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This old Cockney gasp of amazement applies both figuratively and literally to the excerpts from Nicholas II’s diary posted by a friend.

Russians like to argue in the past subjunctive mood about the course Russian history would have taken had a stronger leader than Nicholas been at the helm in 1917.

Now, I like to say that a country doesn’t need a strong leader. It needs a strong society. However, like many aphoristic statements, this one is correct only up to a point.

True, the leader’s personality doesn’t matter very much when a country sails on an even keel. In fact, a weak leader minding his own business may be even preferable when a society is strong enough and balanced enough to run itself.

A strong, energetic leader may well upset that balance by his meddling. Ignoring folk wisdom, he may try to fix what isn’t broken and break it as a result.

But when a storm is brewing or already raging, a strong hand on the tiller is essential – provided that limb is wired to a wise head and a noble heart. When a country needs a Churchill, a Chamberlain won’t do (and, incidentally, vice versa).

The excerpts my friend posted date back to 1904-1905, when Russia was, not to cut too fine a point, falling apart. A disastrous war against Japan was followed by a revolution. The government managed to survive, but only just. Wise heads knew the writing was on the wall, and it spelled E-N-D.

It’s in this context that one can fully appreciate the concerns preoccupying the Tsar of all Russias at the time.

“I had a good walk with Misha, killed a crow.” (7 April, 1904)

“Walking for a long time, killed a crow.” (19 April, 1904)

“He killed the crow.” (29 April, 1904)

“I walked, killed a crow and went kayaking.” (17 May, 1904)

“I walked for a long time and killed 2 crows.” (25 May, 1904)

“Went for a long walk and killed 2 crows.” (27 May, 1904)

“Killed 2 crows. Went for a ride in a kayak.” (June 2, 1904)

“I have read a lot. I rode a bicycle and killed 2 crows; one yesterday.” (4 June, 1904)

“It was a wonderful day. Rode a bike and killed 2 crows.” (5 June, 1904)

“Walking for a long time, killed three crows.” (6 October, 1904)

“We walked together, then Alix came home, and I continued walking and killed five crows.” (10 October, 1904)

“Went out and killed a crow.” (8 November, 1904)

“I went for a walk and killed three crows.” (25 January, 1905)

“Went out and killed a crow.” (27 January, 1905)

“Went out and killed 4 crows.” (19 February, 1905)

“Walked around, killed two crows.” (17 March, 1905)

“He killed the cat.” (8 May, 1905)

“Rode a bike and killed 2 crows.” (28 May, 1905)

“I have read a lot. He killed a crow.” (29 May, 1905)

“He killed a woodpecker.” (10 September, 1905)

When Russia was going to the dogs, her absolute ruler was waging war on crows (and the odd cat and woodpecker). Really, he – though not his family – deserved ending up in that satanic cellar filled with gushing blood.

Russian nationalists like to say that Russia is there to teach the world a lesson. I agree: a lesson in how not to do things.

Now, as the world is balancing on a knife’s edge, take a roll call of Western leaders, to find which of them has the strength of mind and character to be up to a salvation job. Biden? Johnson? Macron? Scholz?

Then remember that worthy heirs to the ghouls who filled that cellar with blood now have their fingers on the red button. And Russia is just 1,000 miles from London – as the crow (or the missile) flies.

The UK inflation rate is rapidly heading towards double digits, making Adam Smith spin like a top in his grave. There he was, teaching the multitudes about natural market forces and the invisible hand.

However, the hand that has been steadily debauching Western currencies with inflation is clearly visible to anyone with eyes to see. It belongs to state officials.

Their motivation is clear: inflation is a tax requiring no legislative approval. By inflating the currency, the state effectively transfers money from the people’s accounts into its own, with a parallel transfer of even more power the same way. This fulfils the overarching objective modern politicians feel in their bone marrow, even if they don’t articulate it.

Any economic primer will tell you that inflation is too much money chasing too few goods. Modern states seldom dirty their hands with producing goods. Yet they have total control over the money supply, using to that end their own good offices and also the quasi-independent central banks.

The US led the way with the Federal Reserve system. In 1913, the year the Federal Reserve Act came into effect, the Sixteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was passed, empowering Congress to levy federal income tax as it saw fit.

European countries were all following suit at roughly the same time. The printing presses went into high gear, banknotes floated through the air like snowflakes, melting as they spiralled down to the ground.

A brief look at the numbers will confirm the distinctly modern flavour of high inflation. Before Western governments were allowed to meddle in economies, inflation was practically nonexistent, varying from 0.1 to 0.2 percent a year.

In Britain, £100 in 1850 equalled £110 in 1900, a negligible inflation of 10 percent over half a century. That meant Britons could confidently plan for the future, anticipating that hard work accompanied by thrift could make them independent not only of want but also of the state.

Conversely, if we look at the next century, £100 in 1950 equalled £2,000 in 2000 – a wealth-busting, soul-destroying inflation of 2,000 percent. To take another Anglo-Saxon currency as an example, over the past 100 years the US dollar has lost 95 percent of its value, a marginally better, though still abysmal, performance.

During the same period, productivity was increasing steadily in both countries, as were the production volumes and GDP per capita. Thus the only thing the state had to do to keep inflation in check was make sure that its spending and the money supply marched in step with production.

Inflation figures, however, prove that everywhere in the West the state did exactly the opposite. It was spending like a beached sailor and, whenever the money ran out, the printing press would go into high gear. And the state has never changed its behaviour.

So why do governments spend more than they take in if they know that such profligacy will predictably turn money into wrapping paper (or, in our days of electronic transfers, not even that)? The only logical answer is that they want money to lose value. They must feel that by acting in this manner they advance their objectives.

One objective I’ve already mentioned: gradual increase of their own power, which these days comes out of the money purse more often than out of the barrel of a gun.

The other is more subtle, though ultimately it amounts to the same thing: by reducing the purchasing power of a monetary unit, the state makes people seek a greater and greater number of such units to make ends meet. Some succeed, others fail.

But both groups have to be wholly committed to economic activity to stay afloat. This commitment has to be expressed not only in working halfway around the clock but also in taking a gambler’s risks with investments.

Those who fail will have to fall back on the state’s largesse in order to survive. But even those who succeed will also depend on the government, if less directly and more negatively.

After all, a quick pull on the printing press lever can usher in a double-digit inflation rate (our consumer price index grew 9% in April). A few years of that, and a nest egg lovingly hatched over a lifetime is broken, with no omelette anywhere in sight.

Some people lack the nous to do anything other than watch their money melt away like snow on the first warm day. Most, however, take a more active approach: they either go on a spending spree or invest in assets, mostly property, but also more speculative ventures.

Suddenly people become spendthrifts or gamblers, with no temperament for either. Since saving is pointless, they might as well borrow to buy that sports car they’ve always wanted or take a huge mortgage on a house with a south-facing garden. After all, inflation will steadily reduce their debt to practically nothing.

The state encourages such recklessness, with the central bank creating conditions not only for promiscuous borrowing, but also for irresponsible lending. Just a few days ago, an announcement was made that our banks would remove the affordability requirement from mortgage applicants. Another 2008 is ghosting into view, and it looms large.

This situation is disastrous not only economically, but also socially. For the rush to invest inflates assets – the law of supply-demand hasn’t yet been repealed. In Britain, for example, over the past 50 years property inflation has outstripped money inflation by a factor of 10.

That means that people doing the same jobs their parents used to do can’t afford the same houses. The side streets around me are filled with two-up-two-down workers’ cottages built some 120 years ago. Today they cost over two million each, which is beyond the means of most workers I know.

As a result, young people can’t get on the property ladder anywhere near their work. Some of my advertising colleagues, for example, earned twice or three times the average UK salary – and still had to commute almost 100 miles each way.

Since rents are also sky-high, the only alternative is to share, and many young executives live in conditions similar to the Soviet communal apartments of my youth. And in New York the average rent for a one-bedroom flat is edging towards £5,000 a month – against the median monthly income of about $3,000.

The upshot is that people have to spend every waking moment either working or commuting. There’s no time left for normal social or family life, and little inclination to start a family.

The desire to consume, however, never abates – with concomitant indebtedness burgeoning pari passu. In the US, for example, average household expenditure over the past three decades has been three times greater than average household income, with the balance funded by packs of credit cards, irresponsible loans and eventually bankruptcies.

People, especially young ones, seem to be competing with one another in who can get rid of their inflated cash faster. Unrestrained consumption becomes the central aspiration of modern societies, making them all consumptive.

People are increasingly losing control of their finances and their lives. But, vindicating the First Law of Thermodynamics, control doesn’t vanish. It merely shifts from individuals to the state.

Macron has lost control of the National Assembly and, as les yanquis would say, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. But neither Manny’s political future nor even, to be honest, France’s political present concerns me very much.

What does terrify me is the dire threat these election results pose to European and global security. And I don’t scare easily.

If you add the seats gained by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s watermelon coalition (red and green) to those won by other left-wing parties and Le Pen’s fascisoid National Rally, you’ll see that the extremists are only two behind Manny’s Ensemble.

‘Others’ hold another 26 seats, which gives them an inordinate weight in the balance of power. Nudge them a bit, and a few of those ‘others’ could swing political control towards the lunatic fringe. Isn’t proportional representation wonderful?

For France to retain a semblance of sanity, Manny will have to get into bed with the Gaullist UDI (64 seats). However, that party feels about Manny the way a lamppost feels about dogs, and for similar reasons.

On the other hand, the extreme parties have much more in common than one would think. A Mélenchon-Le Pen coalition is eminently possible. Even chromatically, brown is a combination of red and green, which points to the compatibility of all these colours.

And politically, red and brown are much closer to each other than either is to the traditional European social democracy, whatever it calls itself. This kinship was demonstrated to a devastating effect in the German elections that brought Hitler to power.

The three main parties in Germany were the Nazis, Social Democrats and Communists. The Nazis emerged as the largest single party, but a bloc of the other two would have won. What happened next gave the lie to the simplistic binary notions of Left and Right.

One would have thought that a bloc between the Social Democrats and Communists was a marriage made in political heaven. One party was moderate Left, the other extreme Left, but both were Left. The Nazis, on the other hand, were regarded as Right in contemporaneous mythology.

The future not only of Germany but of the whole world was in the hands of Ernst Thälmann, head of the Communist Party. One step towards the Social Democrats, and Hitler’s name would today be known only to history buffs and collectors of recondite trivia.

But, taking his cue from Stalin, Thälmann shunned the SDs. Thereby he signed his own death warrant – he was killed at Buchenwald in 1944. Much worse, so were millions of others on either side of the war into which the combined efforts of Hitler and Stalin plunged the world.

After Hitler came to power, whole herds of ex-communists joined NSDAP and went about its satanic business with singular ardour. It wasn’t just naked self-interest. Those ex-communists also sensed that the substantive differences between their two affiliations were slight.

Both parties supported state control over the economy. The Communists were in favour of de jure nationalisation, the Nazis of the de facto kind, but that was a distinction without a difference. Even their flags were the same hue of red, if with different superimposed symbols. (For that reason, Soviet war films meticulously avoided showing Nazi flags in true colours.)

Both parties worshiped at the altar of unlimited violence, largely directed against similar targets. This they proved when the Nazis and Soviets joined forces to rape Poland in 1939.

The two predators immediately started murdering exactly the same groups in the territories they occupied: priests, officers, businessmen, intelligentsia, administrators. The only difference was that Stalin hadn’t yet come around to the idea of murdering Jews – that had to wait another 10 years.

Today’s relationships may appear different in many respects, but fundamentally they are eerily similar. The reds, greens and browns are driven by identical resentments and destructive impulses, even if they camouflage them with divergent slogans.

All three detest Western civilisation and dream of its destruction. They take different paths to that destination, but the destination is the same. And if Western defences are only manned by Macron types, the extremists must rate their chances as fair to good, especially if they act in concert.

A tri-colour coalition is possible, even likely. And, contrary to the laws of chromatics, the colour resulting from this mix can only be black.

That the combined efforts of the reds, greens and browns would produce an economic disaster is so self-evident that I won’t even bother talking about it. Just look at their proposed policies, and you’ll get the picture. Yet the inevitable geopolitical disaster merits a few words.

France has been at best a reluctant member of Nato since de Gaulle’s presidential term (1959-1969). With this black-hearted coalition ruling the roost, a complete break isn’t so much possible as guaranteed. This would deprive Nato of its only nuclear-armed member on the European continent.

All marginal parties in France (and quite possibly a few major ones) are at least passive Putinistas. This explains to some extent Macron’s overtures to Putin. He began leaning that way when he realised that his main challenge in domestic politics came not from the  Republicans, but from Le Pen and Mélenchon, both active stooges to Putin.

A France effectively governed by the nightmare coalition would be Putin’s unreserved ally. The West’s capability to resist Russia’s aggression would be severely compromised, spelling bad news not just for the Ukraine but for all former Soviet colonies. Since some of them are now Nato members, the consequences are impossible to calculate, but believe me – few Europeans will be turning cartwheels.

Add to this the kneejerk anti-Americanism that’s de rigueur in French politics, and chaos beckons. The problem isn’t that the outcome is predictably catastrophic, but that it’s unpredictable, which may be even worse.

Globalism offers many advantages, but one potential problem is that it turns all major countries into upright dominoes, ready to fall if one of them does. “Therefore,” as John Donne wrote, “send not to know/ For whom the bell tolls,/ It tolls for thee.”

Next week Britain will be paralysed by class warriors, this time fronted by the Marxist RMT, the transport union.

It called for a three-day strike, and 40,000 RMT members jumped up and saluted. Mick Lynch, RMT boss, explained that the strike isn’t just any old labour dispute.

Addressing a rally attended by Angela Rayner, Labour’s Deputy Leader, Comrade Lynch spoke in the idiom borrowed from Das Kapital, which he probably hasn’t read, and The Communist Manifesto, which he probably knows by heart.

“The Tories are butchering the working class,” he shouted. And the working class must start butchering back: “The campaign is on. The fight is on. The struggle is on. Who’s with us? The working people are with us. We are the working people of this country. Together we are unstoppable. Get up and fight or live on your knees.”

Lovely. I especially liked the idea of fighting as the only alternative to living on one’s knees. That was a reference to the phrase “better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”

The fiery aphorism was first uttered by a fiery man, the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, who then set off a series of cultural appropriations. The adage was repeated by FDR, but it probably reached Comrade Lynch via the Spanish communist Dolores Ibárruri, a key figure in the Spanish Civil War.

She was nicknamed la Pasionaria, the badge of honour she earned for having bitten through a priest’s jugular vein, thereby establishing her impeccable atheist credentials. The lady missed her true calling. She could have made a top-notch wolfhound.

As far as I know, Lynch hasn’t so far expressed his innermost convictions dentally. But his oration came right out of Ibárruri’s legacy: “The struggle is on. Bring it on. This is the fight of our lives. Stand up and fight. Victory to the RMT!”

The temperature of the occasion should leave no one in any doubt. This isn’t just a haggle about an extra couple of quid in wages. This is a declaration of class war, which actually is superfluous.

For class war has been going on for the better part of two centuries, which doesn’t mean non-stop fighting. It’s more like the Hundred Years’ War, a series of battles and skirmishes separated by years of relative peace.

The fires of this war might not have been started by Marx and his jolly friends, but they certainly fanned them in the nineteenth century – and have been doing that ever since.

Marxism can’t withstand five minutes of rational debate on any level: social, economic, political, philosophical, you name it. It was intellectually defunct even at the time its founder was still burrowing through the British Library in the 1860s.

Marx was describing industrial conditions that were already obsolete at the time of writing, which is why he juggled facts with the dexterity of a cardsharp.

For example, the first edition of Das Kapital gives most statistics up to 1865 or 1866, except those for the changes in wages, which stop in 1850. The second edition brings all other statistics up to date, but the movement of wages again stops in 1850, to mask their rapid growth.

But Marxism isn’t about rational debate. It’s about envy and hatred, two dormant qualities residing in every man’s breast. The point of Marxism is to act as an alarm clock. When it rings loudly enough, envy and hatred wake up with a jolt and begin to destroy.

That is the essence of Marxism: destruction. It doesn’t destroy to achieve some worthy goal. Destruction is the goal, however dense the smokescreen behind which it hides.

It’s no wonder that history’s worst massacres have been perpetrated either by unapologetic Marxists or by the likes of Hitler, who merely acknowledged their debt to Marx.

As the West grew richer and richer, it became clear to unbiased observers that the relationship between prosperity and Marxism could only ever be inverse. But again, Marxism isn’t about improving the lot of the poor. It’s about wreaking enough havoc to make sure everyone is equally destitute and equally oppressed by the Marxists.

The average salary of a British train driver is £48,000 a year, £18,000 higher than the UK’s average. On that basis it’s hard to argue that RMT is defending an oppressed group. Yet arguments don’t fit on the banners of class war. Only slogans do.

However, the readers of this space expect not slogans but arguments. So here’s mine.

Trade unions used to serve a useful purpose, but they have outlived it. They are an Industrial Revolution anachronism, completely out of step with modern economies.

In the past, manufacturing reigned supreme, and mass production was making its first tentative steps. Most labour was unqualified, which made workers interchangeable and easily replaceable.

That’s why individual workers had no clout to negotiate with the management on equal terms. The balance of power swung too far to one end and needed to be redressed. Collective bargaining, and trade unions as its facilitators, thus had a role to play.

One could argue that, even before unionism, workers’ conditions were improving. And as mass production became more sophisticated, farsighted manufacturers saw a clear benefit in keeping their workers happy.

Even in Russia, one of the country’s top industrialists, Savva Morozov (d. 1905), introduced the kind of social provisions for his workers that hardly existed even in the West at the time – or in Russia now. And in the US, Henry Ford didn’t need to be coerced by strikers to pay a decent wage. He turned his workers also into his consumers by paying them a princely $5 a day.

Still, unions were important in the industries that were slow on the uptake – even though unionist methods were often violent. Factory owners responded to violence by violence. They hired thugs as strike-breakers, and many industrial sites were turned into battlefields.

This created troubled waters in which both Marxists and organised crime could profitably fish. Union bosses learned their ideology and methods from those sources, and in due course most unions became Marxist in thought and Mafioso in deed.

Like both Marxists and Mafiosi, they care little about the plight of the people in whose name they supposedly act. Like the former, they strive to destroy. Like the latter, they strive to extort.

Since Marxism has pervaded every pore of Western societies, we all have to go along with the unions. When their extortionate demands make whole countries less competitive, we grin and bear it. When they paralyse whole countries (remember Britain in the 1970s?), we regret their methods and selfishness.

However, it doesn’t occur to anybody to question their usefulness and indeed their right to exist. Yet if we gave ourselves a moment to stop and think, we’d realise that the unions represent a clash of troglodyte philosophy with modern economies.

Much of our mass production is outsourced to places where workers, often including children, toil round the clock for coolie wages. We could discuss the morality of this practice some other time, but meanwhile let’s just look at our own back yard.

A modern Western economy is sustained mostly by qualified labour. Workers – and I don’t just mean industrial proletariat – no longer have just their muscle to sell, but also their training and skills. Unlike muscular strength, these vary within a broad range from individual to individual.

Hence collective bargaining has become not just counterproductive but also unjust. Qualified employees should be in a position to strike individual deals with their employers, and the higher their qualification, the better the deals.

Companies, it must be remembered, compete not only for markets, but also for labour. They can’t afford to lose people to their rivals, which teaches them to treat their employees decently. No Mafia-style extortion is needed.

The unions have become a parallel government cum parallel criminal structure capable of bringing a great country to her knees. They should be disbanded – and would be, if it were possible at least to argue in favour of such a measure.

But it isn’t. Even politicians who know all this also know that trade unions are a sacred cow. It can be milked, but it can’t be slaughtered. Unions are like the NHS in that both sit at the top of a totem pole, too high for reason to reach.

That’s why the RMT will win next week’s battle, especially since there’s no Margaret Thatcher in sight. If only one side dares to fight, there’s only one winner.

If that’s true, I’ve just written 2,000 words on which country really is a friend of the Ukraine.

East is East, and West is West? Verily I say unto you, Kipling had no prophetic powers. He didn’t foresee that, 130 years after he wrote that poem, the West would boast a pro-Russian Pope.

Pope Francis must be on an ecumenical mission to reverse the 1054 Schism. When he broaches the subject of the on-going war, he sounds exactly like the KGB Patriarch Kirill, known in some quarters as ‘agent Mikhailov’.

That means they both sound like Putin’s propagandists, and indeed Putin himself. Both try to justify the bandit raid on the Ukraine. And both certainly agree on the casus belli.

According to all such sources, Putin’s only option was to attack. He was severely provoked (“partly provoked” is how the Pope put it) by the eastward expansion of Nato, threatening Russia’s very survival.

Nato, egged on by its Anglo-Saxon members, was going to use the Ukraine as the beachhead for an offensive to smite Holy Russia. Had Vlad not struck, Abrams tanks would be rolling into Red Square even as we speak.

That idea can be expressed in many ways, and His Holiness expresses it succinctly and unambiguously, as befits a prelate. He recalls that, a few months before the war, he spoke to an unnamed head of state. That mysterious official told him, a propos of nothing, that “a wise man who speaks little is a very wise man indeed”.

Allow me to expose the incognito. The proverb that so impressed His Holiness is Russian, which gives us a clue to the identity of his interlocutor. This little discovery vindicates the book the Pope must have seen when he was younger: “Everything secret will become manifest”.

Moving right along, Putin said “…that he was very worried about how Nato was moving. I asked him why, and he replied, ‘They are barking at the gates of Russia. They don’t understand that the Russians are imperial and can’t have any foreign power getting close to them.’ ”

Nato has never made a single threat to Russia that could be described as even “whispering”, never mind “barking”. It’s not there to annihilate Russia, only to prevent Russia from annihilating others.

And what does “imperial” mean? A blank licence to pounce on any country within reach? As for foreign powers getting close, Russia already has five Nato countries on her borders – and so far those Abrams tanks have stayed put.

The Pope not only repeats those Russian lies, but he also treats them with obvious sympathy. Having vented his perfunctory regrets about the savage brutality of the Russian troops, he added that: “… the danger is that we see only this, which is monstrous, and we do not see the whole drama unfolding behind this war, which was perhaps somehow either provoked or not prevented.”

Quite. Those raped Ukrainian women and children, both male and female, have only themselves to blame. They provoked imperial Russians by wearing short skirts, tight trousers and, presumably, revealing nappies.

Anticipating the reactions of heathen vermin like me, His Holiness clarified matters: “Someone may tell me at this point, ‘But you are in favour of Putin!’ No, I am not. I am simply against reducing the complexity to a distinction between good and bad.”

God forbid. Good and bad are too complex to pinpoint accurately in any situation, and never mind the Decalogue or the Sermon on the Mount.

If I understand correctly, since the Pope isn’t supposed to be in favour of Putin, he repeats Putin’s propaganda out of his professional attachment to relativist truth in all its complexity. As long as that truth has nothing to do with good and evil.

Such relativism is odd in a Christian prelate. One feels like repeating the clichéd question: “Is the Pope Catholic?”

The more he enlarges on this subject, the more valid does that question appear. Thus he adds: “Here is no metaphysical good or bad. What is emerging is something global, involving elements that interlink.”

In other words, the Ukraine got caught between the Scylla of the West (minus Germany, France and Italy) and the Charybdis of Russia. Being imperial, Russia is genetically programmed to seek expansion ad infinitum, so she had to react to Scylla’s encroachments by bombing the Ukraine flat.

Fair enough. But what’s the West’s interest in the bloodbath?

Pope Francis is happy to elucidate: “What is before our eyes is a situation of world war, global interests, arms sales and geopolitical appropriation, which is martyring a heroic people.”

I get it now. It’s arms manufacturers who are to blame. And Nato, with its commitment to geopolitical appropriations. As for Putin, his conduct of the war is lamentable, what with so many heroic people martyred, looted, raped and left homeless. But he really had no other choice, did he?

True, some problems indeed don’t lend themselves to binary moral simplifications. But this isn’t one of them.

A horde of savage bandits attacked a peaceful country going about its daily business. Their road map highlights other destinations too, for future reference. Given half the chance, they’ll reduce all of Europe to Bucha and Mariupol.

They are unquestionably evil, while the heroes so close to the Pope’s heart are being martyred because they are defending everything that’s good in their country – and other countries, which the bandits also see as prey.

The Pope’s moral compass is going haywire. It must have been left next to an iron bar for too long.

On 27 February, 1943, the Gestapo began rounding up Berlin’s male Jews to deport them to…well, kingdom come. Their pestilent presence clashed with the Nazis’ declared aim of making Germany Judenrein, rid of Jews.

Yet many of those men were married to Aryan women, most of whom refused to divorce their husbands, in spite of the pressure the Nazis applied and the incentives they offered. Some of the husbands were part-Aryan themselves, rather than what the Nuremberg laws defined as “full Jew”.

However, the women and their families didn’t accept that outrage meekly. They came out in force to demonstrate on Berlin’s Rosenstrasse. The protests lasted seven days and ended in… I’m not going to tell you.

Instead, if you happen to know any Russians, ask them to guess the outcome of the action. Any such guess would be based on their knowledge of the Nazis’ monstrosity, and also on their own experience of Putin’s Russia.

Five gets you ten, they’ll assume that the police ploughed in with rubber truncheons, laying about them like Macduff, the Thane of Fife. The demonstrators dispersed, their wounds sputtering blood on the nearby Alexanderplatz.

Many were dragged to police stations, where they were all beaten up and tortured. Some of the men were raped with broom handles; some of the women, the old-fashioned way. Prison sentences were then meted out en masse.

Right? No, those poor Russians guessed wrong. The Nazis did no such thing. On Goebbels’s orders 1,800 Jews were released. This, though the Nazis had just lost at Stalingrad and were feeling enough heat to become even more brutal than usual.

The parallel with Putin’s regime is as inexact as such parallels usually are. There were some anti-war demonstrations all over Russia immediately after 24 February, when the bandit raid on the Ukraine began.

Yet they ended in the way my hypothetical Russians hypothetically ascribed to the Rosenstrasse protest: truncheons, torture, imprisonment. Since then the country has been silent. Demonstrating is fine, but not if that turns into a suicide pact.

Then again, not one person among the thousands in the upper reaches of the Russian government has uttered a single word of protest against the brutal, genocidal attack on the Ukraine. Yet, with all the suitable disclaimers, the situation in the Third Reich was different.

Many top German generals, such as Beck, Halder, Blomberg, Fritch, Schleicher, were openly opposed to Hitler’s war – and as openly looked down on him as an upstart corporal. And Admiral Kanaris, head of the Abwehr, not only opposed the war but even plotted against Hitler, some sources suggest in cahoots with the British.

Yet none of those generals was imprisoned or suicided, although some were cashiered. It was only after the July, 1944, plot that some dissidents, including Kanaris, were arrested and executed.

In other words, the blind obedience and uniformity of opinion within Putin’s elite outdo even Nazi Germany. The conclusion makes itself: Putin isn’t Hitler. He is worse.

Many of Hitler’s acolytes, including some of those I’ve mentioned, were Hitler’s stooges. But they weren’t his mindless puppets.

As a Russian émigré commentator mentioned, what goes on in Russia resembles not so much a dictatorship as a death cult. Putin is typologically closer to Jim ‘Kool-Aid’ Jones, than to Hitler.

(For my younger readers, Jones created a fanatical sect. Like many madmen, he emitted powerful emanations, which he used to turn the adherents of his cult into unthinking automata. On his command, in 1978 all 918 cult-followers, a third of them children, committed suicide by drinking Kool-Aid laced with cyanide.)

Hitler too could hypnotise multitudes with his evil charisma – but not quite to the same extent. Putin achieves the same purpose admirably, if by means other than charisma. That’s why he isn’t so much a dictator as a shaman of an evil, brainwashed cult.

And that’s why his 5,000 top henchmen open their mouths and repeat, on Putin’s cue, insane mantras, along the lines of Russia’s natural border being Pas-de-Calais, threats of a nuclear incineration of the world and calls for the genocide of Ukrainians.

Some will take issue with the observation that Putin is worse than Hitler. After all, the KGB major hasn’t murdered millions, occupied most of continental Europe or plunged the world into the most devastating war ever. Not yet, would be my way of completing that sentence.

Actually, Hitler hadn’t done any of those things either, until 1 September, 1939. If Putin acts on ten per cent of his eminently believable threats, Hitler, even post-September, 1939, will look like a humanitarian by comparison.

If the parallel with Hitler is imprecise, the one between the Munich appeasers and today’s EU is unimpeachable. Not all of the EU, just its rotten core.

France, Germany, Italy and Hungary are actively sabotaging the efforts of Poland and the Baltics, which, in alliance with Britain and the US, are doing all they can and even more to help the Ukraine. All those Putinversteheren cover up their cowardice and greed with bien pensant soundbites about the urgent need to stop the bloodshed, save lives and Putin’s face, and some such.

Manny Macron has even gone so far as to say that the last thing Europe wants is the destruction of Russia. The alternative to such a cataclysm is for the Ukraine to capitulate, cede another chink of her territory and stay supine – until Russia has amassed enough power to grab what little is left, and then push on.

Nobody wants to destroy Russia, Manny. Don’t listen to your friend Vlad – he is lying to you. What all decent people (which category manifestly doesn’t include Messrs Stolz, Macron, Draghi and Orban) want is to prevent Putin from destroying others. Ukraine first, the Baltics second, Poland and possibly Finland third – and tomorrow, to borrow a well-known phrase, the world.

President Zelensky keeps appealing to the West with Churchillian pleas: Give us the tools, and we will finish the job. The job he has in mind isn’t destroying Russia. It’s recovering the Ukraine’s possessions stolen by the sadistic death cult that goes by the name of Putin’s Russia.

Unable to produce cars, computers, up-to-date equipment or anything people would want to use, the death cult excels in one manufacturing category only: mass production of corpses.

Those who don’t realise that the cult threatens the survival not just of the Ukraine, but of our civilisation, what’s left of it, are either fools or knaves. Or, as some European ‘leaders’ prove, both.

“It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him,” said Pygmalion’s Higgins.

True, in those days accent was – and to some extent still is – a class indicator. And, though class tensions were never as toxic as Marx portrayed them, neither were they nonexistent.

The Phonetic Atlas of England lists 50 major dialects and perhaps twice as many minor ones. (London alone boasts five distinctive accents, each with sub-variants.) It would be fair to say that even in our progressive times some are perceived as being superior to others, especially since a few accents aren’t always comprehensible to Englishmen from elsewhere.    

Now, 110 years after Shaw wrote his play, such discrimination is about to be outlawed. The Social Mobility Commission has recommended legislation to make socioeconomic background a “protected characteristic” under the Equality Act, alongside race, sex and other forms of discrimination.

Since so far every such proposal has been acted upon, watch out. If you don’t want to get in trouble, make sure you never look down on someone who sounds as if he has just emerged out of a Liverpool or Newcastle slum.

Sorry, did I say ‘look down’? My mistake. You can get in trouble even if you neither do nor even think any such thing. For, according to a recent study, ‘accentism’ is a so-called implicit or unconscious bias. That means you can be an inveterate accentist and not even know it.

It’s not immediately clear how you can get rid of such prejudice if you don’t even realise you have it, but I trust our government officials. They’ll think of something to make our collective schizophrenia progress even faster.

‘Accentism’ is a neologism, adding yet another -ism to the rich collection we have already. I’d love to take credit for this enlargement of our lexicon, but that would be unfair to Dr Robert McKenzie, a social linguist who led the aforementioned study Speaking of Prejudice.

The study found that people with strong northern accents are seen as “less intelligent” and “less educated” than their southern counterparts. The conclusion is obvious: accentism must be outlawed because it causes “profound” social and economic harm to those on the receiving end.

Also, people with “denigrated accents” are more likely to be found guilty in court. No doubt that’s true. But – and I know the skies will open and I’ll be smitten by lightning – could it be that people with “denigrated accents” commit more crimes? I don’t think too many muggers sound like Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Dr McKenzie passionately advocates changes to the Equality Act, citing Labour Deputy Leader Angela Rayner as one known victim of accentism. He said: “She realises that criticism of her accent is a way of taking away her message, and women in particular are targeted this way.”

In actual, rather than our virtual, reality, Miss Rayner could indeed sound like Jacob Rees-Mogg and still come across as a stupid, ignorant, heavily tattooed guttersnipe. No phonetic exploration is needed to “take away her message”.

Her illiterate, turgid, quasi-communist harangues do a splendid job of it by themselves. Anyway, since Rayner has risen to the second-highest position in one of our two main parties, it’s hard to argue that she has been held back by her accent. If anything, she has grossly overachieved. 

No one thought another politician, Enoch Powell, was “less intelligent” or “less educated” because he spoke with a Wolverhampton accent. Closer to home, one of my closest friends sounds like the Yorkshireman he is. Yet I assure you that even his detractors would never underestimate his erudition and brilliance.

Regional accents began to acquire a bad reputation only in relatively recent times. And back in 1755, when our first dictionary was compiled, even the brightest of men – including Dr Johnson, who compiled our first dictionary – bore the phonetic imprint of their birth.

Things began to change with the rise of the middle classes first to a prominent position, then to a dominant one. People in these social strata tend to be socially insecure, which is why they are often more snobbish than aristocrats.

The dwindling aristocracy ringfenced its accent, but the classes immediately below it began to use a uniform, flat pronunciation (and certain lexical quirks) as a badge of class, sending an instant Mowgli-style message: “We be of one blood, ye and I.”

Also, in those backward Victorian times, England hadn’t yet got around to the idea that every jumped-up trade school could be called a university, for Tony Blair to boast that half the population would soon have higher education. Hence all the upper classes tended to send their offspring to the same few schools and the same two universities.

Those schools provided a better education in humanities than do today’s post-graduate courses at Oxbridge. They were also in competition and, by way of a uniform, each developed its own subtle variance on the public-school accent. That way no one would confuse an Old Etonian with a Harrovian, or either of them with a pupil of Rugby or Marlborough.

Then a new concept appeared, Received Pronunciation or Queen’s English. Victoria, though not her German consort, spoke that way, and the public-school classes imitated her speech, with varying success.

Regional accents became the lot of the uneducated classes, but there was a powerful gravitational pull upwards. Ambitious youngsters wished to join the haute bourgeoisie, and getting rid of their natural accents was an essential social hoist at the time.

Then in barged the twentieth century, heralded by the roar of August guns. Out went the aristocracy, gassed in Flanders, taxed in Whitehall.

The middle classes became truly dominant and they began to put their phonetic foot down. A uniform middle-class pronunciation became de rigueur in many professions, and regional accents could still apply brakes to a career.

Eventually Received Pronunciation began to be associated with BBC announcers. Students from all over the world were learning their English vowels from BBC broadcasts, even as that accent began to deteriorate in its native habitat – first imperceptibly, then noticeably.

As society became more egalitarian, upper-class accents began to shift towards the middle. That vindicates my belief that it’s only possible to equalise down, not up.

Regional accents became more acceptable, if not yet universally so. Yet they too suffered from the pandemic of uniformity. If Prof. Higgins lived closer to our time, he’d find it harder to pinpoint a Londoner’s accent to within a few yards of his home.

All of London, and generally South-Eastern, accents started to smooth out their differences and largely merge into so-called Estuary English, transmogrifying into a generic pan-regional pronunciation.

As England degenerated from an increasingly egalitarian society into a frankly socialist one, regional accents became widely acceptable, even desirable. They were seen as a password opening the door to proletarian virtue. A regional accent was an affirmation of political correctness before the term was even coined.

That tendency didn’t leave the upper classes untouched either. From the Palace down, they started to shift towards the middle as well. Even the language of the Queen left much of Queen’s English behind.

If you compare Her Majesty’s accent at the beginning of her reign and now, you’ll know what I mean. And our lovely future queen, Kate, enunciates words like ‘ball’ as close to ‘bow’, which sounds Estuary to me.

As for the BBC accent, it has disappeared altogether. Being the quintessence and promulgator of a socialist England, the Corporation actively encourages regional accents. These days, most of the Phonetic Atlas is regularly illustrated in news broadcasts.

This brings me to another lament of Dr McKenzie. His heart bleeds gushingly all over the plight of some of our civil servants who have to disguise their regional accents at work.

That may be, but the reverse practice is much more widespread. In advertising, for example, I knew several people who worked hard to shift their accents downwards, to make it easier to get jobs and secure promotions.

The same happens in Miss Rayner’s own field, especially in her own party. Tony Blair, for example, resorts to phonetic subterfuge to disguise his expensive education. He desperately tries to drop his aitches, but sometimes he forgets and reverts to his natural way of speaking.

I have a good explanation for the implicit bias that so vexes Dr McKenzie. Most people with northern accents are perceived as “less intelligent” and “less educated” because they are. So are most people with southern and upper-class accents, along with those whose accents have no obvious geographical origin.

Those pejorative modifiers apply to most people, full stop. They don’t apply to a few bright and erudite individuals here and there – and those people are never underrated because of their vowels.

Never, that is, except in the febrile minds of our social, or rather socialist, warriors who are obsessed with class.

My approach to arithmetic tends to be digital: counting on the fingers of one hand, two in extremis. But that’ll suffice to assess the government’s project of sending boat people to Rwanda for processing.

The plan has come in for hamstringing legal challenges and much criticism, most notably from the Prince of Wales, who called the scheme ‘appalling’. That made my mind up for me even before I considered the issue in detail.

HRH is my infallible guide to reaching the right conclusions. Whenever he advocates something passionately, I don’t have to think for myself. I simply take the opposite position and smile all the way to the keyboard.

Thus his drive for ‘organic’ foods (to be pedantic about it, all food is chemically organic), has turned me off such foods for ever. HRH wants to have chemical pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers banned. This noble principle is dearer to him than the millions of lives around the world that will be lost to famines as an inevitable result.

This brings me back to my rudimentary arithmetic. The population of the world will reach eight billion this year. I don’t know how many of them would happily swap their home country for Britain, but I’m sure it’s a hell of a lot, in round numbers. Billions, for sure.

Even HRH and other honorary members of the righteous, or rather self-righteous, set must agree that Britain can’t welcome all such aspiring immigrants. She can’t even accommodate all of roughly 80 million who are refugees already.

Hence some limitations on immigration have to be in place. I’d be keenly interested to know how Prince Charles proposes to handle this problem, but he hasn’t so far graced us with anything approaching a solution.

As to limitations on illegal immigration, there shouldn’t be any. The government is duty-bound to stop it altogether, 100 per cent. Such migrants are law-breakers, which makes this problem not only arithmetical but also legal.

Boris Johnson, who commendably sees little intellectual difference between HRH and the trees he loves to hug, put it in a nutshell: “We cannot sustain a parallel illegal system. Our compassion may be infinite, but our capacity to help people is not.”

On that occasion, he didn’t cite any numbers, leaving the task to me in my self-assumed capacity of homespun arithmetician. So back to my adopted discipline.

In 2021, 28,526 people crossed the Channel in dinghies and other death traps, having paid gangsters thousands of pounds for the privilege of risking their lives. That was more than a three-fold increase over 2020 – and another huge increase is expected this year.

The general rule is that refugees must stay in the first safe country they reach. Since they cross into Britain from France, one has to assume that France isn’t safe in the eyes of the world.

But here’s an interesting paradox: since the 1970s France has indeed suffered the greatest number of terrorist attacks in Europe. However, most of them have been perpetrated by first- or second-generation migrants. That circle is as vicious as they come, which explains why the French look the other way when those dinghies set sail for Britain.

Boat people who don’t drown en route fall into the reluctant embrace of the Home Office, which has to process each case individually. That costs £1.5 billion a year, plus £4.7 million a day for hotels.

That’s it. No more arithmetic is either forthcoming or needed. It ought to be clear to HRH and his like-minded wokers that the plan to ship all such illegal immigrants to Rwanda for processing makes sense on every level – moral, legal, political and financial.

The first 31 are supposed to be shipped tomorrow, but that’s unlikely to happen. Left-wing activists have instructed left-wing lawyers to launch 31 challenges on behalf of that group. They demand an injunction, which may for years bind the whole sensible plan in legal shackles.

Since my grasp of immigration law is even weaker than my numeracy, I don’t know what recourse the government has. It may be able to fight off the challenges and go ahead.

Barring that, much as I detest democracy by plebiscite, I’d be happy with a referendum on this issue. On second thoughts, we don’t really need one. The referendum held six years ago almost to the day communicated the electorate’s views in no uncertain terms.

The people voted to leave the EU for various reasons, but perhaps the strongest one was their wish for Britain to be able to control her borders. The reaction of the woke élite (and most of our élite is woke) to that vote makes one doubt those people’s commitment to democracy.

They held up Brexit for over three years, and it took Boris Johnson’s masterly handling of political mechanics to give the people what they had demanded. As an aside, this partly explains the flood of venom poured on Johnson in all our media, with the exception of The Telegraph and The Mail.

He has many sins, and I for one hate most things the PM is doing. But he deserves gratitude for Britain’s regaining her sovereignty and the right to ruin her economy by her own efforts.

Yet the same influential bigwigs who tried to undermine Brexit are now working behind the scenes to reverse it. Their methods are perforce underhanded, for they can’t afford to be seen as open enemies of democracy. Yet their strategy isn’t hard to discern.

First, they try to make sure Britain’s control of her borders remains a pipe dream. Then they do their utmost to ascribe the current economic difficulties to Brexit, rather than to HMG adopting the same suicidal policies they themselves favour.

The next step will be to force the Tory government out and put their own Labour puppets in. That will be followed by a massive campaign, saying that every reason for Brexit has been compromised.

The influx of migrants hasn’t abated, the economy hasn’t improved, and most of the same EU laws still apply. Hence Britain can only recover by returning to the fold. Keir Starmer, or whoever is in charge, will then call for re-entry into the EU, and the combined forces of the left-wing media and woke quasi-intellectuals will work tirelessly to get their desired result.

Since most of those people are republicans, they may launch a parallel campaign to abolish the monarchy. I wonder if they’ll be able to count on HRH the Prince of Wales for support.   

I once staged a little experiment with the young designers on my staff. They all worked in the same room, with pop music providing background noise. Since I can’t stand that din physically, I told them to turn that abomination off whenever I entered the room.

“You just hate all vocal music,” they said. Not at all, I replied. The next day I brought in a CD of some Bach cantata and put the chorale on.

The youngsters showed acute discomfort. One nice girl simply couldn’t stand the pain. She plugged up her ears with her index fingers and walked out. Tastes differ, commented another nice girl.

Hence this little contemplation.

Homespun proverbs usually make sense, if only on a basic level. Some, however, such as the one alluded to in the title, are wide of the mark.

The implication is that beauty doesn’t exist objectively. Whatever someone – anyone – considers beautiful, is.

You find a Schubert lieder beautiful, he opts for pop, they prefer rap. So all these are different facets of beauty. It’s all a matter of opinion, isn’t it?

So it is – these days. But such totalitarian subjectivity defies not only taste but also logic. If beauty can mean anything at all, it’s so undefinable that for all intents and purposes it’s nonexistent.

Yet beauty does exist, and it allows for valid disagreement only within a narrow range. One man may discern more beauty in the finale of St Matthew Passion, another may argue in favour of the parallel part of St John. However, if either of them insists that a Beatles song is as beautiful as either Passion, albeit in a different way, he has no idea of beauty.

What is beauty? Pontius Pilate once asked a similar question (“What is truth?”), which did his posthumous reputation no good at all. For he tried to apply relativist criteria to an absolute, implying that absolutes don’t exist.

However, three centuries earlier the greatest minds of Hellenic civilisation had no problem answering either question. Or rather they considered the two questions one and the same.

Thus Plato identified Truth, Beauty and Goodness as the inseparable ontological properties of being (note the prefiguration of the Trinity). Beauty is thus inextricably – and invariably – linked with both high reason and morality.

A materialist may argue that, in that case at least, Plato thought in strictly metaphysical categories. Once you’ve accepted such terms, you may accept his argument. But here, in our physical world, nothing is absolute, everything is in flux.

Yet the materialist refutes himself. He is using thought, a metaphysical entity, to argue that metaphysics doesn’t exist. That makes it hard to take him – or any materialist argument – seriously.

Now, if beauty is an inalienable ontological property of being, we must be born with an aesthetic receiver, an innate sense of the beautiful. And not just we.

Let’s ask that same materialist why male birds are so brightly coloured. A peacock’s plumage, for example, dazzles with its profusion of lurid hues.

If the peacock is but a product of evolution, and if evolution is always ameliorative, improving the survivability of each species every step of the way, then how does a peacock’s tail make the species more resilient?

Easy, smirks the materialist with characteristic smugness. The male bird uses his bright vestments to attract females, thereby enabling him to pass on his genes and ensure the survival of the species.

Splendid, yet another mystery solved. However, it’s not, not really. First, that same gorgeous tail attracts not only panting females, but also predators. They can espy a male peacock from a mile away, and then pick him off at their leisure.

For that gorgeous tail makes a peacock cumbersome. He can barely fly, and when he tries, he can’t stay airborne for long. Hence he can only perform his evolutionary duty if a female gets to him before a predator, which isn’t the way to bet.

Thus his tail may spell suicide, not survival (the same argument goes for birdsong, which not only woos females but also betrays the male’s location). So shall we agree, at least, that the problem is less easy than it seems to our materialist?

If this question puts the materialist argument in a coffin, then the next one nails the lid shut. Whence does the female bird get the aesthetic sense to appreciate the beauty of the male’s plumage? It has to be innate, for a bird can’t refine its taste by going to concerts and galleries.

Furthermore, the bird’s taste coincides with ours. We too are dazzled by the beauty of a peacock’s tail, and we too find the sounds of a nightingale’s voice beautiful.

Suddenly, Plato’s idea gets wings. Beauty is indeed an ontological property of being, and not just of the human variety. This doesn’t prove that beauty is absolute and objective, but it certainly makes this view plausible.

We are all born with an aesthetic receiver but, like a wireless, it may be primitive or state-of-the-art. One receiver may filter out interferences and let us hear every note clearly; another one may let us hear only a hissing, crackling noise. But the music we are trying to listen to is the same in both cases.

Therefore, those equipped with only a dud receiver are in no position to judge beauty or speculate on its nature. It takes a fine-tuned apparatus of the highest quality to perceive beauty properly.

That’s where sanity ends and modernity starts. For modernity is defined, inter alia, by repudiation of hierarchies, emphatically including the hierarchy of taste, which is to say the ability to tell real beauty from fake surrogates.

Moreover, since modernity described on its banners the elevation of the common man, it’s also egalitarian aesthetically. Hence, affirmation of any kind of hierarchical ascendancy threatens to undermine the very foundations of modern society.

Even the hierarchy of wealth may be deemed offensive, which is the psychological basis of socialism. Yet rankling though such inequality may be, it’s palpable.

No one can argue that a chap who has a million is no richer than one with only a thousand to his name. The latter may resent and try to dispossess the former, but he won’t deny the obvious evidence before his eyes.

Appreciating the difference between wealth and poverty is easy, while appreciating real beauty requires attuning one’s receiver to the right wavelength. That takes an effort, and most people aren’t going to make one in the absence of an immediate pecuniary gain.

But that doesn’t mean they can’t perceive beauty. They can but, every time they are exposed to it, they feel that the walls of their complacency are being breached. The whole fortress of modernity is about to come tumbling down, leaving them defenceless and despondent.

That’s why they may react passionately and even violently to any suggestion that some tastes are inferior to others. They are eager not only to assert any grotesque parody of beauty, but also to destroy the real thing.

This sentiment resides at the grassroots of modernity, and this weed grows taller and mightier all the time.