Category: Blog

The debt this article owes to the anti-vaxxers is hereby gratefully acknowledged. I’m talking about all those anarchists whose knees jerk before their minds engage.

Here the difference between conservatives and anarchists is worth mentioning. A conservative resents the state claiming inordinate power. An anarchist resents the state claiming any power.

For an anarchist any state is evil by definition. A conservative, on the other hand, recognises that, though some states are evil and all can perpetrate the odd wicked deed, the state isn’t evil in itself.

Compared to the chaotic existence Hobbes described as homo homine lupus est, something that would inevitably result from anarchism if it were allowed to triumph, the state – almost any state – is, relatively speaking, a force for good. For example, the excesses of even the ghastly state of Saddam Hussein weren’t as bad as the carnage that followed its demise.

But how much state power is too much? At what point does the state overstep the line separating its legitimate remit from tyranny? An exhaustive answer to that question, if it’s at all possible, would require more space than this format allows.

However, most people would identify providing protection as a legitimate function of a legitimate state (nothing I say applies to illegitimate ones, whose name is legion). Yes, but what kind of protection?

Against enemies, foreign and domestic? Definitely. Against crime? Of course. Not only is such protection essential, but it’s the kind that only the state can, or rather should, provide.

Private armies, buccaneering navies or people’s militias might have had a role to play in times olden, but today they would be counterproductive in any other than a strictly auxiliary capacity. At best. At worst they could turn into murderous, marauding bands.

In other words, the state is there to protect its people in areas where they can’t protect themselves. But there is an important proviso.

When the state protects people from others, it stays on brief. When the state tries to protect people from themselves, it’s teetering on the edge of tyranny.

That’s why I resent state diktats on how much I should weigh, what I should eat, how much I should drink or what safety devices I should have in my car. “What makes this your business, minister?” are the words that always cross my mind whenever yet another official issues yet another edict.

I’m not buying the argument ab NHS, to the effect that my getting hurt in an accident by not wearing a seatbelt would put a heavier burden on the shoulder of that colossus, thereby harming society. That, to me, is an argument not for seatbelts but against socialised medicine.

With some reservations, it’s not the state’s remit to prevent individuals from harming themselves. When they harm others, that’s a different matter. That’s where the state’s bossiness ends and its legitimate duty of providing protection begins.

Now the Covid pandemic exists, and it kills people. Compared with what we’d expect in a non-pandemic period, there were 97,981 excess deaths in England and Wales between January 2020 and July 2021.

That the rate of spread is inversely proportional to the rate of vaccination is observable throughout the world. The most cautious study I’ve seen estimates that vaccinated people are 63 per cent less likely to infect others.

At the same time, the incidence of adverse reactions to vaccines is negligible, if not nonexistent. So on what grounds can someone refuse to be vaccinated?

There exists a hard core of superstitious haters of vaccines in general, not just anti-Covid ones. This group is small in Britain, but it’s quite large in France and especially in Germany. Parents there routinely refuse to have their children vaccinated against anything.

Those naysayers ought to spend five minutes looking at the rates of infant mortality and, say, polio, before and after vaccines were invented. If they still remain anti-vaxxers after that effort, one wonders which organ in their body they use for thinking.

When it comes to Covid specifically, many people feel the government has overreacted and curtailed our freedom excessively and unnecessarily. They may well be right to some extent, although I’d hate to see the death rate double as a bow towards libertarian rectitude.

Personally, I see nothing wrong with the government claiming emergency powers at a cost to some liberties when an emergency does exist. For example, ordering a blackout in wartime infringes on liberty, but during the Blitz not many Britons argued against that measure on those grounds.

They understood that one person refusing to comply with the blackout order could expose his whole building to a Luftwaffe blockbuster. By being a stickler for individual liberty he could effectively kill many people collectively.

My problems start when the state doesn’t relinquish such powers after the emergency no longer exists. If it doesn’t, which is often the case, then all decent people, which is to say conservatives, should rise in revolt – but that’s a separate subject.

If the cited study is to be believed, then an anti-vaxxer is a typological equivalent of an anti-blackouter of 80 years ago. He endangers not only himself, which would be his privilege, but also others, which shouldn’t be allowed.

If he still persists, I see no problem with the government stepping in and forcing him to comply. In doing so, the state isn’t being tyrannical but responsible.

And its principal, some will say only, responsibility is protecting its citizens from others: Luftwaffe bombers, suicide murderers, criminals of any kind – and idiots who don’t mind exposing others to mortal danger for the sake of upholding their misconstrued rights.

Please help me with something I can’t understand. Did we actually have Brexit?

Don’t answer, I know we did. I’m just unsure why.

I thought the whole idea was to regain full sovereignty, to be governed by the laws passed by our own ancient parliament, not by some foreign body with no historical claim to legitimacy. Are you with me so far?

Then pray explain what on earth Justice Secretary Dominic Raab means by saying that he wants to overhaul the Human Rights Act, preventing our institutions from being “dictated to” by Strasbourg judges. You mean they can still do that, two years after Brexit ‘got done’?

Having made that audacious statement, Mr Raab hastened to settle the public’s jangling nerves. Don’t think for a second we’ll derogate from the European Convention on Human Rights, he quelled our fears. God forbid.

“You couldn’t overturn a Strasbourg ruling,” a ‘source’ explained, “but you could decide how we interpret it.” Though unsure of who exactly the ‘you’ and ‘we’ were, I read on.

“We decide how best to change the law based on UK traditions and laws. We would decide how to comply with Strasbourg case law.”

By all means, do decide. But I can’t decide whether some of the leeway Mr Raab is seeking was something we already had even before Brexit. Surely we had some free hand in deciding “how to comply with the Strasbourg case law”? Provided we did comply?

Even if Brexit made our hand marginally freer, that mass wasn’t really worth the candle. The whole point of Brexit, as I understand (misunderstand?) it, was that we wouldn’t have to comply with European laws at all because they simply wouldn’t apply within the UK — the same way US or Indonesian laws don’t apply.

One can understand, at a stretch, the importance of a human rights act in the EU, some of whose members have a rather spotty legal history. Which spots were by no means erased during half a century of communist rule.

But England? What do Finns, Belgians and Bulgarians know about human rights that the English haven’t learned during a millennium of just governance?

I know I’m offering few solutions but asking many questions. But the next question actually contains a solution. Why is it so unthinkable that we should derogate from the ECHR? Yes, when operating on the continent, we should respect the laws of the land, such as they are.

Other than that, what part of the English Common Law doesn’t Mr Raab understand? And what part of Brexit? Obviously the most important part, some will say the only one.

And while we are on the subject of the English Common Law, a Telegraph article caught my eye. A judge found former Tory MP, Andrew Griffiths, guilty of raping Kate Griffiths, his former wife and his successor in the parliamentary seat.

The paper that used to be conservative but no longer is refers to Mrs Griffiths as ‘Ms’ throughout. Again, being in a conciliatory mood, I can begin to understand the warped feminist thinking behind using this ugly coinage to describe a woman whose marital status is unclear.

But, though Kate divorced Andrew, she still kept his surname. That’s why anyone with any ear for language, and certainly a conservative, should call her Mrs, not Ms, Griffiths. But that’s beside the point.

The point is that the judge found Mr Griffiths guilty “on the balance of probabilities”. Since Mrs Griffiths hadn’t filed criminal charges, this was a civil case involving custody. And in the English Common Law this level of proof is sufficient – as opposed to criminal cases where guilt has to be proved beyond reasonable doubt.

So the letter of the law was kept intact. But what about the spirit?

We are told that rape, marital or otherwise, is the worst crime a woman can suffer. Worse than a severe beating, mutilation or even murder. If so, then why didn’t Mrs Griffiths file criminal charges? Surely she owed it to all those millions of rape victims who allegedly roam the streets of England while trying to cope with the lifelong trauma.

And if she didn’t file those charges, could it be that she… I don’t know how to say this without lightning smiting me from the sky… actually wasn’t raped? Even on the balance of probabilities?

After all, she was in bed with her ex-husband, which in my experience isn’t a normal practice among divorcees. Was she half-raped then, enough to tip the balance of probabilities, but not enough to call the cops?

I wonder what scales His Honour used to measure that balance. Probably not the scales of justice.

“The law is a ass,” said Dickens’s Mr Bumble. Presciently, I think.

People keep asking me whether Putin will attack the Ukraine, and I never say anything of substance in reply. There’s no correct answer to a wrong question.

What do you mean by the future tense? Russia launched an attack on her neighbour in 2014, and the war has raged unabated since then, killing 14,000 Ukrainians – and God knows how many Russians. (Only the deity is privy to the precise number. The Russians are always either lackadaisical about keeping such data or secretive about revealing them.)

The right question is whether or not Russia will escalate her war against the Ukraine, and there I can rely on the authority of a German chancellor to provide an answer.

No, not Scholz or Merkel. The chancellor in question is Bethmann Hollweg, who led the German government during the First World War.

On 30 July, 1914, Russia became the first major power to declare general mobilisation. In response, Bethmann Hollweg declared war on 1 August. When the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Sazonov, demanded an explanation, the chancellor quoted his Chief of the General Staff, Moltke the Younger: “Mobilisation means war.”

This aphorism makes the question in the title even more irrelevant. Not only has Russia been waging war against the Ukraine for seven years, but Putin has already escalated it by deploying an invasion force on the country’s border.

Whether or not he’ll push the button for further escalation is an interesting tactical question but a moot strategic one. The West must respond with equal vigour in either case.

I don’t know whether the Russians will drive deeper into the Ukraine’s territory, as the Ukrainian and US intelligence suggests they will. I’m not sure even Putin himself knows.

If he can get the result he wants without a full-scale onslaught, he’ll stay put for the time being. If not, he may well pounce, the way Russia has been pouncing on her neighbours ever since she coalesced in the 16^th century.

Just as consistently the world has played truant whenever history taught its lessons. That’s why it’s pointless talking about Munich, Chamberlain and peace in our time. Western democracies never learned that a stern early response is the only chance of preventing carnage. They do nothing until nothing is no longer a possible thing to do.

Meanwhile Western governments, along with Putin’s fans among the faschisoid faux-conservatives, put on empathetic faces and beg Putin not to kill any more people. The overall tenor is, “we understand your problems, but bloodshed isn’t a way of solving them”.

Exactly what problems are those? The problem of the USSR, whose collapse Putin describes as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20^th century” (greater than the two world wars, in other words)? The difficulties Putin faces in trying to restore the Soviet Union to its past grandeur? His fear of NATO’s expansion? His dire necessity of staying the alpha male in the eyes of his impoverished subjects?

Throughout their history the Russians have been bleating about being encircled by hostile nations wishing them ill. That paranoia has been used as a justification for Russia’s own aggressive behaviour, which often included attempts to bait adversaries into preemptive strikes.

For example, Russian historiography describes Napoleon’s 1812 invasion as perfidious and unprovoked. In fact, Russia had fought France in three prior wars as a member of hostile coalitions Alexander I had put together.

Even under his father, Paul I, the Russian general Suvorov had fought against Napoleon’s troops in Italy. What ensued in 1812 was a preemptive strike by Napoleon who felt he had no other choice.

The same happened in 1941. Stalin had built the largest and best-equipped army in the world, outnumbering the Nazis in personnel and especially in planes, tanks and artillery pieces. Having entered the war as Hitler’s ally in 1939, Stalin then deployed his hordes in two unmistakably offensive salients, Lvov and Białystok.

Hitler’s generals, aware of Stalin’s intentions, knew their only hope lay in blitzkrieg, striking at the bases of the two salients, cutting off and routing them pre-emptively. Both Hitler and his General Staff knew the danger of fighting a two-front war. However, they felt they had no choice: if Stalin’s juggernaut had been allowed to roll first, it would have been impossible to stop.

Russia’s unprecedented military build-up in the 1930s turned the whole country into a combination of boot camp, concentration camp and armament factory. This was accompanied by a propaganda offensive depicting the Soviet Union as a peaceful weakling threatened from all sides by ‘bourgeois’ enemies.

For the two years preceding the Nazi strike, such enemies were identified as Britain and France, whose ‘capitalist’ rulers were planning to conquer Russia. The propaganda was mainly used to rally the country’s own starving and enslaved population, although the Comintern’s spies and ‘useful idiots’ spread those lies throughout the West.

The present situation is eerily similar. Putin and his assorted goebbelses feign deep concern about NATO’s eastward expansion. That, they whinge, puts Russia in grave danger.

Perhaps it does at that, but not in the way the Russians claim. NATO was created in 1949 as a defensive bloc against Soviet aggression. It was an attempt to hold the line that separated Europe’s part already raped by the Soviets from the part they wished to rape in a similar fashion.

Never was any offensive purpose part of the NATO doctrine. From its very inception the bloc identified its strategic goal as merely containment.

It was true then and it remains true now. Former slave nations of the Soviet Union, each drowned in blood and starved by its erstwhile masters, took advantage of the first opportunity to break away and declare their independence.

Yet unlike the West those countries attended class when history was taught. They knew that what Russia relinquished she could later reclaim at some propitious moment. Hence they sought the protection of the West by joining either NATO or the EU or both.

They hoped that, should the Russians decide to remedy “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20^th century”, Article 5 of NATO’s charter would keep them at bay. If any of them harboured any illusion that such protection was unnecessary, Russia disabused them of that notion by her aggression against Georgia in 2008 and the Ukraine in 2014.

NATO and the EU opened their doors, partly for ideological reasons but mainly for strategic ones. But, contrary to the lies spouted by Putin’s geobbelses, the strategy isn’t to use those countries as a beachhead from which the bloodthirsty West could attack Russia.

Anyone whose mind is in working order, and whose knee doesn’t jerk in Putin’s direction, should be able to appreciate the amount of brainwashing it takes for people to believe such malignant nonsense. Just paint a mental picture of Messrs Biden, Scholz, Johnson and Macron deciding to launch a massive offensive against Russia, which, as Putin never ceases to boast, is a nuclear power. The picture doesn’t quite add up, does it?

The danger NATO’s eastward expansion presents to Putin lies in making his expansionist plans harder to execute. Hence the rattling of Russia’s sabres at the border – indeed hence the non-stop war on the Ukraine Russia has been waging since 2014.

The present strategy may include further escalation or merely an attempt to blackmail the West into concessions first, submission second. My point is that it doesn’t really matter which. The response should be exactly the same in either case.

In his Skype chat with Putin, Biden stupidly ruled out any possibility of NATO’s military involvement. That option should have stayed on the table, even if everyone knew it was unrealistic. However, even a remote possibility of NATO’s direct action could have provided a sufficient deterrent.

Yet the stern economic response Biden threatened should come now, not when Putin’s armour drives at Kiev. The escalation is in the present tense, not the future. So should be the punishment.

Biden promised economic sanctions the likes of which Russia has never seen. The reports have been vague on specifics, making one suspect that the gaga president indeed talked in nebulous generalities. Yet specific measures that could make Putin see the error of his ways are essential.

Russia must be cut off from SWIFT, impoverishing her banks and making the ruble worthless outside the country. The assets that Russian officials, oligarchs and other gangsters keep in the West must be impounded and, if that fails to deter Putin, confiscated. A temporary embargo on Russian hydrocarbons must be introduced, with the threat of making it permanent.

All such sanctions are a whip dialectically linked with the carrot of future withdrawal if Russia’s behaviour improves. Yet I’m afraid the West’s response will amount to a slap on the wrist – at a time when only a bang on the head could possibly work.

According to the newly appointed head of our armed forces, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the British military has a problem. Luckily, he knows exactly what it is.

I thought I did too, but evidently I was wrong. As a rank amateur in matters martial, I focused on incidentals at the expense of the crux of the matter. For example, I noticed that HMG was treating the defence budget as a salami, to be sliced until nothing is left.

As a result, the numerical strength of our army currently stands at 75,000, compared to 250,000 in 1813. Yes, I know Britain was at war at the time, but then the country’s population was less than 30 per cent of what it is today.

Embarrassingly, the tests of our new battle tank had to be discontinued. Turns out it can’t travel safely at more than 20 mph, reverse over obstacles higher than eight inches or fire its cannon when moving. It also vibrates like a pneumatic drill, making it impossible for the crew to stay in for more than 90 minutes. Other than that, it’s just perfect.

In 2018, the army got the present of a new assault rifle, the SA80. Rather than being grateful, soldiers describe it as the worst rifle ever. The SA80 is like a weaponised civil servant, they say: “it doesn’t work, and it can’t be fired.”

Sir Tony’s previous bailiwick, the Royal Navy, can no longer fulfil its brief of ruling the waves. When it did, the rule of thumb was that it should outnumber the combined force of any two potential adversaries. Today it’s outnumbered even by the French navy, for the first time since Trafalgar, or Mers-el-Kébir if you’d rather.

After much hand-wringing we finally managed to commission our second aircraft carrier (the US has 11), only to find that, having failed to replace the Harrier, we had no planes to put on it. That rather defeats the purpose, this amateur would suggest.

So on and so forth, this story of woe can continue. Indeed, Sir Tony agrees that the state of our armed forces is “woeful”. But, being a high-ranking professional, my fellow Russian can put his finger right on the most salient issue. (Frankly, I don’t know if he is of Russian origin. His surname certainly is.)

In his first post-appointment speech, Sir Tony stated that the British military runs the “risk of looking ridiculous”. Why? Because of anything I’ve mentioned? No, don’t be silly.

Our military, explains Sir Tony, suffers from “the woefulness of too few women” – it doesn’t reflect “the diversity of our nation”. Actually this type of diversity, a more or less even split between men and women, isn’t unique to our nation, but no fighting force in the world reflects it faithfully. Still, “this [imbalance] affects our culture, our fighting power, our prowess.”

Anticipating likely sneers by the likes of me, Sir Tony denied he is woke. It’s not about “wokefulness” but “woefulness”, he explained. Or, put another way, the woefulness of wokefulness.

Now, an amateur in such matters I may be, but I have studied a small library of books on the theory and practice of warfare. And not a single one has ever suggested that a low number of female soldiers makes an army less powerful. In fact, many argued exactly the opposite.

This isn’t a debate I’m really qualified to join, although on general principle I can see how women can prove a distraction in the armed forces. They certainly distract me even in much less stressful situations and, unlike our soldiers, I’m not in the first, nor indeed second, flush of youth.

Studies have shown that male soldiers are more likely to slow their advance to help a wounded woman than a man. That’s partly because, if taken prisoner, a woman is practically guaranteed to suffer a fate worse than just the squalor of a POW camp.

Also, over a lifetime of intensive hands-on study, I’ve discovered that women are physiologically different from men, even though these findings now seem downright reactionary. Penelope, for example, needs my help to remove screw tops from bottles. She may be an exception, but surely women are much weaker than men on average.

Are they up to the rigours of service in modern armed forces? Israel, which arguably has the best army in the world, does conscript women, but then she is outnumbered more than 10 to one by those who publicly define their goal as “driving Israel into the sea”.

Yet even in that army, strapped for personnel though it is, 96 per cent of the women only serve in ‘combat-support’, not as frontline troops. But then I’m sure Sir Tony knows something about women’s hidden strengths that the Israeli generals don’t.

Sir Tony has correctly identified Russia as a “threat to our values and interests”. Yet to deter that threat Britain has so far been able to post fewer than 1,000 soldiers in Poland and the Baltics. They are supposed to act as a tripwire, except that it’s unclear what sort of action their certain death would trigger.

I don’t know how many of them are women, but in case of a Russian offensive their future looks gruesome. If you wonder how gruesome, read any book on the Soviet occupation of Germany, such as Antony Beevor’s Berlin: The Downfall 1945.

P.S. The Meteo Office believes the current storm may subside by Christmas. “So perhaps there is hope for a calmer end to the year.” Perhaps? Hope? One detects some uncertainty there. But then we know how hard it is to forecast weather a fortnight ahead. Centuries ahead is much easier.

“Pestering women in street to be outlawed,” screamed a front-page headline in The Telegraph.

In response, my good friend, the Rev. Peter Mullen, wrote a witty letter to the editor, saying: “Quite right too. I’ve been too often the victim of these pestering women!”

Peter is right, unfortunately. Mordant laughter and fervent prayer are the only defences we have left against the massed offensive on our sanity. As Seneca put it presciently, “None of this can be helped, but all of it can be despised.”

Just to think that the great common law of England, the cornerstone of our civilisation, could produce such an ugly stillborn offspring. For this new law is not only subversive in content and intent, but also rotten as far as jurisprudence goes.

Those in the vanguard of modernity know that, if they want to conquer, they need to divide. The greatest fault they can turn into a fissure would split mankind right down the middle, by alienating the sexes.  

Some of those objectionable individuals may push in that direction with deliberate premeditation. Most don’t because they don’t have to: neither do dogs need to make a conscious decision to chase cats, nor cats to run away from dogs or else try to scratch their eyes out. Such actions are coded in their DNA.

That’s why I’ve stopped wondering if those pursuing such evil ends do so wittingly or unwittingly. It simply doesn’t matter. They’ve been doing rather well though.

It’s not just homosexuals, but also homosexuality that enjoys equal rights. The institution of marriage has been severely compromised by legalised homonuptials. A man can declare himself a woman and vice versa on a mere say-so (thus women’s dressing rooms, lavatories and prisons have been penetrated by burly males seeking to do the man thing). A husband raising even his voice, not his hand, against his wife may get a visit from the boys in blue. Complimenting a female colleague on her appearance may lead the offender to industrial tribunal; kissing a woman without explicit permission, to prison.

The definition of rape has been broadened to include any intercourse where a man fails to obtain an unequivocally stated prior consent, ideally in a notarised letter of intent. A woman undressing and indulging in inventive foreplay before actual intercourse can land a man in prison if he fails to stop in mid-stroke.

My friends who teach at universities know they can’t stay alone in the room with a female student without risking a spurious charge of rape. For the same reason, male doctors have to have a nurse present when examining a woman patient.

Put all such outrages together, add those I’ve left out, and the subversive intent begins to shine through. Rather than regarding themselves as complementary, the sexes increasingly look at each other with suspicion, often antipathy. All the normal interplay between them has been curtailed if not downright destroyed.

The new law dovetails with this general tendency nicely. But this law isn’t just subversive. It’s bad.

Good proscriptive laws define the proscribed offences tightly. Bad ones are open-ended, potentially to criminalise greater and greater swathes of humanity. The great legal minds of modernity, such as Lenin, understood this perfectly.

In that spirit, he contemplated the proposed new article prescribing the death penalty for anyone “complicit in any conspiracy to overthrow the Soviet republic”. Lenin knew in his bone marrow that something was missing.

He took his trusted blue pencil out and, after the word ‘complicit’, added “or capable of being complicit”. He looked at his handiwork and knew it was good. So edited, the new article could get every Soviet citizen shot.

This seems to be the model our jurists see as legal perfection. For it’s impossible to define precisely exactly what constitutes ‘pestering’. Obviously, grabbing the more jutting attractions of a strange woman on a bus would qualify. But such behaviour is already covered by existing laws, with no help necessary, thank you very much.

One suspects that pestering will be defined the same way as racial insults are: anything the putative victim sees as such.

Suppose for the sake of argument that a man tries to pick up a pretty girl in the street. This supposition is easy for me to make because I had committed that crime hundreds of times (with a lamentable lack of success) by the time I left my teens.

Let’s imagine he says: “Excuse me for bothering you, but I sense we have much in common. Would you like to have a drink with me one evening?” Is that pestering? Yes? No? Perhaps not yet.

But what if she says no and he rephrases his proposition, committing the well-known fallacy of doing the same thing, but expecting a different result. His new phrasing is as polite as the first time around, so is that pestering?

You see what I’m driving at? The only tight definition of pestering has to be in the eye of the beholder. Some girls say no the first time of asking, but yes after a repetition or two. Some will say no even after multiple repetitions, but still like having been asked. Others will be mortally insulted at ‘Excuse me’, still others at merely an appreciative glance.

The potential for abuse of justice is vast, as it is with every bad law, and it hurts me to think that the great English common law has had to come to this.

So yes, Peter, we can laugh. What the hell else can we do? After all, grown men don’t cry.

A hundred years from now people will be mentioning James MacMillan in the same breath as Bach. At least that’s what I always said.

But I was wrong. The time to speak of Sir James in those terms is now, not in a hundred years.

If you question this judgement, you obviously were nowhere near the Royal Festival Hall last Saturday, when Sir James’s Christmas Oratorio was premiered by the London Philharmonic.

I shan’t attempt to describe the work or its performance in any detail, other than suggesting that no one since Bach has handled the chorale with the same mastery and inexhaustible stream of ideas.

One gets the impression that, had he lived to be two hundred, Bach still wouldn’t have run out of surprises, spellbinding the listener with every phrase, every note. The same can be said of Sir James, with nary a hyperbole anywhere in sight.

I can’t even conceive of a mind capable of constructing a work of such architectural magnitude, while still continuing to jolt and unsettle the listener with a profusion of startling details. No wonder the Oratorio took a year to write.

MacMillan doesn’t encourage complacency – every listener has to remain his hardworking co-author throughout, only to realise the sheer impossibility of keeping pace with the mesmeric harmonic progressions. We fail, but never has a failure been so rewarding.

MacMillan calls himself a modernist, but that, I suspect, is merely kowtowing to the current obsession with formal labelling. He is no more a modernist composer than Bach was a baroque one.

For the first question about art in general, music in particular and Western music especially starts with ‘what’, not ‘how’. The content goes beyond the form, and the form goes beyond its time. If God gives an artist something universal to say, he also gives him the universal means of doing so.

Specific techniques differ from one artist to another, and from one period to the next. But the essence of music transcends its technique. Like a gothic cathedral, music is built from the inside out.

Musicologists tend to identify music by its specific shell, often borrowing designations from architecture. The two arts indeed have much in common: if architecture is an artistic arrangement of space, music is an artistic arrangement of time. In fact, a gothic cathedral has sometimes been described as frozen music or music in stone.

But attaching a specific architectural tag to a composer of genius is a losing proposition, especially if such labelling is based mainly on chronology. In what way, for example, is Bach a baroque composer?

True, baroque was the dominant architectural idiom during his lifetime. But put a baroque cathedral side by side with a gothic one and see which one resembles Bach’s music more. Correct. So was Bach a gothic composer then? This is simply to point out the danger of pigeonholing genius, especially a musical one.

So yes, MacMillan’s musical palette includes atonality, alongside Gregorian chant, Bachian polyphony, direct quotations from Beethoven (who was neither gothic, nor baroque nor modernist), references to Scottish songs and dance music – and I’ll leave it for musicologists to extend this list.

I discerned all those inputs in the Oratorio and, if I hear it again, I may notice some more. However, this will always remain incidental to the essence of music, and not many composers have ever told us what it is in MacMillan’s uncertain terms.

Now that we are into dangerously approximate analogies, music is to other arts is what philosophy is to other sciences. Both have as their exclusive domain first causes and last things – if they don’t, they are in default of their brief.

But unlike philosophy, music goes to the first causes directly, without any verbal mediation – this, even if it includes words, as the Christmas Oratorio obviously does. One could paraphrase St Augustine to say that music is the audible form of an inaudible grace.

Great vocal music uses the voice mostly, sometimes merely, as yet another instrument. That doesn’t mean that words don’t matter. They do. But I wonder if the mighty effect of the Christmas Oratorio would be in any way weakened if the words were in a language one doesn’t know.  

Judging by the loving care MacMillan takes of the sung words, he’d probably disagree with me. Then again, the words he uses – the Gospels and also poems by Southwell, Donne and Milton –  do demand such care.

MacMillan’s mastery is such that even the full orchestra for which the Oratorio is scored never drowns out the words, with each remaining clearly audible and understandable – a task that has defeated many a lesser composer.

I loved the way his instruments, with the celeste often prominent, reiterate the words and sometimes pick up where the words leave off. For example, the violins would wait until the soprano solo climbed as high as she could go, only then to take over seamlessly and climb higher still.

The choice of poets is telling. Southwell was a Catholic, like Sir James himself; Donne was an Anglican; Milton was a Calvinist. Yet in MacMillan’s hands, as in Bach’s, Christian music becomes ecumenical.

Bach was a devout Lutheran, which affected his sensibility, just as MacMillan’s Catholicism affects his. Yet one no more has to be a Catholic (or indeed an exponent of any Christian confession) to appreciate MacMillan’s Oratorio than one has to be a Lutheran to appreciate Bach’s.

Real music breaks the boundaries of everything: quotidian problems, religion in general, confessional differences in particular. That’s why it’s the true art of the first cause – it soars up to a height from which most of our concerns look small.

The programme notes cite Dominic Peter Wells’s book on MacMillan, describing him as “a political composer… operating between the political-aesthetic extremes from autonomy (‘art for art’s sake’) to agitprop, or political propaganda.”

On the basis of that description, a chap who has never heard MacMillan’s music would place him somewhere between Rouget de Lisle, who wrote La Marseillaise, and John Philip Sousa, the composer of jingoistic American marches.

However, anyone who has indeed heard MacMillan’s works would gasp at the arrant nonsense he has just read. He is the least political composer one could possibly imagine. Even though much (though far from all) of MacMillan’s music is overtly religious, I wouldn’t even call him a religious composer.

I’d simply call him a sublime composer who, as such, operates in a sphere infinitely higher than any mundane activity, such as politics, can touch even tangentially. His place is close to Bach, not next to Lisle or Sousa.

When Schumann first heard Chopin’s music, he cried: “Hats off, gentlemen, a genius.” If I didn’t mind plagiarism, I’d say the same thing about James MacMillan.

Some things about candidates for public office excite us (rarely, these days), while others are an instant turn-off.

One thing that invariably crosses a candidate off my list is his excessive commitment to a single issue. This, even if I happen to agree with the issue.

It’s awful to say so, but I’d rather be governed by an unprincipled, lightweight weathercock like Johnson than by a champion of one cause above all.

For example, I consider the EU wicked and detested Britain’s membership in it. Nevertheless I was wary of activists – and I knew quite a few – who defined their whole political being by a craving for Brexit.

Without those zealots Brexit wouldn’t have happened, and I’m grateful to them. Unlike single-issue politicians, single-issue campaigners are indispensable. But if, say, Nigel Farage had stood for Parliament in my constituency in, say, 2015, I wouldn’t have voted for him.

Governing a country is a complex, multifarious activity that doesn’t lend itself to simplistic reductions. Anyone who doesn’t realise this will always end up cutting his own political throat with Occam’s razor.

There’s always a tinge of fanaticism about single-issue politicians, and a concomitant inability to sense nuances and seek workable balances. This brings me to Eric Zemmour, who has now officially announced his candidature for France’s presidency.

Perhaps it’s unfair to describe him as a single-issue politician. If I were to express Zemmour’s electoral programme in a schematic, it would look like a trident: hate the Muslims – dislike les anglo-saxons, especially Britain – love Putin.

But the prongs of this trident are of unequal sizes: the biggest one by far is Zemmour’s palpable hatred of Muslims. He believes they threaten to make Houellebecq’s dystopic fantasy come true by replacing the indigenous population and turning France into an Islamic republic.

As a believer in individual free will, and therefore individual guilt, I’m uneasy about hatred by category. I much prefer the Christian duality of loving the sinner while hating the sin.

But if we overlook the dangerous glimmer in his eyes, by and large I’m with Zemmour on this one. Simple arithmetic seems to vindicate the replacement theory: due to growing immigration and relative birth rates, France’s demographic balance is indeed shifting the wrong way.

France has failed worse than Britain (which is saying a lot) in trying to assimilate the Muslim population – mainly because the French proceed from a dubious cultural premise. They regard any native Francophone as French, expecting their cherished language to act as a magic wand whose wave can work miracles.

(In War and Peace, Tolstoy observed this national trait with his usual acuity. A French officer insists Pierre Bezukhov is French even though he knows he is Russian. But Pierre’s impeccable French elevates him to the Gallic Olympus.)

Turns out the wand isn’t as magic as all that: even many native-born Muslims trash cities to the accompaniment of a thunderous “Nique la France!” choir (the first word has four letters in English). This goes to show that, language or no language, you can’t assimilate people who won’t assimilate.

Such widespread recalcitrance creates a catastrophic social problem with a group that already makes up almost 10 per cent of the country’s population – especially if it communicates its obduracy with bombs and AKs.

Looking at the hundreds of Frenchmen swimming in their own blood over the past few years, one can see Zemmour has a bloody good point. But the biggest peg on which he hangs his political mantle is way too prominent for my liking.

His manifest lack of affection for Britain is a smaller peg, and it’s cut out of Zemmour’s general traditionalism. Judging by his campaign pronouncements and articles in Le Figaro, he regards the Middle Ages as France’s golden age.

Again I agree with him, as does anyone who compares the intellectual level of Paris University in the 13^th century and now – or, for that matter, Notre-Dame Cathedral or La Sainte Chapelle with Tour Montparnasse or La Défense. Alas, that period ended in a Hundred Years’ War with England, and Zemmour’s medievalism seems to come as a package deal.

His affection for Putin and, even worse, Putinism is the third prong of the triad, and I first noticed it in his 2013 article Tsar Poutine. This third prong extends from the same shaft as the other two. Zemmour, along with so many Europeans who are sick of our woke modernity, detects, with his viscera more than his mind, a kindred soul in the KGB colonel.

Unlike “Yeltsyn who sold his country out to trans-Atlantic groups”, he wrote, Putin “has restored the state. And Russian patriotism. By authoritarian methods. In the tradition of the tsars…

“Little by little, he has become the leader of world opposition to the new ideological order dominated by the West [and characterised by] anti-racism, globalism, homophilia, feminism, Islamophilia and Christianophobia.”

Hence, if elected,  Zemmour plans to move France away from NATO and closer to Russia. That would effectively give the freedom of Europe to an evil state formed by history’s unique fusion of secret police and organised crime.

We are observing an interesting phenomenon here. To paraphrase Buffon ever so slightly, Le style, c’est la politique même – the style is politics itself.

This modified aphorism gains validity as one moves away in any direction from a solid conservative centre towards the extreme periphery. The closer to the edges one gets, the more importance does style acquire at the expense of substance.

That’s why Zemmour feels kinship with Putin – he goes beyond the appalling facts of Putin’s tenure, which I’m sure he knows and, if queried, would disavow.

But, like a woman reaching tropistically for the energy exuded by an alpha male, Zemmour clearly responds to the fascisoid miasma emanating from Putin’s every pore. And because he responds to it, one knows he is fascisoid himself. He doesn’t seem to mind “authoritarian methods”.

The problems he talks about are real, and they do demand a solution if the last vestiges of our civilisation are to survive – everywhere, not just in France. Yet the right remedies must be administered by the right people.

If the people are wrong, the remedies won’t remain right for long. They’ll kill the patient more surely and quickly than the disease itself.

P.S. There’s a cultural trend I’d call PROC (Prole Overcompensation). For example, our less fortunate countrymen have heard that the pronoun ‘me’ is suspect in many sentences. Trying to overcompensate, they hope to sound toff by saying things like “They invited my friend and I”, only succeeding in sounding illiterate.

Now PROC is doing seasonal duty, with every newspaper talking about ‘Christmas lunch’. Our under-privileged writers know not to refer to the afternoon meal as ‘dinner’, the way their parents did. Hence ‘Christmas lunch’ is supposed to sound ‘posh’. It doesn’t. This meal has always been Christmas dinner, and, as far as I’m concerned, so it’ll remain.

Thus spoke in 1973 my American friend, when we were watching William F Buckley’s talk show Firing Line.

Having only been in America for less than a week, I knew little and understood less about Western politics. But I still thought the correct conjunction in my friend’s sentence would have been ‘and’, not ‘but’.

I was an intuitive, temperamental conservative, which is to say a real one. Conservatism (or for that matter its opposite) is a character trait more than any set of ideas. Those can be changed at the drop of a hat, while one’s personality is more or less immutable.

That’s why I’m wary of adult communists or other lefties who see the conservative light in their later years. ‘Adult’ is an important word there, for adolescents are hormonally given to bien pensant ideas conveyable in snappy slogans.

Yet if someone is still a communist in his late twenties, with his brain already wired properly, he remains a communist for life as far as I’m concerned. This, irrespective of the kind of politics he espouses publicly.

However, young visceral conservatives of an intellectual bent still need to find a way of relating their intuition to concrete ideas – political, philosophical and cultural. And most need guidance along that road.

This neophyte certainly did, and Buckley came to my aid. For the next 15 years I never missed a single episode of Firing Line, nor a single issue of his National Review, which was then the best journal of conservative opinion I’ve seen before or since.

Buckley’s influence on American political thought can hardly be overestimated. As he once wrote to me, it was thanks to National Review writers that the word ‘conservative’ acquired some respectability, at least this side of ‘liberal’, in effect illiberal, intelligentsia.

When years later I began to stand on my own intellectual feet, I outgrew some of Buckley’s ideas – but not the sense of gratitude I’ve always felt. His was the most immediate influence on my development, if not the deepest in the long run. (When asked who exerted a formative influence on me, I tend to mention Bach. Though this reply is usually seen as eccentric, it’s nonetheless true.)

And now the political drama Best of Enemies is playing at London’s Young Vic. It’s about the spat between Buckley and Gore Vidal during an ABC broadcast of the 1968 Republican convention.

Sight unseen, the play is just awful. And the sight will remain unseen because the reviews tell me everything I need to know.

To begin with, Buckley, with his patrician physique and accent, is played by the black actor David Harewood, as demanded by transracial rectitude. Since the rectitude is not only transracial but also transsexual, ideally the role should have gone to a black actress, lesbian for preference.

In any case, I no longer wish to subsidise even the transracial fetish, which is why all those black Hamlets and Uncle Vanyas will have to entertain someone else. Good luck to them.

One review I’ve read identifies Buckley as “a right-wing, libertarian, Christian intellectual with strong opinions on everything.” Gore Vidal, on the other hand, is described as “a liberal, left-wing, gay iconoclast.” In other words, Vidal was mainstream and Buckley a distinct outsider.

Vidal was also a successful writer of historical novels, though his scandalous fame came from a frankly pornographic book Myra Breckenridge, in which the eponymous character was a male transsexual.

I suppose one could say that, while Buckley was behind his time, Vidal was ahead of his: back in the 60s transsexuality hadn’t yet risen to the high moral ground it occupies today.

The review identifies both men as “failed politicians”, which is correct only superficially, meaning it’s wrong. Vidal indeed ran for political offices twice, once for the House then for the Senate, failing both times.

Buckley did run for mayor of New York in 1965 but, since he had no intention of winning, he didn’t really fail. In fact, when an interviewer asked him during the campaign what Buckley would do if he won, he replied: “Demand a recount”.

His reason for running was to gain a wider exposure for conservative ideas, and in that undertaking he succeeded. That, I’d suggest, would have been another interesting subject for a play, but Mr Graham is unlikely to follow my recommendations.

The central episode of his play, the sharp exchange between Buckley and Vidal, shows that conservatives hadn’t yet learned the lesson now taught universally.

When lefties insult us, we are supposed to be equable and civilised about it. By no means are we allowed to insult back, especially by mentioning pejoratively our offender’s race or sexual deviations. These days we know we could have our collar felt. But at that time the lesson hadn’t quite sunk in yet.

The contretemps started when the conversation veered towards rioting youngsters who expressed their opposition to the Vietnam war by raising Vietcong flags and burning American ones. Buckley compared them to Hitler Youth, not unreasonably. The modus operandi was indeed startlingly similar.

Vidal, on the other hand, felt that the youngsters’ protest was not just valid but commendable. “As far as I’m concerned,” he told Buckley, “the only pro- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself.” All par for the course, but Buckley, who fought against the Nazis as an infantryman, refused to bend over and take his punishment.

He snarled: “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddam face, and you’ll stay plastered.”

That sort of thing, says Graham, worries him more than anything else: “Of all the things I think of that terrify me – from the climate crisis to generational inequality – how we actually talk to each other or don’t talk to each other, and the anger and hate between different sides –  completely arbitrary, falsely binary, reductively simple sides – seems so unrepairable.”

What on earth is “generational inequality”? Does he mean “gender inequality”? One never knows with leftie scribes. And what exactly is “falsely binary”?

It’s the problem that worries him most, the inability to “talk to each other”, that’s truly irreparable (sorry, unrepairable, in Graham’s gobbledygook). For me at any rate.

Duels of any kind are only possible between equals – social, in the aristocratic duels of yesteryear, intellectual, in the verbal jousts of today. And, whether your chosen weapon is language or sword, the duel has to be fought according to set rules.

The rules of argumentative rhetoric were set thousands of years ago, but only conservatives ever follow them. Every left-winger with whom I’ve ever argued – and you might think I ought to have known better – speaks in ad hominems, non sequiturs, circular arguments and all other logical fallacies known to man.

One can’t argue with someone who doesn’t even know what an argument or a refutation is. “I refute you” is routinely uttered simply to register disagreement; “I disagree” is seen as QED sufficient argument.

In this particular instance, how do you argue rationally with someone who thinks that hoisting the flag of a hostile power is acceptable and desirable? Either you avoid such arguments like a French kiss with a Covid carrier or tell him to perform a ballistically improbable procedure on himself.

That’s how I’d converse with Mr Graham, should the subject of William F Buckley come up. Luckily that conversation will never happen: we revolve in different circles.

Happy birthday to me. Well, not exactly to me. It’s just that my blog turned 10 yesterday, as a numerate reader kindly reminded me.

The blog was born on the same date as Winston Churchill and Mark Twain, though in all modesty I can’t claim any other than a chronological commonality there.

But never mind megalomaniac parallels. Instead I’ll answer the question that must have haunted you all these years, keeping you away from any normal routine and driving you to sleeping pills: Why the hell did he decide to do this?

The answer is as short as it is embarrassing: crass commercialism.

The idea, nay demand, came from my publisher. I had a book coming out at about that time, and he insisted that any hope of decent sales rested on “getting my name out there more”.

He knew that by then I had fallen out with most conservative editors in town, those who could get my name out before a big audience. My own bloody-mindedness and exaggerated sense of self-worth were to blame for those fissures.

Having spent 30 years at ad agencies, writing what and how others told me to write, I decided that in my other career I’d do things my way or no way. Editors agreed – and happily went for the second option.

They hated my tantrums thrown every time I heard the sacramental phrase “You can’t say that”. I hated their passive complicity with woke subversion.

They felt the need to edit my style. I protested that their sub-editors were illiterate.

They feared a lawsuit every time I wrote something ‘controversial’, and they certainly got flooded with torrents of PCC shrieks (the Press Complaints Commission, in case you’re wondering). I screamed freedom of speech.

Above all, respectable publications didn’t know how to handle someone who rejected post-Enlightenment modernity root and branch, not just its various excesses. Editors of even conservative papers didn’t feel I was on their side. I didn’t feel they knew what exactly they wished to conserve.

It just so happened that at about the same time my friends Paul and Jacqui also mentioned the possibility of doing a blog. Paul, aware of my computer illiteracy, even volunteered to set it up.

That he did, and he is still managing this space, gently but firmly overriding my Luddite objections every time the software gets more sophisticated. If Jacqui is this blog’s godmother, Paul is the midwife (midhusband?).

Long story short, the blog was born and, in common with so many children these days, there was no pre-planning involved in its conception. Also in common with many children, it failed to live up to lofty expectations: the new book didn’t do noticeably better than my pre-blog books had.

Yet the child isn’t exactly unloved. I’ve grown fond of the idea of running an abattoir for the sacred cows of modernity. And thousands of readers around the world don’t mind indulging their voyeurism by looking at all the blood and gore.

Thus the child has grown to a mature age of 10, but it’s moribund. Unlike most children, it’ll never outlive its father.

That’s it. No more self-indulgence, mawkish or otherwise, not until the next 10-year anniversary. Dum spiro spero, eh?  

They say that a Chinese godfather makes you an offer you can’t understand. But money talks in a clear language everywhere, and certainly in Barbados.

Having received close to a trillion pounds from China in loans and investments, Barbadians have sacked Her Britannic Majesty as their head of state. The Queen couldn’t find a loose trillion quid to match China’s offer.

Barbados has become a republic or, if we are being totally honest, a Chinese protectorate. That makes me wonder what would happen if Chairman Xi were to make a cash offer to Wales. He probably won’t though: the Chinese have trouble enunciating even single Ls, never mind the double ones favoured by the Welsh.

Her Majesty can’t be criticised for not holding on to that job. But, much as it pains me to say so, that doesn’t mean she should be off limits for any other criticism.

Mine concerns her drinking habits, currently in the news. Apparently Her Majesty, God bless her, has given up her customary nightcap of a dry martini. Such was her doctors’ advice, and I’m happy she took it.

But dry martini at night? Really, Your Majesty. This is an excellent drink, but not after dark, unless one is close to the Arctic Circle in winter.

A dry Martini, mixed four parts of gin to, ideally, no parts of vermouth (although a drop of Noilly Prat couldn’t hurt), is a perfect aperitif before a late lunch or early dinner. It’s usually served with a lemon twist or an olive. When it’s both, the cocktail is called ‘Dickens’ in New York (Oliver Twist, get it?).

The only beverages suitable for a nightcap are either malt whisky or cognac, and a noble-born woman like our Queen, God bless her, ought to have known that. Anyway, that’s not an issue any longer: Her Majesty has lost her nightcap in the same week she lost Barbados.

Speaking of gin, it’s Gordon’s that currently holds a royal warrant. I’m in no position to offer advice to Her Majesty, God bless her, but I would have removed that distinction after Diageo lowered the gin’s strength to 37.5 per cent.

Gin ought to be at least 40 per cent, with a big emphasis on at least. Anything less than that is a woke travesty defying the 250 years of Gordon’s tradition. Since monarchy is an inherently conservative institution, the Queen, God bless her, should uphold traditional values – especially where booze is concerned.

These aren’t my only alcohol-related gripes concerning the Queen’s habits. For apparently she enjoys a glass of sweet German wine with dinner.

Sweet? German? With dinner? I’ve heard of iconoclasm, but this goes too far.

Sweet wines are otherwise known as pudding wines, which hints, none too subtly, at the course with which they should be drunk. If consumed with courses other than pudding, they kill the taste buds and, with them, the flavour of the food.

By contrast, table wines from Bordeaux or Burgundy complement the food, the way Trinidad complements Tobago (now we are on the subject of the Commonwealth). As to German sweet wine, I can only put this down to the Queen’s ancestry.

I know she can’t afford Barbados, but surely her finances must stretch to Château d’Yquem or, at a pinch, a lesser Sauternes? If not, I know a chap who’s on the board of Corney & Barrow, the City wine dealer. I’m sure he could arrange for a suitable royal discount – in fact, being a confirmed monarchist, he’ll be honoured to do so.

Anyway, it’s lunch time, and my cocktail shaker is about to see some action. Two ounces of Tanqueray, a drop of vermouth, two ice cubes, exactly seven shakes — now that delicious drink is ready to be strained into a martini glass and topped with two skewered olives.

Here’s to Her Majesty, God bless her. She shouldn’t be too upset about Barbados – good riddance, I say. Our gain is China’s loss.