Category: Blog

Mikhail Gorbachev, a sprightly-looking 88, is now perceived as a world statesman, a status that encourages him to pronounce on global issues with an air of weighty bonhomie.

This time around he regaled BBC viewers with nostalgically sounding Soviet platitudes about the evil of nuclear weapons. Unless every possessor of those diabolic devices agreed to destroy them, he explained, the “planet” will remain in “colossal danger”.

The current standoff between the West and Russia isn’t quite the Cold War it used to be, according to him. Let’s just call it a Chilled War, added a smiley Gorby in an attempt at knee-slapping humour. But the two sides still fly warplanes and sail warships in close proximity to each other, which is asking for trouble.

The spirit of moral equivalence wafted through the air, bringing back the times olden. To Gorby, both Russia and the US are naughty boys shouting “Oh yeah?” at each other before schoolyard fisticuffs.

The wise schoolmaster looks down on them from the vertiginous height of his institutional and intellectual ascendancy and tells them to stop immediately. He brushes aside mutual accusations along the lines of he-started-it. As far as the schoolmaster is concerned, they’re both to blame equally.

That sort of reasoning was mendacious when the war was cold and remains so now, when it’s supposed to be merely chilled. Three Western countries stockpiled nuclear weapons only because of the Soviet threat. The threat is now Russian, rather than Soviet, but none the less dire for it.

NATO perceived then, as it doubtless does now, that only the US nuclear umbrella could protect Europe from impending Russian aggression. A conventional response has always been unrealistic.

In the Cold War days, the Soviets had 50,000 tanks, a force NATO simply couldn’t contain without resorting to cataclysmic weaponry. Its own conventional presence in Europe was so grossly outnumbered that it could at best only hope to slow the Russians down.

These days the Russian forces bristle with a more compact 15,398 battle tanks – not including the tens of thousands of mothballed machines from previous generations that can become battle-worthy overnight. The three largest European armies, British, French and German, have less than 1,000 among them.

The US tank force in Europe has diminished from 5,000 in 1989 to, in round numbers, zero today. Transporting tanks back in sufficient numbers should hostilities break out would take months, by which time the war would be over.

As Russia has shown over the past several years, she is pursuing an aggressive foreign policy, either attacking or threatening her neighbours and fomenting anti-Western sedition all over the world, including in the West itself.

Since some of Russia’s neighbours are NATO members under the aegis of collective security, the world is indeed a dangerous place, made more so by Russia — and less so by NATO nuclear weapons.

Rather than letting Gorbachev spout the old anti-nuke saws unchallenged, the interviewer should have pointed out that, of all European countries, only Russia has occupied vast tracts of foreign territory since the last war. And only the threat of nuclear response can prevent her from grabbing more.

Had I been the interviewer, such weighty matters wouldn’t have come up at all or, if they had, I wouldn’t have let Gorby get away with general banalities, all smacking of Soviet partisanship. Instead I would have asked him to share some factual information with inquisitive viewers.

For example, I’d be curious to know how a man whose top salary had been $600 a month could directly upon his retirement endow a foundation initially capitalised at nine billion dollars.

Yes, one could save a pretty penny by taking bag lunches, but the amount still sounds impressive. And if the money wasn’t Gorby’s, whose was it?

My next question would involve his pre-Moscow tenure as First Secretary in Stavropol, one of the two most corrupt provinces in the Soviet Union.

Is it true that Gorby’s nickname there was Mishka konvert (Mickey Envelope) in reference to his preferred way of doing business? And did his wife only ever intercede with her husband on behalf of supplicants bearing egg-sized gems?

Also, how did Gorby manage to ingratiate himself to KGB head Andropov, who guided his whole career with an avuncular hand?

When Andropov became General Secretary, the first thing he did was transfer Gorby to Moscow, filling the vacancy formed by the sudden demise of two Politburo members, one of a suspicious cardiac arrest, the other of an even more suspicious road accident. Why such affection?

On Gorbachev’s watch, billions of party dollars were transferred to the West and laundered through new holding companies and brassplates. Did he supervise that activity or, barring that, was he aware of it?

The same question, if you please, Mr Gorbachev, about the transfer of power from the party to the KGB that gathered speed during your tenure. Was it a planned and controlled process or did it just happen?

And how do you explain sending special forces into Vilnus when independence was in the air, to bust demonstrators’ heads with entrenchment tools? And by the way, how does he justify lying to the world about the Chernobyl disaster and continuing to do so until satellite evidence became incontrovertible?

Oh well, enough of that. Now you know why I could never be a BBC interviewer. I’d make distinguished old gentlemen too uncomfortable.

‘The worse, the better’ is a time-dishonoured Leninist tactic. Its essence is to drive the country into such penury and chaos that the desperate populace will welcome whatever the strategy is designed to achieve.

In that spirit the Bolsheviks and other socialists did their best to sabotage Russia in the First World War by demoralising the army with pacifist agitation and sowing sedition in the rear with endless strikes and limitless propaganda.

You know what happened next: an orgy of sanguinary repression and enslavement, millions of victims, and a malodorous reflux from which Russia is still suffering a century later.

Learning from the best, Mao raised ‘the worse, the better’ strategy to its logical, cataclysmic peak. Back in the 60s he advocated an all-out nuclear war, killing half of the world’s population but ensuring the triumph of communism for the survivors.

Putting a political objective before horrific human suffering strikes me as rather, well, unconservative, which is to say dubious.

For all political, military and economic earthquakes have one feature in common: while the ensuing suffering is guaranteed, nothing else is. Rising out of the ashes may be either a phoenix of virtue or a carrion of evil, and no one can know for sure which it will be. That’s why conservatives try to keep cataclysms at bay for as much as possible.

Thus I’ve often written that the West has taken so many wrong turns over the past few centuries that only a major military or economic disaster could get it back on track. But, I always add, no decent person could wish for such a calamity nonetheless.

Without taking exhaustive polls, I suspect that most conservatives would agree with me on that. After all, if true conservatism is defined by prudence, intelligence and morality, ‘the worse, the better’ strategy flies in the face of all these virtues.

That’s why it’s so surprising to see supposedly conservative Leavers advocating just that for the upcoming general election.

‘Supposedly’ is a key qualifier here because I’ve always had my doubts about people who taper their whole political Weltanschauung  down to the point of a single issue – even if I happen to agree with the single issue.

Conservative thought is based on a broad vision of things in their complex interrelationships suspended in a fine balance. Overstressing one element at the expense of all others can have the effect of sawing off three legs of a chair and hoping that just one leg will provide sufficient support.

Hence, by insisting on their ideological purity, Nigel Farage and his admirers are prepared to dynamite the very Brexit by which they swear and usher in a Trotskyist government into the bargain.

They want Boris Johnson to form an election-winning pact with the Brexit Party, thereby ditching the deal he managed to wrench out of the EU, one that parliament has already accepted. It takes a particular deafness to political nuances to think that any PM would ever do something like that.

I don’t know how long it took Johnson to reject the idea, but I suspect the elapsed time was measured in seconds. Then, says Farage, the Brexit Party will contest every seat possible, splitting the Leave vote.

And if as a result Britain will suffer the catastrophe of a Trotskyist government, then so be it. Those dastardly Tories will have only themselves to blame.

When I describe to people, in writing or orally, the full magnitude of the horror befalling Britain should that evil Marxist lot get their hands on the levers of power, they just shrug. We’ve had bad governments before and lived to tell about it.

True, Britain has had bad governments before. But never an irredeemably evil one, which the Corbyn-McDonnell clique is. So what, one reader wrote to me.

Let the people experience a few years of unvarnished, unadulterated socialism. They’ll be so appalled that we’ll finally get a true conservative party, which the Tories aren’t.

It’s that Leninist strategy at work again: the worse, the better. In this case, its success is predicated on a few assumptions.

First, that the emergence of a true conservative party, one capable of forming a post-Trotskyist government, is the likeliest consequence of Britain turning into an Anglophone Venezuela.

It’s not, if history is anything to go by. One thing evil socialists of either the red or brown hue are good at is brainwashing. Give them a few years at the helm, and they’ll fill the airwaves with so much effluvia that people will think they’re smelling roses.

More Germans voted against than for the Nazis in 1933. However, had an election been held two or three years later, Hitler would have won by a landslide. Dr Goebbels would have seen to that. And the Germans were at the time infinitely better educated than the Britons are today.

History is replete with examples of weak, vacillating governments being ousted, only to be replaced with bloodthirsty tyrants hungering for human flesh.

Without going too far back, both the Provisional Government in Russia c. 1917 and the Weimar Republic in Germany c. 1932 were ineffectual, quasi-socialist contrivances. Yet once they collapsed, it wasn’t conservative angels but socialist ogres who took over.

I’d suggest that, after a few years of Trotskyist mayhem, Britons will be much more likely to vote not for a hypothetical conservative party, but for one even more Trotskyist or else fascist.

The second assumption from which Farage groupies proceed is that true conservatism isn’t only desirable but also possible in today’s Britain. I agree it would be desirable, but I doubt it’s possible.

This isn’t an argument that can be adequately made in this abbreviated format, so, skipping the intermediate stages, I’ll simply give you the conclusion I reach in my books.

True conservatism is at odds with modernity because it’s deeply rooted in the founding Christian ethos of our civilisation. Those roots have been systematically severed, leaving us with a materialist, deracinated, egotistic world whose fields are so comprehensively sown with godless salt that nothing conservative can ever grow.

Indulging my pun Tourette’s, I always say that in any election we are faced not with the choice between a towering titan and a political pygmy, but with the evil of two lessers.

Any attempt to pursue what we see as absolute goodness can only result in the triumph of absolute badness. Seeking a political heaven on earth we run the risk of creating hell on earth.

So a message to Nigel Farage and his fans: by all means cut off your noses if such is your wont. But please don’t spite my face.

One would think President Trump has enough electoral problems of his own not to get involved in British political campaigns.

The president’s eagerness to do so thus testifies to his generosity of spirit, seldom encountered among property developers. Yes, his flesh is willing but, alas, his spirit is weak – or at least ill-informed.

If one can discern a general tendency behind Mr Trump’s borderline unintelligible pronouncements, he’d like to see Mr Johnson at Downing Street rather than Comrade Corbyn. Perhaps he feels the former would be more willing to flog portions of Britain to the Trump Organisation. Or else he fears the latter might nationalise the holdings that organisation has already.

One way or the other, Mr Trump is like many of us in that he can only think in the terms he knows. These are set by ‘deals’ and denominated in dollars and cents.

Also like many others, Mr Trump is convinced that most people approach life essentially the same way he does, and if they don’t, they should. Hence he has to believe that those quaint Britons want to get out of the EU mainly because they hunger after the freedom to do lucrative trade deals with other countries, mainly the Good Ole US of A.

That indeed has been one of the themes of the Leave campaign but, mercifully, there have been others as well. I for one have been screaming myself hoarse to the few willing to listen that the EU is a political, not economic, project.

Hence all the multiple questions asked about leaving or staying can be profitably reduced to one: Do we wish to be a sovereign nation governed by Her Majesty’s parliament or an adjunct to a giant superstate run by an unaccountable megalomaniac bureaucracy along the lines of the Third Reich, minus, for the time being, the concentration camps?

Unfortunately, however, such reductive thinking is impossible in a materialist country sold on the Marxist notion of the primacy of economics. That’s why both sides to the argument, and increasingly both major parties, have been skewing the debate largely in the direction of Mr Trump’s comfort zone of dollars and cents, or pounds and pence if you’d rather.

The Leavers, and now more or less the entire Tory party, have been dangling before the salivating masses the carrot of American chlorinated chicken on which we’ll be able to gorge ourselves come Brexit.

The Remainers, now more or less the entire opposition, have been objecting that the chlorinated chicken is a pie in the sky. That nasty Trump only pretends to be Britain’s friend, but in fact he’d much rather do trade deals with China, Russia or even North Korea.

The issue has acquired an importance it doesn’t really merit, but the fact remains: it has acquired it. The prospect of a trade agreement with the US is an important vote getter for the Tories; denying it, for Labour.

Enter Mr Trump, interviewed on LBC by Nigel Farage. The president readily agreed with Mr Farage that the arrangement Mr Johnson had reached with the EU was far from perfect.

Moreover, speaking with his customary lucid fluency, Mr Trump added: “To be honest with you… this deal… under certain aspects of the deal… you can’t do it, you can’t do it, you can’t trade.

“We can’t make a trade deal with the UK because I think we can do many times the numbers that we’re doing right now and certainly much bigger numbers than you are doing under the European Union.”

If I were Comrade Corbyn, I’d send Mr Trump a gift, perhaps a Jermyn Street tie pre-knotted to the right length. For, in just a few ill-chosen and barely coherent words, Mr Trump undermined one of the key pledges of the Tory campaign.

Granted, after that he uttered a general statement of opprobrium about Corbyn: “Corbyn would be so bad for your country. He’d be so bad, he’d take you in such a bad way. He’d take you into such bad places.”

But that’s just waffle with no substance to it whatsoever. One can’t attack Corbyn with vague phrases about him taking us in a bad way, whatever that means.

Pragmatic Britons like specifics, and the only specific they got from Trump is that Johnson is lying about the trade deal, while Corbyn is telling the truth.

With friends like Trump, who needs enemas. (If I used this pun before, I apologise. I can’t help myself: it’s a form of Tourette’s.)

The president clearly lacks sensitivity to the numerous subtexts of the upcoming election. Above all, he lacks the good manners not to meddle in the internal affairs of a foreign country about which he knows little and understands even less.

And if Nigel Farage is manipulating Mr Trump to advance his own political aspirations, he ought to be ashamed of himself. Even in modern politics some holds must be barred.

P.S. Nigel Farage has just threatened Mr Johnson that he’ll field a candidate in every seat unless a pact between his Brexit Party and the Tories is formed. Allow me to translate the blackmail terms: the Farage way or the Corbyn highway. Anyone prepared to deliver the country to the Troskyists, for whatever reason, is a dangerous monomaniac. I do hope Mr Farage isn’t prepared to act on his threat.

This morning I caught a glimpse of the Labour slogan and rubbed my eyes to make sure I hadn’t misread. I had.

For a second there I thought it said “F*** THE MANY NOT THE FEW”, which would have been a welcome, if indecorous, display of truth in campaigning.

Alas, a closer examination revealed that the first word was actually FOR. In comes decorum, out goes truth.

Getting back to the truth, on the eponymous date above Britain will go into the most important general election ever. All other elections might have changed the governing party, for a few years. This one may change the country, for ever.

On 11 December Britain will be like any other Western country, better than some (most, as far as I’m concerned), not as good as some others. But within a few weeks of 12 December, she may become hell on earth, in keeping with my little trompe-l’œil.

For, whatever the polls are saying, it’s entirely possible that Corbyn may succeed Johnson, and this is the first time that the words ‘Corbyn’ and ‘succeed’ have been used in the same sentence.

Other parties in other elections wanted to change what Britain does. The Corbyn-McDonnell gang want to change what Britain is.

They don’t want her to remain a moderate country that, despite being mildly socialist, still retains such civilised amenities as basic freedoms, an economy that keeps her close to the top end of world prosperity, justice that’s residually just, a grumbling but generally content populace, a growing but still manageable crime rate.

They want to turn Britain into an Anglophone Venezuela, an impoverished, violent, lawless hellhole in the midst of a civil war, today bubbling just under the surface, tomorrow splashing out in a red mist.

If just half of Labour’s plans come to fruition, and even if sensible people were allowed to choose which half, that’s what Britain will become – overnight and possibly irreversibly.

The economy will collapse almost instantly: close to a trillion pounds has already left our shores in anticipation, with Sir James Dyson leading the exodus. And Dyson is a British patriot, with not only financial but also emotional capital vested in the country.

Foreign capital, unburdened with such ties, will get out immediately, while the getting is good. Our AA credit rating will go in the blink of an eye: financial markets won’t want to do business with a country where business is regarded as evil, where property is insecure and capital is in danger of confiscation.

Wealth producers will stop producing wealth, or rather they’ll produce it elsewhere. Wholesale nationalisation, extortionate taxation, our customary red tape turning into iron chains will put paid to our prosperity, which is unimaginably high in the historical perspective.

Economic catastrophe won’t be short in coming, but that isn’t the whole story, not even the half of it. For economic repression on a scale planned by Labour is bound to lead to political oppression.

No government has ever succeeded in robbing the people in such a decisive fashion without causing a violent response. Even in Russia, with no tradition of liberty whatsoever, wholesale robbery by the new communist state resulted in a civil war and millions of victims.

Granted, the Bolsheviks resorted to violent repression even before such a reaction, but then the freedom-loving British aren’t Russians. It would take less provocation to set them off.

Nowhere in the world has a political programme akin to one planned by Labour ever been carried out without every liberty being severely curtailed – and without violence perpetrated by the state and those resisting it.

The British haven’t so far had the occasion to develop vigilance against such upheavals, and it’s natural that complacency should set in. People here simply don’t believe that a Venezuela or Zimbabwe can arrive at these shores – but it can.

Civilised institutions take centuries of loving nurture to build, but they can be destroyed in an instant of hateful assault. If history teaches anything, it’s that. Alas, history also teaches that nobody learns from it.

I pray that won’t be the case here, and I hope you’ll join me. But prayer alone isn’t enough (don’t tell Fr Michael I said this).

We must all approach the upcoming election with the gravity it deserves. For a start, this means putting aside resentments, rancour, ideological animus, enmities.

Rather than indulging such red-hot emotions, we must activate ice-cold thinking. Voting guided by febrile emotions – or principles, call them whatever you like – can at this stage be tantamount to national suicide.

All of us – Leavers and Remainers, Tories wet or otherwise, even some Labour members – should ask ourselves a simple question: Would Britain and the British be better off with Corbyn as PM, McDonnel as Chancellor and Abbott as Home Secretary?

If the answer is an emphatic no, as it has to be for anyone other than those bereft of brains but possessed of hate, envy and a desire for revenge, then the next question ought to be the quintessentially British query: What are we going to do about it?

Let’s start by not treating 12 December as a second EU referendum, which is an easy impression to get from our press.

All the Leavers among my friends, which is to say all my friends, are unhappy with the deal Boris Johnson has negotiated. It’s not the kind of Brexit we’d like, but – this can’t be overemphasised – it’s the only one we’re going to get, for the time being.

If tactical voting for the Brexit Party or, nostalgically, UKIP splits the vote and ushers Corbyn into Downing Street, we’re likely to stay in the EU until it disintegrates of its own accord, which I hope will be soon.

Even those whose heart is in their EU home, to paraphrase the revolting flag flown by the Hammersmith & Fulham Council, must decide if they’d want to remain if that meant the national catastrophe of a Trotskyist government, with its ensuing impoverishment, disintegration of social order and tyranny.

Whether we want a better deal, no deal or no Brexit, we must remember what’s at stake on 12 December. Not to be too melodramatic about it, it’s our country, ladies and gentlemen.

The title is shamelessly stolen from Richard Aldington’s novel about the horrors of war, one of which was the death of the eponymous hero.

However, at the risk of upsetting veterans, there exists a higher grade of heroism than following one’s comrades over the top: the lonely courage of a man standing up against a satanic regime, alone against the ogre of secret police, pliant courts and browbeaten populace.

It takes much heroism to take on the enemy and fight for one’s country. It takes even more to take on the SYSTEM and fight for one’s soul.

Vladimir Bukovsky was one of the few genuine heroes of my generation, a fighter for the noble cause of human freedom and dignity – everywhere, not just in Russia. His whole life was one continuous scream, echoing St Matthew: “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul”.

They did their best to kill his body, but his soul soared so high above their puny reach that they couldn’t even dream of killing it. Bukovsky was a martyr, in the old, real sense.

I use the word ‘martyr’ advisedly, in the knowledge that he did manage to get out of Russia alive. But the bastards did get him by delayed action: his health was ruined by 12 years spent in prisons, labour camps, punitive psychiatric hospitals, endless hunger strikes. That he survived until age 76 is a miracle, but then men like him are known for them.

Bukovsky hated the Soviets, and the feeling was reciprocated. He was 16 when a KGB interrogator asked him: “Why do you hate us so much?” “I don’t hate you,” replied Bukovsky. “I don’t believe you.”

As all his aphorisms, this one rings true. Russian children couldn’t think through the nature of totalitarianism; they were too young to amass enough factual knowledge or indeed to hone the requisite rational faculties. But some of them had an in-built polygraph: they knew the regime was lying to them and shuddered in revulsion. I was one such child, so I know.

Bukovsky was a purer dissident than the Nobel laureates Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov in that his distaste for communism didn’t evolve in his mature years – it was visceral, innate and impervious to doubt. Also, unlike them, he didn’t enjoy the protective cocoon of worldwide fame and could easily have been killed.

And killing him was never far from the Soviets’ mind, for Bukovsky was the first to expose their most sinister crime: committing dissidents to punitive psychiatric care and trying to destroy their minds with massive doses of Thorazine and other psychotropic drugs.

In that diabolical intent they would have succeeded, but for the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. In 1976 he agreed to exchange the imprisoned leader of the Chilean communist party Luis Corvalán for Bukovsky, who was serving a seven-year term of ‘strict regime’.

Incidentally, Pinochet’s Spanish counterpart, Gen. Franco, also saved the lives of Soviet dissidents, Dymshitz and Kuznetsov, who in 1970 tried to hijack a plane as the only way of getting out of the Soviet paradise. Their death sentences were commuted after Franco agreed to do the same for the similarly sentenced ETA terrorists. Characteristically, the liberal West couldn’t (wouldn’t?) do what those widely reviled men did.

Bukovsky’s fight against the KGB is well-documented, and that was the fight he won by outliving the Soviet Union. But Bukovsky knew he hadn’t outlived the Soviet evil.

Looking at the entourage of Gorbachev and then Yeltsyn, all communist party members, Bukovsky correctly observed that no man could have more than two out of three qualities: intelligence, honesty and party membership.

Intelligent party members were knaves; honest ones, fools. His accurate assumption was that an intelligent and honest man couldn’t belong to that criminal organisation.

Bukovsky wasn’t religious, but, like all cultured and moral people, he thought as if he was. He knew that only repentance could stop the wounds inflicted by Soviet crimes from festering.

That’s why, when the Soviet Union ‘collapsed’, he called for a Russian version of the Nuremberg Trials, with all accomplices in Soviet crimes named, shamed and punished. He also insisted that no member of the communist party and especially the KGB should be allowed to hold any government post.

That insistence was as idealistic as it was unrealistic. In the original post-collapse euphoria, Bukovsky failed to realise that all those glasnosts and perestroikas were designed as a gradual transfer of power from the party to the KGB.

When the transfer was complete, he recoiled with horror, seeing that over 80 per cent of the new ruling elite, including Col. Putin himself, had enjoyed KGB careers. Unlike Western useful idiots, the Hitchenses of this world, Bukovsky never described Putin as anything but evil.

If Lenin’s useful idiots came mostly from the left, Putin’s come from the right. The two extremes may be different ideologically, but they are united in their moral decrepitude: by supporting an evil regime they increase and perpetuate evil in this world. Bukovsky saw that with the clarity of a prophet.

Having settled in Cambridge, he remained the moral and intellectual focus of Russian dissent. But Bukovsky’s sensors of incipient totalitarianism everywhere remained finely attuned and calibrated. 

In one of his books, he coined the portmanteau term ‘EUSSR’, correctly perceiving the EU as the USSR-Lite. The ‘Lite’ part is most welcome: so far the EU hasn’t murdered or imprisoned its opponents.

But Bukovsky’s X-ray vision could penetrate beneath the surface: he saw in the EU the same combination of left-wing ideology and unaccountable bureaucratic structure he had abhorred so much back in Russia. One of his well-aimed epigrams was that the Bolsheviks triumphed in Russia, and the Mensheviks (more moderate socialists) in Europe.

Similarly, Bukovsky loathed the fascisoid dictatorship of political correctness, correctly identifying its Soviet-like totalitarian cravings. The Soviet Union remained his frame of reference, which isn’t the worst measuring stick of tyranny, either mature or inchoate.

Freedom hasn’t had a better defender than Vladimir Bukovsky; tyranny, a more implacable enemy. They don’t make men like him any more, which makes one pessimistic about our future. Without martyrs, heroes and seers to confront evil, it’ll triumph – with Bukovsky raving and ranting about it in heaven as much as he did on earth.

Vladimir Bukovsky, RIP.  

Cambridge-educated Labour MP Keith Vaz doesn’t express himself in the Ali G idiom. But he’d be entitled to ask this question, if with better grammar.

True enough, all those doubting Thomases who refuse to believe Mr Vaz’s simple explanation of that 2016 incident have to be racists.

Why else wouldn’t they accept his perfectly believable version of the event? But judge for yourself.

Somebody spiked Mr Vaz’s drink in a pub at around 11 pm. Can happen to any 60-year-old man, can’t it? Of course it can.

I don’t know what the drug was, but it did have a peculiar effect. Having sipped his drink, Mr Vaz approached two male prostitutes, introduced himself as a washing machine salesman named Jim and invited them to his flat in North London.

Except that he didn’t know they were rent boys. Mr Vaz thought they were interior decorators, which is an easy mistake to make.

Hence they went to his flat to discuss the colour schemes for a possible redecoration project. Nothing odd about that: midnight on a Saturday is my favourite time for such appointments, as I’m sure it’s yours as well.

Mr Vaz then offered to buy cocaine for the two decorators, although, as he explains, not for himself. Such selfless hospitality is to be expected from our MPs in general and Mr Vaz in particular.

He’s ever ready to offer disinterested help to any good cause, as he did in 1989. Although a Catholic, he led a march of several thousand Muslims in Leicester calling for Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses to be banned.

Mr Vaz described the march as “one of the great days in the history of Islam and Great Britain”, while desisting from adding that the day would have been even greater had the marchers been able to execute the fatwa declared on Mr Rushdie.

Such ecumenical selflessness does credit to Mr Vaz’s commitment to multiculturalism, than which no greater cause exists. I for one applaud his courage.

Which he also displayed by welcoming his midnight decorators at a considerable risk to himself. After all, cocaine is a Class A drug, which, contrary to what Ali G believed, isn’t a guarantee of quality. It’s more of a guarantee of criminal prosecution, entailing up to seven years in prison for possession and up to life for supplying.

But no risk is too great when one wishes to be kind to interior decorators. Anyway, at that point the spiked drink kicked in, and Mr Vaz suffered an onset of amnesia.

You may doubt that a spiked drink can induce such an effect, but I assure you it’s quite common. Therefore Mr Vaz doesn’t remember then having unprotected sex with the two decorators, as they claim he did.

So it’s his word against theirs, and whom would you rather believe, two prost… I mean decorators or the honourable gentleman who has represented Leicester North since 1987? I rest my case.

Alas, Mr Vaz’s colleagues in parliament didn’t. When the story of his redecoration project first hit the headlines, he was made to apologise to poor Mrs Vaz (for what, wanting his flat to look nice?) and quit as head of the Home Affairs committee.

However, the parliamentarians then got ashamed of their incredulity and a month later appointed Mr Vaz to the Justice Select Committee. They must have surmised – correctly, I hasten to add – that his ordeal gave him unique insights into matters legal.

The police, who as we know are institutionally racist, took a different view. Proceeding at a slow speed characteristic of natural (and police) forces, the other day they reached the outrageous conclusion that Mr Vaz’s version of the event was less than truthful.

As a result, parliament’s sleaze watchdog declared that Mr Vaz had shown “disrespect for the House’s standards system” and caused “significant damage” to the reputation and integrity of the Commons.

Over the past few months I’ve been doubting that the integrity of the Commons could be damaged any further, but evidently it can. Anyway, the watchdog recommended Mr Vaz be suspended for six months, which would be the longest such suspension ever.

And, if approved, the suspension may lead to Mr Vaz’s losing his seat altogether. The news hit the poor man with a mighty bang, and as a result he has been admitted to hospital.

I hope you’ll join me in wishing Mr Vaz a speedy recovery and prompt return to his parliamentary duties. I for one sympathise with the anguish he has had to suffer at the hands of those racist MPs. Come back soon, Keith – at our parliament you fit right in.

It’s almost 50 years since Harold Wilson lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, and one hears much clamouring for it to be lowered even more.

Now, any argument has a ‘what’ and a ‘how’ aspect: the issue at stake and the rhetorical mastery with which it’s put forth. What these days tends to vex me especially isn’t so much the former as the latter.

All of us have at one time or another supported an untenable proposition, especially when young. I for one blush at some beliefs I held in the Russia of my teens, although mine never included what Lenin so aptly called “the infantile disorder of leftishness”.

The tendency in the West, however, is for the young to reach out tropistically for liberal panaceas, whereas the old know there are no panaceas, and if there were, they wouldn’t be liberal (in the newfangled sense of socialist).

This is nothing new, as Edmund Burke pointed out in his masterly decortication of the French Revolution: “He who is not a républicain at twenty compels one to doubt the generosity of his heart; but he who, after thirty, persists, compels one to doubt the soundness of his mind.”

One might question the first part of the aphorism, but, if the experience gathered over millennia is anything to go by, not the second. This, to me, ends the argument about the voting age: it should be raised, rather than lowered to make sure more voters are sound of mind.

Those who, for some unfathomable reason, are interested in my thoughts on the ‘what’ of the issue can tap ‘paedocracy’ into the SELECT feature in this space. However, the issue that most concerns me these days is the ‘how’, which is to say the puerile inanity that these days passes for rhetoric.

Unless they themselves are young, champions of paedocracy argue not from ideas but from ideology. That would be fine, provided they were honest about it. But they aren’t.

They should take heed from Peter Mandelson’s frank cynicism on the subject of the unlimited Muslim immigration he and his boss Blair had fostered. Rather than laying a smokescreen of verbiage about humanitarian concerns, Mandelson admitted nonchalantly that such migrants had been welcomed because they would eventually vote Labour.

One suspects that the same rationale impels those who insist on a lower voting age: the younger people are, the more likely they are to gobble up the leftie pie in the sky that many older people find indigestible.

But our paedocrats don’t own up to their motivation. Instead they try to offer arguments that invariably sound as if they come from the mouths of babes.

Cue in Ed Miliband, who in 2013, when he was leader of the Labour Party, voiced the usual inanity: “The future of our society is going to affect young people the most. When you get to the age of 16 you can join the Army, you can get married, you can pay taxes. I think you should be able to decide the country’s future.”

That’s like saying that a lad who gets a job stacking the shelves at Waitrose is qualified to sit on the John Lewis board. Or that a recent graduate of a football academy can manage a Premiership club. Or, closer to the point, that a youngster who pays a nominal tax is fit to determine the government’s fiscal policy.

Of course, for chronological reasons, youngsters stand to gain or lose the most from today’s political decisions. By the same token, a tot’s future may be affected by his parents’ decision to move house. But that doesn’t mean sensible adults should let a six-year-old make or veto that decision.

Or should they? Enter Prof David Runciman, the head of politics at Cambridge University. Allow me to clarify: Prof Runciman holds one of the world’s highest academic positions to which a political scientist can ascend.

One would expect that, whatever his innermost convictions, someone with his credentials would be able to support them with sound arguments. Alas, that expectation would be forlorn: I’ve heard better political rhetoric around closing time at the King’s Head.

Prof Runciman doesn’t feel the proposal to lower the voting age to 16 goes far enough: “I would lower the voting age to six, not 16. And I’m serious about that.” I’m sure he is. That’s the trouble.

What’s amazing here is Prof Runciman’s lamentable ignorance of the basics of his chosen discipline. To wit: “You should never, never interfere with the basic principle of democracy, which is one person one vote. And you should never take votes away from people.”

The basic principle of democracy is that some people elect their governments – not that all people do that. For example, only about a third of Britain’s population had the vote in 1927: women were disfranchised, as were both sexes under age 21.

Does this mean Britain only became a democracy the next year, when women got the vote? Or did she gain that status only in 1970, when the voting age was lowered to 18? Or do we still have to wait a while longer, when Prof. Runciman’s proposal has been acted upon?

Actually, even by his logic a democratic deficit will still exist: what about the little ones between ages zero and five, who have even more at stake than six-year-olds? Provided they can talk, shouldn’t they vote too to conform to Prof Runciman’s illiterate notions of democracy?

Lest he might be accused of scholarly impartiality, Prof Runciman then let his guard drop: “If 16- or 17-year-olds voted in the 2017 general election, there is a chance that Jeremy Corbyn would now be prime minister,” he wrote with a distinct longing.

For once I agree. He probably would be. Which is the best argument for raising the voting age to 25 at least – 30 would be even better.

The line currently making the rounds is that “Harry and Meghan are single-handedly modernising the royal family.”

Well, first, it’s not so much modernising as destroying, which in this context (and in most others) amounts to the same thing. And second, it’s far from single-handed.

The rot set in when Edward VIII married for ‘lurve’ and as a result became the Duke of Windsor. His beloved was a twice-divorced American woman of easy virtue, who had distinct pro-Nazi sympathies, so that was a meeting not just of bodies but also of minds. 

Then Harry’s father married his mother, or, to use Harry’s preferred idiom, his dad married his mum. That marriage was arranged, which in theory should have worked better than ‘lurve’. In practice, it didn’t.

For Diana was a thoroughly modern woman, meaning that the notions of duty, service and honour were alien to her. She wanted the glamorous life of a princess, but without sacrificing her otherwise insignificant ego and ‘lurve’.

When that didn’t quite work out, Harry’s mum cuckolded his dad many times over and dragged our monarchy through the gauntlet of numerous glossy covers. Devoid of intelligence but richly endowed with cunning, she basked in media attention, while claiming to abhor it.

Her favourite trick was to tell the paparazzi where she’d be, strike all sorts of seductive poses for their benefit and then claim she was deeply traumatised by the subsequent photographs.

Because the royal family refused to accept her on her own terms, Diana declared war on it. The decisive battle was her BBC interview that had a strong emetic effect on sensible viewers. 

Harry’s mum would flap her eyelashes histrionically, break her voice at appropriate moments, pour her heart out and confess she was besotted with Captain Hewitt, whose spitting image Harry is. (To be fair, he also bears some resemblance to Charles’s pictures at the same age, while ginger hair runs in Diana’s family.)

Hence there’s nothing single-handed about Meghan’s current star performance, with Harry playing a supporting role. They have a suitable role model in Harry’s mum, now that the word  ‘mother’ has followed the word ‘he’ into the rubbish bin of lexicology.

Meghan claims to be traumatised by the incessant media attention she draws as a member of the royal family. Because of that, she says in her TV interview modelled on her late mum-in-law’s performance, she and Harry are reduced to bare “surviving”, missing on the “thriving” that’s their due.

Among other things, that’s a hidden reference to her race: “survivin and thrivin” is a stock jive reply to “How’s it goin?”. Here Meghan is using her mum-in-law’s material: she makes constant references to her black half, only then to accuse the media of being obsessed with it.

Thus on her visit to Africa she told impoverished natives she understood their plight as “a mother and a woman of colour”. That’s a hypocritical ploy often used by American black (in her case, half-black) activists who claim to be “Africans like you” – much to the real Africans’ consternation. What they see before them is Americans, not fellow Africans.

The same dishonesty comes across in Meghan’s complaints about the unbearable pressure of a life in the spotlight for which she was unprepared in spite of her friends’ warnings.

“Because I’m American I very naively didn’t get it. It’s complicated,” moans Meghan. But it’s not complicated at all, and if she really doesn’t get it, it’s not because she’s American, but because she isn’t very bright.

This is a Hollywood starlet that has never in her life missed the slightest photo opportunity, including posing nude, to squeeze every ounce of publicity out of her modest talents. Being in front of the camera and having every juicy detail of her private life scrutinised is her stock in trade, so forgive me if I don’t take her whining at face value.

Then came the inevitable New Age bilge about internalising emotions: “I really tried to adopt this British sensibility of a stiff upper lip… But I think what that does internally is probably really damaging.”

The Hollywood sensibility of stiff upper lap comes more naturally, one can understand that. But dignified restraint is really worth developing even if it doesn’t come naturally, and even if one isn’t a member of the royal family. 

It’s simply good manners not to thrust one’s problems down other people’s throats. And self-restraint does no damage, not this side of New Age psychobabble quackery. 

While stiff upper lip is widely associated with Englishness, it’s not an ethnic characteristic, but a cultural one. I’ve seen it displayed by New Englanders and Texans of a certain type as often as by Englishmen and Welshmen, with none of them looking particularly damaged by their emotional continence.

It’s only the brash, tasteless modern ignoramuses keeping Freudian quacks in business who are trained to let it all hang out not just physically but also emotionally. 

This is also a manifestation of the modern tendency towards homogenising men and women into an emotionally hermaphroditic mass, while in parallel infantilising both sexes.

Harry, doubtless taking his cue from his wife, claims his mental health needs “constant maintenance” because his mum’s death is still a “festering wound”. 

Now, Harry was 12 when his mum was tragically killed on her revenge mission against his dad and the rest of the family. He’s 35 now.

This ought to be enough time for any man to come to terms with his mum’s death, tragic as it doubtless was at the time. If he can’t do so, it’s only because he doesn’t realise that’s what grown-ups do, especially if they happen to be men.

Harry is crying out for our sympathy, but he isn’t entitled to it now, certainly not as much as he was in 1997. This emotional blackmail may be calculated or genuine, and I don’t know which is worse.

As to Meghan, she must realise how lucky she is. She has married into a life of wealth and privilege that’s not contingent on her being ‘nice’ to studio executives, agents, producers and directors. Moreover, it’s not vulnerable to age – she’ll still be the Duchess of Sussex even after her looks fade.

A little dignity and good taste seems a small price to pay, but if she genuinely feels it’s too exorbitant, perhaps her idea of moving to Africa with Harry has some merit. Let them renounce their titles, along with Civil List grants, and make a life for themselves among the people Meghan claims to understand so well.

My guess is that they’d be back to the Civil List and A-list delights within a month, two at the most. By the sound of it, Africa’s gain will be our loss.

This picture was taken from my dining room window overlooking the New King’s Road. That’s in Fulham, London, in case you’re wondering.

Peeking out, I see that all the lampposts along my stretch of the street are tastefully decorated with flags bearing various messages of EU propaganda.

One message is Proud Members of the EU, and since it’s signed by the Hammersmith & Fulham Council, one has to assume it’s this body that feels the pride in question.

One can further surmise that H&F is pursuing its own foreign policy, independent of the UK, which is after all still looking to be on the way out. Yet presumably, even if Britain does leave, Hammersmith & Fulham doesn’t have to tag along.

But this being a democracy, first the denizens of Fulham must hold their own referendum on whether to stay in the UK or seek national sovereignty. Perhaps we could then declare war on Britain, lose it, and live off the fat of a reconstruction plan for the next century.

Alternatively, we may just receive subsidies from the EU, although this particular borough may face an uphill struggle trying to claim hardship.

I wish I could split away from H&F, but I can’t: a divorce settlement would be too costly and fraught with every manner of inconvenience. Perhaps I could just announce I’m leaving and then stay put. I don’t know, what do you think?

At times, one craves freedom not of speech, but from it.

Yes, of course, the reading public should be exposed to a range of opinions. But with one important and increasingly ignored proviso: opinions that are demonstrably idiotic should fall outside that range.

For example, if someone makes an impassioned case for English weather, then by all means give him newspaper space, even if most people would disagree. But if he then concludes that, because English weather is so lovely, Velazquez is a better painter than Goya, the only space he merits is in the loony bin.

Or else, if Michael Morpurgo’s article in The Times is anything to go by, on yesterday’s anti-Brexit march in Westminster.

Since Mr Morpurgo is a celebrated children’s writer, he knows how to speak to little tots in their own language. Alas, he seems to have forgotten how to speak grown-up.

For grown-ups don’t just shoot from the lip when they talk and especially write. If they reach a conclusion on the basis of the evidence presented, then, before writing, they run at least a rudimentary check to see if the evidence justifies the conclusion.

If the disparity between the two is as vast as in the hypothetical example above, they start again. If they don’t realise the disparity is vast, they are either stupid or mad, and you’ll have to decide which designation applies to Mr Morpurgo.

He starts out by listing nine different ethnic inputs into his own DNA, all of them European. Having thus established his ethnic credentials, he then extrapolates to the royal family, whose origin he traces back to every corner of the continent.

No one will demur at this point: not only Mr Morpurgo and our royal family, but just about everybody can boast multi-ethnic roots. And all white people, wherever they live, are of European descent.

That’s not so much true as a truism, which by itself is a bad sign. But in this case, it’s not by itself.

For, displaying sterling erudition that eight-year-olds would find impressive, Mr Morpurgo then states that ours is “a mongrel language, a magnificent blend, from all over the British Isles and all over Europe”.

Not only that, but “our laws and our early religion have their foundations in Rome, our democracy in Athens. So we do not need a flag or anthem or even a union to be European. We are European. We share Europe’s history, her culture, her learning, her glories and her shames.”

Fine, Britain and all other European countries belong to European culture. Since I knew that when I was indeed eight years old, I yawn but at least I don’t vomit.

Moreover, I agree with Mr Morpurgo, that “we do not need a flag or anthem or even a union to be European”. In other words, if I understand him correctly, we can leave the European Union and still remain European.

But I don’t understand him correctly. Because, in the kind of self-refuting reversal amply covered in psychiatric literature, Mr Morpurgo concludes that we do need “a flag or anthem or even a union” after all. We don’t need the EU to be Europeans, but we do need the EU to be good Europeans.

Because, you see, European nations used to fight like alley cats, but then, one wave of Jean Monnet’s magic wand, and: “in the second half of the 20^th century did this change. We built a tunnel: we joined Europe physically. And we joined Europe politically. We joined for business, for trade deals.”

If business and trade deals require a political umbilical cord, one wonders why we didn’t also join the US and dozens of other faraway countries with which we do profitable trade without dissolving our statehood in theirs.

As to the old chestnut of the EU solely responsible for keeping peace “in the second half of the 20^th century”, it’s mendacious on every conceivable level.

But for NATO and the US nuclear umbrella, the Soviets would have overrun Western Europe the same way they had overrun the eastern half. And, whenever the EU or any of its precursors tried to interfere in regional conflicts, such as in Yugoslavia, they either did nothing to stem the bloodshed or made it worse.

“We either did not realise or we forgot the reason the EU, the European Community, the Common Market, came into existence and who had created it,” continues Morpurgo.

But we haven’t forgotten. However, those of us who have can refresh their memory by reading what one of the EU godfathers, Jean Monnet, wrote on the subject in the 1950s:

“Europe’s nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose but which will irreversibly lead to federation.”

Europeans, in other words, must be duped into believing that the EU serves economic and other worthy causes, while in fact all it pursues is the socialist dream of a single European, eventually world, superstate.

Those British people who are less gullible than Mr Morpurgo, realised that and voted to get out while the getting was good. But he knows exactly why they did so: because the EU isn’t socialist enough.

The EU “seemed unaware how alienated and threatened and resentful so many millions of our citizens were feeling… [because] the divide between those who have and those who have not is shamefully wide in this country and wide all over Europe.”

Now I know dozens of people, all of them conspicuously brighter and better informed  than Mr Morpurgo, who voted Leave not because they felt there were too many rich Europeans, but because they wanted Britain to remain sovereign.

He then displays a firm grasp of political science by explaining that, because some people are richer than others, “at the heart of Europe, democracy is compromised”. However, overcome with agued passion for democracy, Mr Morpurgo wants to ignore the democratic vote of the British people and stay in the EU. That makes sense. 

“I don’t want a divorce,” concludes Mr Morpurgo. “I do not want to be estranged from Europe.”

But he argued at the beginning that we couldn’t be estranged from Europe even if we wanted to. I get terribly confused, but not as much as Mr Morpurgo.

Equating Europe with the EU may work in a kindergarten, but we’re big boys and girls here. Hence we wonder how a writer can disgorge such drivel. And we wonder even more how a formerly respectable paper can print it.