Category: Blog

Britain and the rest of the world must be in great shape, judging by the amount of space our papers see fit to devote to Prince Philip’s road accident.

Though the police haven’t confirmed this yet, it’s generally assumed that the accident was his fault. After all, HRH is 97, so who else can possibly be to blame?

Complaints against HRH vary in pitch and vituperation, depending on the paper’s feelings about the monarchy. But in essence they say either that 1) old people shouldn’t drive, 2) he should have been wearing a seatbelt, 3) His next Land Rover shouldn’t have been delivered the next day when the rest of us have to wait longer, and consequently, 4) Britain should be a republic.

Dismissing 3) and 4) as ideologically driven and therefore inane, let’s concentrate on 1) and 2).

On the subject of 1), I agree that drivers who present danger to others shouldn’t be driving – and I hope you appreciate the effort it has taken me to say this.

For I myself am serving a year-long ban, having suffered a (one hopes temporary) health setback that entails the risk of passing out at the wheel. Fair enough, I have to admit, teeth gnashing.

Yet it’s that medical problem that got me banned, not my age. Actually I’m a much safer driver now than I was 40 years ago.

When I was 30, I routinely impersonated a race driver on public roads, and was often drunk when doing so. “If you can walk, you can drive,” I’d say with the stupid arrogance of waning youth.

That sort of thing was irresponsible, and I’m glad that age (and Penelope’s screams) has brought some sense into my life. And I bet many people my age can say similar things.

I do know that older drivers have fewer accidents and traffic violations than youngsters, yet I’m not proposing that young drivers should be banned.

The upshot of this is that dangerous drivers shouldn’t drive, and safe ones should. As to the speed of one’s reflexes, then yes, it does diminish with age.

Yet that statement would only mean something if everybody’s reflexes were equally fast to begin with. But they aren’t.

My reflexes, for example, started out fast and then were further quickened by a lifetime of trying to volley balls hit at 90 mph. However, if my reflexes of 40 years ago were 100 in some imaginary units, they may well be 90 now.

But I’m still quicker than someone whose reflexes are 85 at their fastest. So why should I be banned on that basis while he still drives whistling a merry tune?

Moreover, someone with decades of driving experience is better equipped to avoid situations where quick reflexes are necessary.

Thus I know that only my reflexes kept me alive when I and my cousin would race each other through New York, each of us a bottle of booze in the bag. My need for super-quick reactions doesn’t arise nearly as often now, if ever.

I do think it sensible that older drivers should submit an annual self-assessment of their health, as I did, knowing that a 12-month ban would follow. And perhaps it would be sensible to assess drivers over 80 individually.

But there’s no reason for advocating a blanket ban. As to the outcry about Prince Philip not wearing a seatbelt, that’s even sillier.

Seatbelts do merit discussion, but not in this context. For, even assuming that HRH was at fault in the accident, it certainly didn’t happen because he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.

In fact, by neglecting to do so, he was endangering no one but himself, and I don’t think laws should protect us from ourselves. They’d do well protecting us from wrongdoers, a task in which they’re demonstrably remiss.

When I first came to England all those decades ago, I made that very argument to a good friend of mine, doctor cum journalist.

His counterargument was that, since a driver suffering an injury as a result of not wearing a seatbelt puts extra pressure on the NHS, the state has a right to make such negligence illegal.

That, I said, is an excellent argument against socialised medicine – when the state does a lot for you, it feels entitled to do a lot to you. My friend almost snapped my head off, but I’m happy to report that he has since moderated his views on the NHS.

Wearing a seatbelt may be a good idea, but that doesn’t mean the law should make it obligatory. It’s also a good idea to get regular exercise, avoid stress and eat sensibly, but that doesn’t mean failure to comply should be punishable by law.

One can understand when such attacks on HRH appear in papers like The Guardian, which are socialist and therefore ideologically committed to shifting as much power as possible from the individual to the state.

But when someone like Stephen Glover echoes the same din in a residually conservative Mail, it’s upsetting: “Why shouldn’t they [the royal couple] buckle up like the rest of us? We tell our children to do so, and expect to be chided by police, even prosecuted and fined, if we don’t wear seatbelts.”

Quite apart from what I think of that law, this has nothing to do with the subject under discussion. So why bring it up?

I do wish Prince Philip many more active years, and I trust him to decide for himself when it’s time to turn in his driving licence. He has earned the right.

P.S. Now that we’ve touched on one of my pet gripes, here’s another. The Australian Open is under way, and I marvel at the commentators’ ability to buck statistical odds.

One would think that, having dealt thousands of times with the devilish task of pronouncing Russian names, they’d get one right just once. Yet so far they haven’t. It’s Sha-RA-po-va, chaps, not Sha-ra-PO-va.

And commentators do only marginally better with French names. Yet they, and many other Englishmen of a similar background, bizarrely insist on enunciating the interdental sound in Spanish names like Muguruza.

First, even many Spanish speakers don’t pronounce it Mugurutha. And second, why single out this one phoneme for such pedantry, while ignorantly mispronouncing most of the others?

Incidentally, Englishmen of a certain class tend to replace ‘th’ with an ‘f’. Adding this defect to their selective knowledge of Spanish phonetics, they amusingly pronounce the name of their favourite island as Ibiffa. Go with the ‘z’, lads, and damn the torpedoes.

This document is the first of its kind, the original statement of intent coming from a near-triumphant modernity.

Almost every word there can yield a rich crop, especially in the first two paragraphs where the moral justification for independence is established.

The colonists insist on their right to “…the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them…” They “hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Every word there pits modernity, supposedly inaugurated in the name of reason, against actual reason.

Thus, regardless of what Locke and Paine had to say on the subject, ‘separate and equal station’ can’t be derived from ‘Laws of Nature’.

No law of nature says a colony is entitled to independence from the metropolis. There exists, however, a tendency among revolutionaries to pass their aspirations as rights.

A ‘separate and equal station’, desirable though it may be to some, can only be achieved either by agreement or by force. No group has equality built into its reclaimable biological make-up. Portraying independence as a right that somehow supersedes the law was modern demagoguery, in its embryonic stage.

‘Nature’s God’ is clearly there to mollify believers of a more primitive type, those who react to the word ‘God’ by reflex and for whose benefit wise people (who were, of course, above such nonsense themselves) had to put the word in.

The deist author of the Declaration himself illustrates the pitfalls of such a utilitarian treatment of God. For Thomas Jefferson had a selective approach to Christian doctrine: some of it was acceptable to him, some wasn’t.

So, like Tolstoy did later, he clipped the acceptable passages out of the Bible and pasted them into a notebook, thus creating his own Scripture. One can argue that possibly all Protestants and certainly all deists go through the same exercise in their minds, if not literally.

Collective atheism is the inevitable result, even if it’s masked, as in America, by individual protestations of piety and a statement of faith on banknotes.

God is the only truth that can be regarded as ‘self-evident’ in that, by definition, it’s either taken on faith or not at all. Any other truth, before it can be accepted as such, needs to be proved.

Words like ‘self-evident’ are thus either a sign of intellectual laziness or, worse, an attempt to dupe the gullible with falsehoods.

That ‘all men are created equal’ is, self-evidently, rather the opposite of truth. It’s an attempt to pass wishful thinking for a fact.

All men are created unequal physically, intellectually, morally, socially. What the phrase actually means is this: ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if all men were created equal? We’d then be able to stamp out Western tradition in the name of equality.’

Apart from displaying intimate familiarity with the works of Thomas Paine, the use of this phrase echoes the theories of the noble sauvage beautiful in his state of primitive grace, a tabula rasa on which modernity can scribble its message to the world unless the state has been soiled by Christendom.

It’s questionable whether the term ‘rights’ has any value in serious discourse on political matters.

Today we’re served up any number of rights: to marriage, education, health, development of personality, leisure time, warm and loving family or – barring that – warm and loving social services, employment and so forth.

These ‘rights’ are bogus since they fail the test of not presupposing a concomitant obligation on somebody else’s part. When a ‘right’ presupposes such an obligation, it’s not a right but a matter of consensus.

Thus one’s right to employment would mean anything only if there were someone out there who consents or is obligated by law to give one a job.

One’s right to a developed personality (guaranteed by the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights, which was signed by such authorities on human rights as Stalin’s Russia) presupposes an obligation on somebody else’s part to assist such development.

One’s right to a fulfilling sex life… this can get too silly for words. Far from being natural, all these rights become tangible only if they’re granted by others; and anything given can be taken away, so there go all those pseudo-rights alienated right out of the window.

The right to outward political ‘liberty’, as opposed to inward spiritual freedom, is also bogus, since it too derives from consensus.

‘Liberty’, along with all its cognates, is a word fraught with semantic danger: one man’s liberty is another man’s licence and yet another’s anarchy. For example, is the absence of anti-homosexuality laws a factor of liberty or licence?

If the answer is the former, then we ought to ponder why the first modern country without such laws was Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1934, a place and period not otherwise known for a laissez-faire attitude to life.

The right to life mentioned in the Declaration is indeed natural. But is it terminologically useful?

The English Common Law, in force in America at the time, provided adequate provisions for the protection of life, which would seem to have rendered any invocation of this right redundant.

And all redundant terms have some potential for casuistic abuse. For example, is the death penalty a violation of the natural right to life? Is abortion? How is it that the proponents of the latter are almost always opponents of the former and vice versa, with this right invoked in each case?

‘Happiness’ was at the time a vogue term denoting a secular substitute for virtue as the purpose of life.

Whatever meaning one chooses to assign to happiness, and there are many possibilities, the word describes the exact opposite to Western tradition. This is about the pursuit of truth, inner freedom and salvation, which is more likely to result in suffering than happiness.

As used in the Declaration, the phrase derives from Locke’s “life, liberty and estate”. The Constitution of Virginia, signed in the same year of 1776, replaced ‘estate’ with ‘property. And, though the Declaration coyly used a more general term ‘happiness’, in reality it meant the same thing: money.

Now the right to the pursuit of money, if it doesn’t involve arbitrary separation of other people from theirs, is legitimate. But it too is redundant.

Laws against theft, fraud and the rest derive from the Decalogue and don’t need a modern term to bail them out. On the contrary, it was the separation of such laws from their true source and their shift into the modern area of ‘rights’ that made their enforcement so difficult.

The right to property, one of the few real rights, is a case in point. Born out of the ethos of ‘rights’, the modern political state has elevated judicial confiscation of people’s property to a level unthinkable, say, in the Hellenic world.

For example, Caracalla who, according to Gibbon, “crushed every part of the empire under the weight of his iron spectre” by increasing the inheritance tax from 5 to 10 per cent (thankfully, “the ancient proportion was restored after his death”) was a babe in the woods compared to a modern democratic parliament that’ll hit one for 40 per cent faster than one can say ‘classless society’.

Of course, for the nascent American state, the pursuit of fiscal happiness was crucial. It was, after all, an important part of what brought most Americans together.

However, the qualities involved in the pursuit of money are often diametrically opposite to those that formed our civilisation. For business activity, central to this pursuit, has to become amoral in a modern, secular state.

Not doing anything wrong disappears as an in-built starting point, to be replaced by not getting caught. However, many clever people spend their time, and waste ours, by thinking up cloying moral encomiums for what they call ‘free enterprise’.

However, freedom is a child of responsibility. When ‘responsible’ walks out, ‘free’ becomes an orphan.

If certain of impunity, a modern businessman would market potassium cyanide instead of potassium chloride, this to the chorus of ‘conservative’ economists singing hosannas to both the merchant and his victims for striking important blows for freedom of choice.

One should never forget, even when extolling modern achievements, that the same company that gave us aspirin also gave us Zyklon B.

These days the inherent amorality of business, when conducted in a secular society, is dressed up by elevating it to a moral high ground it never used to occupy in Christendom. (Free enterprise is indeed moral when compared to manifestly wicked socialism, but that’s a wrong reference point.)

‘Conservative’ (in reality libertarian) economists, such as Milton Friedman, will drive us to distraction, explaining that free enterprise has more to do with charity than with acquisitiveness.

In that sense they resemble their supposed antipode Marx who also had a knack for creating in his head a picture of economic life that had little to do with reality.

One wishes people studied modern economies as they are, rather than the idealised picture of them they see in their mind’s eye.

They’d then realise that the welfare state corporatism that dominates the pursuit of happiness today has as little to do with free enterprise as the Korean People’s Democratic Republic has to do with Korea, democracy or republicanism.

And rather than glorifying the founding documents of modernity, they’d perhaps see that this freedom-stifling corporatism is directly traceable back to the pursuit of happiness laid down in the Declaration of Independence.

If you think it odd that thousands of post offices should sell beer, you’ve never lived in Russia, where this innovation has been introduced.

I have and, though in my time post offices didn’t sell beer, I understand why they now do.

It’s no secret that Russians have a certain fondness for drink. Ancient chronicles cite this predilection as one reason Grand Duke Vladimir chose Christianity rather than Islam as the state religion.

Vladimir is alleged to have been turned off by the Muslim injunction against alcohol. “Drinking is the joy of Rus,” explained the prince. “We can’t be without it.”

Quite. In fact, alcoholism is a major problem in Russia, badly affecting such things as life expectancy, demand for medical care, absenteeism, crime rate, breakup of marriages – life in general.

Now one might think that selling beer not only in bars and off-licences but even in post offices would make the problem worse, rather than better.

That’s missing the point, or rather a point. For the problem isn’t just that the Russians drink too much, but that they often drink liquids not manifestly designed for human consumption. Hence officials hope that inducing men to opt for beer will keep them healthier for longer.

According to the Russian government spokesman, window cleaning liquid seems to be the current beverage of choice, closely rivalled by antifreeze, mouthwash and various tinctures.

Many of those delights contain methanol and other poisons, adding a certain frisson to each sip. The trouble is that, if common-or-garden alcoholism takes time to kill, some of those other liquids can do so on the spot.

In fact, rues the same spokesman, every year 1,200 people die for that reason, and I’m sure that number is understated by orders of magnitude. Then, of course, methanol can make you go blind, not just blind drunk.

Call me a soppy sentimentalist, but, reading such reports, I recalled growing up in Moscow with a twinge of nostalgia. Also, call me a reactionary, but I’m a firm believer in the plus ça change version of history.

Russia remains wholly Russia, just as it was back in the ‘60s, when, as ever, drinking was the essential rite of passage for any lad. I was such a lad and, at 16, my liver was bigger than it is now.

It’s important to note straight away that it wasn’t just how much, but what and in what way one drank that mattered.

The redemptive arrival of the consumer age was somehow being delayed throughout my childhood, and the acceptable urban middle-class booze included vodka (Stolichnaya for 3.07 rubles a half-litre bottle, Moskovskaya for 2.87), brandy (Armenian or Georgian 3-star for 4.12) and vile fortified wine named, as the spirit moved the manufacturers, port, cahor or jeres, all costing around 1.40 and bearing just enough resemblance to their illustrious namesakes to turn one off fortified wine for life.

The demographic disclaimer is necessary here because the rural population drank moonshine almost exclusively (as it still does), while urban lower classes seldom elevated their consumption above ‘white wine’, which in their parlance was the cheapest vodka available, and ‘red wine’, which meant the vilest port going.

These represented the upper limit of their tastes but not the lowest, which plunged into the area of dangerous liquids, such as floor varnish, methanol, antifreeze, cologne, deodorants and other arcana.

Benny Yerofeev, the late poet of Russian dipsomania, remarked correctly that while few people in Russia know what Pushkin died of, everybody knows how to prepare floor varnish for drinking.

I hope you won’t find it patronising if I divulge the secret to the uninitiated: you take a three-gallon bucket of floor varnish and empty a four-pound bag of salt into it. The salt will form a blob that will start sinking to the bottom through the dense liquid.

As it sinks, the blob will get heavier with the oils, ethers and other impurities it has absorbed and dragged down to the bottom. In about four hours you’ll be left with a brownish liquid, which would be unlikely to cause any sleepless nights to the makers of Lagavulin, but which can be drunk with relative impunity, at least in the short term.

Since I was definitely urban middle class, I stuck to regulation booze that, as etiquette would have it, was supposed to be consumed either from eight-ounce tumblers in one daring gulp or straight ‘from the neck’. As a concession to one’s wimpish origin one would have been allowed to empty the bottle in several pulls.

Suffering from a rare cardiovascular condition, I spent months in hospital and I still remember the lifts going up and down throughout the night on high holidays.

As Tamara Petrovna, the head nurse, explained to me, those were real men, not wimps like me, who had inadvertently drunk things they shouldn’t have. She then told me to shut the f*** up, which was her usual punctuation at the end of statements.

That was her Mr Hyde part. But Tamara Petrovna also had a Dr Jekyll streak of charity, compassion and camaraderie so characteristic of Russian women.

She knew that men, ill or not, needed their vodka. To satisfy that need Tamara Petrovna always kept in her office several bottles of medical alcohol, which was in such ample supply that no one at the hospital minded her purloining it.

Other nurses would simply sell it on the out for one ruble per 100 millilitres (or ‘grams’, as the Russians refer to alcohol measures). However, Tamara Petrovna preferred to serve not just Mammon but, by relieving the suffering of the patients in her charge, Aesculapius as well.

Her going rate was one ruble or a Prokofievan three oranges for an eight-ounce tumbler of the warm liquid, alcohol diluted to 40 per cent with water. (The chemical reaction between pure alcohol and water releases heat, which knowledge most Russian males acquire empirically before reaching puberty.)

As a gesture of good will, Tamara Petrovna would throw in half a teaspoonful of strawberry jam to stir into the liquid, changing its colour and making it look innocuous to a passing doctor.

You see how a short piece in The Times can bring back such loving memories? The sun must be over the yardarm somewhere, so, my eyes misted over, I’ll have a small Lagavulin, toasting the indestructible Russian character.

Nobel laureate James Watson of the double helix fame is one of the most important modern scientists, and his collection of honorary titles reflects that.

Yet over a couple of decades or so, Prof. Watson has been shedding his gongs through his mouth, with one or two going each time he made a ‘controversial’ remark. (A controversial remark, in case you’re wondering, is any statement that fails the rigorous test of political correctness.)

Now he has lost the last batch, having yet again trodden the minefield of genetic differences among various races, mostly between blacks and whites. These, he maintains, affect not just their appearance but also their intelligence.

Then again, scientists and other specialists are prone to see the whole complexity of life through the prism of their discipline.

Thus an economist may talk about the defining role played by market relationships, a moral philosopher may describe the world as a struggle between good and evil, while a politician may see it as a clash among various political systems and parties.

This reflects a natural human desire to find a simple explanation for everything. Yet, when analysing extremely complex and multifarious phenomena, simple always runs the risk of becoming simplistic.

This is the side on which many thinkers err, and Watson is no exception. As a brilliant scientist, he’s conditioned to look at phenomena from the standpoint of a theory that’s either supported by empirical facts or not.

If it’s not so supported, it’s tossed away; if it is, it becomes scientific fact until refuted by further evidence. Or rather that’s how it should be in a world where intellectual honesty still holds some sway and scientific findings are neither accepted nor rejected a priori for extra-scientific reasons.

Alas, this isn’t the world we live in. Hence, for example, Darwin’s slapdash theory is held to “explain everything” (Dawkins), whereas any theory less politically charged and as factually unsupported would have been discarded a century ago.

Darwin has to be right because otherwise some founding assumptions of modernity are debunked. For exactly the same reason, anyone claiming that one large group may be genetically more intelligent than another has to be wrong – regardless of any evidence.

As far as I know, Prof. Watson first trod that particular minefield in 2000 when he observed that the extract of the pigmentation hormone melatonin had been found to boost sex drive.

“That’s why you have Latin lovers,” he explained. “You’ve never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient.”

Since blacks are conspicuously darker than, say, Italians, Prof. Watson’s observation suggested sexual differences not only between Latins and Englishmen, but also between blacks and everyone else.

Rather than ducking the ensuing slings and arrows, the recalcitrant scientist then made a more general observation, to the effect that ethnic and racial stereotypes may rest on a solid genetic foundation – and not just in sexuality.

Now I’m no scientist, much less a geneticist, but the melatonin story sounds straightforward even to a rank amateur. It can be either proved or disproved experimentally, and to my untutored eye the necessary experiments don’t appear to be devilishly difficult to set up (no, I’m not volunteering as one of the research subjects).

Hence Prof. Watson could have been shown to be either right or wrong, but the point is that his shrill critics didn’t care one way or the other. His statement was wrong (racist, fascist, discriminatory) simply because it had to be.

As to his subsequent comments about whites being more intelligent than blacks, I’m surprised he only lost his titles, not his head. For he committed a capital crime against our glossocratic modernity, one only equalled in its enormity by groping a reluctant rump.

But do let’s look at that argument on its merit, proceeding from indisputable facts: 1) average IQ scores are the most reliable predictor of a group’s practical success; 2) blacks in Watson’s native US consistently score 15 points lower than whites; 3) blacks are demonstrably less successful.

Is there a causal relationship between 2) and 3) or is this a case of post hoc, ergo propter hoc? More facts then:

IQ tests measure the cognitive function, which isn’t intelligence but the potential to acquire it.

Hence, IQ isn’t determinist but simply suggestive. Someone with a genius IQ may not be particularly intelligent or successful, while someone with an average IQ, such as another Nobel laureate William Shockley, can be both.

Music provides a useful analogy:

A prodigiously gifted child may never become a musician unless someone teaches him to play an instrument. If taught to play an instrument, he may never develop virtuosity if he’s too lazy to practise. If he has developed virtuosity, he may never become a great musician unless he acquires a deep knowledge and understanding of the culture that has produced the music.

That’s to say that drawing far-reaching conclusions on the basis of average IQs alone smacks of simplistic, as opposed to simple. Too many other factors come into play.

That’s why in their 1994 book The Bell Curve, Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray hedged their bets: “It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not justify an estimate.”

The authors also explained that their work in no way encouraged discrimination: “If tomorrow you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that all the cognitive differences between races were 100 per cent genetic in origin, nothing of any significance should change. The knowledge would give you no reason to treat individuals differently than if ethnic differences were 100 per cent environmental.”

Such a reasonable stand didn’t protect Herrnstein and Murray from the same savage attacks to which Watson was subjected later. For they argued, facts in hand, that, whatever the mix of nature and nurture, some genetic component is present. Off with their heads, was modernity’s verdict, and no mitigating evidence could be submitted.

Numerous experiments showed that identical twins, separated at birth and brought up under different social, cultural and educational conditions, still show the same IQ scores decades later.

However, such findings only justify the conclusion that an individual IQ score is immune to such factors – not that the same applies to each generation of a large group. Their average IQ scores may be quite fluid indeed.

Thus Jewish immigrants to the US at the beginning of the twentieth century consistently tested below average on intelligence tests, and there’s little doubt that each one of those scores held constant for life. But later tests show that the descendants of those immigrants score considerably above average.

Even within the same race there can be fluctuations. Thus the West Indian blacks in the US outperform the descendants of American slaves, the Chinese outperform both Mongolians and Malays – to a point where, despite being a discriminated minority in Malaysia, they hold a disproportionate number of high-paying jobs.

All in all, ascribing just to genetics all differences in IQ and achievement between whites and blacks is simplistic, and Prof Watson wouldn’t apply such low standards of proof to his day job.

However, to deny not only the presence of a genetic component but the very possibility that it may exist is much worse. This shows contempt for truth and readiness to sacrifice reason and integrity at the totem pole of political bias.

It’s entirely possible that Prof. Watson is indeed the racist his detractors claim he is. Then again, it’s possible he isn’t.

But even if he harbours secret ambitions of becoming a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, his belief in the genetic basis to interracial IQ differences doesn’t prove this one way or the other.

It’s certainly a subject worthy of serious study because results may influence any number of public policies, regarding, for example, education, welfare and foreign aid.

I doubt that the attention Prof. Watson has paid to this subject qualifies as serious study. But I have no doubt that his critics wouldn’t accept any conclusive results of such a study if they didn’t like them. (A bit like our Remainers actually.)

P.S. A propos Remainers.

Chancellor Hammond assures businessmen that no-deal Brexit is “off the table”. At the same time, it’s increasingly clear that Parliament will derail any sensible deal. So what stays on the table, Mr Hammond?

Also, the same Remainers, who have been diligently working to sabotage the referendum results for over two years, are blaming the Brexiteers for creating the ensuing chaos. Words like ‘teapot’, ‘kettle’ and ‘black’ come to mind, along with ‘breathtakingly shameless cynicism’.

It was a rotten deal that deserved to be trounced on merit, or rather demerit. But it wasn’t about that, was it?

Huge political upheavals tend to be about backstabbing, not face value. Subtext, not text. Connotation, not denotation.

And all those things point at the worst constitutional crisis in my long lifetime, a span that covers Suez and a host of lesser debacles.

Suez was bad; some of the others were no God’s gift to Britain either. But none that I recall has ever threatened the survival of Britain as a political entity – which more or less means Britain as a nation.

Our country is blessed with the greatest, certainly longest, political stability in Europe. For example, France has had 17 different constitutions since Louis XIV was king. During the same period Britain has had just one.

Yet there’s a curse implicit in this blessing. Because Britain was both proud and envied as the world’s greatest political success, politics more than anything else got to define British nationhood.

Throughout kaleidoscopic changes of constitutions, France remained France; Spain remained Spain; even Germany remained Germany. England wouldn’t have survived anything like that.

Britain became a political nation – not because she was obsessed with politics, but because she didn’t have to be. Politics could be taken for granted. It was just there, as Britain was.

That’s why the world’s oldest and best constitution didn’t have to be codified in a single document. The British constitution isn’t a contrivance produced by the fecund minds of today’s flavour in sages.

It’s an organic development, written not on paper but in the people’s hearts. If the people’s hearts remain blank, no written constitution will ever succeed over time.

To get back at Americans, who claim Britain has no constitution because she lacks that single sheet of paper, I often liken a written constitution to a prenuptial agreement stipulating the frequency of sex: if you have to write it down, you might as well not bother. There’s some truth in this, although it’s probably not the whole truth.

What’s undeniably true is that Britain’s nation and her politics became an alloy, with neither constituent removable. Any attempt to remove zinc from copper or copper from zinc would destroy brass – this analogy has pertained for 300-odd years at least.

Government, to replace a metaphor with a simile, was like a relay baton, passed from one party to another without ever interrupting the race.

It never – well, seldom – occurred to anybody that the baton could be stamped into the dirt and the race called off. And when that possibility did occur to some reprobate, he had no chance to be in the race at all.

British politics seemed as indestructible as the British nation itself. But make no mistake about it: what is collapsing before our eyes isn’t just May’s ‘deal’. Not just Brexit. Not just the government. Not just the Tory party.

At deadly peril is the very survival of the British constitution, British politics – the British nation.

Within weeks, months at the latest, Britain may well be governed by a gang explicitly devoted to her annihilation. And this isn’t the only sword of Damocles hanging over the nation’s head.

It may also be chopped off by our abject, tail-between-the-legs crawling back into the EU, begging not to be whipped too hard for that little indiscretion, confining ourselves for ever to that political doghouse.

One way or the other, Britain qua Britain will be finished, irretrievably buried by either domestic subversives or foreign tyrants – or, and this is a very distinct possibility, by both acting in concert.

Suddenly the political self-confidence of the British begins to look like negligent complacency. For too long the nation has let its politics slide, without realising how slippery the downward slope was.

People forgot that any political machine is only as good as its operators. Britain’s politics is so solid and organic that the country can get away with a few governments of nonentities: the system will accommodate and compensate.

But its capacity for accommodation and compensation isn’t infinite. Each subsequent government by nonentities, each new crop of representatives unqualified to represent, leaves a dent – and then suddenly a hole with jagged edges appears.

We see the hole and throw our hands up in despair. But we should have noticed the dents in time and banged them out.

We should have realised that, when a political system constantly elevates to government those unfit to govern, something is getting to be terribly wrong with the system.

Alas, seeing that I’m given to a melange of similes today, our political malaise is like the pre-antibiotic TB: when the clearly visible symptoms appear, it may be too late to do anything about it.

Those of us who love Britain must rue her impending demise. I don’t know how it can be prevented, but let’s hope that cleverer and more practical men do.

I pray for such men and I do hope they realise what’s at stake. Not just Brexit. Not just the government. Not just the Tory party. What’s at stake is the British nation.

When a civilisation is moribund, practically every area of life can be held up as an example, a microcosm of decline.

Just look at sports journalism in general and specifically Martin Samuel, one of its most successful practitioners. Or, to narrow the search even further, scan his spread in today’s Mail.

Samuel writes lucid and almost literate prose, which is nothing to sneeze at in this genre. This, even though some readers may take exception to the supercilious condescension with which he treats them.

Personally, I don’t mind that very much, provided such qualities are displayed in debating the virtues of holding midfielders and split strikers. After all, since such subjects are rather limited in scope, any attempt to jazz them up should be welcomed.

However, and this is where modernity’s malaise comes in, people tend to accept that expertise in one area ipso facto confers on its proud possessor expertise in everything else he turns his mind to.

Thus the gasping public is treated to, well, holding midfielders and split strikers opining that Britain shoulda went into the euro, or pop stars insisting that Hezbollah is kinda cool.

This brings us, first, to Andy Murray, whose knackered hip is about to end his distinguished career.

He’s trying to soldier on, refusing to bow to the inevitable, to accept that his life’s work is about to come to an end. But the end is nigh – he knows it, and so does everyone else.

At my infinitesimal level, I know how he feels. For I played through most of 2016 with a similar hip problem, which was getting worse and worse. In the end I could hardly walk – and still insisted on playing tournaments to keep my rating up.

This though whenever I won a tournament I’d get a cheap trophy and perhaps a T-shirt (they’re usually too small for me, but fit Penelope perfectly). Andy, on the other hand, gets millions, running his net worth up into nine digits.

What for me is a hobby is a lucrative vocation for Murray, so his attempt to deny the facts of life are even more understandable, if just about as silly.

Yesterday he played through pain to lose a close match that might well be his last. There were tears in the end, but then, as a modern man, Andy is always ready to get in touch with his feminine side.

Thus he tends to be lachrymose at the end of every major final, regardless of whether he won or lost. That aside, he deserves utmost respect from every tennis fan, especially in Britain.

Murray is by far the most successful British player since Fred Perry, and one has to be 100 to have witnessed his triumphs. So yes, Murray is entitled to having his statue erected at Wimbledon.

What in my view he isn’t entitled to is any claim to heroism. But, as sages of the past used to say, let’s first agree on the terminology.

Heroism to me isn’t just great bravery potentially involving self-sacrifice and indifference to pain. It’s risking one’s life to serve a high purpose.

Thus a para jumping behind enemy lines in defence of Britain is a hero, while a bungee-jumper isn’t. A man leading soldiers over the top is; a man climbing to the top of a mountain isn’t. A man flying a Lancaster into flak is; a man flying a hang glider isn’t.

Since chasing fuzzy yellow balls is essentially a trivial activity, no mastery of it, nor any bravery displayed in its pursuit, qualifies as heroism.

If you accept these criteria, then Murray isn’t a hero. He’s simply a very good tennis player whose career has been cut short by injury.

Yet that’s not the impression one gets reading the papers, specifically Samuel’s articles. Douglas Bader had nothing on Murray’s gallantry, as far as he’s concerned. Murray’s heroism is so epic that he should be put in charge of… Brexit? The country? The world?

Such possibilities remain in the subtext awaiting their turn. For the time being, Samuel merely wants to put Murray in charge of British tennis. And he gives no quarter to people like me, who happen to define heroism differently:

“Some people get quite upset when the word heroic is used in connection with athletic performance. But what can you do? Some people are idiots.”

Now, I’m prepared to accept that some people’s definition of heroism is different from mine. But I’d never describe them as idiots – unless ad hominems were their only arguments.

But fine, I’m an idiot for having the temerity to disagree with the sports hack. However, the same column suggests that I’m an idiot not once but twice over. For I differ with Samuel not only on heroism, but also on Brexit.

It’s common currency among federasts to impugn the mental faculties of those who wish to leave the EU. Brexit is portrayed as a watershed separating intellectual giants like, say, Martin Samuel from intellectual pygmies like, say, Roger Scruton.

However, Samuel wisely desists from citing Scruton as an exemplar of ignorant moron, choosing instead a target closer to home: Neil Warnock, manager of Cardiff City.

Yet Warnock’s soliloquy that caused Samuel’s snide retort, different though it may be in style, is no different in substance from what Scruton, I or any of my friends say on the subject. And, at the risk of sounding immodest, any one of us can probably hold his intellectual own against even Samuel.

This is what Warnock actually said:

“I don’t know why politicians don’t do what the country wants, if I’m honest… Why did we have a referendum in the first bloody place?

“We’ll be far better out of the bloody thing. In every aspect, football-wise as well, absolutely. To hell with the rest of the world.”

Samuel ignores this passage and quotes just the last sentence: “It was good to see Cardiff manager Neil Warnock welcoming Brexit with the words ‘to hell with the rest of the world’ – neatly demonstrating the keen intellect and awareness for which the Leave campaign is renowned.”

Sarcasm drips off every word. Samuel means that, unlike him and his ilk, people like Warnock, Scruton, me and all my friends (I’ll resist the temptation to drop names) possess neither keen intellect nor awareness.

QED. As far as he’s concerned, the point is made. And people read, mark, learn and inwardly digest this nonsense because Samuel is a good sports hack.

Know what I mean about modernity?

In 1990 John Major succeeded Margaret Thatcher as PM, and this is the only context where ‘John Major’ and ‘succeed’ can be used in the same sentence.

That upheaval was effectively a coup perpetrated by the cabinet members ready to pledge their allegiance to Europe at the expense of British sovereignty.

The group, led by Michael Heseltine , chose Major as their front man (if the coup succeeded) or scapegoat (if it failed).

Major, whose academic attainment in his youth had been deemed inadequate for the job of bus conductor, represented Mrs Thatcher’s tragic mistake. It was she who had plucked this unremitting nonentity out of parliamentary obscurity and elevated him to the post of Chancellor.

Her rationale probably was the same as that of her nemeses: she thought Major was easy to manipulate and too inconsequential to be dangerous. Fair enough, Major did prove easy to manipulate – but not by her.

After all, he couldn’t ride two bandwagons at once. When Heseltine’s and Thatcher’s bandwagons went their divergent ways, Major jumped on Heseltine’s and hence the EU’s.

Though lacking in intellect and integrity, he was richly endowed with the apparatchik’s sensitive nose for where the wind is blowing. Since at the time it was blowing in the direction of Brussels, Major joined forces with other Europhiles to twist Mrs Thatcher’s arm into entering the Exchange Rate Mechanism.

That was widely seen as a prelude to joining the single currency and hence the EU. Margaret Thatcher resisted that step for as long as she could, but the combined weight of Messrs Heseltine, Hurd, Howe, Clark et al squashed her flat.

In 1990 Major became the puppet PM and signed the Maastricht Treaty two years later. In another seven months Britain predictably crashed out of the ERM, shedding an estimated £3.3 billion.

Another five years later Major’s leadership of his party produced its most devastating electoral defeat in modern times, elevating to government an even more venomous nonentity, Blair.

At the time Major affixed his autograph to the Maastricht Treaty, I thought it was treasonous – and I still do.

I was satisfied then, as I am now, that signing that document was tantamount to transferring sovereignty from Parliament to a foreign body, which fits any sensible definition of treason.

This, regardless of whether the foreign body in question is good or bad, and irrespective of any economic gains accrued thereby. In that case, the gains were nonexistent, but that wasn’t the issue – and it still isn’t.

Yet Major’s allegiance to the EU was never classified as treason because he found himself on the winning side. As John Harrington (d. 1612) explained, “Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”

Like the Nazi and Vichy bureaucrats morphing into a homogeneous group that later became the EU by incremental steps, so did the British apparat – with some dissent – merge with its continental counterpart.

By now Major’s undying devotion to European federalism, along with his understated intellect and integrity, has become a pandemic disease spreading from Westminster to such oases of collaboration as Notting Hill, Islington and most of the media.

But not to the country at large. When Major’s spiritual heir Cameron arrogantly called a referendum because he was certain of victory and hoped thereby to put paid to all that talk about leaving the EU, he was in for a let-down.

The people voted by a solid majority of over a million to leave that contrivance and revert to the sovereignty of Parliament, that cornerstone of the British constitution.

Both Houses then overwhelmingly voted to invoke Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon, formally notifying the EU of Britain’s departure. One would have thought that the matter was closed. The constitution was back on course.

It was then that a demonstration was staged, if any was needed post-Maastricht, that such things as the constitution, Parliament, the will of the people, democracy and Britain’s entire political history mean nothing to the quisling elite that had in effect usurped power.

Because the government was divided on the matter, the quislings decided to take governing away from the government and transfer it to what they call Parliament, meaning themselves.

They are confident of their majority there, and they’re probably right – because Parliament is no longer the constitutional body evolved over centuries. It has largely become the headquarters of the subversive elite, almost as unaccountable to the British electorate as the EU elite is.

This is the only possible explanation of the very fact that they now have a majority in Parliament. After all, in the last election all but a few dozen of them were returned on the promise issued by both major parties: to comply with the result of the referendum and take Britain out of the EU.

Liars then, opportunists now, self-serving nonentities ever – their true allegiance is pledged to themselves and whichever group is more promising to serve their careers. The EU is hard to beat: it can promise princely employment for productive life and a king’s ransom of a vast pension thereafter.

At that point, Major had to be taken off the mothballs, where he had resided for 21 years. He was asked (tasked?) to explain to the world what parliamentary sovereignty really means in today’s Britain, issuing in the process his own version of Apologia Pro Vita Sua.

Major didn’t disappoint. Article 50, he wrote, must be revoked and a second referendum called. The 17.4 million Britons – more than have ever voted for anything else – who voted to leave proved themselves to be indolent pupils who must re-sit their exams.

They don’t know what’s good for them, but thank God there’s Major to teach them. No-deal Brexit, he hectored, would be catastrophic: “Every single household – rich or poor – would be worse off for many years to come.”

I’ve never been prepared to argue the issue of Britain’s constitutional survival on such a puny basis. Even assuming that Brexit would make us all slightly poorer, our sacrifice for preserving Britain’s historical constitution would be negligible compared to the sacrifices previous generations had to make to the same sacred end.

“This may be politically uncomfortable,” conceded Major, “but any short-term political disruption pales into insignificance when compared with the potential long-term damage that could be wreaked on our country as a whole.”

Let me see if I understand. Burying Britain’s constitution for ever is a temporarily uncomfortable disruption, while potential long-term damage will last in eternity.

I especially like that ‘potential’. The potential for problems or even disasters is ever-present, especially in a country where spivocratic nonentities like Major can become prime ministers.

One can say with equal justification that any election at all, including one for the town librarian, may cause potentially long-term damage. Since in this case the list of confidently predicted disasters includes the debris of satellites falling on our heads, one can safely disregard that inane threat.

What I find particularly refreshing is the gall of our homespun constitutional experts who co-opt Edmund Burke to their own take on parliamentary sovereignty.

Didn’t Burke teach that MPs should be the people’s representatives, not their delegates? Meaning that, once elected, they should act according to the people’s interests (as they see them), not their wishes?

So what’s the problem then? We take the decision away from both the cabinet and the electorate and transfer it to Parliament. That makes this august body truly sovereign, doesn’t it?

Arguing against this idiotic effrontery, Stephen Glover referred to the great Whig as a Tory, but then one expects fundamental ignorance from our commentators.

Chaps, if Burke, one of the greatest constitutional thinkers ever, came back from heaven and saw this on-going Walpurgisnacht, he’d shudder and plead: “Pray, Sir, do take me back whence I came.”

Burke, now forced to cross the aisle to the Tory side, knew different MPs and different voters from today’s lot. Less than five per cent of the population were entitled to vote then (good old days, I say), and some two-thirds of them were in the south.

The voters trusted the MPs to act in their interests because they knew them, often personally, to be sage, accomplished men who dedicated their lives to public service – as opposed to personal enrichment through a career in public services.

It was only in 1911 that parliamentary salaries were introduced. Until then MPs had served pro bono publico, not, as they do today, pro their own bono, and the public be damned.

Instant accountability was guaranteed, and Burke didn’t even have to spell it out. Today, in conditions of our universal franchise run riot, the situation is entirely different.

Today’s crop of MPs are a breed apart from what Burke saw, and himself was. The constitutional arrangement still accentuates parliamentary sovereignty, but it can now only mean independence from foreign legislation – not from the voters’ wishes. For such independence would mean unaccountability.

In any case, today’s lot solve the Burkean conflict between representatives and delegates by being neither. They use voters to advance their own careers, and their pronouncements to the contrary are just camouflage.

Spending my life surrounded by brilliant and erudite British people, and looking at the pygmies who supposedly represent them, I often wonder if de Maistre was right when saying that every nation gets the kind of government it deserves.

I think he’d change his view if he saw the likes of Major. No nation deserves him.

Professor of natural law and legal philosophy John Finnis managed to hang on to his Oxford job by the skin of his teeth.

Frankly I’m amazed at the forbearance shown by Oxford University in the name of academic freedom. For 350 students signed a petition to sack Prof. Finnis and, since students these days are seen as paying customers, their wishes are usually universities’ commands.

What incensed the youngsters was Prof. Finnis’s Collected Essays, in which he allegedly expressed discriminatory views against “the LGBTQ community”, and I’m getting terribly confused with all those initials piling up.

No sooner had I learned what LGBT means than another letter is added to the ‘community’. What on earth does the Q stand for? Queer? Surely not. And they also have Q+ – the mind boggles, as Oxford students say nowadays.

Anyway, in his essay published when most of his accusers were pre-teenagers, the offensive academic argued that homosexuality is “never a valid, humanly acceptable choice and form of life”.

And in another essay, written when most of his accusers weren’t even born, the good professor saw fit to write that “copulation of humans with animals is repudiated because it treats human sexual activity and satisfaction as something appropriately sought in a manner that, like the coupling of animals, is divorced from the expressing of an intelligible common good – and so treats human bodily life, in one of its most intense activities, as merely animal. The deliberate genital coupling of persons of the same sex is repudiated for a very similar reason.”

Now I myself once got in trouble by drawing a parallel between homosexuality and bestiality. I was attacked for not understanding how different those activities are.

But I do. Yet I, and presumably Prof. Finnis, also see a taxonomic similarity. For example, murder and mugging are very different crimes, yet they’re both crimes. And, though homosexuality and bestiality differ in many ways, they’re both perversions.

Actually, given the choice between a nice, fluffy Welsh sheep and, say, Sir Elton John, I’d probably choose… well, neither actually – Penelope needn’t worry. But the taciturn sheep would hold a definite advantage for not pronouncing on political matters, nor banging out awful songs.

Prof. Finnis courageously defended himself by saying that “I stand by all these writings.  There is not a ‘phobic’ sentence in them. The 1994 essay promotes a classical and strictly philosophical moral critique of all non-marital sex acts…”

How he didn’t get lynched after that escapes me. Turns out he opposes not only unnatural sex acts, but also the freedom to ‘hook up’, hard-won on the barricades of the ‘60s sex wars and since then enshrined even in official laws.

It’s hard not to notice that the student bodies of British universities are beginning to resemble the student Red Guards during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Those youngsters called for smashing ‘the dog’s heads’ of those professors who didn’t meet their standards of political correctness.

Those standards were somewhat different from Prof. Finnis’s detractors’, and many of those professorial heads did get smashed in China, while those at Oxford are still in one piece. But one can definitely detect convergence.

Since I’m a sucker for parallels, it’s fun to compare today’s censorship by the mob in Britain to that by church and state in nineteenth-century Russia.

For example, Russian censors routinely redacted the word ‘cornerstone’ from secular texts, explaining that “the cornerstone is Christ; hence this epithet cannot be applied to anything else.”

Also, no Frenchman could be called good because there could be no good people in a commonwealth formed by a regicide revolution.

Branded immoral was any literary work portraying a Jew as a virtuous man because “kikes cannot be virtuous.”

An article mentioning that mushrooms may cause harm was once banned because “mushrooms are the Lenten food of the Orthodox, and thus writing about their harmfulness means undermining faith and spreading faithlessness.”

Also redacted were adjectives like ‘heavenly’, ‘angelic’ and ‘divine’ when used as general terms of praise.

Words like ‘kissed’ and ‘loved’ were off-limits. Instead of “he kissed her”, the censor recommended “he looked at her”, while rather than loving a woman a man was supposed to marry her first.

No emperor, not even Julius Caesar, could be described as murdered lest the readers might get the idea that murdering an emperor was a possibility. Hence Paul I, assassinated in 1801, was officially regarded as having died of a stroke.

Lions couldn’t be described as ‘kings of the jungle’, and no animal kingdom was allowed to exist. In Russian those words are cognates of ‘tsar’, and… well, you know.

One could argue that, while the gap is narrowing, the tsarist censorship was marginally more stringent than that imposed by the modern British mob with the acquiescence, and often active support, of the government.

But then Russia was at the time called ‘the prison of nations’ and ‘the gendarme of Europe’, while Britain is still referred to as a free country, mostly, one suspects, for old times’ sake.

Yet the new totem of political correctness is worshipped with ever-increasing piety, while apostasy is punished with ever-increasing rigour. And not just in matters of sex, race and ‘equality’ all around.

The dictatorship of ‘you can’t say that’ manifests itself in all sorts of areas. Speaking of Oxford, back in 1995 I was an observer at the Byelorussian elections.

One of my co-observers was a professor (reader at the time) who specialised in Eastern Europe, and has since acquired an administrative post reflecting his expertise.

Speaking of Russia, I mentioned casually that, though the windows are dressed differently, the house remained essentially the same, and the much-vaunted glasnost and perestroika merely amounted to the transition of power from the Party to the KGB.

The academic cast a furtive look around, just as Russians did when discussing politics. “You can’t say that,” he whispered. “The most you’re allowed is expressing a regret that democracy in Russia is a bit slower in arriving than we’d like.”

Allowed by whom exactly? The chaps who have since then been regularly inviting the academic to appear on RT? But, unless I’m very much mistaken, they don’t yet have jurisdiction in Britain.

The censoring authority was of course public opinion, or rather those few hundred people who these days decide what public opinion should be and then steer it there. For the sake of brevity, I refer to them as the mob.

Does anyone need any more proof that our dumbed-down populace can’t be trusted to elect good leaders?

Or that years of sustained propaganda can sell any evil nonsense to the masses?

Do you? Well, in that case look no further than the new TV series Icons, in which viewers were asked to choose the greatest political leader of the twentieth century.

The shortlist included Margaret Thatcher, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Nelson Mandela.

In other words, the choice was among the two men who led the victorious anti-Nazi coalition, Britain’s arguably greatest post-war PM who restored the country to some semblance of sanity, and – well, the winner.

These days it’s impossible to talk about Mandela in any other than hagiographic terms. Beatified even before his 1963 imprisonment and canonised to secular sainthood after his 1990 release, Mandela still hasn’t lost his ability to lobotomise people.

At a party some 15 years ago, I took polite exception when a wealthy middle-class woman opined that Mandela was the greatest modern politician.

I even tried to offer a few facts, but didn’t really get the chance. The woman turned puce and told me that she took my insinuations as a personal insult. Though she was an Anglican Englishwoman, her response was as febrile as a Muslim’s would be if someone mentioned casually that Mohammed was a paedophile.

Yet at least Mohammed is the cult worshipped in one of the world’s largest religions. What religion is Mandela the cult of?

Just as a Muslim wouldn’t listen to any smirking references to Fatima’s age, so would Mandela’s worshippers ignore any facts of the secular saint’s life. However, exponents of other religions would find them rather damning.

Apart from the 27-year hiatus mentioned above, Mandela led the African National Congress, a Marxist terrorist organisation committed to replacing the hell of the apartheid government with the paradise of Marxist dictatorship.

Its activities heavily relied on the arms, financing, training and logistic support it received from established Marxist dictatorships, mainly those of the Soviet Union, East Germany and Cuba.

For example, East German Stasi helped the ANC set up ‘Quatro’, the detention centre across the border in Angola. Anti-Marxists were tortured and murdered there, to the silent acquiescence of so-called liberals worldwide.

Even merely aspiring Marxist dictatorships lent a helping hand. For example, in a deal allegedly negotiated by Gerry Adams himself, the IRA sent its bomb-making experts to train ANC murderers.

The ANC also added some indigenous touches, such as the widespread practice of ‘necklacing’, whereby an old tyre was filled with petrol, put around a dissident’s neck and set alight.

However, any evidence of the ANC’s communist nature was routinely hushed up in the West’s predominantly liberal press and denied by Mandela.

This though as far back as the early ‘60s the Special Branch uncovered Mandela’s essay How to Be a Good Communist, in which the saint-to-be promised that “South Africa will be a land of milk and honey under a Communist government.” That too was kept under wraps.

As a true Leninist, Mandela knew that revolution can succeed not only by violence but also by what Lenin called ‘legalism’, using democratic institutions the better to destroy them. Hence, when he emerged from prison, he forswore used tyres and cast himself as the prophet of peace.

As an intelligent man, Mandela sensed that appealing to the world’s illiberal liberals would work much better than necklacing a few more recalcitrant individuals. He was proved right, and that’s how he became the object of hysterical adulation and the ‘father of his country’.

Alas, the child of this father inherited not so much his intelligence and charisma as some of his less commendable traits.

The ANC rule has turned a safe, prosperous country into a corrupt, crime-ridden hellhole. The UN ranks South Africa second in the world for murder and assault, while she comfortably leads the world in rape.

Around 50 people are murdered there each day, which is more by an order of magnitude than 40 years ago. And over 25 per cent of South African men admit to rape, with half of them having raped more than once.

As far as I know, Mandela never shot, tortured, raped or necklaced anyone personally. Yet Lenin never castrated a single priest either, nor did Hitler ever gas a single Jew.

However, by applying criteria universally accepted since the beginning of time, we correctly hold them responsible for the monstrosities committed by their regimes on their watch.

What makes Mandela exempt from such judgement? How did he become a secular saint?

These questions are impossible to answer outside the broad political context, which raises another question. Why did the Soviet Union and its satellites, along with their useful idiots in the West, support the ANC and wage a worldwide campaign against apartheid?

The white South African government was indeed rather unpleasant, but nothing it did was even remotely comparable to the mass murder of millions perpetrated by black Africans in Burundi, Angola and Rwanda at the same time.

I’d even go so far as to suggest that perhaps the present state of South Africa vindicates the apartheid government’s view that the ANC wasn’t quite ready to govern the country.

A sense of proportion was missing then, and it still is now. But then no left-wing campaign against anything Western is ever conducted in measured tones. The purpose isn’t to enlighten brains but to wash them.

Thus racism, however loosely defined, has got to be seen as a vice to trump all others.

Never mind that South African blacks lived better, freer and longer than blacks did in any other African country. Likewise, never mind that Israeli Arabs enjoy greater freedom and prosperity than, say, Egyptian ones.

Once the stigma of racism is attached to a regime, it’s no longer judged according to rational criteria – and neither are its opponents, especially if they’re seen as third-world.

Hence African terrorists led by Mandela and, say, Palestinian terrorists led by Abbas receive much better press than the generally civilised states they see in their sights.

That’s how Mandela thrashed his opponents in the Icons poll, much to the delight of the show’s presenter Sir Trevor McDonald: “In a time of division, I am thrilled that British audiences have voted for Nelson Mandela, a man who brought together a deeply divided nation and changed history.”

Sir Trevor clearly thinks that, no matter how a divided nation is brought together or history changed, a man who performed those heroic deeds is worthy of secular canonisation.

Enter Messrs Stalin, Hitler and Mao, who too ought to qualify on those bases.

The marriage contract, to be signed on 22 January, is called the Treaty of Aachen. The choice of the site for the nuptials is replete with symbolism.

Alternatively called Aix-la-Chapelle, Aachen is a sort of Franco-German half-cast, and it’s only 25 miles down the road from Maastricht, where the two countries last reconfirmed their commitment to each other.

Also, Aachen used to be Charlemagne’s capital of the Holy Roman Empire, which was an early marriage between proto-Germany and proto-France.

Since both Manny and, somewhat incongruously, Angie see themselves as present-day reincarnations of the bellicose Frank, it’s only natural that they tie the knot even tighter in Aachen.

The prenup details haven’t yet been fully disclosed, but the general intent is to strengthen the ties between the happy couple. Joint bank accounts are bound to follow, but for the time being the talk is about unifying “the foreign affairs, defence, external and internal security and development”.

Also, the frontier regions on either side of the border will become androgynous ‘eurozones’. One such will doubtless be Alsace-Lorraine, formerly Reichsland Elsaß-Lothringen, formerly Alsace-Lorraine, formerly Reichsland Elsaß-Lothringen.

It’s high time the place were renamed to reflect its denationalised status. I think Reichsland Alsace-Lorraine would do nicely, but I’m open to ideas.

Since the new treaty will to all intents and purposes turn Germany and France into a single state, perhaps finding a name for it is also advisable.

The possibilities are numerous: Frankonia, Frankland, Frankmany, Deutschmand, Deutschfrankreich – I’d hesitate to choose just one, though someone will have to.

The long-anticipated step reflects the genesis of the star-crossed lovers. The EU was originally conceived as a result of a passionate affair between Nazi and Vichy bureaucrats towards the end of the war.

When its outcome was no longer in doubt, Hitler’s and Laval’s chaps sat down and devised a plan for post-war Europe. That got the bandwagon rolling, and directly the war ended those like Adenauer and de Gaulle, who were neither Nazis nor collaborators, jumped on.

Coming into play was the collective Stockholm syndrome afflicting the French since 1871 and the Germans since 1945.

Essentially, the Germans no longer wanted to be German, but the French did. So they consummated their affair at some imaginary mid-point.

Once the EU gestated to full maturity, it remained de facto a Franco-German affair. The two countries were locked in a passionate embrace, and they managed either to dupe or to bribe 26 others into accepting the role of Franco-German vassals.

Naturally, ugly words like lords, fiefs and vassals were never used, but the ghost of Charlemagne kept wafting in and out of EU meetings, getting both the French and Germans pleasantly high.

They preferred to talk about all those nations being one happy family, but there was no doubt that Germany was the father, France the mother, and the rest were children – usually obedient but at times unruly.

Thus the forthcoming marriage casts Angie as the bridegroom and Manny as the bride, but then such gender-bending is much in vogue. The conjugal bliss is supposed to serve as the model for all to follow, but some children are rapidly growing up.

Nationalist, populist parties are gaining strength – and in some countries, power – all over Europe. For example, Italy, now ruled by such a government, is proving to be a right brat.

In fact, Italy and like-minded Poland are threatening to enter into a marriage of their own, forming their own Montagues to the Franco-German Capulets.

Italy’s anti-EU deputy PM and interior minister, Matteo Salvini, doesn’t mince words. He openly talks about breaking the “Germany-France axis”, which, given the evocative power of ‘axis’, is a meaty choice of words.

Salvini doesn’t want Italy to become the Kasbah that large tracts of France and Germany have already become courtesy of the EU. That makes him naturally opposed to the very notion of an EU – the logic is ironclad.

Yet he doesn’t want to remain a bachelor – he too is looking for a suitable bride. Casting his net wide, Salvini has chosen Poland, whose ruling Law and Justice party shares his dislike of Muslim colonisation (it has gone beyond mere immigration) and therefore of the EU.

By way of betrothal, Salvini has met with his Polish counterparts, and they’ve agreed to end the wintry Franco-German domination, taking the continent into a “European spring”.

This is making my head spin. I thought the whole idea of the EU was unity.

Yet it increasingly seems that just about the only thing uniting the EU members other than the happy Franco-German couple is their opposition to the newlyweds and, by inference, the whole idea of European federalism.

The only aspect of the EU they seem to find acceptable is its money, but that may be in short supply. Having suffered a catastrophic decline in industrial output, Germany is about to go into a recession, with France sharing its lot, as a devoted wife should (“…for richer, for poorer…”).

Both Angie and Manny are teetering at the edge of a political abyss, with populist uprisings about to push them over. Nationalist populism is on the rise everywhere, much to the dismay of EU, British and even US mandarins and other fruits.

They blame all and sundry for the on-going debacle, except the real culprits: themselves. It’s today’s ruling elites that are destroying not just the traditional order but indeed traditional nations by not merely provoking but veritably begging for a populist reaction.

This leaves only three things for me to do: to wish Angie and Manny much happiness, however short-lived; to wonder whose sick mind produced the idea of British EU membership; and to question the sanity, intelligence and integrity of those who think we’ll be better off staying in this obscene contrivance rapidly heading for an explosive, ignominious end.