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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First a truism: politicians who manage to occupy the centre ground usually win.

This isn’t so much a matter of political philosophy as one of political arithmetic.

For it’s generally believed that about a quarter of all voters are right of centre, another quarter left of centre, and hence twice as many find themselves in the middle as in either extreme.

And now why this truism is meaningless. It would be useful only if the political centre were fixed in eternity, which would also imbue both Left and Right with easily definable boundaries.

But that’s not the case. Rather than being an immovable granite rock, the centre ground is quicksand being pushed and shifted by the mighty winds of the zeitgeist.

This line of thought has been stimulated by the on-going mid-term elections in the US, a country I called home for 15 years, from 1973 to 1988. But, politically speaking, it’s not the same country now.

Then too candidates were desperate to occupy the centre ground. In that sense nothing has changed, and it probably never will. But the quicksand has noticeably shifted leftwards since then.

Back in the 1970s the Democratic Party had a well-defined geographical habitat — it was dominant in the South. The appeal was tribal: it had been the party of the Confederacy during the Civil War.

The Mason-Dixon Line no longer existed as a political divide, but it continued to run through the hearts of Southerners. They could no longer fire cannon salvos at the Yankees, but they could still thumb their noses at them.

Loyalty to the Democratic Party was part of that unhygienic gesture. Yet that didn’t presuppose loyalty to the Yankee Democratic Party, one going back to the 18^th century Tammany Hall machine in New York. That was the party of the New Deal, increasingly moving towards what Americans call liberalism and what is in reality socialism.

That wasn’t the Southern way in the 1970s. The region was inclined towards conservatism and so was its Democratic Party. Hence a large swathe of the Democratic Party in general was rather conservative, certainly as much so as just about any political group in today’s America.

Yet the zeitgeist of the post-Enlightenment West blows steadily in the opposite direction. Just as the North ended up winning the Civil War, so was the Northern part of the Democratic Party steadily winning the war of attrition against the Southerners.

When that tendency became plain for all to see, conservative Democrats began to change allegiance. Since my first 10 years in America were spent in Texas, an example from that state springs to mind first, that of a Democratic politician becoming a Republican because his party moved so far to the left that it left him behind.

John Connally (d. 1993) started out as a typical conservative Democrat. JFK, on the other hand, was a New Dealer. Yet in 1971 he appointed Connally to a cabinet post in his administration, this despite the divergence in their politics. A similar inclusivity is hard to imagine today, isn’t it?

Connally then left the Kennedy administration to become the governor of Texas. In fact, he sat next to Kennedy during that ill-fated ride through Dallas and was wounded by one of the bullets. Before he passed out Connally remembered seeing a chunk of Kennedy’s brain landing on his trousers.

Now our imagination has failed to fathom that political convergence, it’s about to receive another blow. For 10 years later Nixon appointed the Democrat Connally to an even higher cabinet post. Nixon was seen as a conservative Republican, but he evidently didn’t think he and Connally were politically incompatible.

This Connally proved by setting up in 1972 a campaigning organisation called Democrats for Nixon. Put your imagination into overdrive and try to picture a high-ranking Democrat of today starting a campaign under the slogan of Democrats for Trump (or DeSantis, if you’d rather). I can’t, hard as I try.

That such a situation is unfathomable is testimony to the shifting sands of American politics. Zeitgeist blew across the landscape and pushed the quicksand of centre ground leftwards, where it mixed with that leftmost 25 per cent, including what in my day was called the lunatic fringe. As a result, that segment grew in size and influence, not only political but also cultural and, if you will, existential.

The right-leaning 25 per cent may still be there, but the general tendency is to keep them in the margins. This explains the unexpectedly modest gains of the Republican Party in the mid-term elections.

Traditionally, the party in power hardly ever wins in mid-term. Its performance never meets the exalted expectations of the electorate because it never can: the daily grind of political rough-and-tumble defeats ideals hands down every time.

In dispute is only the margin of the ruling party’s defeat, and this depends on all the usual factors, the state of the economy and the personality of the president being the major ones. Immediately below that tier of concerns are such social factors as crime, education, healthcare, immigration and so on.

It’s on the basis of all such variables that most commentators predicted a crushing defeat of the Democrats. After all, the economy is in the doldrums, with inflation running at a 40-year high, the deficit and national debt are leaving the stratosphere for the moon, illegal immigration is bursting through the threadbare border controls, the crime rate is soaring.

And as to the personality of the president, well, you know. Joe Biden, never the sharpest chisel in the toolbox at his best, is showing worrying signs of a cognitive decline as progressive as his policies.

The poor chap confuses his wife with his sister, which raises interesting questions about the intimatemost life in that family. He doesn’t remember what his son died of. He repeatedly meanders on stage trying and failing to find the exit. He confuses countries and states, seldom remembering which is which. He indulges in pratfalls, evoking Chevy Chase’s opening routine in the old SNL. And his son Hunter was allegedly mixed up in financial scandals so dirty that Joe too was sullied head to toe.

Considering all that, it was easy to predict a wipe-out for the Democrats in both chambers. Yet nothing like that has happened. As I write this, the Republicans are on course to reclaim the House by a smaller margin than expected, whereas the Senate race is still on a knife-edge.

This falls far short of the confident and logical predictions. So much so that Joe Biden has declared his intention to run again, a decision likely to turn him from a lame duck to a dead one. One would think that any Republican candidate will wipe the floor with Biden, but it’s hard to be sure any longer.

For nothing in politics is as illogical as it seems. The logic is always there, one just has to be able to discern it.

When the Democratic Party moved leftwards, it took the mainstream of the political centre with it. The zeitgeist is blowing in one direction only, right to left, and that’s where the quicksand of the centre ground is shifting.

Today’s centrist is a 1970s liberal rapidly becoming a 1960s radical. This doesn’t bode well for America and, by ricochet, all of us.

Such is the ineluctable logic of today’s politics, not only in the US but throughout the West. And this is the kind of quicksand that can sweep us all into the sea of troubles.

My sceptical attitude to reincarnation is shaking at its foundation. For I’m struggling to explain in any other way the demonstrable presence of Marshal Zhukov’s soul in the body of a Russian priest.

Zhukov, second only to Stalin in the Soviet high command, was known for his snappy retorts, especially when the value of human life was mentioned even tangentially.

When told that his troops were suffering an inordinate casualty rate, he dismissed the comment with a wave of a hand. “The wenches will just have to give more births,” said the peerless warrior.

Now, Zhukov has his detractors. But hey, à la guerre comme à la guerre, as the French say (in today’s England another spelling would be more appropriate: à lager comme à lager).

Western generals may tend to avoid casualties as much as possible, while their Russian colleagues have always adopted a cavalier attitude to their subordinates’ lives. But no generals can ever match priests in their feelings about the value of every human life – their remit is different.

However, the Russians prove that, though generals can’t be like priests, priests can be like generals, of the Zhukov school of martial thought. So much so, in fact, that one has to revise one’s views on reincarnation.

This convergence is best illustrated by Fr Mikhail Vasiliev, chaplain to the Russian airborne and rocket forces, nicknamed the ‘paratrooper padre’. The other day he was killed by a US-made HIMARS rocket in the Ukraine, thereby proving that what goes around does indeed come around.

For Fr Mikhail served as chaplain on various bandit raids launched by his employers in the Kremlin: Kosovo, Bosnia, Abkhazia, Kyrgyzstan, the North Caucasus, Syria, the Ukraine. You name it – Fr Mikhail was there, blessing every rocket about to destroy another residential building, absolving such little peccadilloes as murder, looting and rape.

All in a day’s work, one would say. Yet so far nothing suggests Marshal Zhukov’s soul found a new home in Fr Mikhail’s body. This, however, will.

Addressing the weeping and wailing Russian mothers whose soldier sons had been killed in the Ukraine, Fr Mikhail allowed his Zhukov soul to shine through. Rather than offering solace, he used the occasion to berate them for not having enough children, mainly, he suggested, because of too many abortions.

This is what he said: “I understand perfectly well that in most cases God has given women the natural ability to give birth to many children. If a woman, fulfilling this commandment of God to be fruitful and multiply therefore refuses the wide array of artificial means of pregnancy termination, then obviously she’ll have more than one baby, in most cases. This means it won’t be so painful and scary for her to part with a son…”

Essentially the holy father suggested that a woman blessed with more than one child would just shrug nonchalantly if one of her sons got killed. “Oh well,” she’d supposedly say, “there’s more where this one came from.”

Can you hear Marshal Zhukov’s voice there? Conversely, do you detect much priestly compassion, which is after all a cleric’s stock in trade? Fr Mikhail sounded more like a crass gunslinger than a worshipper of a God who wept with bereaved mothers.

I number priests of three different denominations among my friends, and I’ve met many others. But I’ve never known one who would respond in that fashion to the anguish of a woman who has just lost a beloved son in an unjust war. And my own observation differs from the padre’s: I’ve known women grieving agonisingly all their lives the loss of a child even if they had others.

Using the occasion for an anti-abortion lecture, much as one may agree with its essence, goes beyond any recognised norms of decency. Such a priest should have been summarily unfrocked, but God chose an extreme form of that censure by using a HIMARS rocket in lieu of His customary lightning.

“Like priest, like parish,” goes the Russian saying. However, on this evidence, the reverse is equally true. “Each nation gets the government it deserves,” quipped Joseph de Maistre on leaving Russia in 1815. Also, the priests, one is tempted to add.

I wonder which body Zhukov’s restless soul will next choose as its home. My advice would be to expand its horizons and look beyond our species. A wolf or a jackal might work.

See if you can complete this sentence: Because of Russia’s bandit raid on the Ukraine and the resulting energy crisis, we must… :

A. … build more nuclear power stations

B. … remove unreasonable restraints on fracking

C. … increase exploration of new oil and gas fields, while intensifying production at existing ones

D. … continue at the same time unhurried and thorough research into other realistic sources of energy capable of fuelling a modern economy

If your answer is any or all of the above, congratulations: you are neither mad, nor stupid, nor Rishi Sunak nor a politician in general. Moreover, you are familiar with the basic logic of causality, something that has created modern science.

Mentioning Mr Sunak in that list of deficient responders isn’t meant to suggest he is incapable of logical inference. He isn’t. And I even suspect that neither is he mad or stupid.

He is, however, a politician with far-reaching ambitions. Therefore Mr Sunak couldn’t have given any of the four answers on offer. Never mind causality, feel the fraudulent modern fads, those that have been built up into unquestionable orthodoxy.

Hence he said something entirely different at the UN climate summit COP27. Actually, immediately after downsizing into the flat at 10 Downing Street, Mr Sunak brought a smile on my face by announcing he wasn’t even going to attend that pathetic talk shop.

He had more pressing issues to contend with, he explained, making my smile even broader. However, it has since transpired that no issue is more pressing than swapping fraudulent platitudes with likeminded spivs… sorry, I mean statesmen.

By sweeping the four logical answers off the table, they have effectively committed the West to perhaps the worst economic crisis in its history. And Mr Sunak added his inflated penny’s worth to that collective suicide note.

“Putin’s abhorrent war in Ukraine and rising energy prices across the world are not a reason to go slow on climate change. They are a reason to act faster,” he said. “We can bequeath our children a greener planet and a more prosperous future…”

Now, climate is indeed changing. It always has and always will. The fraud starts with ascribing that law of nature to anthropogenic factors. Thus, contrary to what Mr Sunak pretends to think, we can’t stop climate change because we didn’t cause it.

There exist hundreds of reasons for it, solar activity being by far the dominant one. However, that activity isn’t linear. It goes up and down – and so obediently do global temperatures.

As you can see, both the Roman and Medieval Warming Periods featured temperatures higher than they are now. And I don’t think the Romans and the Crusaders relied on SUVs for their transportation, nor on natural gas for their heating.

The global warming fraud was perpetrated by largely the same people who back in the 1970s were screaming about an imminent Ice Age. That is, if they had any time left from drawing mushroom clouds above pictures of nuclear power stations and marching under placards saying ‘Down with Capitalism’ and ‘Off the Pigs’.

The UN provided a comfortable home for those well-heeled nihilists, generously funding their pseudoscientific swindles with subsidies and grants. Thus global warming became the first scientific discovery in history made not by scientists but by a supranational political body.

Since most Western media sing from the same hymn sheet, it didn’t take long to sell those wild ideas as facts and suicidal urges as virtue. And, since the Fourth Estate now trumps the other three, it took even less time for Western governments to toe the line.

They are all now committed to eliminating fossil fuels and consequently any possibility of averting a possibly irreversible economic downturn. Never in the history of human folly has so much been destroyed by so few to make life miserable for so many on the basis of so little evidence.  

But never mind that. Let’s assume – against all evidence, logic and indeed sanity – that the UN knows something we don’t. Climate is steadily warming up, it’ll never again cool of its own accord, and people will all be playing beach volleyball in winter within a couple of centuries.

Having made that wild assumption, let’s not stop now – we’re on a roll. So let’s further assume that replacing hydrocarbons with alternative energy will reverse that vexing trend over the same period, a couple of centuries or at least several decades.

Alas, none of today’s people will live a couple of centuries, and even several decades may be beyond many. And what do you know, while we are still around we don’t want to freeze and starve in the dark. We still want to live in the reasonable comfort created for us by generations of free, industrious, enterprising people.

Yes, thoroughly brainwashed as we are, we also want “to bequeath our children a greener planet”. Yet we’ve retained enough unsullied grey matter to consider the immediate problem in hand.

The problem is purely practical, leaving no room for platitudinous slogans and virtue signalling. Not only has Russia’s bandit raid on the Ukraine eliminated, or at least downgraded, a vast supply of energy, but it has also emphasised the folly of counting on evil regimes for our vital strategic commodities.

Hence, a) we must become self-sufficient in our energy production, or as near as damn and b) neither wind farms nor solar panels nor replacing internal combustion engines with batteries can get us anywhere near achieving this aim.

Even covering every roof with solar panels and every square yard with wind turbines we’ll fall far short of sustaining heavy industry, which even in this information age continues as the linchpin of a modern economy.

Moving heavy industry into the low-rent parts of the world isn’t so much a solution as a cop-out. In fact, COP-OUT 27 would be a more accurate name for the ongoing conference.

After all, we share ‘our planet’ and our atmosphere with all those less fortunate lands. So from the standpoint of “bequeathing a greener planet” it doesn’t matter whether carbon monoxide is spewed by a factory in India or Indiana.

The upshot is that there isn’t at present, nor will there be for at least several decades, any viable alternative to fossil fuels and nuclear energy. If Russia’s bandit raid on the Ukraine is the cause of the looming energy crisis, then the combination of the four options above is the only possible and desirable effect.

Yet Fishy Rishi has his own idea of causality, the kind that permeates the virtual reality of modern politics. If the cause were to be his contemptuous dismissal of global warming for the fraud it is, the effect would be an instant end to his career.

Can’t have that, can we now? Never mind that the poorer wrinklies may well die of hypothermia this winter. Rishi can live with that.

Thus spoke Generalissimo Alexander Suvorov (d. 1800), using the word Anglichanka (English woman) to describe England and the verb gadit (befouls) as a hint at rather stormy Anglo-Russian affairs.

This should contradict those who claim that relations between Britain and Russia are at the nadir. The indefinite article would be more appropriate, for there have been many such nadirs throughout history.

Russia as a unified political entity with imperial ambitions appeared in the second half of the 16^th century, in the reign of Ivan IV ‘the Terrible’. He earned that nickname by launching a murderous punitive raid on his own people immediately after ascending to the throne.

But before he struck, Ivan had prudently tried to secure a fallback position in case of failure. To that end he sent his brocade-gowned, fur-hatted, shaggy-bearded emissaries to propose marriage to Queen Elizabeth I.

Her putative virginity must have been a factor in Ivan’s proposal, for he prized chastity in his brides as much as he decried its absence. For example, when his fifth wife turned out to be not quite virginal on their wedding night, Ivan had her drowned in a pond, as one does.

In case the Queen was unable to overcome her maidenly qualms, Ivan suggested a second-best option: a mutual guarantee of asylum should rebellious subjects throw either monarch out.

Giles Fletcher, Elizabethan traveller to Russia, renders this offer more eloquently, if a bit archaically, in his memoir: “Further, the Emperor requireth earnestly that there may be assurance made by oath and faith betwixt the Queen’s Majestie and him, that yf any misfortune might fall or chance upon ether of them to go out of their countries, that it might be lawful for ether of them to come into the other countrey for the safeguard of themselves and theyr lives…”

Elizabeth wasn’t so much reluctant to accept either offer as perplexed. Since Her Majesty had only a vague idea of Muscovy (or Tartary, as contemporaneous English maps identified Russia), she was unlikely to regard it as a suitable haven.

And since she probably had never heard of Ivan she was reluctant to let his wooing succeed where Leicester’s had failed. She did however suggest out of politeness that Ivan was free to settle in England if he so chose. Forget about the nuptials though.

Fletcher, by the way, was an agent of the Muscovy Company, a trading concern chartered in 1555 that had a monopoly on trade with Russia until the reign of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich (d. 1676). The father of Peter I harboured suspicions of England, which he expressed quite succinctly.

When the Muscovy Company applied for an extension of its licence, it was floored by the short uppercut of the tsar’s ukase: “Inasmuch as the said Anglic Germans have slaughtered their own King Carolus to death, we hereby decree that none of the said Anglic Germans shall henceforth be admitted to Russia’s land.”

The tsar’s statement suggests that, while vague on the English ethnicity, he grasped the main point about the contemporaneous England. It was becoming dangerous to the well-being of absolute monarchs or those who, like “King Carolus” (Charles I), attempted to regain a fraction of the kind of absolute power that was taken for granted in Russia.

Since then relations between the two countries have been up and down, mostly down. They usually belonged to different and hostile coalitions, as they did during the Northern War (1700-1721), the War of the Polish Succession (1733-1735), the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748), and also the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763).

During the Napoleonic wars, the two countries set out to give the lie to the proverb about our enemy’s enemies. In spite of having common problems with Napoleon, they were officially at war with each other since 1799.

Apart from a short interlude in 1812, Russia fought not so much against France as against England. And even in 1812, when Napoleon attacked Russia, her state of war with England continued, if only formally.

Britain’s policy was always designed to prevent the emergence of a dominant continental power. As Russia’s imperial ambitions grew, she was increasingly cast in that very role. Hence ‘the Great Game’, a political and diplomatic confrontation that existed for most of the 19^th century between Britain and Russia over Afghanistan and other territories in Central and South Asia.

That cold war heated up when Russia’s expansion threatened the existence of the Ottoman Empire, which Britain saw as an essential counterbalance to Russian power in the region. This led to the 1853-1856 Crimean War, in which a small expeditionary force sent over by Britain, France and Sardinia thrashed the Russian army despite being outgunned and outmanned.

In the run-up to the war, England had forced Russia to disband her Holy Alliance with Austria and Prussia, which prevented those countries from coming to Russia’s aid. However, Britain couldn’t press the strategic advantage of her Crimean victory – dysentery turned out to be a more formidable adversary than the Russian army and navy.

In 1833, exactly 100 years before you-know-what, Prussia formed the Zollverein, a customs union with other German principalities. The aim was to bribe or coerce them all eventually to form a single German state under Prussia’s aegis. In hindsight that can be seen as a rehearsal for a larger-scale operation known as the European Union.

That process led to Prussia defeating France in 1871. Immediately thereafter Bismarck proclaimed the German Empire, and a new candidate for continental supremacy was born. Britain saw the signs with unerring clarity and made a mental note that Germany was the greater danger. That’s why Britain and Russia were allies in the Great War, at least until 1918, when Lenin betrayed the Entente by signing a separate peace with Germany.

We can now fast-forward to our own time, leapfrogging the seven decades of Bolshevism, the Second World War and the Cold War. Suffice it to say that, a few years in the 1990s apart, Britain and Russia have been in a relationship that honesty prevents me from describing as amicable.

In fact, I can’t think of any other major Western country as incompatible with Russia as Britain is – and has been for centuries. America, Germany, France all have many common features with Russia. Britain has none that are immediately obvious.

The restrained, pragmatic, self-deprecating yet quietly self-confident English personality weaned on centuries of civil liberties and the rule of law is the exact opposite of Russian effusiveness, bombast and delusions of grandeur born out of a deep-seated sense of inferiority.

That at least partly explains why Britain was the first country to support the Ukraine both morally and materially. The reason for such unequivocal support isn’t so much strategic (although that too) as cultural, historical and, if you will, visceral.

England is – or rather used to be – the epitome of Western civilisation, which the Russians both envy and hate. (For confirmation, see the writings of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.) The history of animosity between the two countries reflects irreconcilable differences that will persevere in eternity.

The main one is the perpetual conflict between civilisation and barbarism, in which only one adversary can ever be left standing. If you still doubt which side is which, I suggest you follow the day-to-day accounts of Russia’s ongoing bandit raid on the Ukraine – and look up the statistics of the overwhelming support for the war among the brainwashed, but otherwise unwashed, Russian population.

One hopes Britain still retains enough of her erstwhile civilisational spunk to keep up her support for the brave people dying to stop Russian barbarism in its tracks. Let history be our guide.

P.S. In this regard, the BBC has finally done something right. I wholeheartedly recommend its documentary series Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone.

This argument seems to grow on trees in our groves of academe. However, the fruit is poisoned, best left unbitten. But judge for yourself.

Suppose you are a good swimmer and a man drowning before your very eyes isn’t. You could easily save him, but should you?

Not necessarily, according to Dr Michael Plant, philosophy don at Oxford. For, according to some moral philosophies, eating meat is a mortal sin. Hence, if the drowning person is a carnivore, he doesn’t deserve to live.

On the contrary, you have a moral duty to watch him sink. After all, writes Dr Plant, “It seems universally accepted that doing or allowing a harm is permissible – and may even be required – when it is the lesser evil.”

Being a philosopher, he correctly ignores the practicalities involved. Yet these are worth a moment’s thought. Let’s say you ponder life while sipping a beer on the beach. Then you see – let’s add a touch of sentiment to the discussion – a child thrashing and splashing about some 50 yards from shore, screaming “Help!!!”

Your first impulse is to jump in but, on general principles, you desist. Some preliminary work is required first. Hence you scream back: “Do! You! Eat! Meat?” There’s the danger that all you’ll hear in reply will be a gurgling sound, but at least your philosophical conscience will remain pristine.   

Lest you may accuse Dr Plant of self-interest, his idea isn’t just impartial but also potentially self-sacrificial: he himself is a meat eater. Here’s a man with the power of his convictions, a rara avis these days. Good to see that young people do have principles after all.

However, as a logical corollary to his proposition, you’d be morally obligated not just to watch a carnivore drown but also to push him off the pier if he wouldn’t jump of his own accord.

All you’d have to do is close your eyes, think of the herds of livestock you’d be saving from this reprobate’s murderous appetite – and push as hard as you can with both hands. After all, “some moral philosophies” say that killing a man is a lesser evil than eating a burger.

Assuming that Dr Plant agrees with Jacques Maritain’s definition of philosophy as a science of first principles, he must believe that our founding code of first principles, the Bible, contains a thou-shalt-not commandment not to eat meat.

It doesn’t though, quite the opposite. Thus, for example, Genesis 9: 3: “Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.”

Animals, therefore, are created strictly to serve man, and, according to Aquinas, himself no slouch at philosophy: “There is no sin in using a thing for the purpose for which it is.”

Now, I realise that Dr Plant may not derive his notion of first principles from the same source as Aquinas did. In fact, that’s the way to bet – he is, after all, a modern Oxford don. I even suspect his definition of philosophy in general and of first principles specifically may differ from Jacques Maritain’s.

To be fair to him though, even first-rate Christian thinkers also pondered the morality of carnivorism. C.S. Lewis, for example, devoted many an essay to the subject of animal suffering and, implicitly, meat eating. Now, accuse me of irreverence to the great man if you will, but I genuinely believe Lewis’s brilliance was wasted on this issue.

My own approach to it, along with many other dilemmas preoccupying the modern mind, comes from another, admittedly cruder, discipline: advertising. It’s encapsulated by the acronym KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Any thought starts from a premise; it’s the foundation on which an intellectual structure is built. The structure then acts as proof of the foundation’s integrity, its ability to prop up a sound thought. The KISS principle suggests that certain premises are best left alone – even if the resulting superstructure (dread term) doesn’t seem to totter.

Dr Plant’s philosophical speciality is eudaemonia, the theory of happiness. Hence I’m sure he could use his evident mental agility to make a valid point in favour of, say, necrophilia.

Even I, tragically lacking the benefit of formal philosophical training, could make a good fist of it. For example, I’d start by saying that, although necrophilia is technically criminal, it’s by definition a victimless crime. Raping a corpse isn’t the same as raping a living, breathing woman: she will hate the experience, but a corpse won’t mind.

On the other hand, the perpetrator will enjoy the act, be the happier for it. Thus the sum total of happiness in the world will be greater as a result and, on balance, this has to be a good thing. There you go, a plausible eudaemonic case made. Long live necrophilia, even though I’m not sure the slogan works semantically.

You may or may not be capable of punching logical holes in this argument. You needn’t bother though: this structure had no right to be built. The premise shouldn’t even be pondered: remember KISS and just say that the practice is degenerate and so is anyone who takes it seriously. Then start thinking about things that really matter.

“I argue that,” continues Dr Plant, “if meat eating is wrong on animal suffering grounds then, once we consider how much suffering might occur, it starts to seem plausible that saving strangers would be the greater evil than not rescuing them and is, therefore, not required after all.”

And I argue that the conditional clause at the beginning of his statement should be dismissed out of hand, even though the wonderful C.S. Lewis didn’t. Let’s just KISS and make up.

P.S. The other day I wrote about the plight of the Irish priest who dared describe homosexuality as a mortal sin. He found himself on the receiving end of slings and arrows, to which Taoiseach Micheál Martin has now added his own: “In my view the language used was not the language of Christianity, and certainly would seem to me to be the language of exclusion as opposed to inclusion.”

I agree with Ireland’s PM: the language of exclusion is un-Christian. Here’s another example of such heathen invective: “Now do ye Pharisees make clean the outside of the cup and the platter; but your inward part is full of ravening and wickedness.” Clearly, whoever said that had no clue of what a Christian should sound like.