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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’.

The Duchess of Kent seldom makes public statements. Over the past decades she has been about as loquacious as your average Trappist nun.

Yet HRH is neither a Trappist nun nor any other kind. This she proved by declaring her love of rap, especially Eminem and Ice Cube.

“I’ll listen to anything,” she said. “I just love music… If it makes my feet tap then I’m happy.”

This is a startling admission for an 89-year-old aristocrat, who was musically trained as a girl, dreamed of performing at Carnegie Hall and only narrowly missed out on a place at the Royal Academy of Music.

That sort of background should have taught her that real music doesn’t make one’s feet tap. At the risk of sounding pompous, music’s function is to lift the soul and remind it of its origin. Its receptors are head and heart, not the organs located lower in the body.

That’s not to say that feet-tapping music has no place in life. But it belongs in a dance hall, not Carnegie Hall. Listening to such music – especially rap – on the wireless, which HRH apparently does all the time, instantly marks the listener as a cultural savage.

“I’ll listen to anything” is a popular statement, next to “I like both classical and pop.” No doubt that’s true: some classical tunes are quite catchy and almost as likable as pop. Alas, no one capable of listening to pop can appreciate real music – no matter how much he likes it.

The difference between liking and appreciating may be illustrated by wine. Most people would like a great wine, say Château Pétrus. But it would take an extremely refined, cultured and experienced palate to appreciate that wine at its own level, giving it its due. In the absence of such faculties, a bottle of Chianti would do just as well, if not better.

Yet the effort made by the budding oenophile is nothing compared to the dedication, application, learning and innate taste involved in appreciating a great piece of music.

Such appreciation demands a lifelong effort in attuning one’s sensibilities to the highest achievements of our culture. I maintain that no one who has made the requisite effort would be able to listen to rap – or any kind of pop – for five seconds. That kind of diabolical noise would give him an acute physical pain.

I wonder if HRH actually listens to the lyrics of the music that makes her feet tap. I hope not, for otherwise one would have to think that Her Majesty’s cousin is married to a woman who is either woefully barbarian or completely gaga.

Even as we speak, I close my eyes and imagine HRH rocking to the sound of Eminem, her feet in high gear:

Bitch, I’m a player, I’m too motherfuckin’ stingy for Cher
Won’t even lend you an ear, ain’t even pretendin’ to care
But I tell a bitch I’ll marry her, if she’ll bury her
Face on my genital area, the original Richard Ramirez
Christian Rivera
‘Cause my lyrics never sit well, so they wanna give me the chair

Push another button, and in comes her other favourite, Ice Cube:

Left my nigga’s house paid
(What)
Picked up a girl been tryin’ to fuck since the 12^th grade
It’s ironic, I had the brew, she had the chronic
The Lakers beat the Supersonics
I felt on the big fat fanny
Pulled out the jammy and killed the punanny
And my dick runs deep, so deep
So deep put her ass to sleep
Woke her up around one
She didn’t hesitate to call Ice Cube the top gun
Drove her to the pad and I’m coastin’
Took another sip of the potion hit the three-wheel motion

In the charitable spirit for which our royals are justly famous, the Duchess spreads her cultural attainments wide. For the past 13 years, she has been teaching music at a Hull comprehensive.

I don’t mean to sound snobbish, but Hull strikes me as a good place for evangelising Eminem and Ice Cube. Doing so with local children must be dead easy. Teaching them to appreciate, say, St Matthew’s Passion is a harder task, and one clearly beyond someone who listens to Eminem on the wireless.

Does ‘Mrs Kent’, as the modest duchess is known at the school, try to teach any other music or just rap? I also wonder why abusing children sexually is against the law, but violating them aesthetically, scarring their brittle sensibilities for life, isn’t.

I think HRH should be placed on the aesthetic offenders’ register and barred from teaching music or anything else. Due process would demand a prior hearing, which I suggest should be accompanied by the songs cited above. That’s prima facie evidence if I ever saw it.

Russian fascism has a long and distinguished history, almost coextensive with Mussolini’s and Hitler’s.

After the revolution, some two million Russians ended up in Europe, mostly in Germany, France and Czechoslovakia. Just about every political movement found its adherents within that group, and fascism was among the most prominent – especially in Germany.

In 1922 the Russian fascists Sergey Taboritsky and Pyotr Shabelsky-Bork murdered the exiled liberal politician Vladimir Nabokov, the writer’s father. But the inspiration behind them came from Gen. Vasily Biskupsky.

Biskupsky was a rich man in his own right, but – if persistent rumours are to be believed – he also had access to a chunk of the Romanovs’ money, which he channelled into the war chests of various German extremists. One of the grateful recipients was the party later known as the NSDAP – the Nazis.

In addition to helping finance Hitler’s rise to power, Biskupsky founded and ran the Aufbau (Economic-Political Society for Aid to the East), where one of his employees was Alfred Rosenberg, a bilingual Balt educated in Petersburg.

(A funny digression if I may. Back in 1973 I was tangentially involved with Radio Liberty in New York, where I met a sixtyish Russian who during the war had been a lieutenant in the Abwehr.

Shortly after publishing his sinewy pamphlet Der Untermensch, where the Slavs were described as the eponymous subhumans, Rosenberg came to inspect the Abwehr headquarters. My acquaintance asked him, in German, “Am I subhuman too?”

“No,” replied Rosenberg. “You can’t be subhuman because you are wearing the uniform of a German officer. “How about my wife?” Rosenberg thought for a second and switched to Russian: “Idite na khui” – go fuck yourself. I told you he was fully bilingual.)

The principal theoreticians of Russian fascism were émigré writers Ivan Shmelyov and Ivan Ilyin, Putin’s favourite philosopher. Through his more hands-on disciples in Germany and their capable friends like Rosenberg he influenced German Nazism, not just the Russian variety.

But of course cultural, historical and philosophical inputs into Nazism were many, which is the case with all successful ideologies. Marx, for example, identified his major influences as French utopian socialism (such as Saint-Simon’s and Fourier’s), Hegel’s dialectics and the classical economics of Smith and Ricardo.

The Nazi river was also fed by many tributaries, and Dugin has followed that fine tradition. His ‘philosophy’ is a mishmash of Orthodox Third Rome messianism, Russian fascism of the 1920s-1940s and the Eurasian movement of the same period.

The latter deserves a special mention because it was one of the prongs of the GPU (KGB’s precursor) op to divide and destabilise the Russian émigré community, which at the time was still seen by the Soviets as a serious threat. Another prong was the Changing of Signposts movement, whose proponents tried to convince the émigrés that Bolshevism shouldn’t be resisted because it embodied the Russian national idea.

The Changing of Signposts was created and tightly controlled by the GPU, but the pre-existent Eurasian movement was something they merely piggybacked. As a result, it became another conduit for Soviet propaganda that eventually succeeded in emasculating the emigration as a viable force.

Dugin created his ideological synthesis by adding to the elements I mentioned above a sort of mysticism based on the death cult. Observing death, he wrote, is a key formative experience for one’s personality and soul.

That should have provided a silver lining to the cloud of watching his daughter’s car explode before his own eyes. Dugin is doubtless bereaved, but his soul has emerged so much the better developed.

Our papers didn’t cover the response to the assassination on Russia’s official TV channels, which is a pity. I’ll try to fill in that gap, not to deprive you of the entertainment value.

“If some scum in Russia is gloating, he should be sent down!” screamed Vladimir Solovyov, affectionately nicknamed ‘Putin’s Goebbels’, the host of a talk show that’s on eight hours every day.

He then added, somewhat incongruously, I’d even say incomprehensibly, that the fitting response would be to “create sharashki”. These were GULAG setups, where imprisoned scientists and engineers were made to toil for the Soviets. Solzhenitsyn described one such in his First Circle. Both Tupolev, of the Tu planes fame, and Korolyov, the driving force behind the Soviet space programme, used to be inmates.

Then Solovyov and his guests turned their attention to Britain, which had incurred their displeasure. “Britain,” explained one of the guests, “plays the role of a European ISIS”.

“If the US wants to talk to us,” he continued, “the entry ticket must be the reining in of Britain. Denuclearisation. Outside administration. The aim should be a total obliteration of this ugly hotbed of perversion, paedophilia, drug addiction and other filth.”

Britain isn’t the only country slated for obliteration, for the Ukraine is still kicking. Thus, another guest suggested that Darya Dugina ought to be commemorated by naming one of Kiev streets after her – after the Ukraine has been brought to heel.

“After the murder of Darya Platonova [Dugina], it’s our duty to annihilate that instrument of evil, to annihilate the Ukraine as a terrorist state. We can’t coexist with the Ukraine on the same earth. It’s impossible to coexist with infernal evil.”

That strategy was neatly, if somewhat illogically, summed up by another guest: “Whoever is behind the murder of Darya Dugina, the Ukraine must be eradicated.”

This last phrase is repeated on Russian TV so often that the Roman senator Cato (d. 46 BC) must feel envious, wherever he is. He only repeated “Deletando est Carthago” (Carthage must be destroyed) a few times, not hundreds of times every day.

You see what you are missing by your inability to follow primary sources? Our own talk shows sound positively insipid by comparison. Where’s the passion, the fervour, the unrestrained vocabulary, the calls to genocide?

Verily I say unto you, if you want to be properly entertained, learn Russian. It may not be the only language for verbal fun, but Chinese would be harder to pick up.

Thus wrote the late Darya Dugina, who was the other day blown to pieces by a car bomb probably meant for her father, Alexander.

Or if you’d like the full robust quote: “We began this operation too delicately and kindly, while at times it’s necessary to be more cruel and less forgiving… Each [Ukrainian] city must have its own tribunal, like the one in the Hague, to investigate the crimes of these subhumans. For they aren’t human any longer.”

One assumes that the Ukrainians stopped being human on 24 February, 2022, when the Russians launched their bandit raid on the country. Or perhaps they became simian creatures in 2014, when the Russians started the war by annexing the Crimea. One way or the other, Darya is living, or rather now dead, proof of the proverb about apples and trees.

The theme of racially inferior species isn’t exactly new in modern history, so neither Darya nor her daddy can claim ownership of the idea. But they have added some indigenous twists to the seminal works by Hitler, Rosenberg, Streicher and Goebbels.

Alexander Dugin isn’t so much a creator as a synthesiser. He expertly weaved together the ideas of the Third Rome dating back to the 16^th century, those of the GPU-inspired Eurasian Movement of the 1920s and German Nazism to create the supremacist fascist ideology Putin has adopted as his own.

With one minor exception: Putin has so far shunned Dugin’s virulent anti-Semitism, satisfying himself with the other aspects of his ‘philosophy’. Yet something tells me that oversight will soon be corrected – anti-Semitism is never too deep beneath the surface in Russia, and it always comes out sooner or later, especially when things aren’t going too well.

Both Dugins have agitated for war against the Ukraine since the time it was barely a twinkle in Putin’s eye.

The father has led the way since at least 2008, nominating the Ukraine as the first step on the way to creating a Russia “from Dublin to Vladivostok”. But the daughter echoed his ideas faithfully in her own writing, acting as a sort of Streicher to his Rosenberg.

The question is, whodunit? “Is it possible that Darya was killed by Russians?” asked one of my readers yesterday, to which I replied that, “Everything is possible.”

One possibility, that the Ukrainians did it, is vehemently denied by both the Ukrainian government and the Russian friends of that long-suffering nation.

Describing the explosion as a terrorist act, head of the Ukrainian President’s administration, Mikhail Podolyak, said: “I stress that the Ukraine definitely had nothing to do with this because we aren’t a criminal state like the Russian Federation, and especially not a terrorist state.”

I agree that the Ukrainian state isn’t criminal but, if it were indeed responsible for the assassination, I disagree that it would be a crime. There is a war going on, and the Dugins are legitimate targets.

The precedent was established at Nuremberg, where both Rosenberg and Streicher were hanged in 1946, even though neither of them had played a hands-on role in the Nazi crimes. Yet those crimes were committed in the name of an ideology, whose creators and promulgators were judged to be criminals themselves.

Those who think that the Dugins, along with other creators and champions of Russian Nazism, should be off-limits for attacks must also believe that Rosenberg and Streicher should have been spared at Nuremberg. Looking at some British Putinistas I know, I wouldn’t be surprised if they believed just that. But this isn’t a view shared by decent people.

The Israelis are known to have assassinated a few physicists involved in Iran’s nuclear programme. I have no moral problem with that: those who create physical weapons for an evil regime to annihilate a civilised nation are legitimate targets. However, I’d suggest that creators of ideological weapons are equally culpable – if not more so.

If I were a spokesman for the Ukrainian government, I’d happily take the credit for the assassination even if someone else was responsible. It’s important for the Russians to know that war isn’t just happening somewhere else, that they themselves can be targeted.

The inhuman monstrosity with which the Russian Nazis are conducting their bandit raid is fully comparable, in kind if not quite yet in scale, with the crimes committed by the German Nazis 80 years ago. That was seen as sufficient justification for the Allies to bomb Germany flat. Taking this as a precedent, bombing a car carrying an ideologue of Russian fascism strikes me as both just and strategically desirable.

But yes, of course it’s possible that Darya was killed by the Russians. They’ve used false-flag terrorism on Putin’s watch before when, for example, the FSB blew up several residential buildings in Russia as a pretext for starting the second Chechen war.

Putin might have sensed that the hatred of Ukrainians his propaganda had cultivated is losing its febrile pitch. Hence he might have counted on the assassination as a way of ratcheting up popular enthusiasm for the war, perhaps even for the use of nuclear weapons. That would be a fit answer to Darya’s lament about the Russians being “too delicate and kind” in the Ukraine.

It’s also possible that the Dugins fell victim of internecine squabbles within the ruling regime, which isn’t an unusual occurrence there. Murder is a reliable technique of political debate in Russia, especially over the past 20 years.

Then of course Dugin père has extensive business interests in addition to his ‘philosophy’, which is a factor of danger in a country whose economy is criminalised from top to bottom. It’s quite possible he was supposed to be ‘whacked’ for purely economic reasons. It’s even possible that Darya was targeted specifically, for whatever reason, such as sending a message to her father.

But all such possibilities lack the poetic justice of Ukrainian involvement. Taking the war into Russia, if only on a limited scale, is a proper response to the ghastly crimes being committed by Russian Nazis in the Ukraine.

P.S. Dugin, by the way, is the darling of assorted Western (including British) extremists who see him as a kindred soul. Those who still feel that way after all the Russians have done should be hit by personal sanctions — just like the Dugins were.

That would be denying their right to free expression, but then so was the execution of Lord Haw Haw. Enemy propaganda shouldn’t be confused with free speech.

If we can’t get a diverse RAF, we don’t want any. Air Vice-Marshal Maria Byford, chief of RAF staff personnel, didn’t say this in so many words. But that’s what I infer from what she did say.

Under her guidance, the RAF “slowed down”, in effect paused, its recruitment. For the most important target the RAF is being set up to hit is diversity.

Our air force is committed to having 20 per cent women and 10 per cent ethnic minorities, which has sent recruitment into a tailspin. Too many white men apply for the job, and that just won’t do.

And there I was, thinking that in this context diversity meant a judicious mix of fighters, bombers and ground-attack aircraft, all with a proper logistical support. Turns out it doesn’t. It means the same in the RAF as everywhere else: sheer suicidal madness inspired by a pernicious ideology.

Byford doesn’t see it that way though: “I want the best people. So I need the best people to join to achieve the best they can during their service career and we get… what we need from an operational capability perspective.

“And if I can include more women and more people from different backgrounds in that, I think I have a better service in the long run. We are unashamed about doing that because I think that’s a good thing.”

Good to know. We don’t want our top brass to be ashamed of what they are doing. But Byford should still be ashamed of the twaddle she sees fit to mouth. Because what she effectively says is that women and ethnic minorities have a better “operational capability” than white men.

Or do I misunderstand the logic? Let’s see.

Thesis: Byford wants “the best people… from an operational capability perspective”. Antithesis: According to her, “more women and more people from different backgrounds” will deliver “a better service in the long run”. Synthesis: So I didn’t misunderstand. The more women and ethnics, the better will the RAF be operationally.

I seldom argue with professionals, assuming they know better. But in this case that simple syllogism is so counterintuitive that some historical proof of it wouldn’t go amiss.

Looking at the RAF’s finest hour, the Battle of Britain, women were part of it, but not the most spectacular part. As members of the Air Transport Auxiliary, they flew aircraft between factories and airfields.

Women flew neither Spitfires into dog fights nor Wellingtons on bombing raids. They made an important contribution, but I doubt Air Chief Marshal Dowding would have looked kindly on any suggestion that RAF women should do the same jobs as the men.

There was indeed some ethnic diversity in the RAF at the time. Two fighter squadrons were manned by Polish pilots, and two more by Czech ones. All four fought heroically, but that’s hardly the kind of diversity Maria Byford has in mind, is it? After all, both Czechs and Poles are shamefully, irredeemably white.

In other words, today’s RAF is playing the same destructive ideological games as are all other government services. But the consequences can be much more devastating.

Thomas Sowell, the most trustworthy writer on such matters, shows, figures in hand, that public officials are more likely than business executives to indulge in discrimination, negative or in this case positive.

After all, the latter stand to gain or lose their own money (or that of their shareholders) if their recruitment goes awry. Their economic survival depends on getting the best possible staff, and even the rankest racists among them are likely to suppress their innermost feelings for the sake of the bottom line.

(I myself hired some talented youngsters who bore the stigmata of modernity that made my stomach turn. But then I thought of my pension fund and controlled the gastric reactions.)

Not so with government officials, writes Sowell. Their personal risks in recruitment are so low as to be non-existent. They are happy to play ideological games because that gets them on the right side of their likeminded superiors. And if they hire unqualified candidates, who cares? The public will pay.

All that is highly persuasive. But the RAF, or any other branch of the military, isn’t like the Ministry for Women or The Arts Council, is it? Our national survival depended on it in 1940 and it may do so again, sooner than we think.

Keeping the RAF understaffed because racial and sex quotas can’t be met is borderline treasonous – especially now, when Article 5 of the Nato Charter may be triggered at any moment.

Both America and Britain have informed Putin that a deliberate radiation leak from Europe’s largest nuclear power station at Zaporozhe will have exactly that effect. And the Russians are close to weaponising the station. Speaking of that area, Gen. Vasilyev, head of Russia’s radiation, chemical and biological defence, said: “We’ll have here either free Russian territory or scorched desert.”

That means the RAF may soon be flying combat missions against the deadliest enemy of our country and civilisation – just like in 1940, but with even more at stake in our nuclear age. We want the most qualified pilots in those cockpits, not those who satisfy the criteria of woke racism.

Maria Byford ought to be cashiered with immediate effect and put into a job where she could do less lethal harm. May I suggest directorship at Tate Modern?

P.S. On the subject of Article 5, ultranationalist journalist Darya Dugina, 29, was yesterday killed near Moscow by a car bomb meant for her father.

Alexander Dugin is the principal ideologue of Russian fascism who advocates a Russia “from Dublin to Vladivostok”. He is close to Putin who sees him as his inspiration. Both Alexander and Darya have been under personal sanctions in the West for years, but it looks as if the Ukrainians have administered their own tranche.

Asked to comment on the incident, Prophet Hosea said: “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”

Can you imagine Holland without the windmills, France without the cathedrals, Italy without the opera, Britain without the warm beer or Russia without the cold vodka? I can’t.

But then neither can I fathom America’s Bible Belt without the Bible. Take it away, and the belt turns into a noose, throttling all life out of that part of the world.

Yet Texan schools don’t seem to share such qualms. Following parental complaints, many of them have withdrawn that subversive book. It’s regarded as unsuitable for children to see.

One vigilant parent objected to the Bible because of its “sexual content, violence including rape, murder, human sacrifice, misogyny, homophobia, discrimination, and other inappropriate content.” Splendid. Not a word out of place, each is unimpeachable.

The only problem I have is with that wishy-washy “other inappropriate content”. I would have been tempted to spell it out, extending the list to include incest, cultural appropriation, drunkenness, meat eating and cruelty to animals. But fine, even the offences mentioned are sufficient reason to put Bibles in a tidy stack and burn them in every schoolyard.

Now, when I lived in Texas (1974-1984), a school district in receipt of such a complaint would have forwarded it to the institution for the criminally insane. The next day that concerned parent would have received a visit from the men in white coats equipped with a stretcher, a straitjacket and a tranquilliser syringe loaded for horse.

Those were reactionary times though. These days no one questions the parent’s sanity, nor the legitimacy of his complaint. His deranged diatribe is seen as a call to action even in Texas. One wonders what more liberal states, such as Massachusetts or California, will come up with, what or whom they may wish to burn.

Much as I am appalled by such no-holds-barred hostility to Christianity, boosted by most refreshing ignorance of it, I’m not especially concerned. Christianity has survived Pelagianism, Arianism, Docetism, Catharism, the Enlightenment, Marxism, Bolshevism, Darwinism and whatnot.

I’d suggest we’ve made it into the semi-finals, and I don’t think anything concocted by those Texan educators or other clinical idiots will hold us back. A much greater danger is presented by otherwise intelligent atheists, who magnanimously acknowledge the social utility of Christianity.

In my view, such people are dangerous because they can use their talents and intelligence to peddle to the masses a perverted idea of Christianity without overtly rejecting it. Such thinkers as David Hume or, later, Tolstoy, or, even later, Max Eastman or, later still, Roger Scruton are deadly in this respect, much as they are commendable in others.

They all reduce Christianity to a moral system, while denying everything supernatural in it, everything that has anything to do with faith. Tolstoy even took the trouble of producing his own Gospel by merging the known four into one and cleansing it of everything he regarded as nonsensical, such as the Incarnation, the Resurrection, Virgin Birth, the Eucharist, the miracles. (For details, see – if you can find it – my book God and Man According to Tolstoy, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.)

Tolstoy basically defined a Christian as a good man, making one wonder what he needed that term for. Why not just describe a paragon of morality as kind, charitable, honest and so on?

Then, of course, the writer espied with his eagle eye that morality doesn’t change substantially from one religion to the next. After all, none of them encourage people to be beastly to their neighbours, lie, steal and murder. On that basis, Tolstoy issued a redundancy note to Christianity – there’s no point in it if it’s more or less the same as all others.

All those thinkers are seductive, and they seduce their admirers into atheism by asking the wrong question: “Is Christianity good for society?” That way they draw people away from asking the right question, the only one that should matter to a thinking person: “Is Christianity true?”

This is a binary question allowing for only a yes or no answer. Each in turn allows for only one conclusion.

If Christianity is true, then the question of whether or not it’s socially useful is irrelevant. Any intellectually honest man is duty-bound to espouse it first and ponder the social ramifications later.

If, however, Christianity is some kind of protracted hoax, then the same man must reject it, taking his cue from those educational idiots in Texas. Claiming that Christianity is useful anyway is tantamount to insisting that a successful society can be built on the foundation of a lie.

All the men I name-checked were brilliant, as are some of my friends who agree with them. Yet the things I mentioned are so elementary and self-evident that their failure to grasp them is baffling. But only until one has realised something important about Christianity.

Whatever rewards Christianity offers to individuals or societies, it comes packaged with a severe punishment to be meted out to any intelligent atheist trying to interpret Christianity to suit his preconceptions. He instantly stops being intelligent, as if leaving his mind on the way into the argument, only to claim it back on the way out.

“Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat,” was how Dr Johnson Latinised a popular Greek phrase. Those whom God wishes to destroy he first deprives of reason. Only temporarily, in some cases. Permanently, I’m afraid, in the case of those Texas educators.

P.S. The list of likely members of Liz Truss’s cabinet includes just one white man, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and even him only in a minor post. So where’s the diversity in that?  

Petrolhead Jeremy Clarkson knows exactly what education is (rubbish) and what it’s good for (nothing).

For years now he has been posting an annual message of consolation when A-level results come out in August. Some pupils don’t get the scores to make it into a good university, but not to worry.

Clarkson is on hand to shine a ray of hope. The first part of every message is the same every year, with only minor changes of a word or two: “Don’t worry if your A-levels are disappointing. I got a C and two Us, but…”

The second part varies, depending on what part of his vulgar achievements Clarkson wishes to highlight. This year it’s: “…I’m currently holidaying on this boat.”

The boat in question is taking Clarkson and his girlfriend around Saint Tropez. (As an aside, the preponderance of people like him is making our friends sell their Saint Tropez houses and flee to less befouled areas.)

I’m surprised he didn’t add, “…and my girlfriend has long, shapely legs”, so perhaps this is something to look forward to next year. Those things have a monetary equivalent too, and the longer the legs, the higher the price.

Last year, the tail end of the boast was different: “…and I’ve ended up happy, with loads of friends and a Bentley.” In 2020, it was: “…I’m currently building a large house with far reaching views of the Cotswolds.”

This is an upgrade from the 2014 message: “…And I have a Mercedes Benz.” Things must be looking up for Clarkson – in a mere seven years he traded his Mercedes in for “loads of friends and a Bentley.”

He didn’t specify the exact models, but an average Bentley costs some £150,00 more than a high-end Mercedes. I don’t know the price tag attached to Clarkson’s ‘loads of friends’, but I’m sure they are all happy to sit next to luxury vehicles on his shop shelves.

The Top Gear presenter is occasionally amusing, but that doesn’t make up for the subversion he has dedicated his life to fostering. He is one of the most successful promulgators of the philistine heaven on earth: a life wholly signposted by material possessions, of which cars take pride of place.

I like cars as much as the next man, unless of course the next man is Jeremy Clarkson. He has elevated vehicular transport into a philosophy of life, and millions of people gobble it up avidly, McPherson struts and all.

That’s what I hate about cars. For me, they are purely functional machines. I like them to be fast, comfortable, steady around bends and aesthetically pleasing. That’s all. I refuse to detect any transcendent, metaphysical properties in cars, the kind peddled by advertising – and the likes of Clarkson.

I wish that were all they peddled. Alas, their wares also include utter contempt for life of the mind, spirit and beauty, the sort of transcendent cosmos for which universities were supposed to provide a launchpad.

That used to be their role and, at their best, they can still play it, sporadically. But few people these days understand education in such terms – the Clarksons of this world have done their job well.

Most people see university education as the starting point on a road to prosperity, and some degrees don’t disappoint. IT, computer science, engineering, medicine, law all score high in that department.

Humanities, however, are in the doldrums, which is reflected in a number of apt jokes. Such as: “What do you say to a philosophy graduate? I’ll have fries with that.”

To some, considerable, extent this is universities’ own fault. Humanities departments have been turned into indoctrination centres, with Marxism in its various genres acting as the mainstay of most curricula. But the real problem is deeper than just the ideological bias of humanities faculties.

They increasingly attract lefty ignoramuses full of ideological rancour because subjects directly linked with the essence of our civilisation have become marginalised, just like the civilisation itself. That’s why they draw individuals who find themselves at the margins of society and resent it.

The mainstream is formed by those who see life in strictly materialist terms, usually of the crudest type. They are the ones who have made Clarkson rich because he knows how to tickle their most vulgar bits effectively. He is their flesh and blood, and they are his.

And he is right: success defined by Bentleys, yachts and houses with a view doesn’t depend on a university diploma, although it may still help. Why waste years at university, accumulating student debts in the process, when you can do paid apprenticeship at a plumbing company (or, in Clarkson’s case, a local newspaper) and get a head start on an aspiring egghead?

I can confirm that on the basis of my own experience. The only decent living I’ve ever consistently made in the West came from advertising, a field for which I had no educational credentials whatsoever. However, I’d cite this as an example of a life wasted, not one of enviable success.

I have nothing against Jeremy Clarkson. In fact, I find him a charming and capable man who has earned his success, as he defines it. However, I do have plenty against a society shaped by people like him. Someone like John Henry Newman would be my preference, but, well, not in this life.

You must have uttered this phrase at least once in your life. I know I have, and more, much more than once.

But did we really mean it? Perhaps we did, on the spur of the moment. The moment might have bared its spur after we did something nasty, shameful, unkind, something we knew was wrong, something we knew we’d regret later.

Hence the precise way to describe our feelings about ourselves would have been “I hate what I’ve done” or perhaps even “I hate myself for what I’ve done.”

The sentence in the title is shorthand for that, but it’s misleading shorthand. For we tend not to hate ourselves in general. We may not like ourselves very much, but we still love ourselves. After all, though we like for something, we love in spite of everything.

Such love is tantamount to knowledge mixed with hope that things will end up well for us. We may be occasionally nasty, dishonest and rude, but we wish ourselves well regardless.

This simple observation provides a clue to some essential Judaeo-Christian commandments, which otherwise may seem baffling. Take “thou shalt love thy neighbor”, for example.

What, any neighbour? What if he tosses his rubbish into your garden, blocks your driveway with his van, plays intolerable music full blast through the night? How can you love that sad excuse for a human being?

By taking another look at the commandment, is the answer to that. For the form in which it’s usually cited is truncated. The full text of what Leviticus said is actually: “though shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” [my emphasis].

That’s why I started out by trying to understand how we love ourselves. For this is the only way in which we are expected to love our neighbour, figurative or literal – in spite of everything he is or does. We may hate all those things, but Leviticus says, if not in so many words, that we must wish him well in the end.

Here we must define ‘the end’, which means moving from the Old Testament on to the New. For, according to Scripture, just as there is death in life, there is life in death. The ultimate purpose of life is salvation, which gives it a teleological dimension that continues undamaged after physical demise.

Such is the ultimate meaning of a happy end to one’s life: if it’s to be happy, it’s not the end. Thus loving our neighbour only means wishing him ultimate salvation, not shrugging with benign indifference at the awful things he may be doing.

This explains Christ’s embellishment of Leviticus, who only extended love to one’s neighbour. St Matthew records Jesus’s words as saying: “But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.”

To any outsider this commandment sounds counterintuitive, to put it mildly. It also sounds like at least a correction of Leviticus, if not its outright denial. It’s neither though. What Christ said was simply a logical development, taking Leviticus to the next rational step.

The key is in the words “…pray for them…”. Pray for what exactly? That they stop doing those ghastly things to us? Such a prayer would be an exercise in futility, for those reprobates’ actions are a matter of their own relationship with God, not ours.

The only possible thing you could pray for is that, for all the horrible things that man has done, he will be saved in the end. In other words, it’s the same plea you enter not only for your neighbour, but also for yourself.

This explains why treating Christianity as pacifism is a woeful misunderstanding. Christ himself was unequivocal on the subject: “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.”

This means Christ knew that his arrival would be divisive. Some people would accept it, others would turn against them with hatred.

They too ought to be loved, in the same sense in which we love ourselves and our neighbours. But this doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be resisted, with violence if necessary.

Violence is evil, but it’s to be condoned when it prevents greater evil. Moreover, perpetrating such violence doesn’t contradict the commandment to love our enemies.

This is indirectly hinted at in Matthew 10: 28: “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”

The final reckoning is again relegated to life eternal, not life here and now. The worst fate to befall a man isn’t the destruction of his body in this life, say on the battlefield. It’s the destruction of “both soul and body in hell” – which is to say denial of salvation.

This is something a soldier fighting for a just cause mustn’t wish on his enemy even as he tries to kill him. Killing an enemy under such circumstances doesn’t mean not loving him in the sense of wishing him salvation.

This understanding lies at the foundation of the Augustinian (later also Thomist) concept of just war. That’s how some of the greatest minds in history reconciled just war – but only that kind – with the notion of Christian love and the commandments postulating it.

The same argument can be applied to capital punishment, which neither Testament treats as either cruel or unusual. A campaign against it can only proceed from purely materialist premises. That such a campaign has succeeded throughout much of the West proves that much of the West is indeed purely materialist.

A materialist regards as the ultimate tragedy the premature end to physical life, not denial of salvation in life everlasting. An executioner’s axe was seen in Christendom as an instrument of divine justice, which is to say an aspect of divine love.

The judge passing the death sentence, the priest administering the last rites to the condemned man and indeed the executioner prayed God had mercy on his soul. That way they expressed Christian love – not only for the man to be executed, but also for the society he had wronged.

History’s greatest Christian thinker (in my view greatest thinker tout court), St Thomas Aquinas, saw no contradiction between any Christian commandment and capital punishment. Natural moral law stated unreservedly that the state had the duty (and therefore the right) to protect its citizens not only from external enemies, but also from internal criminals. The former might have involved just war; the latter the death penalty, equally just.

Our materialist world equates the abolition of the death penalty with a high moral ground, which is simply wrong. For example, the death penalty was abolished in Stalin’s USSR between 1947 and 1950, which was one of the most evil periods in human history.

Millions of innocent victims were at the time tortured to death either quickly, in Lubyanka cellars, or slowly, in concentration camps. Whole nations were being deported to a slow, but certain, death. But there was no death penalty on the books, to the hosannahs chanted by Western ‘liberals’.

By the same token, the death penalty doesn’t exist in Putin’s Russia, one of the world’s most evil extant regimes. This doesn’t prevent it from murdering people extrajudicially, nor from waging genocidal war.

This is yet another proof of how hopelessly contradictory modern, which is to say, materialist liberalism is. And how logical are Christian dogmas, when one bothers to explore them in sufficient depth.

Both men are black, but that’s where the similarity ends.

One is an Olympic sprinter; the other a sociologist cum philosopher. One is young; the other isn’t. One is named Ricardo Dos Santos; the other, Thomas Sowell.

Now imagine you are a policeman patrolling empty London streets at 3 AM. Both men drive past you in £60,000 cars, and your nose twitches. Which one are you going to pull over?

This is a no-brainer. Young blacks are statistically likelier to offend than whites, but old blacks aren’t. Thus, though both men are racially similar, statistics work against Dos Santos.

But policemen don’t just go by statistical probabilities. They also rely on the evidence before their eyes. They look at a man and match his appearance to the profile of a typical criminal they’ve had to nab many times.

Prof. Sowell just doesn’t fit it, whatever his race. His clothes are conservative, and so is his haircut. Neither does he look especially athletic or aggressive. In fact, he looks like a chap whose only brush with the law has been a parking ticket he got around Cambridge, Mass., in 1976 or thereabouts.

The muscular Mr Dos Santos, on the other hand, sports a cornrow haircut popular in gangsta circles, and our cop has had to chase similarly coiffed chaps through many a dark alley. Another strike against Dos Santos.

I am trying to reproduce the thought process sequentially, but I’m sure things don’t work that way in real life. All that analysis must have flashed through the cop’s mind in a fraction of a second, which was all the time he had to react. He pulled Dos Santos over, while Prof. Sowell kept driving on, definitely within the speed limit.

The situation is partly hypothetical, for as far as I know Prof. Sowell was nowhere near the A40 at that time. But Mr Dos Santos was indeed stopped by police there in the early hours of Sunday. Since this is the third time that has happened to him in the past two years, Dos Santos is going to sue the Met, claiming he was racially profiled.

Profiled he doubtless was, but not just racially. His cultivating a dope pusher’s je ne sais quoi must have had something to do with it as well.

I am sure Mr Dos Santos is an upstanding young man. In fact, once you’ve looked past the first impression, he comes across as one. Then why does he want to look like a gang member?

This is yet another vindication of my frequent observation: the gravitational pull of conformity is these days vectored downwards. Young whites don’t want to look like Jacob Rees-Mogg. They want to look like young blacks, and young blacks want to look like dope pushers on a Sarf London estate.

This is indeed a form of conformism, masquerading as individualism. Those youngsters think they are flouting ‘the establishment’ by refusing to look, talk and act like its members. In fact, they are lemmings, blindly following one another to the cultural precipice.

Mr Dos Santos is understandably irate. I know I would be if a cop stopped me for no good reason (or even with good reason, truth be told). Yet this isn’t what he described as “a harassment thing”. It’s police doing their job – something assorted ‘liberals’ are tirelessly working to prevent them from doing.

And their job involves profiling, trying to match an individual to a certain Identikit picture experience has formed in their mind’s eye. That way they have a better chance at preventing a crime, rather than responding to it post factum.

Unfortunately, this means some innocent black youngsters like Mr Dos Santos are occasionally going to suffer some discomfort. It’s tempting to put this down to the institutional racism of the Met, but that temptation should be resisted.

I’m sure black or Asian officers follow the same profiling pattern. Their suspicions must be triggered by similar factors, and race is only one of them. However, denying the racial aspect of criminality means ignoring facts, which isn’t what cops do – or are supposed to do.

I’m sorry to hear that Mr Dos Santos no longer feels safe driving through London. Perhaps if he made a bit of an effort to look like a law-abiding Londoner, his problem would disappear.

He should use Prof. Sowell as his role model or, closer to our shores, Sir Trevor McDonald. Looking like a gangsta may mean being treated as one.

The actress Anne Heche, 53, has died after driving her car into somebody else’s house at 90 mph.

I’m mildly upset because I liked watching her on screen. That had little to do with Heche’s thespian excellence, for I found her performances rather mannered and histrionic.

But my aesthetic standards leave room for compromise wherever good-looking actresses are concerned, and yes, I know how sexist this sounds. Moreover, moving right along from sexist to troglodyte, every time I admired Heche’s gamin pulchritude, I thought, “What a waste.”

For the actress was a lesbian, although she seems to have been versatile enough in her affections. Her omnivorous sexuality was only objectionable because everyone knew about it, and please don’t accuse me of moral relativism. All I’m saying is that even the strictest moralist couldn’t have objected to Heche’s lesbianism had she kept it under wraps.

But she didn’t. In fact, Heche turned it into a cause célèbre, much to the detriment of her career.

In 1997, when Heche was at her nubile best, she insisted on attending the premier of her film Volcano with her lover, Ellen DeGeneres. She had informed her Hollywood bosses of that intention beforehand, and they were furious.

You do that, they said, and you can kiss your Fox contract good-bye. Millions of dollars were at stake, but Heche valued her principles more. Even DeGeneres tried to talk her out of that attempt at career suicide, but Heche stuck to her guns.

As a result, she lost her contract and didn’t make another studio picture for the next 10 years. She managed to hold on to her role in the 1998 comedy Six Days, Seven Nights, but only because the studio was desperate.

The film had been intended as a vehicle for Julia Roberts, but she had walked off the set. Heche was brought in as a last-minute replacement, and the shooting couldn’t be delayed any longer, lesbianism or no. And Heche’s co-star, Harrison Ford, interceded on her behalf.

All those events unfolded 25 years ago, not an especially long time. But time can be measured not only chronologically, but also historically, culturally and socially. By those standards, 1997 wasn’t just a quarter-century ago. It was a different era, an age when even generally amoral Hollywood still had to take a bow towards conventional decency.

The obituaries praise Heche’s self-sacrificial heroism in her fight for LGBT+ causes. Obviously, had she taken the same stance in 2022, rather than 1997, she wouldn’t have to die to rate gasping plaudits.

If anything, today her career would suffer if she tried to stay in the closet. She’d be roundly castigated for cowardice, careerism and letting the side down. As it is, she is showered with posthumous accolades for courage in the face of reactionary forces.

However, those forces were never as reactionary as all that. Provided people’s private parts remained private, no one cared one way or the other (or both).

Staying with Hollywood, it was widely known that some of the top stars were open to unorthodox amorous options. Greta Garbo, Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Rock Hudson, Lawrence Olivier, Marlon Brando were all homosexual to various extents – at a time when homosexuality was still against the law in many American states.

But those stars lived according to the maxim by that great aphorist, De La Rochefoucauld (d. 1680): “Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue.” They didn’t just play roles; they also played the game.

Hypocrisy has a bad name these days. However, not just civility but indeed civilisation would be impossible without it. Hypocrisy is inevitable when society lives by certain norms of public behaviour (and if it doesn’t, it’s not a society but an aggregate of atomised egoists).

Whatever such norms are, they will always seem too lax to some people and too stringent to others. But as long as they all agree to live by those norms or at least to pay lip service to them, not to flout them too vehemently or openly, society will remain stable.

Amazingly, the shock waves of the sexual revolution still hadn’t quite destroyed civilised hypocrisy by 1997, 30-odd years after the explosion. Now they have, and transmorality has been added to transvestism and transsexuality.

Yesterday’s virtues have become today’s sins, yesterday’s sins today’s virtues. That’s how it has always been with revolutions: the saints of the old regime become the demons of the new one and vice versa. And the accelerating moral and cultural decline of modernity is nothing if not revolutionary.

Hence it’s not surprising that the moral about-face happened. What’s surprising is that it happened so fast, and the story of Anne Heche provides a useful speedometer of the metamorphosis.

Anne Heche, RIP.