Category: Blog

Those who know modern US history will recognise the signs, even if they are flagged in Britain. For hysterical attacks on Dominic Cummings evoke Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon circa 1950.

In that year, the Soviet spy Alger Hiss was convicted for perjury, having been nailed to the wall by his HUAC interrogator, Congressman Richard Nixon. That was a hallmark case, largely vindicating Sen. Joe McCarthy’s campaign against communist subversion.

It was then that McCarthy and Nixon became marked men in the press. Both, especially McCarthy, were subjected to savage attacks, proving that lovies aren’t dovies. They are more akin to vultures.

McCarthy was literally hounded to death: incessant vituperative attacks proved harder to handle than the enemy ‘Tailgunner Joe’ had faced during the war. He drank himself to death at 48.

Many of the attacks were personal, dealing with McCarthy’s style and demeanour, rather than the substance of his accusations. In fact, the celebrities he targeted were indeed communist subversives, whose allegiance was with a hostile foreign power.

McCarthy, son of a poor Wisconsin farmer, was an outsider to the smart Eastern Seaboard circles, whose sympathies lay distinctly with McCarthy’s ‘victims’. He was portrayed as a rude, vulgar demagogue, vindictively going out to get good people.

It’s true that McCarthy’s voice was at times too loud and unpolished, and he himself too strident. Yet what he said was essentially true, which of course rankled the most.

On the other hand, after his original ‘crime’ of nailing Hiss, Nixon was less vulnerable to personal attacks. That didn’t mean they ceased: to the media Hiss was one of them, and ludicrous claims of his innocence are still heard today.

Nixon, on the other hand, was an outsider thrice over: not only did he corner the ‘liberal’ flag-bearer Hiss, but he was also a Californian and a conservative Republican. Off with his head.

Hence the media were complicit with the Democrats in stealing the 1960 election from Nixon. Not only did the networks’ cameramen lovingly show close-ups of Nixon sweating during the televised debate with Kennedy, but, much worse, the media hushed up the massive theft of votes in the swing state of Illinois.

Throughout that campaign the stylish bon vivant Kennedy was idolised, and his haughty dismissal of Nixon (“That guy has got no class”) was quoted ad infinitum. 

When he eventually became president, Nixon left himself open at Watergate. The media sharks smelled blood and pounced.

This isn’t to say that Nixon was innocent. He wasn’t. Yet one just wonders whether the pitch of self-righteous hysteria would have been as febrile if the culprit had been, say, one of the Kennedy brothers. Or whether the ‘liberal’ Washington Post would have pursued the leads so relentlessly.

Just compare the treatment of Nixon with that of Teddy Kennedy, the Chappaquiddick swimming champ. Under similar circumstances any conservative Republican would probably have been accused of murder, persistently and stridently.

Dominic Cummings is a lesser figure than Nixon or McCarthy. Yet a scaled-down model can still be an accurate representation of the original.

Cummings, Johnson’s chief adviser, supposedly broke the lockdown law. He drove his little son 260 miles to his parents’ farm in County Durham after both he and his wife had developed coronavirus symptoms. They decided that the safest course for their son was to leave him in the care of Cummings’s mother and sister.

Some kind soul immediately grassed him up to the ‘liberal’ papers, and the shouts of tally-ho! reverberated through Fleet Street, where Cummings is alternately despised and hated.

He is gleefully portrayed as an abrasive, unprincipled, Swengalian and sartorially inadequate northerner, what with his T-shirts and fleeces. All probably true, but none of this justifies the clamour for his summary dismissal.

Neither does his transgression. The lockdown law bans only unnecessary travel, and if trying to protect one’s child doesn’t qualify as necessary, I don’t know what does.

That’s why Boris Johnson supported Cummings who, according to him, had acted “responsibly, legally and with integrity”. And yesterday Durham police confirmed that Cummings had no case to answer.

Yet the frenzy goes on, and that’s where a parallel with Nixon and McCarthy becomes visible. For Cummings committed several crimes against every cherished cause those elegant ‘liberal’ dressers hold dear.

First, he ran the Vote Leave campaign that – fingers crossed – got Britain out of the EU in the nick of time, offending every reader of The Guardian and The Observer (the two papers in the vanguard of the assault on Cummings), not to mention the entire BBC staff.

Then he focused the Tory campaign in the general election not on Islington and Notting Hill, those twin peaks of ‘liberal’ rectitude, but – are you ready for this? – on the North. The North! Where people wear T-shirts and fleeces, refer to dinner as ‘tea’ and speak in laughable accents!

Even worse, Cummings’s strategy was proved right, and the Tories won a landslide. That painted an indelible bull’s eye on his T-shirted chest.

I haven’t met Mr Cummings, but I hear from those who have that he isn’t exactly God’s best gift to mankind. But then neither was Alastair Campbell, who was to Blair what Cummings is to Johnson – and he never suffered the same treatment.

It’s just that Campbell wasn’t tarred with the Tory brush and Cummings is. Even worse, he had the gall to defeat the smart set twice, by getting Britain out of the EU and a Tory into 10 Downing Street.

That’s the nature of the witch-hunting campaign against Cummings, for which his display of parental love is but a pretext. However, I do hope Dominic starts wearing suits. If hated for being a vanquishing Tory anyway, he might as well dress as one.  

T.S. Eliot prophetically described April as “the cruellest month” – and he had never heard of coronavirus.

Compared to April, 2019, 44,000 more people died last month, making it the deadliest month on record. Could many of those people have been saved had the government acted earlier? Were many more indeed saved by the lockdown?

Probably, on both counts. In any case, those numbers provide a sombre illustration to the argument I had the other day with a friend, who tends to see the world mainly in economic terms.

Actually, I wouldn’t call it an argument because everything I said was couched in doubts, whereas his position was chiselled in stone. Destroying the economy, according to him, was too steep a price to pay for saving a few wrinklies.

Now, regular readers of this space know that I’m not usually short of a strong view or two. Yet ever since Covid arrived “I don’t know and nobody knows” has been the leitmotif of my writings on the subject.

I don’t know what would have been the right course of action. Perhaps the government went too far with the lockdown. It’s possible that isolating the most vulnerable groups while letting others roam free would have been wiser. It would certainly have been less economically ruinous.

But what if tens of thousands more still had died? Libertarian arguments would have been compromised, wouldn’t they? Or would they? I just don’t know.

My friend does. He hit me with a rhetorical device called reductio ad absurdum, pushing an argument to its grotesque extreme to show how ludicrous it is.

“You’d be willing to pay a trillion pounds to save a few lives,” he said. Actually I didn’t recall putting a precise number on it and, not being a financial man like my friend, I couldn’t even imagine a trillion pounds.

But yes, I said, I’d be willing to pay quite a lot of money to save quite a few lives. My friend immediately did what I would have done upon observing vacillation on my interlocutor’s part. He demanded that I define ‘quite a lot’ and ‘quite a few’.

That I couldn’t do. As a matter of historical observation, however, good countries, including Britain, have been known to accept economic ruin for the sake of upholding certain values and, yes, saving lives in the long run.

Turning the rhetorical tables on my friend, I could have said that, to him, no number of human lives is worth a large amount of money. This argument probably would have been as powerful as his – and as unsound.

I wish I had been as certain as some people, those who don’t care how many die defending abstract libertarian principles. All I can do at the moment is grieve for those 44,000 excess deaths we’ve suffered during that cruellest month. Putting this in perspective, the Luftwaffe only managed to kill 32,000 British civilians during the 10 months of the Blitz.

I am certain, however, that a human life is valuable throughout its duration, from conception to death. The argument that most of those people would have died anyway, what with their existing conditions, of which age is the deadliest, is immoral to the point of being monstrous.

The underlying assumption is that a 25-year-old is worth saving, while a 65-year-old is not, or at least less so. Perhaps in God’s eyes both lives are equally precious, though I wouldn’t like to second-guess the deity.

But regarded through human eyes that proposition isn’t just horrific morally but also unsound empirically. I’d suggest that the last year of J.S. Bach’s life, during which he composed The B Minor Mass and The Art of Fugue was of greater value to mankind than the whole life expectancy of a 25-year-old pusher at King’s Cross.

Bach died at 65 and I can’t begin to imagine the sublime revelations he would have bequeathed us had he lived another year – or ten. Actually, I find it easier to imagine a trillion pounds.

Physicists Pierre and Marie Curie ruined their health by deliberately exposing themselves to radiation. Yet their self-experimentation made possible the use of radium in medicine.

There are many other examples of scientists becoming their own guinea pigs for the sake of a higher good. But none so heroic as evolutionists, who courageously put out reams of twaddle to prove by their own example the simian origin of at least some humans.

The latest of such unsung heroes is Dr Adriano Lameira of Warwick University. He proved that chimps, described by The Times as “our nearest evolutionary relatives”, move their lips at the frequency of human speech.

“It is exactly the signature you see if you looked at my lips open and close right now,” said Dr Lameira. “This is exciting.”

Orgasmically so, I’d suggest. As The Times, itself in the throes of excitement, explained, “He and his colleagues argue that this implies we inherited the trait from a common ancestor. And while most descendants use it as a general form of interaction, one particular ape added more complex sounds and grammar and it became language.”

Just like that. One ape decided its life wouldn’t be complete without subjects, objects and predicates. So instead of just moving its lips it used them to form words and eventually write Summa Theologiae, Hamlet and The Critique of Pure Reason.

While complimenting Dr Lameira on the self-lacerating honesty of his analysis, one can’t help noticing that, for most other people, there’s more to speech than lip movement.

Dr Lameira may not realise this, but language depends on a capacity for abstract thought. That’s what it takes to relate a concept, be that a melon, love or categorical imperative, to sounds of speech or squiggles on paper.

And thought is the metaphysical output of an intricate physical organ, the brain. That’s about all we know about it.

For despite the billions pumped into assorted Genome Projects and Decades of the Brain, we still don’t know what a thought is, how it’s produced and how, if at all, man’s capacity for it has developed over history.

The only thing those scanner-wielding scientists have discovered is that some physical processes accompany thought. But these aren’t the same as thought any more than, on this evidence, a doctorate degree is the same as intelligence. 

I recall Khrushchev claiming back in 1961 that, since Gagarin didn’t see God in space, God doesn’t exist. This is roughly the intellectual level on which the Lameiras of this world operate.

I’d suggest, without any pretensions to scientific rigour, that he ponder the verb ‘to ape’. The first giant stride would be to understand why it was the primate and not, say, the giraffe or the antelope that was chosen as the metaphor for imitation (and not just in English).

Having concluded that it was perhaps due to the ape’s knack for grotesque mimicry, Dr Lameira would then be ready to make another leap, towards considering the possibility that his chimp moves its lips like talking humans because it, well, apes them.

I’m not insisting that this is the only possible explanation, only that it sounds more plausible than the chimp being on the verge of declaiming “To be or not to be?” (or, being a modern animal, perhaps he’d opt for “To be or to not be?”).

When faced with such offensive mockery, evolutionists explain that transitions like the one from lip movement to Hamlet happened over a long time. How long exactly?

Well, you name it. Millions of years, they’d suggest first, but then some real scientist will show this would be too short a period to produce the requisite amount of evolutionary change. Well, billions then. No? Fine, trillions, but that’s my last offer.

Then they like to flag the fact that chimpanzees and humans share some 99 per cent of their active genetic material. Yet the QED expressions on their faces are premature. For biochemical likeness between apes and humans creates problems for their ilk.

Biology can’t explain why, given such close proximity, apes still look rather different from humans, even those as flawed as Richard Dawkins. Anything near the same biochemical closeness produces virtual twins in other animals. For example, even though they are 20 to 30 times further apart, some species of squirrels or frogs are practically indistinguishable from each other.

Dr Lameira and indeed The Times accept as fact that humans and chimpanzees have “a common ancestor”. If so, why is it that millions of uncovered fossilised remains belong either to apes or to humans, with no intermediate species ever found? In fact, there’s a remarkable dearth of evidence of any intermediate species, not just between ape and man.

Dr Lameira’s sort of reasoning would have him drummed out of any other science: his colleagues would be too busy laughing to do any serious work. But evolutionism isn’t like any other science. In fact it’s not a science at all. It’s an ideology by pseudo-scientific means.

That explains its remarkable longevity: any theory less politically charged would have been discarded at least a century ago. Few unproven ones (and anything called ‘a theory’ lacks decisive proof by definition) ever lasted longer than 40 to 50 years.

But evolutionism is essential to modernity, brought to life as it was by an attempt to debunk God. A modern zealot knows a priori that everything must have a purely physical explanation. And if facts don’t support that presupposition, then they must be dismissed, falsified or spuriously interpreted.

Here’s another promising area for Dr Lameira to explore. I’ve noticed that some frogs do flip-flops in mid-leap. Doesn’t that prove that Olympic high jumpers doing the Fosbury Flop share an ancestor with amphibians? Worth a grant, that.

Polling is like three-card Monte. With a bit of legerdemain you can get any result you want.

You need to know what question to ask and how to word it. And, like in an EU referendum, if you don’t get the result you want, you rephrase the question, ask again and keep asking until respondents get it right.

This explains the problem the Bloomberg news agency has found itself in. It reprinted the results of a poll conducted by the All-Russian Public Opinion Research Centre, a government-owned pollster.

Asked to name politicians they trusted, only 27 per cent of respondents gave the right answer, Putin. Seeing that it was in effect the Russian government itself that had conducted the poll, Bloomberg happily published the findings.

The agency ignored the truth universally acknowledged that, polls or no polls, Putin’s approval rating must be at least 100 per cent. More than that would be welcome, but anything less constitutes an act of aggression against Russia.

After all, Russia is coextensive with Putin, as the Duma Speaker Volodin once claimed. “There’s Putin, there’s Russia,” explained Russia’s answer to Sir Lindsay Hoyle. “No Putin, no Russia.”

That was the premise from which Mr Volodin responded to Bloomberg’s calumny. As everyone knows, American, and all Western, media are in the pay of the CIA, whose sole purpose is to destroy Russia.

Hence the Bloomberg publication was part of a dastardly conspiracy to “discredit the president, the key institutions of power and leading politicians, weakening them and undermining trust.” And of course the ultimate goal was “to dismember Russia”.

The Russian Embassy in Washington launched an official protest, demanding that real, as opposed to subversive, poll results be published, accompanied by profuse apologies for that “disinformation”.

If that was the tone of Russia’s reaction to a publication outside her control, it doesn’t take much imagination to picture the fear of God put into her own culpable researchers. People have been defenestrated for less, and the hapless pollsters were doubtless reminded of that fact.

As a result, they hastily conducted another poll that yielded a respectable 67.9 per cent support for Putin. That was more like it, though still lamentably short of the universally acknowledged figure of 100 per cent plus. Oh well, next time.

The new finding was waved under the nose of Bloomberg and its CIA spymasters. There, this is the right poll, you hirelings of Wall Street.

In fact, both polls were right. They just asked different questions and therefore activated different response mechanisms.

The first poll didn’t give respondents any names. It simply asked which politicians they trusted most, leaving the options wide-open. Respondents racked their brains, pondered the comparative qualities of politicians they knew and gave Putin a paltry 27 per cent support.

The second poll involved no such mental exertions. It demanded a simple yes or no answer to the question “Do you trust Putin?”. Now, to understand why Putin’s rating improved so dramatically, you must consider both the current and historical context.

Since Putin is Russia and Russia is Putin, in effect the question was: “Are you a patriot of our motherland or its enemy?” Take it from someone who grew up there, opting for the latter isn’t easy.

Actually, in my day that would have been tantamount to suicide, most likely only professional but possibly also physical. After all, the people posing the question lived by Gorky’s aphorism: “If the enemy doesn’t surrender, he must be destroyed.”

A binary division of all into two simple groups, friend or foe, has been a permanent feature of the Russian state ever since its inception. That has inculcated in Russians a response mechanism based on the preservation instinct, which clicks into action whenever a thorny question is asked.

The consequences of a wrong answer have fluctuated in severity, depending on the current ruler. But one could always have feared at least some consequences.

The response mechanism in question isn’t always, and never merely, rational. Yet it’s always there.

If pressed, respondents to the second poll would have probably admitted that the chances of suffering any immediate repercussions for a ‘no’ answer were slim. But slim doesn’t mean nonexistent. Thus, to be on the safe side, it was more natural to nod ‘yes’ and be done with it. God looks after those who look after themselves.

Then again, the situation in Russia is such that the screws can be turned at any moment. The combination of coronavirus and derisory oil prices is producing mass discontent, and not just among the intelligentsia.

Covid will make us all poorer, but we won’t starve. The Russians will – in fact millions are already starving. However you measure Putin’s support, it’s dropping. Before long, rallies of protest will attract not just writers, historians and scientists, but, well, everyone.

The Russian state, including its present kleptofascist incarnation, knows only one possible response: unbounded violence. Witness the three unrelated doctors who posted videos protesting against having no protection in their fight against Covid, and also against the government falsifying the death statistics.

All three have fallen out of high windows, no doubt committing suicide after realising the enormity of what they had done. Some people just can’t handle guilt, can they?

Hence I must congratulate the circumspect respondents in the second poll on their prudence and foresight. Better safe than sorry, wouldn’t you say?

Israel is undoubtedly the most reliable ally the West has in the Middle East. But is she herself Western?

Some argue about the extent to which the ambient Middle Eastern culture has left an imprint on Israel’s mores, ethos and general social tone. This isn’t an argument I feel qualified to join.

However, it’s clear that a state younger than I am had to borrow its political models from elsewhere, and the West was happy to oblige. Mutatis mutandis Israel’s political system resembles ours, with executive power vested in the cabinet, legislative power in the Knesset, and the judiciary independent of either.

Moreover, like all truly civilised countries (well, Britain, to be exact), Israel has no written constitution, relying instead on a system of precedents. Sounds ideal so far, but alas here on earth we aren’t blessed with ideal systems. There’s got to be a damp squib somewhere.

As there is in Israel. For the democracy the Israelis largely borrowed from us came packaged with our hypocrisy, including the tendency to appeal to mythical political virtues for real political gain.

We pretend to expect pristine probity from our politicians, and they pretend to possess it. When they do something that shatters that expectation, our reaction depends on how we feel about their politics.

If a left-wing politician turns out to be less than angelic, all right-minded individuals are up in arms: doesn’t that Satan’s spawn realise that the moral standards of a democracy must exceed those in a Trappist monastery? And of course vice versa: a conservative politician overstepping the imaginary line instantly becomes the devil incarnate.

The nature of Western politics is such that the vice versa scenario is played out more often. Conservatism is alien to the post-Enlightenment ‘liberal’ culture, which is the area where most media operate.

To be elected, a conservative politician has to scale the barrier of generally hostile coverage. And once in office, he has to watch his step like a soldier negotiating a minefield. One tiny step in the wrong direction, and his career may explode into a red mist.

This brings us to Benjamin Netanyahu, the first standing PM to face prosecution in Israel’s history. Mr Netanyahu, who’s on trial not only for his career but also his liberty, denies accusations of bribery, fraud and breach of trust.

Now, though I don’t follow Israeli politics as close as I should, I have followed Mr Netanyahu’s career ever since he was Deputy Foreign Minister, doing diplomacy in impeccable English, or whatever passes for it in the US, where he was educated.

My affection for politicians in general isn’t without certain in-built limits, but that disclaimer aside, I’ve always liked Mr Netanyahu. I see him as an extremely shrewd political operator with conservative instincts, but enough acumen to know when he has to compromise on them.

He certainly looks like the best Israeli PM in my lifetime, and most Israelis agree. After all, Mr Netanyahu is Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, which is no mean feat in a country with a socialist DNA.

That tenure will end if he’s found guilty of the crimes he’s charged with. But how criminal are those crimes? I’ve looked at the indictment, and the only crime Mr Netanyahu seems to have committed is being, well, a politician.

Not a saint, not an angel, not a messiah – only a man who has to survive in the minefield of political rough-and-tumble. That’s a game played for keeps, and its rules are different from the charter of a Trappist monastery.

To be a player, one has to leaven one’s principles, moral and intellectual, with a certain amount of latitude demanded from a modern politician. It’s a game for big boys (of either sex), and those who can’t or won’t be big boys shouldn’t get into politics.

Being a big boy, Mr Netanyahu has been indicted on three counts, known as Cases 1,000, 2,000 and 4,000.

Case 1,000: He’s accused of receiving cigars and bottles of champagne from businessmen in exchange for favours.

I don’t know much about Israel, but our politicians certainly don’t come so cheap. The only favour a box of cigars or a bottle of bubbly will get you is a handshake. In today’s world, such things barely qualify as tokens of appreciation, never mind bribes.

Again, I’ll remind you for the last time that we aren’t talking about a Trappist monastery here, nor a Carmelite convent. 

Case 2,000: Mr Netanyahu is accused of offering to boost the circulation of the newspaper Yediot Ahronot in exchange for positive coverage.

Now show me a politician who wouldn’t do that, and I’ll show you a figment of idealistic imagination.

In 1990, when I wrote ads for Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, he was asked if he’d fire any employee voting Labour. “No,” he said, “but I’d pay for his psychiatric examination.”

Imagine my surprise when all Murdoch papers, including the most conservative ones, came out for Tony Blair in 1997. Are you going to tell me that Rupert had undergone a change of heart and no quid pro quo was involved?

Please don’t; I’m not going to believe you. Yet I don’t remember any demands for an investigation, much less an indictment. Then of course our democracy has had more time to develop a cocoon of cynicism.

Case 4,000: Mr Netanyahu is accused of promoting regulations favourable to Shaul Elovitch, principal shareholder of Bezeq telecom giant, again in exchange for positive coverage on his news site.

That’s not strictly kosher, as it were, and perhaps Mr Netanyahu deserves a reprimand. But a criminal indictment? Oh please.

As I said, Mr Netanyahu denies all these charges, and I hope he’s found innocent. Yet even assuming for the sake of argument that he did do all those awful things, do they really constitute criminal corruption?

We can’t accuse politicians of corruption when they merely act as politicians. Criminal corruption starts not when a politician accepts a bottle of champagne, but when he enacts ruinous policies undermining his country’s national interests.

As far as I can tell, Mr Netanyahu isn’t guilty of that kind of corruption. Quite the opposite, he has served his country’s national interests with wisdom, courage and dignity. Throwing him to the howling leftie wolves would be unforgivable.

I’m not using the word in its colloquial meaning of ‘mad’. I’m sure HRH is a paragon of sanity.

Nor do I wish to denigrate his work for the Royal Foundation, organised to promote his, his wife’s and his brother’s charitable impulses. It’s just that the part of this work that most fascinates HRH concerns mental health.

Now, I wouldn’t be the first to suggest that people are nowadays obsessed with psychology more than ever before.

In the absence of any higher values their inner selves assume an undue significance. They are encouraged to delve into their psyche and then share every perceived anomaly with all and sundry. Traditional – and laudable – British reticence is castigated as ‘repression’ and ‘bottling up the emotions’, with supposedly detrimental effects.

Naturally psychiatric disorders, such as clinical depression, do exist. However, clinical problems are best dealt with by, well, clinicians.

The rest of us, like HRH, simply don’t know enough about this area to contribute anything helpful to the discussion. The opportunities for sounding excruciatingly vulgar, on the other hand, are rife and HRH seldom neglects to take advantage of them.

His forthcoming BBC discussion of ‘mental issues’ with the footballer Marvin Sordell is a case in point. Reading the preview I wondered if Prince William has contracted Covid.  

For the sake of the dynasty, I hope he hasn’t. However, he does show one known symptom of coronavirus: absence of taste. HRH seems to think that babbling about one’s problems to anyone willing, or at a pinch even reluctant, to listen is an unequivocally good thing.

However, I’ve known several people suffering from clinical depression, and none of them could have been helped by a public chinwag.

They sought qualified medical help, which typically came in the shape of psychotropic drugs, accompanied by some therapy. For, my psychiatrist friends tell me, such diseases are either caused or accompanied by abnormal biochemical activity.

Controlling it with medicines usually controls the depression – on this they all agree. They do at times diverge on the relative importance of counselling, with many just shrugging their shoulders: can’t hurt, could help.

Obviously, psychiatrists need surgeries, hospitals, salaries, equipment and other costly things. Any charity is therefore welcome, but that doesn’t mean psychobabble is. Medical talk is best left to medical professionals.

Yet I’ve also known many people who use the technical term ‘depression’ when talking nineteen to the dozen about their bad moods, inclination to melancholy or sadness caused by bereavement.

In the past, such self-indulgent individuals were told to pull themselves together and have a stiff drink. I for one can’t understand how it’s possible to let one’s emotions run riot for too long when Laphroaig, Tanqueray and Absolut are readily available. If the sufferer is a friend, I’ll happily share such delights with him and listen.

But those people shouldn’t be encouraged to pour their hearts out to anyone but family and close friends. For one thing, when doing so it’s almost impossible not to overstep the boundaries of good taste.

Enter HRH, talking to Sordell who seems to suffer from real depression and has attempted suicide in the past. That’s unfortunate, and I hope his doctors are working overtime.

Yet I can’t imagine his condition improving as a result of being exposed to a barrage of HRH’s platitudes, expressed in the language of downmarket faux-sensitivity.

Moreover, I’d rather not be a subject of a king capable of saying “It’s okay to not be okay”. ‘Not to be’ would have been an improvement, but only a marginal one.

Royals shouldn’t sound like tabloid agony aunts for the whole family. That punches holes in their aura of mystique, which, in the absence of executive power, is an important part of their raison d’être.

The footballer complained that: “I grew up without my father… and now I’ve got a child. I don’t really know how I’m dealing with this and I really struggled with my emotions at that time.”

People who can’t cope emotionally with having children shouldn’t have them. Instead they should seek treatment and only consider procreation when the therapy has succeeded.

HRH could have suggested it to Sordell, perhaps couching that advice in more compassionate words than mine. Instead, he echoed the striker’s complaint with one of his own: “Being a dad was overwhelming after losing my mum.”

It seems that the words ‘father’ and ‘mother’ have gone the way of the masculine personal pronouns. Somehow we’re supposed to replace them with soppy prole equivalents. I bet William’s father doesn’t refer to his parents as ‘mum’ and ‘dad’.

No upper-class people do. They may say ‘mummy’ and ‘daddy’, and in fact Prince Charles has referred to Her Majesty as ‘mummy’ on a number of occasions.

Then again, the word ‘after’ sounds as if the loss of William’s ‘mum’ was closely followed by his becoming a ‘dad’. In fact the two events were separated by 16 years, which is enough time to come to terms with the tragedy and not let it remain ‘overwhelming’.

On we go, in the same vein: having children is “one of the most amazing moments in life, but also one of the scariest”.

I’ll buy “one of the most amazing”, but what’s so scary about it? Was William worried about paying babysitters? Future school bills? The possibility that little George would grow up to be like Harry?

And then: “But I think emotionally things come out of the blue that you don’t ever expect, or maybe you think you have dealt with.” How much more banal can one get?

I’d better stop – thinking about the future of our monarchy makes me too depressed for words.

No equivocation. No sitting on the fence. I’m hereby declaring that Joe Biden is good, very good. For a laugh, that is.

I can understand my American friends who expect more than just entertainment value from their chief executive. That’s fair enough.

However, since I don’t live in America, the person of a US president affects me only indirectly. Hence I’m less interested in such boring qualifications as sagacity, statesmanship and leadership. I don’t want to be led. I only want to be amused.

Given such frivolous requirements, Joe Biden fills the bill perfectly. In fact, if elected, he’ll break new ground in the history of American politics.

First, at 78, he could become history’s oldest president at the beginning of his first term. And we know that age has more than just its privileges. It also has a rich potential for other things as well, such as senility.

Now, some US presidents developed age-related mental problems towards the end of their tenure, usually in the second term. Off the top one could mention Woodrow Wilson, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, who none of them were quite compos mentis towards the end.

Yet Joe may claim the distinction of becoming the first president to start out that way, which promises many a delightful moment. While acknowledging that laughing at other people’s misfortunes is wrong, a part of me looks forward to four years of Joe’s gig, complete with memorable one-liners, pratfalls, bloopers and general hilarity.

However, in his rare lucid moments Joe is capable of deep, if inadvertent, insights. For example, the other day, addressing a predominantly black audience, he unintentionally vindicated one of my cherished observations.

“If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump,” said my main man, “then you ain’t black.” That’s it in a nutshell: negritude has no more to do with race than womanhood has with sex. Both are above all political categories.

I cracked a joke about that shortly upon arriving in England. Talking to a perfect English gentleman, I said that most American blacks are left-wing. “They are left-wing because they are black,” replied my interlocutor. “It’s the other way around,” I said, pleased with myself. “They are black because they are left-wing.”

Thus Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas or philosopher Thomas Sowell may be black in colour, but not in essence. Because they aren’t left-wing, they aren’t black.

I also admired Joe’s use of the vernacular “ain’t”. That takes a long stride towards being accepted by blacks as one of their own.

Yet that’s only a first step. For even greater verisimilitude, Joe should fashion his speeches along jive lines more comprehensively.

False modesty aside, I think my speech-writing acumen could swing the election his way. After all, Joe has used British scribes, such as Neil Kinnock, before. And anything Neil can do, other than being an EU Commissioner, I can do better.

For example, the phrase “they ain’t black” shouldn’t have been allowed just to hang there. Joe should have tackled head-on the issue of the 1.6 million blacks who voted for Trump four years ago. This is what I would have had him say:

“Y’all wanna strive and thrive, it ain’t no jive. But I ain’t neva lied, them folks ain’t got no pride. They ain’t black, brother man, they’s coconuts, black on the outside, white on the inside.

“How come I’s the first Biden who be black inside? That peckerwood cracker Trump, he say, ‘What are the five most dreaded words in the English language? Hello, I’s yo new neighbour.’ I say, ‘Yo, Trump, you be one jiveass. I report yo ass to the po-lice.’

“When I be pre-si-dent, ain’t no whitey mofo say something wrong wi’ brothers for neighbours. I have a dream, man, that one day bloods live on Fifth Avenue. An’ I have a dream that one day… Well, can’t remember no dreams no more, there be too many. But you dig, yeah?

“My cam-paign go on, man. One monkey don’t stop no show, and this monkey be yo pre-si-dent. You crack the whip, home, I make the trip.

“As my main man… can’t remember his name… wrote, ‘Got a quarter tank of gas// in my new E class// But that’s alright,// cause I’m gon’ ride.’ I sure is, and I’s gon’ take y’all for a ride too.

“You don’t want no racist honky for pre-si-dent. So stay cool, bloods, keep jumpin’ and thumpin’ but no trumpin’ – and maintain.”

There, I hope I’ve established my credentials. If Joe’s got a plan, I’s his man.

“We owe it to ourselves” sits high on the list of irresponsible statements about public debt, next to “In the long run we are all dead.”

The first is by one of today’s most popular economists, Paul Krugman; the second, by his inspiration, John Maynard Keynes. Both imply that, since the debt will never have to be repaid, we shouldn’t worry about it.

If only that were true. Our public debt already stands at £1.9 trillion. Granted, this still isn’t a patch on the US debt that’s about 10 times as high, but if today’s news is any indication we’ll close the gap fast.

The Exchequer borrowed £62 billion in April, six times more than in April, 2019. And, since Boris Johnson has already promised there will be no return to ‘austerity’, which he flippantly calls “the A-word”, this is only a point of departure – for the sky.

But in rides Krugman on his white steed, saving the day: “Because debt is money we owe to ourselves, it does not directly make the economy poorer (and paying it off doesn’t make us richer).”

We ought to follow Descartes’s advice and agree on the meaning of the words we use. Such as ‘we’, ‘ourselves’ and ‘directly’.

Krugman’s ‘we’ is the global economy as a unit, and one has to congratulate him on possessing such panoramic vision. Indeed, if one looks down on the world’s economies from the vertiginous height of his intellect, they may all seem to be one homogeneous blob.

However, descending to the more familiar level of mortal humans, one realises that the international economy is largely a patchwork of national constituents. Hence, while a bird’s eye view will suggest that money borrowed by Britain from, say, China stays in the same global pocket, a closer look will show that Britain is the debtor and China is the creditor.

Perhaps some 20 per cent of our national debt is owed to the Bank of England and, though that’s still not exactly owing it to ourselves, that creditor is unlikely to tell us he knows where we live and threaten to have our legs broken.

The rest of it is owed to foreign governments and the money markets. Quite apart from leaving Britain exposed to political and economic blackmail, this debt has one annoying aspect familiar to all mortgage holders: it incurs interest.

Because we are living in a period of uncharacteristically low inflation, our debt servicing isn’t as expensive as it could be. Still, Britain pays the better part of £50 billion a year in interest charges, higher than our defence spend.

Another suspect word in Krugman’s epigram is ‘directly’. It’s true that borrowing doesn’t make the economy poorer directly, straight away. By the same token, a pleasure-seeker who borrows £10,000 to pay for a junket to Thailand suffers no instant pain.

The problem will start when the debt has to be repaid, and a state has similar, though not identical, problems. Yes, unlike our hedonist, the state stands a better chance of deferring repayments.

It can continue to issue IOU bonds, derivative bonds and bonds on the derivatives for a long time. But not indefinitely. At some point, its credit rating will drop, making further borrowing suicidal. The only way for the public to repay such debts will be to accept much higher taxes and much lower consumption.

To continue the parallel between our hedonist and the state, the former will have to repay his debt within a few years, while the latter may be able to pass it on to the subsequent generations. But it’s naïve to deny that at some point the balloon will go up, with bankruptcy beckoning.

Every Briton’s share in the present debt is about £30,000. In the next generation, that’s likely to triple if not quadruple. And I haven’t yet begun to list the blows huge public debts deliver to the public.

Promiscuous borrowing is inherently inflationary, at least over that long term that Keynes dismissed as irrelevant.

Inflation is low now, but chances are it won’t stay that way, especially with the government injecting more and more new cash into the economy. Just a generation ago, our inflation rate was higher than today by an order of magnitude. This may well return, and the cost of servicing our gargantuan debt will become unsupportable.

Even that isn’t all. For the billions borrowed by the state are the billions unavailable to free enterprise. Economists describe this situation as public borrowing ‘crowding out’ the private kind.

One doesn’t have to be a libertarian to observe that free enterprise generally uses investment more productively than the state. The state will spend most of the borrowed capital to finance grossly inefficient public services and infrastructure projects.

While zero-sum economics is spurious, money markets are indeed zero sum in that, the more finance goes to the state, the less is left for the private sector, the only one that can eventually get the economy back on track.

The chancellor likes to compare the current situation with the Second World War. He forgets to mention that Britain only finished repaying those war debts in 2006 and had to endure several decades of economic misery – thanks to exactly the kind of policies this government seems to favour.

Much of our asparagus harvest has rotted on the ground, and the same is likely to happen to the strawberry crop.

Taking a short-term view, one can legitimately blame Covid: because of it, to quote David Aaronovitch of The Times, “The country is short of 80,000 workers, usually supplied by the EU nations.”

However, judging by the title of Mr Aaronovitch’s article, Britain Won’t Work Without Unskilled Migrants, the short-term view isn’t the one he favours.

For he believes that, by ending EU-dictated free movement, HMG will do the work of coronavirus. The present arrangement will be replaced by a points-based system, whereby only qualified immigrants earning over £25,600 a year will be admitted. 

Mr Aaranovitch hates the idea. In fact, he takes little trouble to conceal his distaste for leaving the EU. And he’s particularly scathing about our arch-Leaver Home Secretary Priti Patel who spearheads the points system.

“If we were to erect a Statue of Liberty in the Patel era its plaque would read: ‘Give me your huddled Nobel prize-winners, your future tech billionaires yearning to breathe free’,” writes Mr Aaranovitch in an attempt at devastating irony.

He then uncorks what he sees as a clincher: “Under such a regime my own illiterate grandparents would have been turned away from the Port of London when their ship docked in 1904.” Some may feel such a tragedy would have been a small price to pay for the subsequent generations to be spared Mr Aaranovitch’s musings.

He is entitled to feel about Brexit as he sees fit. But this argument against it is as weak as Mr Aaronovitch’s humour.

His main idea is that we need Bulgarians and Romanians to do unskilled jobs because indigenous Britons won’t do them. This argument would be valid – if only it ended with a small proviso: “as things are”.

Then the numbers quoted by Mr Aaronovitch would indeed end the discussion, for some people at least: “The first instalment of a campaign to get furloughed Brits to do the work began a few weeks ago. One organisation reported last month that of 50,000 people who had applied, 6,000 accepted an interview but only 150 had taken up offers of work.”

Others acted in the manner of one healthy young man Mr Aaronovitch gives as an example. Instead of looking for a job, he stays at home all day playing video games. That, I’d suggest, is an improvement on going out to mug passersby for drug money, but yes, asparagus still stays in the ground.

Mr Aaronovitch has outlined the problem well; shame about the conclusion: “The only viable options for fruit picking are migrant labour or mechanisation. There will be no British jobs there… [And in social care] even if you were to put the salaries up by 15 per cent that computer boy still wouldn’t want to care for dementia patients.”

The problem indeed seems unsolvable, but I’m happy to lend Mr Aaronovitch a helping hand and solve it. For, in a flash of epiphanous inspiration, I’ve found a way for ‘that computer boy’ to get off his calloused rump and go off to work.

Why doesn’t he do so now? The answer is, because he doesn’t have to. Assuming he gets a full range of social benefits, he’d have to earn roughly the income required by Miss Patel to match them.

As with most epiphanies, the conclusion is so simple that it’s amazing Mr Aaronovitch hasn’t thought of it: The computer boy should be taken off the welfare rolls.

Paying young able-bodied people to do nothing is morally wrong, economically ruinous and socially disastrous. It creates whole generations of parasite classes sponging off the rest of us, through the good offices of the megalomaniac state.

Sociologists will tell you that there exist two main incentives to work: survival and the improvement of one’s lot, with the first being much stronger than the second.

Thus someone getting enough to buy computers and electronic games may not want to work simply to buy more recent computers and more elaborate games. But he’d have to work if his food and shelter were at stake.

Considering the level of our compulsory and comprehensive education, the computer boy wouldn’t be able to command a wage to match his benefits. But if he didn’t get those benefits he’d be happy to pick asparagus or care for demented patients. For, as St Paul explained so lucidly, “He who does not work, neither shall he eat.”

Clearly, neither Mr Aaronovitch nor his ‘liberal’ colleagues can entertain this thought. They see no difficulties with having, say, three generations of the same family never doing a day’s work and living off public money.

Then again, they may feel that protesting against this outrage is akin to remonstrating against hurricanes. Such things just are, and must be accepted as they are.

However, such submissive equanimity contradicts a writer’s remit. It’s his duty to analyse the problem in its fullness, not to use it for the sake of scoring cheap political points.

In this duty Mr Aaronivitch is demonstrably remiss. And incidentally, I bet his illiterate grandparents went to work directly they arrived in Britain. After all, they must have had to. And look at their grandson now.

It’s so much more than just that. It’s a unique civilisation, without any close analogues in history.

Thus spake Vlad Putin in his speech the other day. Or rather he spake nine months ago, but the speech was kept on the back burner until the time was judged propitious for its release.

He then evoked a vivid memory of one of Chekhov’s short stories, where two officers argue whether or not Pushkin was a great psychologist. One of them wins the argument with an irresistible logical flourish: “If Pushkin hadn’t been a great psychologist, they wouldn’t have erected his statue in Moscow.”

I don’t know if Vlad has read that story; I rather doubt it on general grounds. However, he did employ similar logic to prove his point about Russia being not just a country but a civilisation:

“This is already an obvious fact: [otherwise] we would never have had modern weapon systems, high-tech systems, high technology indeed, that no other country possesses, at least not yet…”

The US may take exception to that last claim, but the conclusion was unassailable: in order to preserve this civilisation “it’s precisely high technologies and their future development that we must definitely emphasise.”

By singling out the kind of high technologies that kill people en masse, Vlad sold his great civilisation short. It has also perfected technologies involved in hacking, trolling, applied toxicology and money laundering.

However, his conclusion can’t be faulted. Without keeping pace with Western science and technology, Russia is destined for ever to stay on what Russian journalists call “the oil needle”.

Yet that fix depends on fickle markets: when oil prices are high, Russia can indulge her affection for designing sophisticated weapons and trying them out on those who can’t respond in kind. When the prices are low, the unique civilisation totters and begins to fall into China’s eagerly open arms.

Putin and his cronies will amass their billions either way, but the rest of the population may get restless. To wit, Vlad’s approval ratings have already dropped by some 40 per cent, and they are heading in only one direction, what with oil currently selling for less than it costs to produce.

Last year, even before Covid, the Federal State Statistics Service reported that 20.9 million Russians, more than 14 per cent of the population, were living on less than £163 a month.

The situation is even worse in areas where no natural resources are extracted. Thus in Smolensk (p. 330,000) more than 16 per cent of the people are trying, and often failing, to survive on less than £4.50 a day.

And of course coronavirus, while devastating all economies, is even deadlier in places like Smolensk. “Never… have I seen so many hungry and desperate people as during these months of coronavirus pandemic,” said a spokesman for a major local charity.

So yes, high technologies may well be a solution. However, developing them to a level where they could help the people eat regularly involves two things, and both are in short and dwindling supply.

One is money, which rushes out of Russia in a mighty stream, eventually settling in the numbered accounts of Putin and his immediate entourage. The other is brains, which follow the same path, ending up in Western companies, research centres and universities.

There they prove yet again that, if Russia were indeed a real country, rather than a mythical ‘civilisation’, she’d have no shortage of talent. After all, say what you will about Google and Facebook, but we’ve got both courtesy of Russian immigrants.

As it is, the brain drain has reached diluvian proportions. Apparently, Russian scientists and engineers stubbornly refuse to abandon the habit of eating, even in exchange for the privilege of living in a unique civilisation held together by unrivalled spirituality.

A scan of Appointment ads in the Russian press explains this exodus adequately, with no commentary needed.

For example, Vektor, one of the country’s leading research centres, is advertising a vacancy for a senior scientist in the genome research department.

Research areas: human genome, gene editing, development of anti-HIV and cell technologies. Required qualifications: a degree in biochemistry, numerous publications in science journals, at least 10 years’ R&D experience in such areas as molecular biology, virology, biotechnology.

Salary: from 20,000 roubles a month (about £225).

Now, I don’t know how much a scientist with such qualifications would earn anywhere in the West. But even in the absence of such detailed information, one can see a potential candidate jumping on the first plane out of Russia, whenever they start flying again.

We aren’t talking about more or less comfort here. At stake is basic survival, and the law of self-preservation hasn’t yet been repealed even in Russia.

Putin is half-right: Russia indeed is no longer a country. But neither is it a unique civilisation. It’s a mass of poor, desperate, brainwashed people bossed by a state that’s indeed unique.

It’s history’s only fusion of secret police and organised crime, with the two constituents forming a homogeneous elite. The elite relies on fascistic methods of boundless propaganda and violence to keep the population in check, while siphoning trillions out of the country.

Nowhere this side of tinhorn Third World dictatorships is the contrast between the rulers and the ruled so vast. Yet none of those dictatorships gets the kind of good press Russia receives from the West’s fascisoid papers and parties.

But then some of those purloined trillions can buy any number of papers and parties. Alas, there’s little left to keep the people fed and the brains in the country.

P.S. Umberto Eco, RIP