cloth to cover their breasts.

Fair enough. If normal girls in their 20s and 30s choose to act and dress in a blatantly sexual (or homosexual) manner, it’s their business, not mine. Hey, I’m even man enough to admit that I occasionally steal the odd glance at the secondary sex characteristics on display. So complaining too loudly would be ever so slightly hypocritical.

However, the prime minister of a major country isn’t a normal woman of 36. The seminal difference between her and our two hacks is that they represent no one but themselves – and, alas, the paper lending its space to their New Age bilge.

Miss Marin, by contrast, represents not just her sexy self but an important and generally attractive nation. This is a high honour that ought to confer some dignity on its recipient. It should also remind her that she no longer belongs to herself or her immediate family. She belongs to the country that has chosen her to serve it.

By accepting that post she also accepted the responsibility to grow into it. That involves making the right choices and pushing them through parliament – this much goes without saying.

But it also presupposes some decorum of appearance and demeanour, for its absence may suggest to people that the holder has no respect for the post into which the people have put her. That means she has no respect for them as a whole, reserving that feeling only for similarly ‘cool’ youngsters.

“Policing female behaviour”, which so vexes Miss Petter, is passé now, one has to accept that, even if the word ‘unfortunately’ flashes through one’s mind. But a nation has every right to expect certain standards of behaviour from its elected representatives.

And yes, I realise how retrograde this sounds. Words like ‘decorum’, ‘decency’ and ‘propriety’ have no place in a modern lexicon. They belong in what Trotsky called ‘the dustbin of history’ – next to the words ‘discernment’ and ‘taste’.