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The other day a close friend asked me to comment on the similarities between the Soviet Union of my youth and the Britain of my old age.

These are less numerous than the differences, but it’s not the number but the relative weight that matters. And one similarity is beginning to outweigh the differences.

Over 20 years ago I wrote my book How the West Was Lost, in which I commented on ‘glossocracy’, the use of language as a mechanism of tyrannical power. In the West it’s the dominant mechanism, in the Soviet Union it was supported by physical coercion, but that’s a matter of technicalities.

The glossocratic mechanism can be activated in any number of ways, both proscriptive and prescriptive. The former is telling people what they can’t say. The latter is telling them what they must say.

A push for glossocratic tyranny tends to start out as proscriptive, but once all resistance has been overcome, the diktat will ineluctably become prescriptive. Both the USSR circa 1972 and the UK circa 2022 vindicate this observation, with Britain still lagging somewhat behind but closing the gap fast.

In the Moscow of my youth, any number of functionaries, all linked with the KGB at least tangentially, practised the art of asking a pointed glossocratic question. That wasn’t a request for information, but a trap. One such question was asked by KGB officers recruiting potential snitches: “Do you consider yourself a Soviet man?”

That was a yes or no question, or rather a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ one. If you said no, not really, you weren’t a free man claiming a divergent political allegiance. You were an enemy, to be dealt with in any number of ways, all detrimental to your physical wellbeing.

In my parents’ generation a no answer to that question spelled a death sentence, executed either immediately or over a few agonising years in a concentration camp. When I became a sentient, if not yet sapient, being in the ‘60s, such an outcome was unlikely, though not impossible. But in any case you could forget about ever having a fulfilling professional life.

If you said yes, the trap slammed shut: “In that case, don’t you want to help us, the embodiment of Sovietism?” Anyone answering yes would gain some physical benefits, but lose for ever any right to self-respect and the respect of his friends. I knew several men who made that Faustian transaction, and they were all sullen pariahs.

What I’ve described was an extreme situation, but a Soviet man had to field hundreds of related questions every day of his life. Most didn’t have the guts for defiance. They’d offer the desired answers on cue and eventually proceed to volunteer variations on the same theme.

Anyone who ever lived in a permanent state of nausea induced by glossocratic emetics ends up developing a well-honed diagnostic ability to detect the early danger signs. In today’s Britain, and the West in general, these aren’t even particularly early any longer.

For illustration, I suggest you watch tonight’s TV debate among the candidates for Tory leadership and therefore Number 10. The aspiring PMs won’t be answering genuine questions designed to clarify their stand on important issues. They’ll be trying to sidestep glossocratic traps.

“Can you define a woman, minister?” will be one such. The answer will have to come from the available menu: Item A: “A woman is somebody born as one or made into one artificially.” Item B: “A woman is anyone who identifies as such.” Item C: “A woman is a person born as one biologically.”

The reply C is correct factually but not politically. Any candidate offering it will step into the trap and have his political ankle crushed.

You don’t need my prompting to imagine the fetid storm sweeping the next day’s papers. The culprit denies trans rights, which has to mean he is a homophobe, misogynist, fascist, racist, reactionary, colonialist… Let’s just say it won’t be only mud that the papers will be slinging.

The actual arguments pro or con won’t come into play at all. This isn’t about debate aimed at establishing, God forbid, the truth of the matter. It’s about pushing the button to activate the glossocratic mechanism of tyranny.

Someone opting for A or B won’t be out of the woods either. He’ll be surely if incongruously accused by woke hacks of being woke, and probably not sincere enough in his wokery. The hypocritical populist is trying to appeal to the left fringe of the Tory Party, promising to do their bidding if elected… and so forth, you know the drill.

Hence ‘debate’ is a misnomer. Grown men and women won’t be trying to elucidate Britain’s future under their stewardship. They’ll be hopping, jumping, veering, bending themselves into contortionist shapes whenever they detect a glossocratic trap, be it trans rights, economy, defence, taxation, climate, the NHS, you name it.

No one laying those traps will really care what those sweaty people on the podium think. The trap-layers will be merely asserting their glossocratic power, secure in the knowledge they’ll win in any case, however their questions are answered.

Similarly, KGB officers asking a poor wretch whether he considered himself a true-red Soviet man knew perfectly well he didn’t. If he did, they wouldn’t have had to ask.

They were implicitly saying that yes, we know you hate us, but we don’t give a damn. We are after an exercise of our power to make you say – and eventually do – what we want. As long as you play the game by our rules, you can go on indulging your onanistic dissent in private, see if we care.

This is an exact parallel of what happened to Penny ‘Thunder Thighs’ Mordaunt when she faced the fashionable trans trap, lurking in the question of what made a woman. Penny knew it’s impossible to change one’s sex, her interrogator knew it, Penny knew the interrogator knew and so on.

Yet they both also knew that wasn’t the real question. The real question was: “Are you ready to submit to glossocratic power?” Penny answered in the affirmative: “Absolutely.” Her actual words were “A trans woman is a woman, and a trans man is a man”, but what she really meant was that she was happy to become a slave to glossocratic masters.

A real debate about real issues is no longer possible in any public space, not just in a political beauty pageant in front of TV cameras. Even the university, an institution specifically created as a vehicle to be driven towards the truth, has been reduced to an instrument of glossocratic tyranny.

A scientist who produces research proving the strictly biological basis of womanhood would be ‘cancelled’, possibly sacked. A climatologist proving, facts in hand, that global warming is a subversive, unscientific hoax, will be boycotted. An economist unfolding spreadsheets showing that ‘renewable’ energy can’t power a modern economy, will have to retrain as a supermarket manager.

Science doesn’t matter. Truth doesn’t matter. Only glossocracy does – as it did in the Soviet Union, albeit in a more virulent form.

The object of terror is to terrorise, wrote Lenin. By the same token, the object of tyranny is to tyrannise. When a political or ideological objective takes precedence, it will ride roughshod over everything real: truth, honesty, integrity, beauty, morality.

Thus glossocratic tyranny is by its nature nihilistic. For all its sanctimonious virtue-signalling, it’s out to destroy everything seen as a potential obstacle to its triumph, including the genuine creative impulse that needs freedom to survive.

Creativity is like a poppy – when taken out of its natural habitat, it dies. If we allow glossocracy to thrive, Britain (and the West in general) will become bone-crushingly dull first, beggared second, downright evil third. The Soviet Union became all those things, if not necessarily in that order.

A message to Penny Mordaunt: If you are unsure what a woman is, dear, look in the mirror. That’s what the female secondary sex characteristics look like, and they are produced by the primary ones – not by a consumer choice.

Can you name a single Western European country that has a succinctly expressed national idea? Britain? France? Holland?

Germany had one back in the 1930s, but few would give her a retrospective pat on the back for it. You may say that was an example of a bad national idea, but I can’t for the life of me think of a good one. (For fear of alienating my American readers, I’ll for once leave their Declaration of Independence alone.)

This isn’t to say that civilised countries stand for nothing. It’s just that they stand for so many things that any attempt to express them in a few sentences will fail. It’s impossible to unscramble the ganglion of synapses accumulated over centuries in the national mind. When such attempts are made, they deliver nothing but vulgar statements of jingoism.

A civilised nation can be defined historically and existentially, but never ideologically. When it can be so defined, it’s not civilised.

Characteristically, an attempt to codify a national idea will fail even if undertaken by a clever man. For example, the émigré religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev (d. 1948) wrote a whole book The Russian Idea, in which he described the 1936 Soviet Constitution as “the most democratic in history”.

Called ‘Stalin’s constitution’, it was actually written by one of the top Bolsheviks Nikolai Bukharin. By way of gratitude, Stalin had him shot two years later.

“The Russian messianic conception,” wrote Berdyaev, “always exalted Russia as a country that would help to solve the problems of humanity and would accept a place in the service of humanity.”

Therefore, “recent changes in Russia, the changed attitude to religion and to the country’s traditions, make it not only possible but right for Christian Russians to rally to the Soviet government.”

The same government, in other words, that had already murdered 60 million Russians (including tens of thousands of priests and millions of their parishioners) and enslaved the rest. Not bad for a religious philosopher and, incidentally, the darling of Soviet dissidents.

If you think I’m going too far back, you’ll be happy to know that the Russian national idea has recently been worded concisely and cogently, at last. The man who achieved that improbable feat is Ivan Okhlobystin, one of Russia’s best-known personalities.

Looking at Ivan’s CV, one realises how little one has accomplished. Even Renaissance men like Leonardo would feel humbled.

Okhlobystin’s Wikipedia entry describes him as an “actor, director, script writer, playwright, writer, TV show host, radio show host, politician, ordained priest in the Russian Orthodox Church”.

In his 55 years, Ivan has starred in some 50 films, scripted 22 others, appeared in countless TV shows, written 12 books, served as parish priest – and still found time in his manic schedule to define the Russian idea.

I shan’t keep you in suspense any longer. Here is that elusive idea according to Ivan:

“The Ukraine must disappear, the West must be brought to its knees and forced to do penal labour for the benefit of the Russian Empire, the rest of the world must prove its support for us and share our concept of the future for some two hundred years to come. This is precisely how the Russian idea sounds today. All other ideas are from the devil.”

Berdyaev was a celebrated philosopher and accomplished stylist, yet even he fell short of Ivan’s rare ability to say so much in so few words. Berdyaev had to envelop the same basic concept in a fog of prolixity, whereas Renaissance man Ivan cuts right to the chase laconically and forcefully.

If you ever wonder why so many Russians support Putin’s bandit raid on the Ukraine, just reread Ivan’s credo. This isn’t the rant of a drug-addled madman, but a sample of the intellectual fare fed to the Russians round the clock in every available medium. All other dishes are strictly off the menu.

“The Russian messianic conception” has been a dominant idea in that country since the 16^th century, but at least under the tsars it wasn’t the only one. In 1917 it, in a different guise, ousted all competition and has ruled the roost continuously in one form or another ever since, with only a couple of years’ hiatus in the early 1990s.

The great literature of which the Russians are justifiably proud expressed this messianism with greater mastery than Ivan did, but with no more equivocation. Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Turgenev all glorified the saintly Russian peasant towering spiritually and morally over the godless West. And, especially in his Diaries, Dostoyevsky pushed that notion into the territory adjacent to one later occupied by such Germans as Julius Streicher and Joseph Goebbels.

When such sentiments are planted at the grassroots, sooner or later they’ll produce a bountiful harvest. All it takes is fertilising the soil with uncontested fascist propaganda, while sprinkling it with herbicides to exterminate all dissent.

Please ponder this next time you read yet another hack saying that the problem lies just with Putin, not the Russian people. Putin has effectively marshalled the attitudes residing in the Russian breast. But he didn’t put them there.

This is enough to make you believe in reincarnation. When asked last week how he thought his war on the Ukraine was going, Putin said, “Everybody should know that, largely speaking, we haven’t yet even started anything in earnest.”

Commentators immediately began to speculate what he might have meant by that, and I’ll offer my version shortly. But what first caught my eye was the uncanny historical parallel.

A similar line was uttered by the naval hero of the American Revolution, Captain John Paul Jones. Jones was a Scot who upheld a fine tradition of his native land by moving to America, becoming a naval officer and fighting the English.

In one battle he found his flagship Bonhomme Richard (France’s gift to the insurgents) being blown to bits by a British frigate off the coast of England. When the English captain demanded his surrender, Jones famously presaged Putin’s aphorism by saying, “I have not yet begun to fight!”

Having won that battle, the sea wolf found himself unemployed after the victorious Revolution. In search of action, he went to Russia, where Catherine the Great promoted him to rear-admiral. Jones distinguished himself during the Russo-Turkish War, where his flagship was named – brace yourself! – Vladimir. An amazing coincidence or what?

History is screaming parallels, is anyone listening? To finish with Jones, he was soon embroiled in a scandal involving a 12-year-old girl, lost his commission and eventually died in Paris, near Luxembourg Gardens.

Now his alter ego Putin echoes the celebrated gesture of defiance, indicating he has far-reaching plans. Having already lost 35,000 soldiers dead, plus thousands more of the so-called separatists and the mercenaries of the Wagner Group, Putin is barely warming up.

For what? Here I beseech you yet again to listen to what he is actually saying. Westerners have been conditioned to be sceptical about their politicians’ promises, but that’s democracy for you. Dictators don’t have to curry favour with the electorate, which is why they tend to mean what they say.

We’d be well-advised to take Putin at his word, just as Britain and France shouldn’t have dismissed Hitler’s wild threats as mere braggadocio. So what is Putin saying?

Right from the start he has been explaining that his “special operation” isn’t a war on the Ukraine. It’s only the prelude to Russia’s war on Nato, meaning the West in general.

As usual, the West was slow on the uptake, but the message is beginning to sink in. At the recent Madrid Summit, Nato leaders have undertaken to beef up their rapid response contingent in Europe from 40,000 to 300,000. They have also belatedly begun to increase their defence budgets, and even Germany is making tentative steps towards at last acquiring an army.

Observing the performance of the Russian army in the Ukraine, neither Putin nor any of his generals can be confident about the prospect of taking on all of Nato in a conventional confrontation. They know, and Nato knows, and everyone knows that such a clash would result in a quick rout of the Russian forces.

Putin is holding a losing hand, but he does boast a strong trump: nuclear weapons. Western observers keep speculating along the lines of “Will he or won’t he?”, but that’s the wrong question to ask.

The right question is, “Can he do anything else?” And the only possible answer is no. Putin can’t withdraw from the Ukraine tail between his legs – such abject retreat would go against the grain of the very essence of his aggressive, fascist regime.

Such regimes always go all the way, or die trying. They need victory as both self-vindication and self-defence.

In Putin’s case, his determination is also predicated on his youthful experience as a street gang member in his native Leningrad. Since I used to run away from similar gangs to those Putin used to run with, I know that those chaps would rather lose their life than their face.

They function according to their own code and their own ethic, with neither countenancing defeat. A defeated gangster loses respect, meaning he loses everything – including his life.

If Putin has no hope of winning a conventional clash with Nato, and since defeat isn’t an option, he has to go nuclear. How nuclear is a big question, and I for one doubt he’d go all in from the start. More likely is that he’d begin with some low-yield tactical weapons, as a statement of intent. He’d first brandish a razor, holding a loaded gun behind his back.

I don’t have the benefit of access to Nato’s intelligence reports, but Putin’s public pronouncements, and those of his stooges, give a sufficient clue to his intentions, and also his targets. Such pronouncements go beyond the de rigueur threats to turn America into a Stalin Strait separating Canada from Mexico or to sink Britain with a couple of big bombs.

Hidden in the pile of such verbal manure are the pearls of real information. One such is that the likely targets of the first nuclear strikes will be the Ukraine, Poland and one of the Baltic states, most probably Lithuania.

Another is that Lukashenko’s Belarus is likely to be used as the launchpad. There are many indications of this, starting with the constitutional changes Lukashenko announced on 28 February, four days after the kick-off of the “special operation”.

One such was allowing the permanent presence of Russian nuclear forces on Belarusian territory. Belarus of course inherited some Soviet nuclear weapons after the 1991 break-up of the Soviet Union, which she then relinquished to Russia in 1994.

Now the country was ready to reclaim such weapons under Russian control, effectively turning Belarus into what I’ve described as Russia’s launchpad. A few days ago, Lukashenko reiterated his invitation, which effectively means Belarus is no longer subject to the conditions of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

This was accompanied by a slow but steady redeployment of Russian nuclear-tipped Iskander missiles closer to the Belarusian border. That process gathered speed after Lithuania blocked the supply of sanctioned goods to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, formerly Königsberg.

Western leaders have been reacting to these developments with characteristic vacillation – or at least so it seems to those of us who aren’t privy to classified data. They are doing their utmost to avoid any direct confrontation between Nato and Russian forces.

Their military aid to the Ukraine is significant and vital, but it doesn’t enable the Ukrainians to take the war to Russia. Nato doesn’t arm them with many long-range weapons, and the few that do reach the Ukraine come in exchange for the promise not to fire them into Russian territory.

At the same time one continues to hear Western leaders begging Zelensky to relinquish a large chunk of his territory for the sake of a peace treaty. In addition to cowardice and immorality, this shows a woeful misreading of the situation.

First, Zelensky or any other Ukrainian leader will never accept such terms, not after losing thousands of lives and seeing their cities reduced to a good replica of Dresden, circa 1945. More important, they wouldn’t accept such a deal because they know Putin wants all of the Ukraine, not a part. Give him time to catch his breath, and he’ll come back in force.

Nor can such a treaty be on the table because Putin doesn’t want it either. He may be after all of the Ukraine, but only as a step along the way, not the final destination. Take him at his word, and let me spell it out for you: P-U-T-I-N  I-S  F-I-G-H-T-I-N-G  N-A-T-O,  N-O-T  U-K-R-A-I-N-E.

Yes, Putin is already fighting Nato, but Nato isn’t fighting Putin. It’s like the Phoney War preceding the Battle of Britain: the war was in full swing, but the Allies pursued the ostrich strategy of pretending not to notice it.

When Putin says he hasn’t “yet even started anything in earnest”, he is lying: he has. But Nato hasn’t, and the sooner it does, the less devastating will the consequences be. Nato can’t afford to be like a child who covers up his eyes and believes that whatever is scaring him is no longer there.

When Putin takes a leaf out of John Paul Jones’s book, he means it. The earlier and more decisive Nato’s response will be, the better chance it’ll have to sink Putin’s ambitions.

I wonder if Western strategists are considering a preemptive strike on Belarus the moment those Iskanders cross the border. If they aren’t, they should: if they allow a nuclear broadside, an Armageddon beckons.  

You may wonder what tennis has to do with life, specifically yours. After all, chances are you neither play the game nor watch it, not regularly at any rate.

So why should you waste your time reading about youngsters chasing fuzzy yellow balls around a patch of Wimbledon grass? Simple. Think of it as another exhibit in the indictment of modernity.

The charge is total – and totalitarian – primacy of ideology over everything else. One of the pieces of corroborative evidence is enforcement of equality where no parity exists.

Men, women, others are all supposed to be proportionately represented and equally paid – regardless of achievement, industry or competence. Justice, morality, even commercial common sense need not apply, and there I was, thinking modernity is obsessed about money. So it is, but not when it clashes with ideology.

Thus men and women are paid exactly the same prize money at the four Grand Slam events, of which Wimbledon takes pride of place. This year’s winners got just over £2 million each; the runners-up half that.

A labourer worthy of his hire and all that – justice, modern style, was done. However, comparing the two finals, men’s and women’s, even a casual watcher would have known that in this case, as in so many others, modern justice actually means injustice.

It even has nothing to do with the supposedly relevant principle of equal pay for equal work. For the work put in by the men and the women was as equal as chicken salad and chicken manure.

The most obvious thing first: the men’s final took four sets played over 3 hours 1 minute. Had it gone to five sets, it would probably have lasted more than four hours. The women’s final was a three-setter lasting 1 hour 47 minutes, which was about as long as it could have gone (women don’t play five-setters). Hence Novak Djokovic’s hourly wage was much lower than that of Yelena Rybakina, the women’s champion.

And if you compare the total time on court over the whole tournament, poor Novak got paid less than half of Rybakina’s pro rata earnings. Let’s hear it for gender equality.

Yet it’s not just about quantity but also quality. For the Djokovic-Kyrgios final was tennis at its most brilliant, with most points won by a cluster of good shots, not lost by silly errors. Facing one of the biggest hitters on the men’s tour, Djokovic committed only 17 unforced errors in four hard-fought sets.

By contrast, the Rybakina-Jabeur final was greatly inferior even to some club matches I’ve seen. And in terms of net play it was inferior to some club matches I’ve played.

The girls couldn’t hit two shots in a row, even when they weren’t going for winners. In earning her £2 million, Rybakina committed 33 unforced errors – that’s a set and a half just thrown away. Those few shots she did manage to get over the net and between the white lines carried more weight than Jabeur’s cream puffs, which is why she won. Watching that kind of tennis was painful.

Her opponent noticed that Rybakina’s mobility wasn’t that of a professional athlete. Hence Jabeur tried to hit one drop shot after another, but she wasn’t good at it. Any male player would have changed his strategy, but Jabeur – world number two! – had only one string to her bow, if that.

When she did push Rybakina into a corner, the latter was patently unable to retrieve her central position after hitting the ball. So she kept whacking Hail Mary shots, hit or miss, mostly miss.

All this shows that the women haven’t spent enough time either on the practice court or on the running track. They haven’t mastered the professional technique of hitting the ball with consistent power and placement, and neither are they physically up to scratch.

Someone like Djokovic demonstrably has put in the required time, which cuts his pro rata wage even more compared to Rybakina’s. Equality reigns supreme.

Some of the commentators were professional players who know infinitely more about the game than I do. They could compare Djokovic and Rybakina, or men’s and women’s tennis in general, stroke for stroke – and offer their instructive conclusions chapter and verse.

So did they? Of course not. The totalitarian ideology won’t let them. They were equally effusive about both finals, which was tantamount to cheating the audience of expert opinion. Yet the subject of prize money did come up, regularly.

However, not one commentator pointed out the glaring injustice of equal prize funds. Instead – are you ready for this? – they kept lamenting that, yes, the Grand Slam events do strike a blow for gender equality. But if you look at other tournaments, you’ll see that women’s prizes are merely 85 per cent of the men’s. Clearly, there’s some work to be done yet.

The work I’d like to see done is cutting women’s prize funds to no more than half of the men’s, or a third, if justice is really to be served. Be that as it may, tennis tournaments are organised by independent organisations under the aegis of the ATP or the WTA, which don’t answer to any governments either.

So how does the woke brigade of tennis propose to force those tournaments to increase women’s prize funds? The same way they pushed through gender equality at the Grand Slams: through rabid propaganda and unrestrained political pressure. It worked once, it’ll work again.

Speaking of Rybakina, she was only allowed to compete at Wimbledon because she is listed as a Kazakh, not Russian. Russian players were banned from this year’s Wimbledon because the organisers didn’t want to give Putin a chance to gloat should one of them win.

Now, Rybakina is a Russian girl, born and bred in Moscow where she has lived all her life, and where she is still living. I’m not even sure she has ever visited Kazakhstan. However, in the past 10 years that country’s government has started buying Russian athletes wholesale to boost its own international prestige.

No residence requirements exist. A Russian athlete can simply agree to represent Kazakhstan in return for generous financial support, which is what Rybakina did some six years ago.

I watched her match in France, and the commentators kept saying that she didn’t just represent Kazakhstan, but was d’origine Kazakh. Clearly, they had never seen any persons of Kazakh origin, who tend to be less blonde than Rybakina and somewhat shorter than her six feet.

One such person, the president of the Kazakhstan Tennis Association, was in attendance, and he celebrated Rybakina’s triumph like a winner of a prole TV game show. He wasn’t the only one.

The Russians celebrated even more wildly. Shamil Tarpishchev, Putin’s tennis coach, who happens to be under personal international sanctions for links with organised crime, bleated that “Yelena is ours.”

So she is, and the triumphant articles in the Russian press somehow omitted her links with Kazakhstan. Thus Wimbledon’s ploy didn’t work, but at least the intention was laudable.

I wonder how much of her £2 million Yelena will have to kick back to Tarpishchev and his jolly friends. Quite a lot, would be my guess, but I’m sure she’ll have enough left not to sweat on the practice court, learning how to hit the ball in consistently. Add to this her forthcoming modelling contracts, and Djokovich will seem like a pauper.

Boris Johnson was brought down by a cabal of vengeful Remainers, anti-Tory hacks and cabinet backstabbers, all as feeble of mind and character as they are strong on perfidy.

Now his party has embarked on a meandering course at the end of which a generation of Labour governance beckons. Will the real Tory in the lot please stand up?

They all remain seated. The declared candidates for Number 10 don’t even know what conservatism means. They aren’t about statesmanship, ideas and principles. Their whole being is circumscribed by naked powerlust.

Just look at Rishi Sunak. He registered his ready4rishi website in December, which at least shows some aptitude for foresight. And his sleek campaign video hit the waves just hours after Johnson announced his manically upbeat resignation.

Take it from a former adman – that video had to take at least a week to conceive, produce and edit. It was in the can, ready to roll, just as Rishi was honing his knife on a strop.

Now he is making pronouncements that would make a well-read child ashamed of himself. Rishi is talking about the “fairy tales” allegedly peddled by his rivals. They are promising, he says, both low taxes and high public spending.

By contrast, his own take on the economy is “grown-up”. Rishi correctly believes that high spending must be accompanied by high taxation and, credit where it’s due, as Chancellor he practised what he preaches.

He isn’t the only one. The Tories have been in power for 12 years, and what they have to show for this stint is the highest public debt ever and the greatest taxation burden in decades. And now two of the perpetrating chancellors, Sunak and Javid, have the gall to preach sound economics.

No one, including Rishi, is even mooting the possibility of reducing both spending and taxes. All they are saying is that the latter would be destructive without the former – and the blighters are right about that. Yet they all refuse even to consider the possibility of reducing the economy-busting, inflation-boosting, business-stifling public spending.

Now that the unauthorised piss-up and the odd drunken homosexual pass have been removed as targets, the plotters are trying to sort it out among themselves on the battleground of the economy. Yet they haven’t come up with a single realistic proposal on how they are going to reverse Johnson’s disastrous policies.

The reason is simple. They know they would have done exactly the same in his place – and will do exactly the same when the occupy his place. Moreover, they have all been complicit in the protracted suicide pact going by the name of our economic policy.

Will any of those spivs have the courage to announce he’ll abandon the lunatic net-zero emissions policy to which Johnson committed Britain? Will they admit that the underlying theory was hatched by those who hate our civilisation?

Will they paraphrase Churchill to say that “never in the field of human economics has so much been destroyed by so few to impoverish so many on so little scientific evidence”?

Will they abandon the insane and counterproductive drive for ‘renewable’ energy (which will never be able to power a modern economy) and instead demand an increase in oil and gas production? Will they provide incentives for the hydraulic fracturing of shale gas (fracking), whose vast reserves would make Britain independent of foreign sources?

Will they abolish green taxes and regulations? Stop encouraging the electric-car madness? Lower fuel duty from its current rate of 57.95p per litre, plus 20 per cent VAT? That alone would instantly lower the prices at the pump, but they aren’t going to do that, are they?

Yet Johnson’s refusal to cut such consumption taxes was one of the mightiest blows he delivered to the economy. Here’s an opening for you, chaps, wide enough to drive a petrol tanker through. Alas, that foot isn’t coming anywhere near the accelerator pedal.

Yet fuel prices are the principal contributing factor of the runaway inflation rate. Quite apart from its immediately destructive effects on the economy, a two-digit inflation rate creates a devastating shift in personal economic behaviour.

It discourages prudence and thrift, while encouraging profligate spending, gambling investments and indebtedness. With their nest eggs being dismantled twig by twig, people will rush either to spend their money while it can still buy something or to invest it in something that may retain value, usually property.

High public spending financed by burgeoning borrowing and taxation is what drives the inflation upwards. Are any of our aspiring leaders going to reverse this trend? Don’t be silly.

Another blow inflation delivers to the standard of living is the so-called bracket creep. As money loses its real value, its nominal value goes up. Thus more and more people are being pushed into higher tax brackets, which leaves even less money for their families.

Instead of freezing income tax brackets, Johnson, ably assisted by Chancellor Sunak, imposed an extra 2.5 per cent national insurance tax. Ask Rishi if he is going to abandon that piece of economic sabotage, see what he says.

Stimulating business and attracting investment are two ways of treating economic ills. Yet instead of lowering business taxes to make Britain a paradise for investors, Johnson-Sunak hiked them high enough to produce an investment hell. Will Rishi undo this damage? Of course not.

Johnson deserved to be dumped for his wokery, virtue-signalling, socialist policies reminiscent of Roosevelt’s New Deal and economically ruinous politicking. Yet none of the candidates shows the slightest sign of being any different, except in the direction of being even worse.

At least Johnson managed to get us out of that corrupt and ineffectual Leviathan, the EU, something most of his rivals fought. Thanks to that he was able to respond to the two great blights of his tenure, Covid and Putin, better than any of his European counterparts.

Putin and his gang wildly celebrating Johnson’s resignation is testimony to at least one good thing he did in government. He is our enemy’s enemy, which should give Johnson a sporting chance of being our friend.

Dubious achievements falling short of ideal responses, some would say. True. But at least they were indeed achievements.

What did Cameron achieve? Legalised homomarriage? And what about that darling bud of May? What did she ever do, other than trying to sabotage the greatest vote in British history?

One doesn’t have to be a soothsayer to predict that the Rishi, Sajid, Jeremy, Liz circus won’t yield a leader any better than Johnson. Even worse, is the safe way to bet.

Yesterday I wrote about the intimate links between Austrian politicians and Putin. Austria being a long way away, a reader asked me to name some similarly connected figure closer to home.

Generally, following Burke’s prescription, I try to respond to my readers’ interests, not necessarily their wishes. This time, however, destiny intervened.

An announcement was made that Prince and Princess Michael of Kent (whom Princess Anne once called ‘Princess Pushy’, and the name stuck) are withdrawing from their official royal duties. The news left me cold since it’s only their unofficial dealings that interest me.

And these enable me to make a start on the aforementioned request. But first I must declare a personal interest. In 2012 I wrote the article below in The Daily Mail, which put an end to my involvement with the paper. The Palace complained, and little insignificant I was out on my ear – especially since I already was on notice for getting on the wrong side of PinkNews.

Here’s that article, with a few current comments attached.

In Russian business a killing doesn’t just mean making a lot of money. It’s a way of settling disagreements, enforcing contracts, collecting debts or just gaining a competitive advantage.

I don’t know which of those motives inspired the murder of the Moscow furniture tycoon Mikhail Kravchenko, and frankly I don’t care. Life has always been cheap in Russia, and it’s now even cheaper than it was, say, 50 years ago. People these days can be murdered for most trivial reasons, making it hard to second-guess the real one.

I only wish that members of our royal family didn’t get embroiled, however tangentially, in the murky world of Russian gangland. That’s precisely what the Russian business world is – and what it can only be in a country that has little tradition of legality. Without a just, independent and enforceable legal system, free enterprise is gangsterism. To this rule there are no exceptions.

That doesn’t mean that every rich man in Russia is a crime lord. Some are, some aren’t. But even those who aren’t have to play the game whose rules are set by the Mafia, operating under the aegis of that ultimate protection racket, the country’s government.

I don’t know much about the late Mr Kravchenko. If newspaper accounts are to be believed, he built his chain of furniture stores on the Ikea model. No direct Mafia links have been mentioned, but every Russian millionaire is tainted, if only by association. A pub landlord who pays protection money to the local hoodlum is unwittingly tarred by the same brush.

That’s why those British figures who stand for something other than just themselves should steer clear of any personal association with so-called Russian businessmen. One realises that this would be too much to expect from the likes of Lord Mandelson, whose financial shenanigans even within Britain have twice got him sacked from the government, and who is now friends with the Russian aluminium king Deripaska. But one is entitled to expect probity from members of the reigning dynasty that’s supposed to embody the historical sagacity and virtue of its realm.

Yet Prince and Princess Michael insist on hobnobbing with various Russians whose power and wealth by definition have a dubious provenance. Speculation has been rife that the Princess’s relationship with Kravchenko went beyond the ‘close friendship’ to which she owns up. I really don’t care one way or the other – though most men would be upset if their wives were photographed holding hands with a younger man in Venice. Venice isn’t Milan; one doesn’t go there on business. But let the gossip columns ponder this. For me a ‘close friendship’ is bad enough.

It may be entirely coincidental that Princess Michael’s ‘close friend’ got riddled with bullets during the same week in which it was revealed that Prince Michael had accepted a gift of £320,000 from Boris Berezovsky. Then again, it may not be.

Berezovsky, Putin’s friend and patron in the past, is now his worst enemy. This means that Boris can’t show his face anywhere near Russia and has to live in England with a platoon of bodyguards in close attendance. Occasionally peeking out from his assorted fortresses, he’s still meddling in Russian politics, usually by financing Putin’s opponents.

Berezovsky has claimed that his gift to Prince Michael was just a friendly gesture, offering help to a man in need. The extent of the grace-and-favour royal’s deprivation is neither immediately obvious nor particularly important. What is significant is that, even if the Russian exile had been driven by uncharacteristically noble impulses, the Prince acted imprudently by accepting money whose origin is in some eyes questionable. And Putin isn’t above sending a not-so-subtle message to the princely family: stay away or else.

Nor is it out of the question that this KGB colonel may see the Prince as a potential rival. The monarchist sentiment is strong in Russia, and it’s getting stronger. And Prince Michael has often been rumoured as a possible tsar, what with the immediate Romanov dynasty having been wiped out in 1918.

In all fairness, it has to be said that the Prince does little to dispel such rumours. He doesn’t mind, for example, emphasising his already remarkable resemblance to his second cousin twice removed, Tsar Nicholas II. To that end His Royal Highness has grown a beard styled à la Nicholas and has taken the trouble of learning Russian to a reasonable standard. His consultancy has had business dealings with Russia for many years, and the Prince has been awarded Russia’s Order of Friendship, a decoration for particularly friendly foreigners.

Being friendly to Russia is one thing; being friendly to her ruling regime is quite another. Apart from its transparent criminality, this regime is fickle in its affections. That it awards a medal to the husband today doesn’t at all preclude the possibility that it might ‘whack’ (to use Putin’s favourite word) the wife’s ‘close friend’ tomorrow.

I’m not speculating whether it did or didn’t. All I’m saying is that it’s best not to come in close contact with dirt, for some of it may rub off on one. It’s best to exercise prudence – unless of course the Prince and Princess wish to strike yet another blow for republicanism in Britain.

Since that article was written for a reputable publication, it was couched in polite terms. I could have gone further then, and I can certainly do so now. After all, the intervening 10 years have added corrective touches to the old story.

For one thing, the security precautions Berezovsky took at the time of writing didn’t work. A few months later he was found garrotted in his bathroom. The official judgement was suicide, which was later changed to an open verdict. That open verdict is an open secret to anyone who knows anything about Putin’s MO: Berezovsky was ‘whacked’.

That didn’t prevent Prince Michael from flogging access to Putin and his entourage for large sums of money, reputed to be £10,000 a day. You must understand that such access is a precious commodity that the paranoid and hypochondriac chieftain doesn’t grant lightly. And he certainly wouldn’t accept mediation from just anybody.

There had to be a quid pro quo there somewhere, and it went beyond the piles of quid both Vlad and HRH could make as a result of such representation. Would it be too much of a stretch to suggest that Prince Michael not only gained but also offered access, making it easier for Putin’s emissaries to infiltrate the British establishment?

The Prince has long-standing links with Russia, and until recently he served as the patron of the Russo-British Chamber of Commerce, a transparent KGB front. And he still remains an ambassador and shareholder of RemitRadar, a money-transfer firm run by former KGB officer Sergei Markov (“There’s no such thing as ex-KGB. This is for life,” Putin once said.)

Just last year Prince Michael was caught on camera peddling access to Putin. His prospective clients were two undercover reporters posing as Korean gold traders. The Prince assured them that his Russian links would “bring them some benefit”, while his associate told them to keep the transaction hush-hush.

For decades now, the royal couple have relied on Russia for a great part of their income. And by all accounts, Princess Pushy was also attached to Russia emotionally, not just commercially.

I hope that one day all Russian links of the British social and political elite will be properly investigated. I doubt it though: people don’t like to ask questions when they know in advance they’ll hate the answers.

If you ever wonder how thoroughly Western countries are infiltrated by Russian agents (of influence or otherwise), look no further than Austria.

Last week, Karin Kneissl, the country’s Foreign Minister between 2017 and 2019, emigrated from her native land, citing “death threats”.

To this extremely casual observer of Austrian affairs, it was fear for her freedom, not her life, that must have driven her out. For Kneissl’s links with Russia were intimate enough to be described as borderline treasonous.

Putin has been putting his KGB training to good use by systematically infiltrating European politics and recruiting European politicians. Since Germany is the biggest country on that targeted continent, it’s mostly German Putinistas who make the news.

If fact, the process of KGB seduction is called ‘Schroederization’, in honour of Gerhardt Schroeder, the former Chancellor who, when still in office, allowed the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and in general promoted Russian interests wherever he could. After he lost his post, Schroeder made millions as chairman of the Russian oil giant Rosneft.

His successor Angela Merkel was nicknamed ‘Putin’s best woman’, and she did all she could to merit that soubriquet. I’m sure that only Russia’s current attack on the Ukraine has prevented Frau Merkel from collecting her reward of a corporate post matching Schroeder’s.

That Ostpolitik policy of craven appeasement was covered with the fig leaf of a lame excuse called Wandel durch Handel, change through trade. The assumption peddled to the credulous public was that Putin will change his ways under the avalanche of euros pouring into his coffers.

However, predictably, for all the Handel going on, the only Wandel Putin was showing was for the worse. Expecting a KGB regime to act differently was a symptom of, kindly speaking, naivety, and I’d rather not ponder other possibilities.   

For all that, Germany wasn’t the most infiltrated country in Europe. In fact, compared to Austria, Germany comes across as practically a staunch bulwark of anti-Putin resistance. Like their German colleagues, Austrian politicians displayed an enviable cross-party consensus in falling over themselves to kiss the nether regions of Putin’s anatomy.

The Social Democrats led the way, proffering their protruded lips while holding out their hands for the stream of Russian gold. Former Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer (2007-8) ended up on the board of the Dialogue of Civilisations Institute, a Kremlin front led by the KGB general Vladimir Yakunin.

Another former SD Chancellor, Christian Kern, served on the supervisory board of Russian Railways. He campaigned against US sanctions aimed at stopping Nord Stream 2.

As a manifestation of that cross-party consensus, Hans Joerg Schelling, former Conservative Finance Minister, is under contract to Nord Stream 2. And Christian Democrat Wolfgang Schüssel, another former Chancellor, sat on the board of Lukoil, Rosneft’s competitor.

Then the turn came of the Freedom Party, Austria’s answer to France’s National Rally. That party was in the ruling coalition until 2019, when its leader, Vice-Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache was caught in a sting operation. He was filmed offering to swap government contracts for political support to men posing as Russian oligarchs.

A scandal broke out, and Chancellor Kurz had to end his coalition with the Freedom Party. That also ended the political career of Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl. But, as the saying goes, when one door closes, another opens.

Kneissl was a close friend of Putin’s fascism for years. For example, she visited the Crimea after the occupation, and campaigned vigorously against the post-annexation sanctions. And her personal relationship with Putin made Angie Merkel look positively standoffish.

In fact, Putin was the guest of honour at Kneissl’s 2018 wedding, and let me tell you: not every foreign minister is granted such an honour. Accompanied by the Cossack band he brought with him, Vlad danced with the blushing bride and kissed her hand. In response, Kneissl curtseyed, a gesture normally reserved for royalty.

Her rewards for loyalty were indeed royal. Having lost her government post, Kneissl joined the Rosneft board, which meant instant millions denominated in whatever currency you care to name. She also became a regular columnist at RT, Russia’s close equivalent of Der Stürmer or, to be marginally kinder, of the Völkischer Beobachter.

The aforementioned politicians immediately resigned their lucrative Russian posts after 24 February, when Russia launched her bandit raid on the Ukraine. Putin’s previous escapades of that kind, notably in Georgia, 2008, and the same Ukraine, 2014, hadn’t produced the same effect, but now their hunger for Putin’s rouble had to be put on hold.

Kneissl, however, held out for months and only reluctantly resigned from the Rosneft board in May. And now she is on the run, pursued by death threats or, more likely, the looming prospect of prosecution.

If I were her, I’d inquire if Xi has any openings for European collaborators. The lady is on a roll, and that’s like riding a tiger. The most dangerous thing you can do is to stop.

“To lose one Gazprom tycoon this year is unfortunate. To lose five is sheer carelessness” – this is what Wilde might have said had he not died in 1900.

More to the point is what his instructors must have taught about coincidences at Putin’s KGB spying school. When they number more than two, those gurus doubtless said, they aren’t coincidences.

My question, informed by neither analytical intelligence techniques nor by Wilde’s wit, is one I always ask under such circumstances: What are the odds?

In January, Leonid Shulman, the head of Gazprom’s transport service, was discovered dead at his mansion near St Petersburg. Verdict: suicide.

A month later, another Gazprom official, Alexander Tyulakov, was found hanged. Verdict: suicide.

In April, Vladislav Avayev, a former Gazprombank vice-president, his wife and 13-year-old daughter were found dead of gunshot wounds in their palatial Moscow apartment. Verdict: murder-suicide.

In that same cruel month, Sergey Protosenya, a top manager of an energy company linked with Gazprom, his wife and 18-year-old daughter were found dead of the same cause at their Spanish villa. Verdict: murder-suicide.

And the other day, Yuri Voronov, head of a Gazprom-related transportation company, was found floating dead in his swimming pool, with the gun that had killed him left at the scene nearby. Verdict: suicide.

Far be it from me to suspect foul play within the ranks of Russia’s gas monopoly, nominally headed by Putin’s Petersburg friend Alexei Miller, but part-owned by Vlad himself. It’s just that everything I’ve ever heard or read about statistics inclines me towards scepticism.

Since I don’t think suicide is a viral disease capable of causing epidemics, I’m stuck for a credible explanation. Then again, the history of communist and post-communist countries does add many new twists to epidemiology.

For example, just one month in 1984 saw an outbreak of cardiovascular deaths among Eastern European defence officials.

On 2 December, Army General Hoffmann, East Germany’s Defence Minister died of cardiac arrest. On 15 December, Army General Oláh, Hungary’s Defence Minister, died of cardiac arrest. On 16 December, Army General Dzúr, Czechoslovakia’s Defence Minister, died of cardiac arrest. On 20 December, Marshal Ustinov, Soviet Defence Minister, died of cardiac arrest.

All told, one either has to revise one’s understanding of medicine and, for that matter, statistics, or perhaps reassess one’s grasp of evil regimes. Our governments in the West may be variously incompetent, woke, self-destructive and even unjust. But they are qualitatively different from evil regimes, such as the one in Russia.

That’s partly why Western governments are always tardy in mustering a forceful response when such regimes act up. We simply refuse to accept that they come not just from a different culture, but from an alien moral universe largely inhabited, and exclusively run, by evil humanoids.

Now those creatures, in the deceptively human physique of the Kremlin spokesman Peskov and Foreign Ministry spokesman Zakharova, are in the grip of indecent joy over Boris Johnson’s resignation.

He is supposed to have been “hit by a boomerang launched by himself”, thereby providing a cautionary tale: “do not seek to destroy Russia”. This obscene glee is reason enough to mourn Johnson’s departure.

And do I detect a hint that the Russians played a part in whipping up anti-Johnson hysteria? I wouldn’t put it past them.

The resignation of two cabinet members, Chancellor Sunak and Health Secretary Javid, has thrown Boris Johnson’s tenure into a tailspin that he’ll find hard to reverse.

Now, typically I refrain from delving too deeply into the political rough-and-tumble of Britain. Since I’m not particularly interested in political mechanics and machinations myself, I don’t see how I can keep my readers, especially non-Britons, from stifling yawns.

However, the political problem Britain is facing is neither strictly political nor indigenously British. It’s existential and international or, if you will, civilisational.

We can argue about the pros and cons of our democracy run riot till the MPs come home from their summer recess, but one thing is indisputable. This system consistently fails to elevate to government those fit to govern, which is after all a principal desideratum of any political method. And practice shows that, whenever any system fails to deliver on its remit for decades, the problem lies with the system, not just its specific operators.

As I look at the line-up of Western leaders this century, I genuinely fear for our collective survival. Seldom does one see such a complement of fools and knaves in any important jobs, never mind those that affect the whole world.

Not a single one displays the traits of character, morality and intellect that ought to be essential job requirements for a career in government. Against that background, I can’t for the life of me see how Johnson deserves to be ousted and, say, Biden, Scholz and Macron don’t.

Getting back to our green and pleasant land, nor do I see a Tory leader promising to be any better than Johnson. As for Labour politicians, not a single one is within a million miles of being able to run anything bigger than a local communist cell… sorry, I mean a union branch.

That Johnson doesn’t seem to know the difference between truth and falsehood, wielding either or both as the situation demands, is obvious. That he is obsessed with power for its own sake can’t be gainsaid either, and neither can the palpable contempt he feels for his own regulations.

These are the first and usually last points brought up by his critics, frothing at the mouth on Sky News this morning. Alastair Campbell, Svengali to Tony Blair, was especially foamy.

He was on the air for about five minutes, during which time he managed to scream “liar, cheat, charlatan, criminal” half a dozen times. Johnson, he shouted with that stern self-righteous expression of his, is “the worst prime minister we’ve ever had”.

I’d say Johnson is better, or rather marginally less awful, than any post-Thatcher PM, emphatically including Campbell’s former charge. No PM in British history wreaked as much constitutional sabotage as Blair did, with Campbell providing the inspiration and the spin.

Then Michael Heseltine came on and croaked many words along the same lines, adding a few inanities of his own. The greatest crime Johnson committed, said that Remainer-in-Chief, was pushing Brexit through.

Really? And there I was, thinking that, by doing so, Johnson merely acted on the will of the British people, expressed in the biggest number of votes ever cast for anything.

We are all committed democrats, aren’t we? Especially those who, like Heseltine, devoted their whole lives to democratic politics? It sounds suspiciously as if those chaps like democracy only when it yields the result they want.

Johnson did push Brexit through, even though the political establishment fought tooth and nail to ignore the greatest vote in British history. By doing so, he rode roughshod over saboteurs of British sovereignty and therefore constitution, those who were willing to turn Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth into Liz Windsor, citizen of the EU.

Johnson also unrolled the Covid vaccination programme faster and more effectively than any other European leader. I know that many people regard the relevant science as dubious, but they weren’t in a position to make life or death decisions, as Johnson was. Agree or disagree, but he did well in showing due respect for a pandemic that killed 4.5 million worldwide.

He also put Britain in the vanguard of the civilised countries trying to stop Russian fascism in its tracks. People say that Johnson came out as a champion of the Ukraine’s independence for selfish reasons, to divert public attention from domestic problems. That very well may be, but it’s not as if Messrs Biden, Macron, Scholz and Draghi had no domestic problems they’d wish to divert public attention from.

All the crimes Johnson is charged with in the court of his political opponents are trivial. At worst, they fall into the category of misdemeanours for which a gentle rap on the knuckles would be sufficient punishment.

He flouted his own regulations by having a garden shindig at Number 10 – naughty. But he who is without sin, and all that. Did you follow every Covid regulation without fail? Did anyone you know? I didn’t, and I don’t expect a politician to be any more law-abiding, or for that matter moral, than I am.

Then he didn’t immediately sack that walking aptronym, Deputy Whip Pincher, when it came to light that the chap tended to, well, pinch other men when in his cups. When confronted, Johnson told a transparent lie about not having heard any of the previous accusations of Pincher’s tactile tendencies.

Bring out that ruler, time for another rap on the knuckles. Of course, it’s not nice for politicians to lie. But show me one who says he never does, and I’ll show you a liar. A modern politician who doesn’t lie violates the sacred, if unspoken, oath of his profession.

Every few years they are supposed to go before the public, having first spent millions on trying to gauge the public’s wishes. Then, focus group reports in front of their eyes, they systematically promise to fulfil every one of those wishes, knowing in advance they have neither the means nor indeed the intention of doing so.

They thus prostitute the essence of their profession, while sticking by its overwhelmingly dominant techniques. Compared to that, what’s a little lie about another politician’s wandering hands? Kindergarten stuff, really.

Lest you may think I’m arguing that Johnson is fit to be prime minister, I am not. Of course, he isn’t. Johnson isn’t a bad politician, he is just a typical one.

Actually, he is wittier, better educated and better spoken than most. Someone like Biden or Trump can’t even speak English properly, while Johnson effortlessly swaps Gallic puns with Manny Macron. He can even whip out a Greek quotation when pressed.

All those qualities make him an ideal companion at a dinner party, provided he can keep his hands off the behinds of other men’s wives. Alas, such accomplishments are irrelevant to his profession, and some will even argue they are injurious to it.

Few great statesmen from Washington to de Gaulle to Thatcher were widely celebrated for their effortless charm. They brought to bear on their mission other qualities, those demonstrably lacking in Johnson.

One such is having principles. Johnson doesn’t seem to believe in anything but Johnson. He is certainly not a Tory in anything other than his dress sense and speech.

He is an opportunist who will do or say anything that’ll keep him in power a while longer. Looking at his record on the economy, there is no denying his tenure has been plagued by bad luck, in the shape of Covid and Putin (my French friends maliciously pronounce the word virus as vie-russe, thereby merging the two plagues together).

Yet it’s as clear that Johnson’s policies have made the situation much worse. Having sensed that going against the woke grain would be detrimental to his political career, he has committed the country to every knavish trick of modernity.

Trillions are in the process of being wasted on the diktats of the green ideology, with Johnson making frankly idiotic and unrealistic commitments, such as having no fossil-engine cars by 2030. Abandoning such anti-scientific neo-Luddite programmes would go a long way towards easing the country’s economic plight.

Johnson’s commitment to promiscuous social spending financed by the highest taxation for decades is rapidly turning what could have been a mild downturn into a looming catastrophe. High public spending is a principal driver of high inflation, which economic maxim Johnson is helpfully vindicating.

Interestingly, his critics don’t take Johnson to account on such suicidal economic irresponsibility because he is practising exactly what they themselves preach. Nor is he criticised for his commitment to every woke diktat, from multi-culti to numerically virtuous representation of women in government and corporations to homomarriage to the transsex perversions.

This gets me back to the question in the headline above. Who should take Johnson’s place, provided the place becomes vacant thanks to the combined efforts of our ‘liberal’ media and his political competitors? Who would have done better in his place, or can be confidently expected to do better if finding himself at Number 10?

Sunak? Javid? Gove? Raab? Mordaunt, she of the thunder thighs fame? Or – and I hope you’ve already had your lunch – Starmer? Sturgeon perhaps? Possibly Blair, should he make a comeback, as is widely mooted?

You begin to see my point. The problem is with the horse, not the jockey. Unless we rethink all modern political assumptions, we’ll be forever stuck with self-serving nonentities, of whom Johnson is far from the worst.

In most countries, history is to some extent politicised, that is revised to reflect modern political sensibilities. Some of that is unavoidable, I suppose, but pushing that tendency to an extreme will replace history with politics altogether.

Russian historiography, especially but far from exclusively over the past 100 years, is a typical example of facts replaced with politically motivated mythology. Putin is a prime exponent of this, justifying his beastliness with historical references that can only charitably be described as inaccurate.

This brings me to Alexander Nevsky (d. 1263), honoured in Russia as one of its greatest heroes and canonised by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1547. In a 2008 poll, Nevsky was named the greatest Russian ever, narrowly beating Stalin to that honour. Yet that tells you more about Russians in general than specifically about Nevsky.

Alexander, Grand Prince of Kiev, Grand Prince of Vladimir and Prince of Novgorod, acquired his sobriquet by defeating a mighty Swedish army in the 1240 Battle of the Neva. Two years later he defeated the Livonian knights in a battle fought on the ice of Lake Peipus, thus again saving Holy Russia from Western infidels.

The latter exploit was immortalised by Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 film, commissioned by Stalin. Hence the first icon, or rather iconic image on the left: Nikolai Cherkassky in the eponymous role, his chiselled Nordic features doubtless reflecting Stalin’s self-image he liked to cherish in his heart (though not in front of a mirror).

Eisenstein’s brilliant camerawork, accompanied by Shostakovich’s rousing score, showed Nevsky leading his host into battle. At the critical moment, the ice cracked and hundreds of those Teutonic knights drowned.

Such was the climax of history as politics. History as fact is rather different.

Alexander’s first epic victory was won against a mounted convoy accompanying a caravan of goods for sale. Hence the engagement was merely a skirmish, which Alexander indeed won. However, the provenance of his adversaries is uncertain.

One known fact is that their leader was named Spiridon, a name of Slavic origin. Another fact was that Alexander’s second-in-command was named Drochila, meaning ‘wanker’. A possible name for an epic hero, I suppose, but not the most obvious one.

The contemporaneous chronicles don’t mention the event at all, a gap that Swedish documents never filled. Russian chronicles waited for at least another century for the triumph to make an appearance, but even then it only rated the briefest of mentions.

The Battle on the Ice wasn’t much of a battle either, and by all reliable accounts it wasn’t fought on ice. What is a documented fact is that only 20 knights were killed there, which again qualifies the encounter as a skirmish, not a great battle.

While playing fast and loose with facts, Russian historians, ably assisted by Eisenstein, were accurate in their depiction of Nevsky as an implacable enemy of the West. Russian princes had by then resisted any penetration by Catholicism for at least three centuries, and portraying Alexander in that light was true to life.

He was much more relaxed about cooperating with the Mongols who had invaded Rus’ (Russia qua Russia didn’t exist then) three years before Alexander’s jolly men raided that Slavo-Swedish caravan. In fact, perhaps ‘relaxed’ was too mild a word.

It was with gusto that Alexander collaborated with the Mongol invaders under Khan Batu. He collected tributes for the Mongols from other Rus’ princes, putting his foot down when they wouldn’t pay. Novgorod, a Hanseatic and hence pro-Western principality, was particularly reluctant to cough up.

Alexander attacked on behalf of his Mongol masters and drowned the city in blood. The chronicles of the time record noses and ears cut off, eyes gouged out, and heads rolling. The Mongols had every reason to be happy with their boy.

So happy, in fact, that Alexander officially fraternised with Batu’s son Sartaq (an Arian Christian, by the way). Legally, therefore, he became the Khan’s foster son, a member of his family.

After perestroika arrived, historical revisionism in Russia was for a while privatised, with many amateur historians coming up with wild theories that had nothing to do with reality. Their books were a jolly good read, but one was ill-advised to rely on them for knowledge.

According to one such theory, Alexander wasn’t a Rus’ prince of Scandinavian descent, but actually himself a Mongol. Moreover, he was Batu’s actual, rather than just legal, son. I once read a whole book about that, in the same spirit in which one reads science fiction or comic novels.

And then, in 2005, I attended the greatest exhibition of Russian icons I’ve ever seen, at the Petit Palais in Paris. Some 500 pieces were on show, including the one on the left.

This 17^th century icon shows Alexander Nevsky as, not to cut too fine a point, a Mongol. His facial features are definitely Mongoloid, and he is wearing the dress of a Mongol khan.

What does one make of this? You tell me. The best I can do is have a guess, or rather a few of them.

One would be that the crazy theory wasn’t as crazy as all that, and Alexander was indeed Batu’s son. As far as wild guesses go, this one is as good as any, but there’s a slight hitch. Not a single document supports this possibility.

In fact, Alexander’s genealogy isn’t disputed anywhere. He was a son of the Vladimir Grand Prince Yaroslav, grandson of Vsevolod the Big Nest (so nicknamed because he had 14 children) and great-grandson of Yuri Dolgoruky, the founder of Moscow.

There isn’t a Mongol in that family tree, whose roots can be traced back to Sweden. Then why depict Alexander as a Mongol chieftain?

That could have been a piece of satire, a sort of posthumous rebuke for Alexander’s role as an early prototype of Quisling with an extra violent dimension. The message could have been that, while technically of Rus’ origin, Alexander was a Mongol at heart.

Yet this message is defeated by its medium. An icon is a vehicle for veneration, not criticism. By the time that icon was painted, Alexander had been canonised for about 100 years. Thus the icon depicted St Alexander Nevsky, not the savage debt collector in the service of Khan Batu.

Why then? I don’t know, and none of my guesses sounds convincing. In fact, I’m writing this piece in the hope that an expert will read it and poopoo my ignorance. As a supposedly educated man, he’d say, you should know that… Alas, I can’t complete this sentence.