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That stern warning was issued by Matthew Parris, the guiding light of The Times.

Apparently, during the recent Lambeth Conference the Archbishop of Canterbury failed to issue a carte blanche to “the celebration of same-sex unions”, limiting himself instead to protestations of “sympathy, ‘compassion’, ‘listening’, ‘understanding’, emphasising how God loves you despite everything. Jesus did not stare at his shoes and tell people how he empathised.”

Though a self-acknowledged atheist, Mr Parris then shows familiarity with Scripture by reminding us that, rather than limiting himself to wishy-washy pronouncements, Jesus drove money-changers out of the Temple.

True. But I don’t think his problem with the usurers was that they didn’t let homosexuals marry.

One has to infer that, should the Second Coming happen today, Jesus would act in the same decisive spirit and force the recalcitrant archbishop to start pronouncing newlyweds man and man. I must admit the logic escapes me.

Jesus acted in such an aggressive fashion to enforce scriptural rectitude that he felt was being debauched by the brisk trade going on in the Temple. Yet the same scripture unequivocally refers to homosexuality as “abomination”.

St Paul then repeated the term in his Epistle to the Romans. And, though he had never met Jesus in the flesh, none of the men who had, including the four Evangelists, took exception to Paul’s intransigence.

That means that, for once, Archbishop Welby was doctrinally sound. He refused to countenance the ritual blessing of a practice explicitly and emphatically proscribed in both Testaments.

That, warns Mr Parris, “is an insult to the whole of England”. He then tugs at our heart strings by telling an anecdote for us to understand the egregious depth of that insult.

A young vicar at a church in west London, whom Mr Parris euphemistically calls a friend, concluded his homily with “a short prayer for those who had fought bravely for acceptance in the face of persecution”.

“To my friend’s surprise, some people among the congregation started crying. His prayer had broken open wounds. The church they loved had inflicted this hurt.”

I know quite a few homosexuals and used to sit on the same Anglican pews with them. Yet I’ve never seen one burst into tears because the Church doesn’t bless homomarriage.

I wonder where Mr Parris got his mandate to speak for large groups of people, be that “the whole of England”, all homosexuals or even residents of west London. That’s where I happen to live, and I’ve never seen crowds of weeping and self-flagellating people agonising about having no access to the altar.

To his credit, Mr Parris makes no pretence of disinterested objectivity. “We gays are done with all that ‘feeling your pain’ business. We feel no pain about being gay. We do feel pain about Welby’s evasion… There is nothing more to explain, nothing to discuss, nothing to ‘understand’ and no need for sympathy. Simple respect is what’s missing from the Church.”

There is respect aplenty, but that’s not what Mr Parris is demanding. He wants the Church to prostitute Christian doctrine for the noble purpose of indulging a small vociferous minority of politicised homosexuals like him.

And it must do it on pain of extinction. “The C of E is our established church, a national institution, and if it wants to remain so it must allow the rest of us an interest in how it engages with our wider society.”

I wonder if Archbishop Welby gets the message. I certainly do: unless he starts “celebrating same-sex unions”, Mr Parris will personally disestablish the Church of England. Seldom does one read, even in our neo-barbaric time, such ignorant, arrogant, unadulterated bilge.

The C of E is indeed a national institution, one of several. But it’s different from, say, the monarchy, parliament, the Old Bailey, the National Trust and David Beckham.

Unlike them, it engages with “our wider society” on a different, transcendent level. The Church serves a kingdom that is not of this world and, whenever it attempts to serve any other, it compromises its mission. For, in the eternal hierarchy of pecking orders, the kingdom it serves is higher than this world – and infinitely higher than “our wider society”.

Mr Parris self-admittedly has no use for Jesus’s love. Yet if he did, he’d want Jesus to love him not despite his sexual aberration, but because of it. That notion is so preposterous that even he must be aware of it.

Anyway, that’s not what he is after. Homosexual activists want to bend the Church to their will not because they need to be married at the altar but because they need to grab more power, to impose their views not just on “our wider society” (they’ve already done that), but on the bride of Christ.

Like other radicalised minorities, they crave total, which is to say totalitarian, power. And, unable to get all they want by frontal assault (no pun intended), they resort to guerrilla action. The more institutions they undermine, the less will “our wider society” be able to resist their powerlust.

It’s only against this backdrop that one can grasp the meaning of Mr Parris’s article. Otherwise one would have to conclude that The Times’s star columnist is off his rocker.  

In 1941, James Burnham wrote his prophetic book The Managerial Revolution, in which he predicted the rise of a new ruling class, that of managers.

Whether they ply their trade in government or the corporate world is immaterial. Neither their mentality nor their modus operandi changes when they float from cabinet rooms to boardrooms – and back again.

The Soviet term nomenklatura describes this class accurately, and whenever Soviet concepts apply in the West, I have sleepless nights preceded by a bout of nausea.   

The spirit of James Burnham wafted through the Sky TV studio the other day, when Attorney General Suella Braverman had to explain why she had put an end to diversity training in her department.

She took that audacious measure not for any moral, intellectual or aesthetic reasons, God forbid, but as a result of a cost-benefit analysis. Apparently, last year her employees spent 2,000 hours listening to expensive consultants pontificate on diversity – with nary a financial benefit to show for it.

Sternly queried on her feelings about diversity, Mrs Braverman restated her, and her party’s, unwavering commitment to that transcendent virtue. She was especially proud, she said, that it was a Tory PM who had legalised homomarriage. And in general, she’d happily vote for any diversity law – trans, racial, gender, interspecies, you name it.

No, it was just a matter of the bottom line. Her employees could spend their time more profitably than learning about pronouns, unconscious biases and cultural appropriation, vital though such education is.

The conversation then veered into other areas, such as the economy, healthcare, education and so on. Here Mrs Braverman instantly underwent a metamorphosis that has become the hallmark of her profession: she turned into a human jukebox.

Push a button, and a pre-recorded tune comes out. In this case, every sentence she uttered included the buzz word ‘deliver’. It’s a function of government, maintained Mrs Braverman robotically, to deliver [person-to-person GP appointments, best economic outcomes, affordable energy, multi-orgasmic sex… I made that last one up, but you get the picture.]

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

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

That’s not how statesmen talk because it’s not how statesmen think – or act. This is the jargon of the new class whose ascendance Burnham predicted so presciently.

He identified a developing problem in the corporate world: those who control capital no longer own it. A member of the nomenklatura has worlds to gain if his company does well, but next to nothing to lose when it doesn’t. A golden parachute will pop open, and the chap will softly descend into another job at another corporation or perhaps a government quango.

This is the spirit in which the nomenklatura acts when it runs the country as well, or rather as badly. Any corporation with the record of HMG would be bankrupt by now, with its officers possibly facing charges of fiduciary malfeasance.

Our governmental managers, otherwise known as ‘leaders’, are even further removed from the capital they control, and I don’t just mean money. Hence they use the language of management consultants not to elucidate but to obfuscate.

They all, with but a handful of exceptions all over the West, lack the basic skills to function in their chosen field. That’s why they hope that the jargon borrowed from another field will help them hide their incompetence behind a verbal smokescreen.

They should be informed by the tenets of political philosophy, not those of crooked double-entry accounting with several sets of books. I don’t mean they should be philosopher-kings of Plato’s fancy. But they should check their words and deeds against the first principles of politics, economics, justice and morality.

That doesn’t mean turning into dogmatic doctrinaires, for the art of government presupposes a certain amount of compromise. Statesmen guided by the noblest of principles are sometimes forced to deviate from them. Yet tactical flexibility shouldn’t mean strategic ignorance. It’s one thing to have to compromise on one’s principles occasionally, quite another not to have them in the first place.   

By their words shall you know them, for if our politicians were indeed guided by immutable values, they wouldn’t be expressing themselves in the lingo of a pizza takeaway. They’d know it’s not the function of government to run a delivery service.

It’s to protect the people from foreign enemies and domestic criminals. It’s to make sure that the country is run by just laws, not pernicious fads. It’s not to ‘level up’, to use another buzz non-word, but to create conditions in which people can fulfil their potential to its limit by their own efforts. It’s to set an example of prudence, sagacity and thrift. It’s to protect freedom of expression, including the kind of expression some may not like. It’s to encourage proper family life, not abortion, divorce, various perversions and casual cohabitation.

It’s to govern, not to ‘deliver’. Then again, our ‘leaders’ have to think of their post-leadership careers. So perhaps it’s a good idea to bone up on managerial cant, in the hope of someday using it full time to a lucrative effect.   

After all, there’s only one first principle our politicians recognise: look out for number one.

The age of criminal culpability varies from one country to another.

For example, in 35 American states it’s as young as seven. That, however, is deemed too old for South Carolina, where it is six.

In Germany and Austria, no one under the age of 14 can be held criminally responsible. In the UK, where on this evidence children mature earlier, the cut-off point is 10.

I am sure legislators in all those places can argue in favour of their laws cogently and persuasively. So much so that I shan’t even attempt to take them on.

But let’s shift the argument from criminal to intellectual culpability. At what age do people become fully responsible for their views?

The question isn’t purely academic. For we’ve been trained to go over politicians’ biographies with a fine-toothed comb, looking for objectionable things they said or did in their young age.

Fine. But how young is too young to be held accountable for one’s past indiscretions? I suggest we approach this problem in the spirit distilled, in equal measure, from forgiveness and realism.

For example, I’ve read in the paper today that Liz Truss, soon likely to be our new PM, campaigned to abolish the royal family in1994. She made a fiery speech to that effect at the conference of the LibDem Party to which she then belonged.

The article didn’t mention her preferred method of abolition. Since I am too lazy to look up the actual speech, I’m prepared to give Miss Truss the benefit of the doubt and allow that she didn’t advocate regicide.

Still, even less violent manifestations of republicanism ought to disqualify her from holding any office in the Tory Party, and certainly that of its leader. Unless, of course, she was under the age of intellectual culpability.

To Wikipedia I go, where I find that Miss Truss was a 19-year-old Oxford student at the time. She went on to join the Conservative Party upon graduation in 1996 and has remained within its ranks ever since.

Now, think of yourself at 19. Did you hold a few unsound ideas at that age? How many of them do you still hold? My own self-respect is too brittle to indulge in this kind of retrospective self-analysis.

Those few ideas I do remember advocating at that age are making me blush even as we speak. Everything I then understood about the world could have fit into one book – of matches.

This gets Liz Truss off that particular hook, as far as I’m concerned. When I was the age she is now, 47, I had long since got rid of most of my stupid ideas. Hence I’m prepared to forgive her subversive republicanism, a crime committed before she reached the age of intellectual culpability.

Our brains don’t even get wired properly until a couple of years on either side of 25. This biological fact should dispose us to charitable leniency – but also to merciless denunciation of silly or wicked ideas surviving into a later stage in life.

Thus Miss Truss, already an accomplished politician, was 40 when she campaigned for Remain. I argued against it at such length then that I’d be too bored to repeat myself now. Suffice it to say that, whatever you may think of the intrinsic merits or demerits of the Remain position, it’s certainly not conservative – nor even Conservative.

In fact, it’s an implicit paraphrase of the same republican cause that Liz advocated with such vigour as a hormone-laden lass. For, should Britain belong to a single European state (which is what the EU will become or die in the attempt), there would be no legal distinction between Liz Truss and Liz Windsor.

Both would be socially and politically equal citizens of the EU, endowed with the same nebulous rights and charged with the same onerous duties. Again, whatever you may think of such a development, it definitely represents the kind of constitutional sabotage that no real Tory can possibly countenance.

Once Brexit prevailed, Miss Truss jumped on that bandwagon, but is she entitled to a free ride on having changed her views so radically? I’m not so sure. Feeling uncharacteristically charitable, I’m prepared to sit on the fence on this one.

But I jump off instantly when it comes to views I regard as not just misguided, but as evil. Hence, when a man remains a communist well into his 30s, not to say 40s, only then to undergo a change of heart and claim a conservative allegiance, I don’t accept him as an ally.

Required for such a metamorphosis isn’t a change of opinion, nor even a change of heart, but a drastic change of one’s personality. That means ditching every intuitive and temperamental presupposition of which our ideas are woven – a sheer impossibility, in other words.

One exception exists: a religious epiphany, a sort of Damascene experience. Crudely put, this is like picking up a lottery ticket off the pavement and then winning a zillion pounds.

The gift of riches would then come not from within, but from without. It would be a gift in its strictest sense, something presented instantly by an outside donor, in this case chance. No personal effort would be involved, no hard work, no painful philosophical ruminations.

However, barring that, I refuse to accept into the fold (my own, that is) any communist or other evil radical who added the ‘ex-’ preface in his mature age. That’s like saying that at age 38 he thought mass murder was perfectly acceptable, only to decide it wasn’t after all at 39.

As for Miss Truss, the jury is still out. Let’s see what verdict it will return. However, if I were her defending counsel, I’d be worrying.

P.S. On a related subject, I’ve just thought of the definition of old age. It’s when you stop worrying about undressing women and begin worrying about dressing yourself.

In 1961 Hannah Arendt looked at the trial of Adolph Eichmann and was surprised. She expected to see a sadist, a perverted monster revelling in mass murder.

Instead, sitting in the dock was a hard-working bureaucrat who had taken the necessary steps towards career advancement. Eichmann had certain administrative skills and put them to the service of evil. In a different situation, he would have been transporting schoolchildren to summer camps, not prisoners to death camps. All in a day’s work.

Arendt then spoke of the “banality of evil”, as if she expected evil to be extraordinary. It isn’t, as anyone who has heard of original sin will tell you. Evil lurks in human nature, just waiting for propitious circumstances to come out and defeat equally innate virtue.

Yet all children of the Enlightenment are brought up on the presumption of human goodness. We are believed to be born in conditions of primordial virtue, and any reasonable person will put two and two together and realise it makes sense to be good.

Hence evil has to be purely visceral. The presumption of goodness doesn’t let us accept a situation where evil is done for rational reasons, especially on a mass scale.

This brings us to the question in the title.

That the horde of invading Russians includes many pathological, thoroughly brutalised sadists is evident to anyone who has followed the bandit raid on the Ukraine. Yet it would have been easy enough for the Russian officers to order that the bodies of horrendously mutilated Ukrainian POWs be hidden or otherwise disposed of.

Instead, they encourage turning that monstrosity into a global show, if not one for the whole family. That seems to make no sense.

After all, the laws of human nature haven’t yet been repealed. The response of Ukrainian soldiers to the sight of their comrades with various body parts missing and abdomens opened like a tin of sardines is entirely predictable. They are going to retaliate, aren’t they?

Of course they are. As it is, they are reluctant to take prisoners and only do so on explicit orders. Now they are going to shoot first and… I’d rather not even ponder what they might do second.

Since a certain number of combatants on both sides are always taken prisoner, the Russian command is depriving its soldiers of any chance to save their lives by surrendering in a hopeless situation. That has to drive up the KIA statistics, which seems like an unnecessarily stupid, or at least irrational, thing to do.

It isn’t though – and history explains why.

For the Russians did exactly the same thing in the Second World War. When the Wehrmacht advanced at a march speed between 22 June, 1941, and mid-1942, some five million Red Army soldiers found themselves in captivity.

Their lives were at the Nazis’ mercy, which wasn’t in good supply. In any case, no army in the world would have been able to look after five million POWs in compliance with the terms of the Geneva Convention (which the Soviets hadn’t signed anyway). Half of those men died of hunger, disease and neglect – which, alas, was inevitable.

Yet many others didn’t even make it to captivity. They were shot on the spot, and those were the lucky ones. For the advancing Nazi troops found in their path the bodies of their comrades taken prisoner by the Soviets and mutilated just like today’s heirs to the USSR are mutilating Ukrainian POWs.

That made the Nazis even more brutal than they were in the first place, and hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers bore the brunt of their savagery. But don’t accuse the Soviet command of stupidity. They got exactly the reaction they wanted.

They desperately wanted to discourage their soldiers from surrendering. Every one of them, from private to general, had to realise that his choice wasn’t between life and death. It was between dying as a hero fighting to the last breath and being tortured to death by the Germans.

The tactic worked: during the remaining three years of the war only 175,000 Red Army soldiers were taken prisoner – compared to five million in the first year. Much of that drop was due to the changing fortunes of war: the Russians went on the offensive, and, while the attacking side always tends to suffer heavier casualties, the number of its POWs goes down.

But it doesn’t normally go down by a factor of 25, as it did then, or rather 75 if we consider the time element. Much of the reduction was caused by the tactic I mentioned, augmented by other inhuman practices.

Stalin declared that the soldiers’ families were hostages to their valour. If any Red soldier was taken prisoner, his family automatically lost its ration cards, which often meant starving to death. And the Red Air Force routinely strafed columns and camps of Soviet POWs – this at the beginning of the war when one would have thought there were more vital targets on offer.

But turning the advancing army into raging beasts was an important part of the whole ploy. To the same end, NKVD units were left behind enemy lines to commit acts of senseless terrorism whose sole purpose was to force Germans to respond with violence against civilians (not that the Nazis took much forcing).

Thus, for example, when German troops entered Kiev, the NKVD blew up Kreshchiatik, the city’s main thoroughfare. Only a few Germans were killed, along with several hundred locals. The Germans predictably responded by taking and shooting hostages, thereby turning against them the very people who until then had been welcoming them as deliverers.

It’s drawing on such heritage that makes Russian officers encourage, and widely publicise, acts of inhuman savagery against Ukrainian POWs (and of course civilians).

At present, the number of Russian POWs is small for the Ukrainian army is fighting strictly defensive action. But all signs point to an impending counteroffensive, with the Russian army group in the Kherson area at risk of being cut off and surrounded.

That could produce thousands of POWs, but Putin’s thugs are trying to do their worst to make sure it won’t. They want to brutalise Ukrainian soldiers enough for them to commit such atrocities that Russian soldiers would prefer death to surrender.

So yes, evil is banal, Arendt was right about that. But it can also be perfectly rational, provided that reason is wielded by evil men.      

Would you be able to watch a video of a man forcibly castrated? And should your stomach prove strong enough, would you put a ‘like’ on it? Thousands of Russians did both.

The video proves the eclectic nature of the Russians, who seamlessly join archaism with modernity. As a tribute to the former, several Russian soldiers held a Ukrainian POW down, while the man in the photograph castrated him with a Stanley knife.

That foray outside the Geneva Convention has old antecedents. Prisoners were sometimes mutilated in the Byzantine Empire, Africa, ancient Japan and elsewhere.

That such practices are still extant in our post-industrial age testifies to the Russians’ commitment to what Putin lovingly calls “traditional values”. I too admire conservatism, but not irrespective of what it is that’s being conserved.

Yet such traditionalism effortlessly blends with the Russians keeping an open mind to the technological advances of modernity. Thus, while some soldiers castrated the prisoner, others were filming the action, doubtless with their smartphones.

Having completed the procedure, the soldiers waved the severed genitals before the smartphone camera and then, in a sudden flash of inspiration, called the victim’s wife to spread the fun more widely. They then shot the prisoner in the back of the head.

The man wielding the knife is a Kalmyk, a member of the only Buddhist nation that has settled in Europe. Many other Mongolian peoples have fused with the Finno-Ugrian and Slavic Russians to create a nation that, according to the first Russian philosopher Chaadayev, inherited the worst features of both Europe and Asia.

One of Russia’s greatest poets, Alexander Blok (d. 1921), celebrated this heritage with gusto and pride:

You are but millions. Our unnumbered nations
Are as the sands upon the sounding shore.
We are the Scythians! We are the slit-eyed Asians!
Try to wage war with us – you’ll try no more!

War brings out the worst in even civilised nations, never mind the descendants of the Scythians. But the worst in some nations is much worse than in some others.

Isolated instances of inhuman savagery happen in all wars. But in the on-going bandit raid on the Ukraine, such instances aren’t isolated. They are what passes for Russia’s military strategy.

Lest you may think that it’s only the ethnic minorities, such as the Chechens, Kalmyks and Buryats, who are guilty of inhuman atrocities, listen to the few survivors of Bucha. Retreating Russian troops left that city near Kiev strewn with mutilated, tortured, often raped corpses of women, men and children.

Those few denizens whose luck was good testify that simon-pure ethnic Russians were the worst. Even Chechen militants, known for their cruelty, weren’t a patch on them.

In this context, calls for peace talks sound especially, inhumanly callous. Thus a Mail columnist who’ll go nameless (I’ve named him often enough before) writes: “If anyone suggests we try to make peace in Ukraine (as I do), he is immediately denounced as an ‘appeaser’.”

I wouldn’t denounce him as an appeaser. I’d denounce him as an accomplice.

How do you make peace with murderers, rapists, castrators and looters? How do you even sit down to talk to them? Would you negotiate with someone who has done such things to your family? I wouldn’t.

When your brothers, sisters, children, spouses and parents fall victim to such satanic atrocities, you don’t talk. You fight – and continue fighting until only one side is left standing.

The only kind of peace the Ukraine can accept after all this is Russia relinquishing every inch of stolen Ukrainian territory and submitting to an international tribunal on war crimes. Pushing the country into any other arrangement means promoting the victory of Putin’s evil regime.

I can only regret that the Russians have allowed themselves to be brutalised to such an infernal extent. That part of their nature had to be close to the surface to have burst out so quickly and to such an effect.

It is our sacred duty to help the Ukraine in every possible way. In doing so, we’ll also be helping ourselves, for marauding Scythian hordes don’t stop until they are stopped.

And if you don’t believe me, re-read Blok’s poem. He understood his own people much better than even Mail columnists do.

If you get a distinct sense of déjà vu, you know your modern history. The part I have in mind is the 1933 election in Germany that brought Hitler to power.

For it wasn’t the German electorate that chose Hitler. It was Stalin, acting in the capacity of führer-maker.

The Nazis were the largest single party elected. But the Social Democrats and the Communists had more votes, put together. And together they should be, clamoured the progressives at the time. They are both parties of the Left, aren’t they? Then they have more in common with each other than either has with Hitler. A marriage made in heaven, nicht wahr?

There was a minor difference between the two parties though. The Social Democrats were a legitimate (if misguided) political institution. The Communists weren’t.

They were part of the Communist International (Comintern) run out of Moscow. Ernst Thälmann, the party’s general secretary, was Stalin’s agent, which he didn’t mind advertising by donning the Red Army uniform on his frequent visits to Russia.

And Stalin didn’t want a wishy-washy coalition led by the Social Democrats. He wanted a revanchist Germany that could smash the West and pave the way for the Red juggernaut to roll in. He wanted Hitler.

Hence Stalin forbade Thälmann from forming a coalition with the Social Democrats, whom the Soviet press routinely called “social fascists” . Thälmann complied, thereby signing his own death sentence (the Nazis murdered him in Buchenwald in 1944). Hitler came to power.

The current situation in Italy is eerily similar. The other day, Matteo Salvini’s League Party pulled out of Mario Draghi’s coalition, thus bringing his government down. The League Party was joined by two others, including Sylvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia.

Both Salvini and Berlusconi have been cultivated by Putin for years. I don’t know the exact nature of the relationship between Matteo and Vlad, and it may well differ in some details from the one between Thälmann and Stalin. Yet there’s no doubt that a relationship exists, and it’s more than amicable.

Italian papers report that Salvini’s decision followed immediately after a meeting between his close adviser Antonio Capuano and Oleg Kostyukov, billed as a Russian embassy ‘political officer’.

Since we’ve already established that you know your modern history, you don’t need me to tell you what that job description actually means. If some doubts still linger, then here’s a little detail omitted in our newspaper reports. Oleg’s father, Gen. Igor Kostyukov, is head of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence.

Salvini has been doing Putin’s bidding for a long time. Thus in 2019, when the photograph above was taken, he acted on Vlad’s request (order?) to ban a strike at a Russian-owned Lukoil refinery in Italy.

Neither Salvini nor Berlusconi is a one-off aberration in European politics. Putin’s KGB government may be weak on economics, human rights and, by the looks of it, military strategy, but it knows how to develop the rich legacy of Stalin’s NKVD.

Ever since Putin took over in 2000, he has been systematically cultivating Western politicians, especially extremists of both Left and Right (if these terms mean anything, which they really don’t). Centrist politicians, such as Angela Merkel, were also targeted, but they had to be recruited one by one.

Extremist parties, on the other hand, could be bought wholesale, lock, stock and oil barrel. The communists under different guises certainly, but especially various fascisoid parties, such as France’s National Rally, Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, Greece’s Golden Dawn, Hungary’s Jobbik, Austria’s Freedom Party, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland are all recipients of Putin’s largesse.

Various British groups are also seen as potential recruits, and they can be pernicious enough. However, the ‘first past the post’ system of British politics makes it hard for extremist parties to exert a substantial influence on political outcomes. (Unless you see, with some justification, Labour as an extremist party.)

The European system of proportional representation, by contrast, fosters governing coalitions, often made up of numerous parties. Such coalitions can be brought down by one or two parties withdrawing for whatever reason – including possible interference by a hostile foreign power.

Putin is clearly trying to create his own version of Stalin’s Comintern, a fascist International rendering European countries ungovernable and impotent to counter Russia’s imperial expansion. And Italy shows how that strategy can succeed.

The collapse of Draghi’s coalition leaves the frankly fascist Brothers of Italy (which descends from Mussolini’s Black Shirts) as the country’s biggest party. Traditionally allied with Salvini’s League Party and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, the Brothers may well lead the next coalition, with Putin a shadow partner wielding veto power.

Perhaps the party ought to be renamed the Sisters of Italy, considering that it’s led by a pretty blonde girl, Giorgia Meloni. If she becomes Italy’s first woman prime minister, I’m sure feminists will rejoice. So, more to the point, will Putin.

What do you call a woman who has two black eyes? Nothing. She’s already been told twice.

Do you find this joke funny? Never mind answering. What you or I think doesn’t matter because, by telling it, I’ve already committed an imprisonable offence. A crime, in other words.

It’s for exchanging such jokes on a private WhatsApp group that three Met officers are being tried at Westminster magistrates’ court. They are accused of sending “grossly racist, sexist, misogynistic” messages, sometimes when on duty.

One member of the group, PC Wayne Couzens, actually abducted, raped and murdered a woman, for which he is now serving a whole-life sentence. Personally, I’d have him strung up, but we’ll leave that aside for now.

Most people, even those who are less bloodthirsty than I, would agree that doing such things is a crime. However, all sensible people should realise than joking about them shouldn’t and – in a sane country – wouldn’t be criminalised.

But who has ever said we are living in a sane country? Or, for that matter, a sane world?

To give you a selection of the officers’ crimes, they referred to rape as “struggle snuggle”. They joked that victims of domestic violence “love it… that’s why they are repeated victims more than often.”

Describing three such incidents, one of the cops wrote: “I bet they all had one thing in common. Women that don’t listen.”

They also opined that all Muslims are terrorists and suggested that people with Down’s syndrome should be used for “target practice”. For fear of traumatising you for life, I’ll spare you any references to their racial and homophobic slurs. No one will be forced to read such filth, not on my watch.

The prosecuting QC said the public would be “grossly offended” by the comments. (Don’t you just love the subjunctive mood?) And there was no doubt that “each of the messages was plainly grossly offensive by any objective standard.”

Calling such standards objective suggests that the poor chap doesn’t even know what the word means. Thus neither I nor Penelope nor any of my friends would be “grossly offended” by any of those comments. Some of us would find them unfunny and tasteless. However, if bad taste were to be criminalised, I’d suggest we’d instantly fill every prison to the gunwales and then have to build hundreds more.

For example, the group mentioned in the previous paragraph would send down anyone sporting tattoos and facial metal. All attendees of pop concerts and raves. People who wear ‘brown in town’ (shoes, that is) or socks with sandals. Anyone wearing legible clothing of any kind, especially T-shirts. Anyone who has ever referred to the Earth as “our planet”. Anyone who thinks Greta Thunberg is right. Anyone who has ever used words like ‘homophobia’, ‘transphobia’ or ‘misogyny’. Anyone who thinks animals have rights.

So much for objectivity. For tastes can’t be objective. They can only be good or bad, and it takes subjective judgement to decide which is which. That, by the way, doesn’t mean that all subjective judgements are equal. They aren’t. But they are all indeed subjective.

I always hesitate to say that Britain is as bad as the Soviet Union of my youth, or, God forbid, even worse. On balance, it isn’t.

But the balance is definitely tipping that way. In my university days (1964-1970) one could be reprimanded for cracking a political joke or mocking one of the Soviet leaders, usually the eminently mockable Brezhnev. Repeat offenders could possibly be expelled, especially if they showed no remorse.

But they wouldn’t be arrested and imprisoned. In my parents’ generation, yes. A wrong sense of humour could easily earn the wag a one-way trip to Stalin’s death camps. But during the more vegetarian period of Soviet history, politically incorrect jokes weren’t treated as a capital offence.

On the evidence of the on-going trial, and many other such gross abuses of justice, Britain is currently somewhere between Brezhnev’s and Stalin’s USSR, but moving backwards towards the latter.

Now have you heard the one about women getting paid less than men? That’s because a woman’s work is never done.

Do you think I’ll get off with a suspended sentence?

His Holiness reminded me of how much I have to apologise for.

As a human being, I apologise for Adam and Eve, who queered the pitch for all of us.

As a man, I apologise to all oppressed women, including, but not limited to, those I might have inadvertently oppressed myself.

As specifically a white man, I apologise for white racism, leaving it for chromatically different persons to apologise for any other kind.

As someone born in the Soviet Union, I apologise for the Gulag.

As a (lapsed) American, I apologise for slavery, Hiroshima and Joe Biden.

As a British subject, I apologise for colonialism.

And as a Catholic… Well, mercifully I don’t have to apologise for anything as a Catholic. The Pope is doing a good job of it without my help.

On his visit to Canada, he apologised to “the Indigenous peoples” (formerly known as Canadian Indians) for the abuse they had suffered in residential schools, created and funded by the government, but mostly run by Catholics.

The schools existed from the 19^th century until the 1970s. The government forcibly separated Indian children from their families and sent them out to be converted to Christianity, taught English and assimilated into Canadian society.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) published a report in 2015, which stated that children in those schools “were abused, physically and sexually, and they died in the schools in numbers that would not have been tolerated in any school system anywhere in the country.”

Some 4,000 children died in those 139 schools, mostly from tuberculosis that was rampant at the time. That’s about 30 a year, and I assume that number is higher than the statistical average.

Any physical and sexual abuse that happened is undoubtedly criminal. If any perpetrators are still with us, they should be prosecuted. However, considering that the schools have been out of business for half a century, such longevity is unlikely. For all I know, those criminals are burning in hell.

However, I struggle with the full extent of the Pope’s apology. The impression I get is that he agreed with the full list of charges put forth in the TRC report. “The residential school system,” said that document, “was based on an assumption that European civilisation and Christian religions were superior to Aboriginal culture.”

Call me a racist and report me to the police, but that assumption seems justified to me. For the aboriginal culture in question is too primitive to prepare children for life in a modern Western society. And surely a practitioner of any religion has to believe it’s superior to others.

Had those children remained within their ‘indigenous’ culture, they would have spent their lives on reservations, drinking rotgut, smoking things that aren’t good for you and acting as ethnographic exhibits for gawking tourists.

As it is, many of them ended up with advanced degrees from McGill University, having acquired the means of accusing the white establishment in good English full of scholarly references to the critical theory.

The possibility of such a positive outcome doesn’t justify the use of force in removing children from their families. However, the TRC confirms it wasn’t the Catholic Church but the government that applied such force. To his credit, the Pope did refer to that fact, if only obliquely.

However, he made it sound as if what calls for an apology isn’t just various abuses of the assimilation system, but the system itself. That got me confused.

I thought integrating ethnic minorities into society was a Good Thing. Surely that’s better than consigning them to a life of cultural, political and economic exclusion?

Undeniably, the Catholic Church has supported the system of conversion and assimilation since at least the Middle Ages. Such is its institutional remit, laid down in numerous proselytising verses of the New Testament.

Thus, for example, Matthew 5:16: “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.” Or Matthew 10:7: “And as you go, preach, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand’.”

His Holiness didn’t separate the policy from its abuses clearly enough, although he did make a meek attempt to do so: “I am here because the first step of my penitential pilgrimage among you is that of again asking forgiveness, of telling you once more that I am deeply sorry. Sorry for the ways in which, regrettably, many Christians supported the colonising mentality of the powers that oppressed the indigenous peoples.”

“Many Christians”? What about the Church as a whole? Or the entire white civilisation? Such papal equivocations were wide of the mark, judged the TRC types.

To them and those they represent, that humble pie was too small to satisfy their hunger for humiliating the Church and, more generally, the West. To make things even worse, the Pope apologised for those children having suffered “physical, verbal, psychological and spiritual abuse.”

The outcry was thunderous: he left sexual abuse out! Doesn’t he realise that this is what the Church is all about?

The general reaction to the Pope’s effort can best be summed up by the cliché of too little, too late. Yes, ran the consensus, it was good that the Pope showed willing.

But he omitted to apologise for so many things (possibly including some I mentioned at the beginning) that his “penitential pilgrimage” has to be put down as a missed opportunity. Nor was his sincerity sufficiently persuasive. As one of his detractors put it, his song didn’t come from the heart.

All in all, the season of apologies is in full swing, and it’s not the best time in our cultural calendar. The victims, real or putative, are never satisfied. Rather than reducing their quest for divisive insularity, apologies make it more fervent. On balance, they do more harm than good.

Talking specifically about North American Indians, the white settlers treated them with savage brutality, which I can’t condone. Progress is often held up as justification but, to me, it doesn’t justify much of anything, and certainly not inhuman cruelty.

Closer to our own time, the abuses suffered by the pupils of those residential schools are unpardonable. But they won’t be undone by fulsome apologies. If anything, their aftermath will continue to fester longer as a result.

Let’s just make sure such things never happen again, shall we? Contrition is best kept for our penitential prayers. Their recipient will accept them with more grace than any woke warriors ever will.

The French have, for all intents and purposes, suffocated our Channel ports with a go-slow strike.

Post-Brexit, the French insist on stamping our passports before boarding the Dover ferry or the Folkestone channel train. That obviously requires more border officials to keep the traffic flowing.

However, rather than beefing up their staffs, the French drastically reduced them. That created tailbacks taking from eight to 21 hours to clear. Some inveterate British travellers slept in their cars. Many just turned around and went home cursing a certain species of reptile all the way.

Now, about 200,000 Britons (including us) own houses in France where they spend much of their time. On top of that, millions of British tourists travel there every year.

This creates mighty streams of revenue flowing into France’s coffers, at a time when they aren’t necessarily bursting at the seams. (To give you an idea, Penelope and I spend perhaps £25,000 in France every year, and I’d say we are about average British homeowners.) So why are the French so bloody-minded about this?

Because some things in life are more important than money. One such is religious faith, whether real or of the ersatz secular variety, otherwise known as ideology. People have been known to sacrifice their lives for it, never mind a few million euros here and there.

Blind secular faith allows no exegesis, no heresy, no apostasy. It relies on visceral, gonadic biochemistry, not rational thought.

Now that real religions have lost their street cred, surrogates reign supreme. In Britain, that’s NHS. On the face of it, it’s nothing but a method of financing medical care. As such, it should be compared with other methods, with the pluses and minuses assessed and weighed in a dispassionate manner.

But that doesn’t happen, does it? Like a demiurge, the NHS sits on a lofty moral peak that reason can’t even approach, never mind scale. Otherwise bright people put their intelligence on hold and refuse even to discuss the issue. If you are against the NHS, you aren’t just a chap with an argument. You are a traitor, or else an apostate.

What the NHS is for the British, the EU is for the French. When we first bought our house over 20 years ago, I still tried to argue with our French friends about that wicked contrivance.

It must be said that they are all without exception intelligent, erudite and cultured people. They can put forth a nuanced and rational argument on atomism and Thomism, Bach and Offenbach, the Fifth Republic and the Third Reich, first principles and last things.

Yet try to engage them in a serious discussion of the EU and – whoosh! – their minds fly out and secular piety takes over. You can argue until you are puce in the face that there isn’t a single rational, moral, economic or empirical argument in favour of the EU – they don’t want to know. The EU is a secular god and as such is owed unquestioning, genuflecting devotion. That’s all there is to it.

This mindset explains the spirit of vindictive revanchism wafting through France’s smart salons and government offices. By leaving the EU, Britain didn’t just opt for restoring her ancient sovereignty. She committed apostasy. And apostates must be punished, if only pour encourager les autres.

That’s why the French waited so patiently for the start of the peak holiday season to create a bottleneck at the ports. For punishment to work, it must really hurt.

Their officials don’t even bother to conceal their motives. “If you want a smooth crossing, rejoin the Schengen zone,” they smirk. The blighters don’t even know we were never in it.

Some sort of reciprocal agreement, similar to the one we have with another EU member, Portugal, would be easy to work out. That would benefit both parties, except that one party doesn’t care about benefits. It has to indulge its infantile craving for revenge.

My area of London is crawling with French people, and their number hasn’t noticeably dropped since Brexit. The three French schools around us are still open, and French children still spill out into the neighbourhood parks to kick footballs about. (What’s the French for “On me ‘ed, son”?)

The Kent town of Ashford is still more French than English, what with many Frenchmen opting for British taxes even if they have to catch the Eurostar every morning to go to work in France.

We could, probably should, make life difficult for all of them, in the hope that they’ll put some pressure on their own government to see sense. Oh well, not much chance of that. The British are too docile to retaliate, and the French are too committed to care.

Secular gods are athirst, and they demand sacrifices. One such could well become any goodwill between these two neighbours.

Aren’t these debates fun? A knee-slapper, if you ask me.

“There’s nothing I can say about my opponent that hasn’t already been said about herpes. He has the intelligence of a doorknob, the moral sense of a skunk and the preening egotism of a B actress. He is the scum of the earth, which is why I’ll appoint him to a Great Office of State if I win.”

That’s a slight embellishment of what Dizzy Lizzy said about Fishy Rishi in yesterday’s debate, but she did utter words to that effect.

Sunak, said Miss Truss, is “unfit for office”. But of course she’d give him a post in her cabinet if she won. We wouldn’t want to waste talent like that, would we now?

How does that even add up? Is he fit or unfit? Is she? One thing for sure: such verbal jousts aren’t the way to answer questions of this kind.

Miss Truss, who used to make rousing speeches at LibDem conferences, held Mr Sunak’s wealth and schooling against him. This son of immigrants became a millionaire by working hard and then a prospective billionaire by marrying well.

I could understand someone like Corbyn making hay out of this, but an aspiring Tory prime minister? Since when do Tories attack people for going to a public school and then making a lot of money? Since the Tory Party stopped being a Tory Party, I suppose.

I’m surprised Truss didn’t ask Sunak if he knew how much a pint of milk costs, although I’m sure he must have looked it up not to fall into that bog standard trap.  

As a backdrop to this, a supposedly conservative paper ran a whole feature about the £3,500 suits and £400 shoes Sunak wears. The implication was that such sartorial excesses mean he is out of touch with the poor people who know the price of milk without having to look it up.

I do hope next time Mr Sunak will have the good sense to turn up wearing torn jeans and a legible T-shirt, ideally saying “Two World Wars, one World Cup, so fuck off”. That would establish his patriotism, populist credentials and an ability to appeal to the burgeoning segment of the electorate.

Meanwhile, he attacked Miss Truss’s proposals as economically illiterate, while being rather reticent about his own. She in turn called him a “bean counter” whose economic ideas, whatever they are, would push Britain into a recession.

A friend of mine, who, unlike me, is a member of the Tory Party, asked my advice on how she should vote. I suggested a coin toss, taking off the mothballs my stock phrase I keep for such occasions: the evil of two lessers.

But let’s be fair: for all I know, both candidates may be great statesmen, whose ideas will rejuvenate Britain, turn her into an economic powerhouse and a bastion of freedom while, most important, enabling her to cock a snook at the EU.

It’s just that a silly show like that isn’t going to let them reveal such a potential, in the unlikely event they have it. Having taken part in many debates, if less momentous ones, I know that the only gift it takes to win one is that of the gab.

These aren’t intellectual contests played by strict rhetorical rules and designed to arrive at truth. Our political debates are shrill slanging matches long on irrelevant ad hominems and short on serious arguments.

The candidates’ record in the offices they held in the past isn’t much help either. Truss’s record as Trade Secretary was better than Sunak’s as Chancellor, but her tasks were easier. He had to contend with Covid and a prime minister hellbent on buying people’s votes with their own money.

Looking at the scraps of information the two candidates do provide on their economic plans, I can confidently predict a resounding victory for Labour in two years’ time. From what I can gather, Sunak wants to increase both taxes and spending, while Truss plans to lower the former but raise the latter.

A recession may well ensue whoever wins, but a high inflation rate is worse than any recession because it inculcates suicidal economic habits. Since both candidates propose to hike public spending, inflation will continue its crippling rise whoever wins – and so will the national debt.

We are already paying some £80 billion a year to service it, which too drives the inflation rate upwards because we have to take on more debt to service the existing one. But courtesy of Keynesian economists, who dominate both in government and the academy, we have little fear of a runaway public debt.

“We owe it to ourselves” is the fallacy making the rounds. That nonsense already existed in Adam Smith’s time, who cited it as an example of “the sophistry of the mercantile system”. Above all, it’s not even true: we owe it to the money markets, which charge interest.

As far as I’m concerned, little separates the two candidates in their economic thought. Perhaps sensing that, Sunak slyly pointed out that most Tory voters are Leavers and, unlike Truss, he had voted the right way.

But here’s a paradox that, if you look at it closely, isn’t at all paradoxical. Most Tory Leavers support Truss even though she voted Remain; while the Remainers are solidly behind the Leaver Sunak.

The reason is that they know how little principles mean to either candidate. They suspect both Sunak and Truss would campaign to rejoin the EU or even join the Russian Federation if they thought there were votes in it.

So yes, it’s back to my coin toss suggestion. Heads, Labour wins. Tails, Labour wins. And if the coin lands on edge and stays there, we’ll have a real Tory government.