Category: Blog

Modernity is remiss not only intellectually and morally, but also aurally. How else could one explain the current profusion of ugly, jarring usages?

For example, no one with a good ear would ever use the construction to be sat, as in I was sat next to the hostess. Since this usage is rapidly gaining currency, the conclusion is inescapable: an increasing number of people suffer from a tin ear for language.

Otherwise, depending on what they want to communicate, they’d say I was seated, I was sitting or simply I sat. One could vindicate such preferences by referring to the entire history of English, especially its transition from the Middle to the Modern period.

When languishing for several centuries after the Norman Conquest in a secondary, almost dialectal status, English underwent massive changes. Most of them gradually made the language more streamlined and compact, with some grammatical categories (such as the cases and genders of nouns) becoming extinct and some others highly suspect.

One such category was the passive voice, which offended the emergent structure of the English sentence revolving around an active verb. Since language constantly interacts with the national mentality, alternately reflecting and forming it, this tendency probably sprang from the dynamic, pragmatic English character.

The same goes for the uncompromising demand for an active, rather than nominal, subject in an English sentence, one assuming responsibility for the action conveyed by the verb. By contrast, a Russian sentence can thrive without either a verbal predicate or a subject, possibly reflecting the characteristic Russian vagueness the West perceives as ‘the mysterious Russian soul’.

In English, however, these two allies, the subject and the predicate, join forces to relegate the passive voice to a suspect status. It’s to be avoided whenever possible, and only brought in from the cold in dire necessity (as in this sentence, for example).

One could enunciate one’s objections to I was sat in this rational manner, avoiding any allusion to aural acuity. But the better argument against this abomination is that it’s jarring to the ear – in the same way that a wrong note hurts the ear of anyone blessed with a sense of pitch.

In his presidential campaign of some 25 years ago, Bill Clinton asked the voters to “give Al Gore and I a chance”. That led to a lively argument on The Firing Line between the host William F. Buckley and his guest, who had just published a popular book advocating linguistic permissiveness.

The guest defended Clinton’s usage by asking a question he considered rhetorical: “Are you accusing this Rhodes scholar of being illiterate?” “No,” replied Buckley, “I’m accusing him of having a bad ear.”

Such an accusation would clinch the argument for anyone who heard language in the same tonal detail. A musician may also point out to a tone-deaf listener that the piece he has just heard is in the wrong key. The former requires no rational proof for his remark – he just knows it’s true. But the latter may wish to dip into the area of acoustics, wishing to know, for example, what frequency corresponds to D Minor.

Similarly, Buckley heard the false grammatical note, but his guest didn’t, or rather wouldn’t. He tried to excuse the Rhodes scholar’s illiteracy by offering a factually correct but conceptually irrelevant defence. Clinton, he explained, must have been taught as a child that it’s wrong to say Me and Hilary both want to be president. He should say Hilary and I…

That compromised in his mind the usage of me altogether, and Clinton, along with millions of others, felt one always had to opt for I to be on the safe side. In the same vein, many Englishmen taught not to drop their aitches as children actually pronounce the tricky letter as haitch, thinking they sound ‘well posh’ thereby.

Buckley’s guest didn’t explain why Clinton’s impressive transatlantic credentials didn’t cover the difference between subject and object. To Buckley that difference was self-evident, to his guest irrelevant, to Clinton nonexistent.

I would have been tempted to backtrack even further, to the same transition from Middle to Modern English, during which the whole category of the case came under attack. As a result, it suffered attrition, but still managed to hang on in personal pronouns.

Interestingly, Buckley also tried to make his point by suggesting that no one would say give I a chance. He was using an argument borrowed from transformational grammar, a useful teaching tool if nothing else.

But his crystal ball was murky: these days one can hear many Americans, and a growing number of Britons, saying things like they invited I to a party. Tin ear is a contagion spreading as fast and wide as some pandemics we’ve grown to know and love.

Buckley’s guest then tried to unsheathe a rusty truism as his defence weapon. “Language,” he said, “is constantly changing”. Like most truisms, as opposed to truths, this weapon ought to have been decommissioned a long time ago.

We’ve known since the time of Heraclitus that everything changes, emphatically including language. Hence a modern reader finds Shakespeare hard to read in places, Chaucer maddeningly so, and Beowulf well-nigh impossible.

That language changes is indisputable. However, the pernicious presumption of progress misfires here as badly as it does everywhere else. For not all change is for the better; much of it is for the worse. Its direction depends on who initiates the change, why and on what basis.

English used to be a club with a qualified open-door policy. Outsiders could be admitted, but they had to be vetted by the club members first.

The metaphorical club included the cultured elite endowed with the education, sensitivity – and yes, ear – to judge which newcomers should be admitted and which blackballed. They managed to keep undesirables at bay, sometimes forever, sometimes at least for a long time.

That elite used to be small in number, but it was never culturally marginal. Now it is. The masses broke the club doors down and rushed inside, trampling underfoot the linguistic treasures lovingly collected over centuries.

That onrush is these days growing exponentially, especially under the influence of social media. Increasingly, verbal communication gives way to either cryptic acronyms or hieroglyphics, all those smileys, emoticons and emojis.

The prerogative of using the written word to affect the usages of millions has been stolen from the elite and usurped by our comprehensively educated masses who don’t know the passive voice from a holding midfielder.

English has never had a single regulatory body like the French Academy. In the past the speed and temperature of change were on a short lead, but the lead wasn’t nonexistent. Now it has fallen by the wayside, and a game played by loose but definite rules has given way to an anarchic free-for-all.

Rather than becoming richer and bigger as a result, English has become poorer and smaller. For anarchic change is always ugly and reductive – in language and everywhere else.

I often find much that’s despicable in the news, but hardly ever anything that’s surprising. When one has lived for… well, a long time, one can’t help becoming somewhat jaded.

Hence I must thank Sarah Broughton, the head of consular affairs at the Foreign Office, for shaking me out of my torpor. In a few clear, unequivocal words she left me speechless, with my mouth open wide enough to accommodate my heart and what’s left of my other internal organs.

The words that had such a shattering effect appear in Miss Broughton’s letter to the lawyers acting for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliff, a Briton of Iranian descent languishing in a Tehran prison on a trumped-up charge.

British subjects, explained Miss Broughton, “have no legal right to consular assistance” or the government’s diplomatic protection even if falsely accused and tortured. This is the most revolting statement I’ve seen emerging from the government, and the list of candidates for that distinction is long.

It has been assumed since time immemorial that any British subject arrested oversees has the right to at least consular access. If falsely accused (like Mrs Ratcliff), the subject must be secure in the knowledge that the government will seek every possible diplomatic and legal redress to secure his release.

Such is the nature of the ancient compact between the state and the citizen: protectio trahit subjectionem, subjectio protectionem (protection entails allegiance; allegiance, protection). The Foreign Office statement breaks the compact, leading to a logical conclusion: if the government withdraws its protection, we can withdraw our allegiance.

Interestingly, HMG won’t do what it asks of others. Here, I’ve opened my passport to read these words on the inside cover: “Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State Requests and requires in the Name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary.”

Not only requests but also requires, eh? If I were a foreign official, I’d just say “Look who’s talking. Why should I assist and protect waylaid Britons if even their own government won’t do that?”

If the aforementioned legal principle is now null and void, we should campaign for the posthumous rehabilitation of William Joyce, known as Lord Haw-Haw. In 1946 that Nazi propagandist went to the gallows on a technicality.

Though Joyce was a US and Irish citizen, he managed to obtain a British passport on false pretences, developing a phony upper-class British accent in the process. That was the passport he used to travel to Nazi Germany, and that was the accent he used when becoming Goebbels’s Anglophone voice.

The prosecution was able to charge Joyce with treason and invoke the principle of protectio trahit subjectionem, subjectio protectionem. Since he used a British passport to go to Germany, Joyce was entitled to the protection of the Crown, while the latter was entitled to his loyalty.

Had he used one of his other passports, he would have got off. Since neither the US nor Ireland was at war with Germany at the time Joyce went there, he couldn’t be judged a traitor to those countries. And Joyce couldn’t be a traitor to Britain because, as a non-subject, he didn’t owe her any subjectio.

What I found as astounding as the FO statement itself is the muted, nonchalant reaction to it. Thus The Times only mentioned that “the government’s position has profound implications for all British citizens travelling abroad”. I daresay those implications go quite a bit wider than that.

The government’s position brings into question the very nature of government, along with the factors of its legitimacy. It breaks the bilateral compact balancing rights and duties that lies at the foundation of any civilised state. This position implies a unilateral arrangement hitherto associated only with tyrannies: the citizens owe the state everything, while the state owes them nothing.

I’m not trying to distract public attention from genuflecting to the thunderous din of Black Lives Matter. All I’m trying to say is that other things matter too, and some, at the risk of being smitten with a woke lightning, may mean even more.

Prime among them is the constitutional relationship between the state and the people. When that disintegrates, so do a whole raft of erstwhile certitudes on which statehood rests. Its legs buckling, the state may go plop on its belly, crushing us all under its weight.

“All crimes are vulgar, all vulgarity is a crime,” wrote Oscar Wilde in his typically brilliant yet facile manner. Like most of his aphorisms, this is one is to enjoy, not to analyse.

Any attempt at decortication will show, for example, that not all crimes are vulgar – and nor, contrary to Hanna Arendt’s observation, all evil banal. But Wilde unwittingly raises an interesting question: What is vulgarity?

I’d suggest it exists on two planes: low, instantly obvious; and high, elucidated only by subsequent thought. Only the first type of vulgarity is perceived as such in common usage.

Typically it’s associated with a propensity for telling unfunny salacious jokes or peppering one’s speech with expletives based on sex organs and their use. This is so widespread, not to say universal, that there’s really no point belabouring it any further – not here at any rate.

What interests me is the higher, intellectual vulgarity, especially of the epistemological variety. For we can’t really acquire knowledge if we don’t understand what knowledge is. If such understanding is poisoned with vulgarity at inception, knowledge itself will be vulgar – which is another way of saying that the baby of knowledge will be stillborn.

This is a very serious matter indeed, for, if vulgar definitions of knowledge gain wide acceptance in a society, the society will become intellectually and morally diseased. This is worth pondering because it’s exactly the crossroads at which modernity has arrived after an orgy of crepuscular obscurantism going by the misnomer of the Enlightenment.

For a start, look at chess as a simplified epistemological model. A game is in full swing, one side is attacking, the other defending, and the position is complex. Looking at the weaknesses around his opponent’s king and the deployment of his own pieces, the attacker knows there’s a winning combination there somewhere.

He knows it intuitively, but in this very simple case his intuition is probably based on the recognition of some patterns that have occurred many times before in other games, his own and other players’. One way or another, he knows a killing blow is within sight. But, with the chess clock ticking away, he can’t find it.

The game fizzes out to a draw, and only in the post-mortem analysis does the player uncover the winning continuation he missed at the board. Does this mean he acquires knowledge only then? Or was the knowledge already there during the game, when he sensed its presence intuitively?

The answer is both. It’s just that any cognitive process starts from an intuitive impulse. Archimedes’s bathtub, Newton’s apple and Mendeleyev’s dream may all be apocryphal, but they still ring true. The scientists’ intuition was activated, and the intuition then galvanised a rational process.

Unlike our hapless chess player, they managed to rationalise, or rather post-rationalise, their intuitive knowledge successfully. But knowledge had existed before they managed to do so, just as an oil formation exists before an explorer finds it.

What an intuitive hypothesis is to science, metaphysical intuition is to faith, the knowledge of God. As St Anselm put it, “I believe so that I may understand, not understand so that I may believe”.

This adage alludes to the same cognitive sequence as that activated by Archimedes, Newton and Mendeleyev to such an effect: an intuitive knowledge successfully post-rationalised.

I’d go so far as to suggest that the higher the knowledge, the more it depends on the initial actuator of a powerful metaphysical intuition. Even if the desired outcome of knowledge is tangibly concrete, it descends to that level from the higher plateau of abstraction and intuition.

This gets us back to the subject of epistemological vulgarity, the dominant (mercifully, still not the only) feature of post-Enlightenment thought. Its principal characteristic is contempt for metaphysical intuition and metaphysics in general. This destroys the cognitive sequence of metaphysical intuition descending to the level of rational thought and thereby closing the cognitive loop.

Eventually that leads to the utmost vulgarity of defining knowledge in strictly material terms, to the turgid musings of Feuerbach, Marx, Compte and all the way down to Popper, Ayer et al. Yet not all epistemological vulgarity is vulgar stylistically – David Hume is a case in point.

One of the best writers of English treatises, Hume couched his epistemological vulgarity in the beautifully shaped prose of his essays. That makes them eminently enjoyable, without in any way mitigating the underlying vulgarity of Hume’s epistemology. To wit:

“If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”

My friend Peter Mullen points out that Hume’s statement is contradictory to the point of being nonsensical because it itself contains neither experimental nor abstract reasoning. That’s true, but the statement is also vulgar.

Therein lies the problem no materialists can solve. They can be brilliant people, but their understanding of life forces them to push their thought down to the quotidian level, away from first principles and last things, where post-rationalised metaphysical intuition reigns supreme.

That’s why a materialist philosopher is as much of an oxymoron as, say, an atheist theologian. Materialists can be physicists, physicians or physiologists, and they can even be social commentators. But whenever they venture into the discipline circumscribed by its quest for the truth of first principles, they sound out of their depth and, well, vulgar.

Is this the kind of vulgarity Wilde would describe as a crime? Probably not. But it’s the kind that has a lethal effect on the collective intellect, including its practical manifestations in morality, politics or economics. Intellectual vulgarity explodes at the epicentre, but its shockwaves travel wide.   

I fear that Boris Johnson’s battle cry of “Let’s get Brexit done” will in effect be replaced with the notion in the title above.

Say what you will against the EU, and God knows I said a fair bit, but it offered HMG an invaluable asset: a scapegoat. Our leaders could effortlessly blame many of Britain’s ills on that pernicious contrivance, with its red tape, restrictive trade practices and swarms of infra dig immigrants inundating our shores.

However, that chalice was poisoned. Rather than reducing the whole issue of Brexit to its core, regaining sovereignty, Johnson et al. dragged in a wide raft of economic benefits supposedly to be accrued as a direct result of leaving the EU.

Such benefits can indeed come our way, but not against the backdrop of the government’s asinine home-spun policies. New opportunities are there, but it takes wisdom and resolve to take advantage of them.

Thanking, as we all should, Boris Johnson for getting Brexit done, we must still keep a watchful eye on his plans, to make sure that Britain won’t be undone should they come to fruition. Alas, what I’ve seen so far comes close to that tired cliché: a recipe for disaster.

“This government has a very clear agenda to use this moment to unite and level up and to spread opportunity across the government,” writes Mr Johnson, making one wonder whether he meant to say “across the country”. After all, the government is already replete with opportunities for its members and their staffs.

And, if I read Johnson’s intentions correctly, it’s there, and not among common folk, that the best opportunities will remain concentrated. For that’s the inexorable consequence of any attempt by any state to ‘level up’.

If the trimillennial experience of recorded history is anything to go by, a state can only level down, not up. A government may succeed in making everyone (except its own members and their retinue, naturally) equally poor, but it’ll never be able to make everyone equally prosperous.

The very nature of market economy precludes upward levelling because, for the economic activity to remain robust, economically active people must compete for higher rewards. And any competition has its losers as well as winners.

Granted, a civilised society mustn’t let its people lose too badly, by, for example, leaving them to starve to death. But that desideratum falls far short of the levelling up inscribed on the banners of our newly sovereign government.

Free markets may at times be cruel to some people, but they have been proven historically to be the only guarantor of a prosperity spread widely, if not equally. History also shows that any attempt to interfere with the free operation of markets in the name of equality will only spread penury.

Edmund Burke knew this more than two centuries ago: “The moment that government appears at market, the principles of the market will be subverted.” The intervening period has done nothing to disprove this statement.

So far HMG hasn’t regaled us with many concrete plans, but even the general outline vouchsafed to the public makes me cringe. There are broad hints at giant construction projects financed out of the public purse, whose strings will be loosened to reduce unemployment and increase equality.

This stratagem has failed, except in the very short term, everywhere it has ever been tried, be that within the framework of Stalin’s Five-Year Plan, Hitler’s copycat Four-Year Plan or Roosevelt’s New Deal. Such is the brutal truth of every hue of socialism: it fails.

Whether the chains binding the economy are made at home or abroad, they are just as restrictive and painful. And the early indications are that HMG is deaf to the clanking sounds of those tethers. For another big project mooted by Johnson is frankly couched in Rooseveltian terms: the Green New Deal.

This again constitutes what Burke described as economic subversion, and it would be destructive even if undertaken at a time of economic boom. Even thinking of something like this when the country has been crippled by Covid is tantamount to sacrificing the economy at the totem pole of ideology. It’s with avuncular pride that Comrades Lenin, Stalin and Mao may be looking at Comrade Johnson out of their graves.

In the same article, he mentions in passing that his Brexit deal “perhaps does not go as far as we would like” on financial services. Allow me to translate: British financial institutions will only be granted access to EU markets if they continue to be bound hand and foot by EU regulations.

Labour critics spotted the problem with their eagle eye, but they didn’t comment on the true depth of the pitfall. Being institutionally more concerned with employment than economic success, they gnashed their teeth at the potential problem for those employed in financial services, about seven per cent of our total labour force.

But the real problem is that those seven percent generate almost a quarter of Britain’s GDP, making the City both the most important and the most vulnerable of our economic institutions. Hence the EU’s continuing ability to lord it over our financial services exposes Britain’s economy to grave risks.

Germany and France have been toying with the possibility of replacing London with Frankfurt even when Britain was still in the EU. Now they may see that possibility as a punitive measure, much needed to prevent further exits.

And make no mistake about it: EU leaders still think in those terms. In one of his increasingly strident speeches, Manny Macron said two astonishingly insane things the other day. First, France’s sovereignty is more secure when vested in a supranational setup; second, Brexit threatens the sovereignty of the EU in general and France in particular.

While showing a feeble grasp of political theory, the speech is a veiled statement of practical intent: for all the reassurances of lasting friendship, the EU sees Britain as a direct threat to be thwarted. Johnson’s failure to protect the City thus takes on dimensions vaster than merely the need to protect one in 14 British jobs.

None of this should imply that my enthusiasm for Brexit is in any way diminished. Since EU membership made mockery of Britain’s history, constitution and her whole political ethos, stopping that abomination was the just thing to do.

I only hope HMG won’t live to regret losing the ready EU excuse for its own ineptitude.

The other day the comedian Rory Bremner said: “I give up. You think you’re being satirical but the reality is even more farcical.”

When professional wits acknowledge that everyday life throws up scenarios even they couldn’t make up, we know we are in trouble. My previous article is a case in point.

I was lampooning today’s obsession with woke language, which has stopped being merely absurd to become clinically certifiable. In particular, I feigned apology for my use of words like niggling, niggardly and renege (a friend has since also suggested ‘negate’).

Yet before the proverbial and nonexistent ink dried on my final full stop, the Football Association proved Rory Bremner’s point. It banned the Uruguayan ManU striker Edinson Cavani for three matches and fined him £100,000 for using insulting and improper words. He’ll also have to attend a “face-to-face” education programme, eerily reminiscent of China’s re-education camps in the ’60s.

I wrote about this some time ago, when Cavani was first charged, but by way of a reminder his crime was responding to a friend’s twitted message of congratulations with “gracias negrito”. Whatever the etymological undercurrents, in Cavani’s native River Plate Spanish this sentence merely means “thanks, mate”.

Yet our berserk modernity is running amok. Its FA specimens, who can barely string a grammatical English sentence together, took it upon themselves to police not only their own language, but also other nations’.

Their mastery of their mother tongue was amply demonstrated by the final ruling in Cavani’s case. Writing in their inimitable bureaucratese, they decreed that his post was “insulting and/or abusive and/or improper and/or brought the game into disrepute”. His “comment constitutes an aggravated breach which included reference, whether express or implied, to colour and/or race and/or ethnic origin”.

I’d suggest that this statement is cretinous and/or ignorant and/or schizophrenic. For Cavani’s post contains no such reference. If it does, then so do words like blackberry, bête noire, blackguard and Nigeria – to say nothing of those I mentioned before.

In the good tradition of China’s Red Guards, Cavani was forced to issue a profuse apology. “It was intended as an affectionate greeting to a friend, thanking him for his congratulations after the game,” he wrote.

“The last thing I wanted to do was cause offence to anyone. I am completely opposed to racism and deleted the message as soon as it was explained that it can be interpreted differently.”

In a desperate attempt to prevent Cavani from incurring an even lengthier ban, his team Manchester United stated: “Despite his honest belief that he was simply sending an affectionate thank you in response to a congratulatory message from a close friend, he chose not to contest the charge out of respect for, and solidarity with, the FA and the fight against racism in football.”

The lunatics aren’t just running the asylum – they’ve extended it to the whole world. On pain of severe punishment, sane people now have to pretend to be as deranged as the lunatics themselves. Solidarity with what exactly?

It’s certainly not with any fight against racism. Rather Cavani and his employers meekly genuflected before tyrannical, psychopathic maniacs trying to impose their disease on the whole of society.

If you think this judgement is too harsh, just consider the BBC comment on the incident: “There is sympathy for the Uruguayan in what was an innocent personal post. However, there is simply no excuse for not being aware of the wider aspect of the society he is living in – and either he should have been aware, or the club should have made him aware of the offence it could cause.”

I used to teach English for a living, but I can’t get my head around the preventive measures the BBC may have in mind. Cavani’s English is, to be charitable, rudimentary — after all, he has only been in the country a few months. So how could he or his club have created the requisite awareness?

Should the club have compiled a list of all potentially offensive morphemes and letter combinations? This task may be feasible in English, just. But, considering that the Premier League attracts players from every corner of the globe, the maniacs would have to do the same job on each of the world’s 6,500 languages.

Even the FA’s resources don’t stretch as far, although modernity does have a vast reservoir of surprises it can spring at any moment. Could it perhaps issue an injunction against players communicating in any language other than woke English?

Yes, perhaps that’s it. Actually, an historical precedent for such a measure exists, although it’s of an earlier provenance than China’s Red Guards.

Many Russian aristocrats took part in the December uprising of 1825 and were imprisoned as a result. Their everyday language was French, even though, since most of them were officers, they knew how to communicate with the rank-and-file in Russian as well.

However, many of their wives found it hard to converse in Russian (a problem satirised by Tolstoy in War and Peace). Hence they talked to their husbands in French on visiting days, which created a problem for the screws, who couldn’t understand a word. The women were consequently banned from using French, and many of them had to take courses in Russian to be able to speak to their men.

Combining the experience of Imperial Russia and Red China, the FA can possibly find a way out of the linguistic conundrum. The rest of us will be watching on from the sidelines with – with horror or, in my case, with mirth.

Satire may have been superseded, but we can still laugh, can’t we? As Seneca put it, “None of this can be helped, but all of it can be despised.”

Now is the time to cast a glance over a year drawing to a close and repent any sins one has committed. In that spirit, though I’m incapable of emulating St Francis’s saintliness, I’m adopting even as we speak his penitent pose, as depicted by Zurbarán. So, in no particular order:

Several times over the past 12 months I’ve enjoyed a cocktail called Negroni, a mixture of gin, red vermouth and Campari. Yet never once did I stop to think of how criminally racist the drink’s name is.

That is doubtless a symptom of unconscious bias, and I am deeply sorry. Anyway, the cocktail is bright red, not black. So why give it that offensive name if not for the beastly purpose of expressing implicit racism?

By way of redemption I propose that this drink be henceforth called Uguaglianza, which is the Italian for Equality – and that every bar using the old name be summarily closed and ideally razed.

Now, my heart is racing and my throat feels constricted, but I have to make this next admission. On numerous occasions this year I’ve revealed my subcutaneous racism by using words like niggardly, niggling and renege.

Also, even though I’m aware of how offensive certain words can be even in seemingly innocuous contexts, I’ve callously neglected to replace apes and monkeys with simians, bananas with curved yellow tropical fruit, coconut with the fruit of the palm tree, spade with shovel (as in ‘call a shovel a shovel’) and watermelon with a Cucurbitaceae, a much safer word, though not easy to pronounce. I apologise unreservedly.

Then earlier in the year I wrote that President Macron of France had decreed that the French national anthem La Marseillaise be replaced with the hymn O Come Emmanuel. It turns out my friend Manny never did any such thing, and neither does he have any intention of ever doing so, much as he would like to. I apologise to him, France and anyone whose religious feelings I might have offended.

And, following today’s fashion, I apologise on behalf of Western civilisation for bringing our planet to the verge of extinction, using scientific and technological progress as a lame excuse.

I also apologise on behalf of all those who insist on citing irrelevant statistics, such as those comparing our life expectancy now, at the time of the wholesale rape of the planet by science, industry and intensive agriculture, and in the morally impeccable old days, when energy was produced by muscle, wave and wind.

Trust those materialists to point out that we now live twice as long. They don’t realise that what matters isn’t the length of life, but its moral quality.

In this connection, I’d also like to apologise to Greta Thunberg, whom I have on several occasions inadvertently called retarded, evil, hysterical and generally mad. I now know she’s a brilliant, saintly young woman ideally suited to lead the world towards extinct…, sorry, I mean excellence.

I also apologise to no one in particular for driving a car powered by a 3-litre diesel engine.

By way of extenuation, I’ve proposed to Penelope on several occasions that we replace that offensive vehicle with a tandem bicycle. However, she has vetoed this environmentally responsible shift, saying that if I want to cycle all the way to France, I’m welcome to do so. She’ll be driving that planet-killer come what may. I’ll continue to work on her, but knowing how bloody-minded she can get, I’m not holding my breath.

Even though no one has authorised me to speak for our whole civilisation, I’ll still take this opportunity to apologise for its racist, colonialist past. Especially objectionable is Britain’s pathetic excuse for it, so-called liberal interventionism. Far from being liberal, all such interventionism was criminal and none was necessary.

After all, we can see how well all African countries are doing at present, now they are free of the trammels of Western colonialism. Those who point out that over 10 million people have been murdered in Central Africa over the past few decades are inveterate racists, and I apologise for them humbly.

Also I can’t help noticing that animal proteins have featured prominently in my 2020 diet. I apologise unequivocally for this barbaric carnivorism. Only consuming naturally grown grasses, nuts and tree bark would obviate the need for apology, and I hope to do better next year, although honesty prevents my issuing any ironclad guarantees.

Finally I apologise to the NHS which I have been known to besmirch. Far from being the unwieldy socialist Leviathan I called it so many times, it’s the paragon of efficiency, fairness and equality, the envy of every country in His creation. If they aren’t falling over themselves trying to imitate it, I apologise for their tardiness in seeing the light.

Having got that burden off my chest, I wish you all a happy, or at least happier, New Year. And if your 2020 wasn’t entirely ecstatic, I’m genuinely sorry. 

Not so long ago, John McEnroe fluffed up a sitter. A radio interviewer put the ball in his court, and Mac missed terribly.

The question was where in his view Serena Williams ranked among the greatest tennis players. That looked like an easy, no-pace shot down the middle. She is, replied Mac, unquestionably the greatest female player in history.

He thought he had won the point, but the interviewer thought otherwise. What do you mean, the greatest female player? he asked. Why not the greatest player of all time?

Now, Mac is nothing if not politically correct – in general. But that subject wasn’t general. It was specific, and it concerned his life’s work.

“Whoa,” he said, holding his open palms in front of his chest. “That’s a different story.” Clearly, Mac’s feet weren’t set properly, because his next shot missed by a mile. “If she played on the men’s tour, she wouldn’t get into the top 700,” he said, watching the shanked ball sailing out of the studio.

The interviewer and his other guests were aghast. So were the thousands of irate tennis fans who later wrote to complain and protest. How could he say that?!? He knows nothing about tennis, and even less about life!

At roughly the same time, a challenge of the sexes was being mooted between Serena and Andy Murray, who wasn’t yet crocked. However, when a question about that possibility was put to Serena at another chat show, she just laughed.

“Are you kidding?” she said. “I’m not going to play Murray. I don’t want to be embarrassed. He’d beat me love and love in 10 minutes flat. I’m happy playing the girls, it’s a totally different sport.”

Both McEnroe and Williams know all there is to know about tennis. But one doesn’t have to be a world-class player to realise they are right. Anyone who has ever wielded a tennis racquet in anger is aware that men and women play a different game.

The men are faster, stronger, more athletic, more technically accomplished, more tactically astute and so forth. It’s the same in all sports.

Since I don’t follow women’s football, I don’t have a clue who is regarded as the best female player of all time. But whoever she is, how would she compare to Maradona or Messi? I bet the same way as Serena compares to Federer, Djokovic, Nadal or, well, McEnroe.

Mac and Serena spoke the truth, but it was a mundane, physical truth residing in the realm of facts. There exists a higher, metaphysical truth that soars high above facts, reaching the stratosphere of ideology.

And in that rarefied medium it’s impossible even to consider the possibility that men can be by definition better than women at anything. As a certain Eton teacher will confirm, anyone daring to suggest that had better be prepared to collect unemployment benefits. Virtual reality exists, and it trumps the actual kind every time.

Any psychiatrist will tell you that mental divorce from actual reality is a clinical symptom of schizophrenia, and this progressive disease is indeed besetting our progressive people.

Their fevered minds create a warped picture of life, wherein men and women are the same, the Earth has never been warm before, comprehensive education educates, sex and race are a matter of personal choice, the NHS is the envy of the world, and Richard Dawkins is a serious thinker.

In the past, schizophrenics were hospitalised, treated and kept in isolation until their disease was in remission. Now they set the tone of public discourse, and the state is ever ready to support them with the full weight of its laws.

If the disease progresses, as it surely will, what will happen to us all? Oh well, that doesn’t bear thinking about. Tennis, anyone?

Two articles in today’s Times have pushed this question to the front of my mind, not that it ever was too far back.

One is by Michael Gove, who did much to secure the Leave vote in the 2016 referendum. The other is by Max Hastings, who thinks the vote went the wrong way. Amazingly, though the two articles look at the problem from opposite directions, both are equally worrying.

Actually, Gove’s piece is even more so, if only because his government job makes him one of the navigators of the course Britain is likely to follow. Hastings’s article is interesting only because it illustrates widespread Remainer fallacies.

“The completion of Brexit,” he writes, “represents a declaration of British exceptionalism… [reflecting] a yearning to reassert a British tribal identity.” And there I was, thinking Brexit only “represented a declaration” of British self-government.

Hastings clearly feels that sovereignty is synonymous with exceptionalism and a yearning for tribal identity, but it isn’t. If his rancour of a sore loser didn’t override his mind, he’d notice that the only political term sovereignty is synonymous with is national independence.

Exceptionalism and tribal identity are emotional and ideological constructs that may or may not have anything to do with reality. Sovereignty, on the other hand, is merely a statement of legal status. It’s not entirely free of emotions, but it’s not rooted in them. In other words, Hastings commits a category error, and fully engaged minds tend to sidestep those.

Then, for a change, he makes an unassailable statement: “… most of our national problems – education, productivity, housing, sustaining the NHS – have nothing to do with Europe.” In fact, the statement is so unassailable that it’s hard to see why it has to be made.

But what matters here isn’t denotation but connotation, the implication that, though our problems have nothing to do with Europe, continued EU membership could have solved them. One wonders on what basis Hastings has reached this conclusion.

Uncontrolled immigration, largely, though not exclusively, enabled by the EU law on free movement? Billions we’ve been pouring into EU coffers every year? Suffocating red tape imposed by Brussels? Being steadily dragged into a single European state ruled by practices alien to Britain’s political, cultural and social ethos?

Yet it’s unfair to criticise Hastings’s article on rational grounds because he doesn’t even try to put together a semblance of a rational argument. His purpose is different: to draw the lines of future attacks on the government and specifically Johnson, whom Hastings cordially loathes (not always without reason). Now every faux pas committed by HMG will be seen through the magnifying glass of the Hastings Manifesto, with the author and his friends bathing in the tepid water of I-told-you gloating.

Judging by Gove’s idea of future governance, they’ll have rich pickings. The idea already comes across in the title: We Have Taken Back Control, Now We Can Level Up at Home.

Had I known that the purpose of taking back control was to “level up”, I would have supported Brexit less enthusiastically. However, not many of us are any longer surprised to see a supposedly Conservative government pursuing unapologetically socialist desiderata.

Gove then proves he really campaigned for Brexit in pursuit of political advancement only, not because he understands the wicked nature of the EU: “Whatever the original nobility of the European project, the reality for so many Britons was an erosion of control of their lives.”

One detects little nobility, original or otherwise, in a project that has from its very inception veiled its true aims in a tissue of lies. These were designed not to scare off potential members by openly proclaiming the true objective of creating a giant pan-European state, with constituent nations specifically designed to suffer “an erosion of control of their lives”. Gove’s phrasing suggests he sees said erosion as a betrayal of the founding ideals rather than their realisation, which is arrant nonsense.

“We have a duty to spread opportunity more equally across the UK. Outside the EU, with a good trade deal in place, we can tackle the injustices and inequalities that have held Britain back,” continues Gove’s analysis of the situation.

Any remotely conservative, which is to say sound, thinker would argue that most of Britain’s problems have been caused not by too much inequality, but by too little. Or rather they have been caused by successive governments preaching and enacting the socialist egalitarian dogma that’s guaranteed to compromise the economy and social cohesion.

One doesn’t see anything in Gove’s daydreams that couldn’t have been written by a rank Labourite. To wit: “We are committed to a fairer, more inclusive country in which those whose horizons were narrowed through no fault of their own enjoy the dignity they deserve.”

This is the usual socialist bilge encapsulated in the ubiquitous mantra of “it’s all society’s fault”. Within that idiom, fair means unfair: severing the link between work and reward. Yet even at its worst, Britain offers enough opportunities for anyone to keep his horizons as wide as his abilities allow.

In any system of thought unsullied by socialist afflatus, being on the receiving end of state charity confers rather the opposite of dignity – and any wholesale attempt to solve economic problems out of public funds will be ineluctably tantamount to state charity.

Lest you might think that Gove thinks strictly in generalities, he does mention a couple of specifics, all coming from an impeccably woke wish list: “we can… invest more in the environment” and we’ll “support our manufacturing sector… as we develop new electric vehicles.” (This last means beggaring car manufacturers by forcing them to abandon IC engines.)

This wish list is actually an economic suicide note, outlining as it does the intention to convert Great Britain into Greta Britain. This ‘project’ is guaranteed to deliver an accelerating descent into economic hell, but at least we’ll go there in our own fashion.

Hastings is right: most of our problems haven’t been caused by Europe. They have been caused by the Majors, Blairs, Browns, Camerons, Mays, Johnsons and Goves of this world, whose idea of governance isn’t bono publico but bono privato – serving themselves under the guise of serving the people. At least now they’ll no longer be able to use the EU Leviathan for that purpose.

Christianity is founded on the belief that Christ’s mission was to sacrifice himself to redeem the sins of the world. But which sins?

Surely not just a little boy telling his mother to shut up, or a fair maiden turning out not to be quite so maidenly? Anyway, according to another basic tenet, all individual sins derive from the original collective one.

So, in the conviction of any Christian regardless of his confession, it was that sin that God redeemed by being incarnated, living for 30-odd years as a man and then accepting an awful death.

Hence His sacrifice wiped man’s slate clean of the Fall and therefore of wholesale guilt. Yet since the evidence before our very eyes shows that man didn’t become pristine as a result, a second sin, Mark II as it were, must have replaced the first one, and this substitution could only have occurred after original sin had been redeemed.

Logically, this must have been the sin of rejecting Christ. That offence isn’t identical to original sin, though neither is it dissimilar to it. Both, after all, represent rejection of God: the first by disobeying and the second by failing to recognise Him.

If Original Sin Mark I was disobedience and therefore rejection, then Mark II is rejection and therefore disobedience. But mankind in its entirety never rejected Christ. Some – arguably most – people did so, yet some – arguably few – didn’t.

However small the second group may have been, it was made up of people who of their own accord chose to belong to it, thereby, if we follow this logic one step further, cleansing themselves of the new version of original sin.

Therefore the choice between acceptance and rejection cannot be collective. It has to be individual and it has to be free. That’s the meaning of John 32:8 – “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Knowledge of truth is the first step towards freedom, and it’s up to each of us to acquire this knowledge – or at least to accept it if it’s offered by an outside donor.

This can only mean that after Christ’s sacrifice each individual can establish a personal account with God, and, even if we start out that way, we don’t have to stay tarred with the brush of original sin for ever, be that Mark I or Mark II.

It stands to reason that a man could do nothing to redeem the collective Mark I, which is why Christ’s sacrifice was necessary. But it’s equally clear that a man can do something to redeem the individual Mark II.

This understanding has a far-reaching significance in secular matters as well. For, whenever we demonise some people for presumably belonging to a diabolical corporate entity without any proof of individual wrongdoing, we dehumanise not only them but, by denying free will, all of mankind.

Thus a German who belonged to the SS was complicit in its atrocities, by association at least. But if one accuses an ordinary person who lived in Germany at the time, the accuser must bear the burden of concrete proof. The same goes for Russia and her KGB. Neither nations nor religions do murder; it’s people who do that, and they do so because they freely make a wrong choice.

It can still be argued that, since the world at large demonstrably didn’t accept Christ, we may be slated for collective perdition. But what’s undeniable, at least for any Christian, is that Christ showed a clear path to individual salvation, and we are free to take that path or not.

Free will thus becomes the most important possession of man, which it can only remain if we stand to gain from a correct choice or suffer the consequences of a wrong one (this is a veiled argument against the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, but we won’t go into that now). God’s is the absolute freedom, but if we are truly created in his image, ours has to be at least a relative one. Only God can be totally free, but that doesn’t mean man has to be totally enslaved.

Such thoughts are hard to escape on this day. And when they flood in, all those Brexits, Covids and trade deals begin to look puny and trivial. Well, until tomorrow at any rate.

A blessed Christmas to all of you, whatever your religion, origin, race or sex. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”  

During this Christmas season, one’s soul naturally turns to matters religious and ecclesiastic. This has to direct one’s thoughts towards Rome, but which Rome?

Geographically there’s only one worthy of mention, but religiously there have been at least two – or three, if you accept Moscow’s claim to the title of the third Rome.

The idea that Moscow had a legitimate right to that lofty title originated in the Grand Duchy of Muscovy during the reign of Ivan III. He ascended to the Moscow throne in 1462, just a few years after the fall of the second Rome, Constantinople.

Byzantium was no more, and Ivan felt its mission had been passed over to Moscow and him personally, especially since he was married to Sophia Paleologue, the daughter of the last Byzantine ruler. However, Ivan died in 1505, and the third Rome doctrine was coherently formulated during the reign of his son, Vasily III.

The man responsible for explaining the concept to the Grand Duke was the Pskov monk Philotheus, who wrote to Vasily: “So know, pious king, that all the Christian kingdoms came to an end and came together in a single kingdom of yours, two Romes have fallen, the third stands, and there will be no fourth.”

But there was work still to be done. Yes, explained Philotheus, the first two Romes had sunk into debauchery and heresy, thereby dropping the mantle of holiness into Moscow’s lap. The Russians had become God-chosen people, having relegated the Jews and the Greeks from that status.

Philotheus scolded Vasily for failing to accept such indisputable facts and act accordingly. However, the Russians too had room for self-improvement. For them to lead the world until the Second Coming they had to get rid of certain practices Philotheus found incompatible with their sacred mission.

Specifically, they still insisted on crossing themselves with two fingers, rather than the three prescribed by the Greek Orthodox Church. That deadly heresy was only abandoned in the late 17^th century, when many of the two-finger schismatics were burned at the stake. Vasily, however, failed to act on the monk’s command, thereby doubtless consigning himself to the fire of hell.

Then Philotheus took exception to the Russian princes’ propensity to rob churches of their valuables. Now that charming tendency never quite went out of fashion.

For example, Ivan the Terrible and the two Russian tsars who merited the sobriquet of ‘Great’, Peter and Catherine (Ivan III was also called Great, but he wasn’t strictly speaking a tsar), didn’t mind replenishing their treasury at the expense of churches and monasteries.

And of course the Bolsheviks outdid them all by not only robbing the churches but also murdering over 40,000 priests and God only knows how many parishioners – all still on Lenin’s watch (d. 1924). It appears that Philotheus’s second warning fell on deaf ears.

All that is straightforward, but his third gripe was far from straight, as it were. For Philotheus accused the Russians of fondness for what he called the “Sodomite sin”. Moreover, according to him, “that abomination was widespread not only among the masses, but also among others who will go nameless, although the reader will understand.”

What the reader was confidently expected to understand was that Vasily himself wasn’t alien to that little indulgence. In fact, he shocked the Muscovites by shaving his face (which was extremely risqué at the time), surrounding himself with a bevy of muscular Adonises and ignoring his wife Solomonnia, whom he confined to a convent.

Yet eventually dynastic duty prevailed. Vasily remarried and, when he was well into his 50s, even produced an heir. The Russians, however, had good reasons to regret that Vasily had strayed from his natural inclination. For his heir went on to become the first Russian tsar, Ivan IV, better known by his richly deserved nickname The Terrible.

Was Philotheus right in implying that the “Sodomite sin” was more prevalent in Russia than elsewhere? Since he wasn’t a well-travelled man, the monk had no basis even for anecdotal comparison, and I doubt he had any statistical data at his disposal.

However, fast-forwarding four centuries, the first European country to decriminalise homosexuality was Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1934, a place and period not otherwise known for a laissez-faire attitude to life. After 1934, however, Comrade Stalin could no longer reconcile his high moral standards with such permissiveness.

Laws against homosexuality appeared on the books, and they were often enforced with brutal severity. And of course the current tsar, Vlad II, regularly rails against homosexuality and other vices that he ascribes to Western dissipation and degeneracy. (If you detect excessive vigour in his diatribes, you are a Russophobe.)

Russia has thus come full circle, and the idea of the third Rome has been taken off the mothballs too. Some spoilsports still insist that Russian history, especially over the past 100 years, makes it hard for any but an extremely perceptive analyst to detect any signs of holiness. But what do they know?

It’s the thought that counts, and this persistent thought vindicates adherents to the cyclical nature of history. One of them was Ecclesiastes: “And the wind returneth again according to its circuits.” (It is seasonally fitting to end on a biblical note.)