Category: Blog

Yet another car was driven this morning into the security barriers protecting the Houses of Parliament.

Before swerving into the barriers, the driver negotiated a path that took him through a crowd of cyclists, most of whom must be blessed with lightning-quick reflexes and managed to jump out of the way.

Only this can explain why, of the 10 cyclists hit, only two victims ended up in hospital, presumably St Thomas’s just across the river. However, this assumption isn’t entirely safe: knowing how the NHS operates, they might as easily have taken the victims to a hospital in Muswell Hill or Richmond.

The police say their minds are open, which is a good thing – provided their brains don’t fall out. They didn’t specify what it was that their minds were open to, considering that every eyewitness stated unequivocally that the act was deliberate.

Those familiar with the geography of the area will know that there’s so little room in which to swerve at 50 mph that such a manoeuvre couldn’t possibly have  been executed accidentally – especially since the driver was only conning a Ford Fiesta, hardly the most powerful car out there.

Are the officers’ minds open to the perpetrator’s identity? That’s highly unlikely, considering that they arrested him on the spot. Ask him nicely, and he’ll be only too pleased to introduce himself, thereby closing all those inquisitive minds.

However, even if the police know who drove that Fiesta, we don’t, not at the time of writing. We do know the car wasn’t a self-drive vehicle. One newspaper mentioned in passing that the driver was black; the others didn’t volunteer any information at all.

And we still have no inkling why that black gentleman chose to write off his car in such a spectacular fashion. It couldn’t have been insurance fraud because he made no attempt at subterfuge. Nor was it a suicide attempt, for otherwise he could have simply driven the car off the cliff somewhere upcountry.

As always, police reticence under such circumstances leaves the door wide-open for speculation. And here we must decide which great English mind we should look to for inspiration: Bertie Russell or Sherlock Holmes.

Russell believed that, no matter how regularly and for how long the same event has been happening, there’s no guarantee it’ll happen again. The sun may have risen every morning as far back as anyone can remember, he said, but we can’t infer on that basis that it’ll rise again tomorrow morning.

His near contemporary Sherlock Holmes would have disagreed vehemently. Abstractions aside, he’d say, in a world of solving practical problems, when something has always happened for a certain reason, one can confidently predict it’ll happen again and for the same reason.

This morning’s incident at Westminster definitely falls into Mr Holmes’s area of expertise, rather than Prof. Russell’s. And it’s Sherlock Holmes’s practical approach to such matters that can help us come up with a credible hypothesis on the nature of the Fiesta fiasco.

Mr Holmes himself would have had it all figured out before even arriving at the scene. He’d dismiss out of hand as utterly improbable any motive other than vehicular terrorism.

And he’d make a mental note that so far every such incident involved a Muslim perpetrator – including the attack on the same target 17 months ago that left five dead.

Ergo, the great detective would explain to his hapless sidekick, Dr Watson, the black driver of that Fiesta is a Muslim, doing what he did because he’s a Muslim. Elementary. (Speaking today, Holmes would probably say something like “Sor’ed” instead – tempora mutantur, and usually for the worse.)

After an earlier such incident I proposed that every Muslim driver should be made to take a remedial course in keeping the car on the road.

If you want to hit a cyclist, Ahmed, get out of the car – most of us other drivers would cheer you on, what with cyclists tending to be sanctimonious pests. I for one have lost my voice on several occasions, screaming irate obscenities at those road menaces.

And Ahmed? Think twice before driving at full pelt into a concrete and steel barrier: in that crash there can only be one winner. Get yourself a Challenger 2 battle tank if you want to take a security barrier on.

Building on that didactic initiative, I’d suggest every Muslim car owner display on his rear window two stickers: ‘Muslim on board’ and ‘Learner terrorist’.

(I realise that most Muslim drivers aren’t going to use their vehicle for the purpose of terrorism. By the same token, most Rottweilers aren’t going to attack a pedestrian. However, they’re all muzzled in the street just the same: better safe than sorry, what?)

You may think that two such messages would be redundant, and either one would do the same job because they are interchangeable.

Well, this is up for discussion. My mind is open too, even though I’m not a cop.

As a fellow socialist, nay Marxist, nay Trotskyist, I deplore the vituperative attacks on my friend Jeremy in every conceivable medium.

Accusing Jeremy of anti-Semitism is like accusing his girlfriend Diane Abbott of being fat… or is it a wrong simile?

Must be, for she’s indeed fat, while Jeremy doesn’t have an anti-Semitic bone in his body. My writing is getting sloppy in my dotage.

Anyway, you know what I mean. Not an anti-Semitic bone in his body – that’s exactly what Jeremy said in reply to my question when I rang him last night.

“Listen, Comrade, those hyenas of journalism, those hirelings of world capital and specifically of the City and Wall Street don’t even understand the words they use,” complained Jeremy.

“First they run all those ridiculous, if true, stories about my support for the Palestinians’ just cause.

“Then they publish photographs of my kissing and hugging dozens of freedom fighters from the PLO, Hamas or what have you – and then they have the stupidity and gall to say I’m an anti-Semite.

“I looked it up: Arabs are Semites. Right, Comrade? I love Arabs, so how does that make me an anti-Semite? I’m a philo-Semite if anything.”

“Well, that’s not quite what those hangers-on, renegades and lackeys mean,” I interjected gently. “They mean you hate Jews.”

“Hate Jews?” Jeremy sounded genuinely surprised. “Nothing can be further from the truth. Why, some of my best friends are ki… I mean Christ-killers.”

“Of course, Jeremy, of course. I know that, you know that, but those pawns in the hands of world capital don’t know it.

“They keep banging on about Tunis,” I explained, “that wreath you laid in 2014 at the tomb of those terrorists who tortured and slaughtered 11 Israeli athletes in Munich…”

“Terrorists? Et tu, Boot? Freedom bloody fighters, not terrorists, Comrade. And anyway, I just dropped a wreath at that tomb on my way to another tomb, of those PLO hero-martyrs killed by Israeli imperialist colonialists in an air strike.”

“Yes, Jeremy, but those media stooges to the Jewish conspiracy will say that the PLO was terrorist too…”

“Are you kidding me, Comrade? That’s like describing as terrorists those fighters for the liberation of Ireland from British imperialism and colonialism.”

“Yes, Jeremy, but the Jews…”

“Don’t talk to me about the Yids, Comrade,” objected Jeremy rather forcefully. “I love them and all, but sometimes they get too uppity for words. First, they genocide millions of Palestinians…”

“Are you sure about that number, Jeremy?” Sometimes my pedantic side is hard to contain.

“Millions, Comrade! They’re worse than the Nazis! And then they moan about those 11 athletes. In the general scheme of things, what’s 11 athletes more or less?

“Those Israeli Jewboys whinge they’ve been at war non-stop for 70 years, and then they bitch about 11 casualties. They’re just sore losers, if you ask me. When you chop wood, chips will fly, as Trotsky said.”

“Do me a favour, Jeremy,” I pleaded. “Quote someone else from now on, until after the next general election at least. Those jackals of Fleet Street will eat you alive…”

“Jews’ flunkeys, every one of them,” interrupted Jeremy. “Not that I have anything against Jews.”

“Of course not,” I agreed hastily. “But listen, Jeremy, I’ll be in London around the second week in September. Perhaps we could grab a beer and talk about your PR?”

“Can’t do that week, Comrade. I’ll be in Saudi then, laying a wreath at the memorial to those 19 heroes of 9/11. Maybe later in the month.”

“Fine, Jeremy, later in the month it is,” I said. “But until then, take it easy, will you, for Marx’s sake? Keep shtum about the Jews, Hamas, the Holocaust…”

“The what?”

“Well, you know, the Holocaust. It did happen, didn’t it?”

“No, it didn’t,” said my friend Jeremy firmly. “But it will.”

There’s no difference between wearing a burqa or a crucifix. Both should be defended, says Ruth Davidson, reinforcing thereby her claim to future Tory leadership.

This airtight analogy was drawn in the midst of the knock-down, drag-out controversy I wrote about the other day: that nasty Boris Johnson sounding dismissive about the burqa, though stopping short of calling for a ban.

That is, when I wrote about that I didn’t realise there would be so much brouhaha about it. But the madness is now upon us, complete with calls for Johnson to be investigated, though not yet stoned or mutilated.

Fair enough, the opportunity was too good to miss. By castigating Mr Johnson and upholding multi-culti virtue, politicians can tick all the rubrics essential for a front-bench career.

Ruth’s ticks, however, are bigger and fatter than anyone else’s. Thus spake our PM a couple of elections down the road – and certainly the Conservative leader in the near future.

Miss Davidson’s credentials are unassailable.

First, she’s a shrewd political operator, which she demonstrated in 2016 by making the Tories the second-largest party in Scotland.

For Tories to come in ahead of Labour in Scotland is like a neo-Nazi party coming in ahead of Labour in Israel. So that electoral coup must have caught the eye of Tory mandarins and other fruits.

Then Miss Davidson is a member of four (!) oppressed minorities. A membership in at least one now provides a strong boost to a political career, and is well on its way to becoming an ironclad requirement.

First, Miss Davidson is a Scot and therefore a long-suffering victim of brutal English colonialism, as conclusively proved by any number of Hollywood films, all starring Mel Gibson.

Second, she’s a woman, which group is both oppressed and a minority – in the existential sense that transcends arithmetic. And women deserve political prominence as compensation for millennia of abject subjugation.

This isn’t specific to the UK. The American Republican Party, for example, has proudly announced its intention to nominate women as at least half of their congressional candidates. ‘Irrespective of any other qualifications’ was the implicit yet inevitable refrain.

Third, Miss Davison is a lesbian, who’s currently having an IVF baby with another woman. And if sexual deviancy can’t earn a person a place on the modern political Olympus, I don’t know what can. That too is fast approaching the status of a necessary (and sufficient?) job qualification.

In fact, I’m hereby starting a campaign to replace the outdated aphorism ‘divide and rule’ (divide et impera) with ‘deviate and rule’ (deviat et impera).

Fourth, Miss Davidson goes even further by belonging to an oppressed minority within an oppressed minority – and I know you’ll find this as surprising as I did a few days ago.

My eye opener came in a morning issue of Sky News, which featured in one of its top segments a lesbian woman complaining bitterly of the ‘T’ in the LGBT pushing the ‘L’ to an inferior status.

I’m a lesbian, explained the interviewee, meaning I’m a woman who likes other women. Those bloody ‘Ts’, however, aren’t real women but, because they capture public imagination to such a degree, they impose their own agenda on the ‘Ls’, depriving them of their God-given freedom of speech.

I’m not sure I followed every argument but, as a progressivist of long standing, I wholeheartedly agreed that the plight of lesbians within the LGBT ‘community’ qualifies them as a martyred minority.

Given her membership in four oppressed minorities, I’m surprised Miss Davidson felt the need to beef up her CV, but beef it up she did.

These days any candidate aspiring to lead our true-blue Conservatives must demonstrate total ignorance of (and ideally contempt for) British history, civilisation, culture and – most critical – constitution.

By equating the Cross and the burqa, Miss Davidson succeeded in doing just that, which turns her candidature into an unstoppable juggernaut. And this vehicle is further souped up by her general ignorance.

As Boris Johnson and that Oxford imam, whose name escapes me, correctly stated, the burqa has no scriptural justification in Islam. Therefore it’s not a religious symbol, but an ethnic and cultural one.

The Cross, however, isn’t just any old religious symbol, but one in whose name our civilisation was created. This isn’t an expression of faith but simply a statement of historical truth.

The Cross, furthermore, was the inspiration behind every successful effort to stop Islamic aggression in Europe, perpetrated by the very people who then decided to hide their womenfolk behind hideous garments.

Do the dates 732, 1571 and 1683 mean anything to Miss Davidson? I suspect not, which is most unfortunate.

Granted, Miss Davidson is entitled to her own opinions and her own faith – but she isn’t entitled to her own facts.

She is, however, entitled to ignorance, especially of the religious foundations of the West and hence Britain. But it wouldn’t hurt a professional politician to know the kind of basic information about the British political system that goes (or should go) into the citizenship test.

One datum that seems to have gone by Miss Davidson is that Britain is a monarchy and the Queen is its head of state. A related datum is that in Britain the church isn’t separated from the state, as it is, say, in the USA or France.

The existence of an established church makes Britain a Christian commonwealth not just historically and culturally, but statutorily. This was re-confirmed 64 years ago, during the coronation ceremony of Her Majesty, as this exchange shows:

“Archbishop. Will you to the utmost of your power maintain the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel? Will you to the utmost of your power maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law?…”

Queen. All this I promise to do.”

Miss Davidson may bemoan the fact that Britain is a Christian commonwealth rather than a Muslim caliphate (where she’d probably be tossed off a tall building, but that’s beside the point), but that is indeed a fact.

In view of that fact, equating the Cross with the burqa makes Miss Davidson an ignorant, cynical opportunist. And an ideal candidate for Tory leadership.

Putin is incandescent. There he was, thinking Don loved him – and now this. The Yanks call this a ‘sliding scale of pressure’.

Having scrutinised the evidence provided by Britain, the United States concluded that it was the Russians who used military-grade chemical weapons to poison the Skripals.

And, while they were at it, most of the rest of Salisbury as well.

Vlad had to ring friend Don direct, use a few choice expressions highlighting the loose sexuality of Don’s mother and ask him what the hell was going on.

At first friend Don whimpered and grovelled, but then he blew his top. “For crying out loud, Vlad,” he shouted, “they shoved the goddamn evidence under my nose! What was I supposed to do, disband Congress? Fire the whole damn State Department? Gimme a break, for Chrissake!”

He had a point. The good news was announced some 90 days ago, at which point the button was pushed for the statutory 60-day countdown before new sanctions had to be imposed.

To give credit to Don, Vlad has to admit begrudgingly that he did all he could to delay the sanctions. The trouble is, the Main Adversary’s government is set up in such a stupid, incomprehensible way that the president can only do so much.

‘So much’ in this case turned out to be just a paltry 30 days’ delay before the sanctions were announced, and another fortnight or so before they’ll go into effect. Every little bit helps and all that, but this bit is just too little for words.

Now the Russian economy will edge even closer to being well and truly buggered, thinks Vlad. Normally that wouldn’t bother him all that much, what with those Panama cellos stuffed with laundered cash still playing a merry tune.

But this time the Main Adversary has sanctioned the export of the kind of electronics and avionics that Russia simply can’t produce herself. How’s Vlad supposed to target his ICBMs without those gadgets? And how’s he supposed to scare the living bejeesus out of the Main Adversary without his ICBMs?

Let’s face it, the Russian economy only has three sectors, thinks Vlad, and they’re like the three legs of a tripod: knock one out and the whole shebang goes down.

First, there’s the pipe through which oil flows westwards, and dollars flow back. Second, there’s the giant laundry through which the dollars are diverted into private accounts in godforsaken places like Panama. And third, there’s the ICBMs reminding the Main Adversary not to get too bloody sanctimonious about this cozy arrangement.

Turning the US into radioactive ash and creating the Atlantic Strait between Canada and Mexico – the threat has been communicated to the Main Adversary thousands of times and in no uncertain terms. And still they play silly buggers!

And that damn scale could slide even higher if Vlad doesn’t let a swarm of Yank spies into the country, to inspect the relevant branch of Russia’s chemical industry. Within 30 days!

Give him a year, and all those novichok factories will look like fertiliser plants – compared to Vlad, Potemkin with his villages was a bungling amateur. But a month is just plain ridiculous.

Call this friendship Don? After all that Vlad did for you, you ungrateful twerp! Whatever next?

Actually, Vlad has a pretty good idea of what could come next. The menu for the next batch of sanctions includes such Russophobe atrocities as:

A ban on US banks providing credits to Russia; the US voting against any international banks providing such credits; a ban on the export of all American goods; reducing the level of diplomatic relations or discontinuing them altogether; banning state-controlled airlines, such as Aeroflot.

And if you think that’s bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet, thinks Vlad. There’s this bipartisan bill going through Congress about sanctioning Russia for meddling in US elections.

That’s what one gets for giving a little helping hand to a friend, moans Vlad. As if there’s something wrong with friendship. Well, there’s plenty wrong with the proposed sanctions.

The Yanks are talking about new sanctions against Vlad’s accompl…, no, he means friends; a ban on US participation in Russia’s energy-related projects; investigation of Russia’s sponsoring of terrorism.

And – here Vlad swallows so hard that his Botoxed cheeks almost burst open – they’ll examine Vlad’s assets and overall wealth! There’s nothing sacred for the Main Adversary.

So what if a successful man puts away the odd hundred billion for a rainy day? The Yanks like to talk about property rights, so what business is it of theirs how Vlad takes care of his retirement? What about his property rights?

Vlad’s face hardens, and his eyes narrow down to slits. He doesn’t give a flying buck about all the rest of it or, even if he does, he could just about live with it. But this last thing?

That’s like relieving yourself at the altar of Christ the Saviour, sacrilege to end all sacrileges. Worse than Vlad’s idol Stalin blowing up the original cathedral back in 1931.

Time to tell friend Don to get his finger out and bloody well do something about that. If he doesn’t, Vlad will lower the boom on friend Don so fast he’ll end up a little puddle on the floor.

Friends, thinks Vlad bitterly. A man can never count on them in this world. Oh, the good old days…

Using accurate similes is a stylistic and therefore moral imperative. Using wrong ones is confusing, misleading and therefore indefensible.

That’s why I think Mr Johnson ought to apologise for claiming that burqa-wearing women look like ‘letter boxes’ and ‘bank robbers’. His similes were inexact.

I haven’t seen many black letter boxes around, while burqas are usually black. And bank robbers may cover their faces, but not necessarily with black stockings or masks. Nor do they always wear black over the rest of their bodies.

Burqas look more like Halloween costumes designed to scare passers-by out of their wits, and in fact I once asked a group of women thus clad if Halloween came early that year. The exchange took place in Hyde Park at midday, and I felt reasonably safe with so many people around.

Otherwise I could have been in trouble, especially if one of the Aishas carrying Gucci handbags had turned out to be an Abdul carrying an AK under his garment.

Avian similes could also have worked much better. At certain camera angles, for example, penguins look remarkably like burqa-clad persons (I’m not being sex-specific on purpose: we have no way of knowing if the garment conceals a fourth wife of a visiting sheik or a runaway male terrorist).

Also crows and starlings have a fair claim to looking just like one of those persons. Admittedly those birds fly and black-clad persons don’t – unless of course the bomb goes off prematurely. But hey, I’m not claiming a perfect simile, only one that’s better than Mr Johnson’s.

To sum it up, I agree with Mrs May, who demanded that Mr Johnson apologise for his inaccurate use of similes… Hold on a second. My wife has just looked over my shoulder and said I got it wrong.

That is, Mrs May did demand that Mr Johnson apologise, but not for a stylistic solecism. What she thought called for public contrition was that his remarks had “clearly caused offence”, presumably to the Muslim ‘community’.

Granted, said ‘community’ is notoriously sensitive about any disparagement of its customs, such as making women cover up head to toe, polygamy, forced marriages, stoning of adulterers, FGM, blowing up public transport or flying airliners into tall buildings.

Now heaven forbid we’d want to offend anybody, gratuitously or otherwise. Civilised people don’t insult one another, unless they are very young and/or very drunk.

Being old and, for the moment at least, stone sober, I wholeheartedly subscribe to that sentiment. However, ‘one another’ are the operative words there.

They communicate reciprocity: we don’t offend Muslims and in return they don’t offend us. Alas, one has to note with chagrin that the Muslim ‘community’ hasn’t exactly kept its end of the bargain.

I’m sure I’m not just speaking for myself when saying that I’m offended every time yet another atrocity is committed by chaps screaming “Allahu akbar!”.

Call me oversensitive, but yes, I’m offended when bombs rip apart passengers on London buses and underground. When knives are stuck into the bodies of my countrymen. When heavy vehicles are driven through crowds, with body parts flying in every direction.

The only thing that mitigates the offence is that those causing it usually die in the process. But there’s no mitigation to the offence of watching whole Muslim ‘communities’ dancing with ecstatic joy in their thousands every time one of those massacres is committed.

A milder offence, but an offence nonetheless, is caused by those ‘communities’ refusing to adapt to the mores of their host country, instead trying to impose their own.

Another offence, less mild this time, is the sight of signs saying “This area is governed by Sharia”. One country, one legal system, my friends, and, one hopes, it’s not going to be Sharia any day soon.

It also offends me deeply to read about Muslim children in places like Bradford who don’t even realise Britain isn’t a Muslim country. How would they if all the tots see around them are Muslims, if they listen to nothing but Muslim radio and watch nothing but Muslim TV, if they’re taught in schools where the Koran makes up the bulk of the curriculum?

Another affront is to see thousands of mosques in Britain, while there isn’t a single church in Saudi Arabia, where you can be arrested for bringing a Bible into the country. It’s that reciprocity again.

The nature of worship in many of those mosques offends me even more, with wild-eyed mullahs preaching hatred for everything I love and openly promoting jihad – against everyone I love.

And yes, now we’re talking offences, I am offended by the sight of those black-clad creatures making our streets look like a Kasbah somewhere in Sudan. I have nothing against Kasbahs, you understand – provided they are indeed in Sudan (and not, for example, in the reception area of every private hospital I know in London).

To his credit, Mr Johnson refused to apologise. To his discredit, he tried to explain himself by steering the discussion away from where it should be.

Full-face veils shouldn’t be banned, he said, but it’s ridiculous that people should choose to wear them.

This misses the point altogether. First, many women don’t choose to wear the burqa. The choice is made for them by their devout, which is to say violent, brothers, fathers and husbands – by the whole suffocating ethos thrust down their throats so deep it can’t be spat out.

And why not ban such veils? The idea lacks novelty appeal: 13 countries have already done so, among them those not known for their reactionary social policies: Denmark, Belgium, France, Austria.

In our civilisation, imperfect as it may be, people hide their faces in two situations only: at a fancy-dress ball or if they’re up to no good. Apart from aesthetics, there are legal concerns here, those I touched upon facetiously earlier: our authorities are entitled to see and identify the faces of people inhabiting our cities.

Moreover, in our civilisation women aren’t treated as men’s chattels, which is the attitude behind the veil. All men are entitled to see the faces of all women – this privilege isn’t reserved for the woman’s husband or next of kin.

Another irrelevant point Mr Johnson made is that there’s no scriptural authority for the burqa in Islam. True enough, the garment isn’t mentioned in the Koran.

But it’s not his remit, nor mine, to uphold the scriptural purity of Islam. Whether Muslims do what they do because the Koran says so, or because their culture dictates it is immaterial.

What’s important is that they do things that are clearly incompatible with our culture, one it would offend me to lose.

As a life-long champion of progressive causes, I’m appalled at the gross miscarriage of justice perpetrated in Oklahoma.

It’s clear that the light of equal rights for everyone and everything hasn’t yet shone on that American backwater. Those hicks from the sticks still hold antediluvian views on alternative lifestyles – and they act on those views with troglodyte savagery.

Just witness the latest violation of human and animal rights making the news in that reactionary part of the world.

A naked man was… hold on a second, let me wait for my blood pressure to return to normal… Yes, that poor naked man was brutally arrested for having consensual and mutually satisfying sex with a miniature pony.

Arrested! For practising an alternative lifestyle! In a supposedly civilised country! Sorry, I’m going to run out of exclamation marks, I’m so worked up.

And the most worrying aspect of this gross violation of everything progressive humanity holds dear is that the victim had to come up with excuses for doing what comes naturally to him.

That’s like you having to defend yourself for having sex with your spouse of either sex or both of them.

The poor man had to claim that his action had been caused by the medication he was taking. Apparently there exist drugs that make people mount ponies in more ways than one.

Well, even though no excuses needed to be made, this one is perfectly plausible. A chap takes a pill and ponies up, as it were. All I can say is that the drug obviously wasn’t one of the half-dozen or so I take every morning, for none of them has so far had the same effect.

The victim was charged and held in lieu of a $50,000 bond – this for exercising his natural right to sexual self-expression of any kind. Charged with what? I hear you ask.

As far as I know, the pony was of age, so there’s no question of corrupting the morals of a minor. Since the pony didn’t kick back, nor showed any other signs of displeasure, a charge of rape clearly wouldn’t stick (Harvey Weinstein, ring your office). Neither did the pony suffer any physical damage.

So what’s left? Indecent exposure? Crime against nature?

In fact, the poor man was charged with those very transgressions. How ludicrous is that?

There’s no such thing as indecent exposure any longer, as last week’s Pride weekend in Brighton shows.

Converging on that Regency city (population 229,000) were 300,000 LGBT activists, wearing all sorts of imaginative costumes or none and giving the lucky residents variously explicit and uniformly entertaining demonstrations of their preferences.

Did anyone complain, never mind call the police? Of course not. Brighton residents have the notion of sexual equality so firmly ingrained that they kept their mouths shut (or sometimes agape) and tried to enjoy the show.

Crime against nature is an even more risible charge. Both the defendant and the pony are entitled to receive and give sexual pleasure. No harm to nature ensued, certainly none as compared to global warming caused – as the UN conclusively established – by your aerosol spray.

It was back in 2001 that Peter Singer, Boston professor of bioethics, explained why there’s nothing wrong about sex with animals.

Humans and animals, postulated this ultimate authority on such matters, can have “mutually satisfying” sexual relations because “we are animals, indeed more specifically, we are great apes.” Therefore such sex “ceases to be an offence to our status and dignity as human beings.” Or to the status and dignity of ponies, I feel like adding.

Oklahoma police are guilty of blatant speciesism, which, as far as human rights violations go, ranks with homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia and Brexit. That’s why I’m happy to announce my new initiative, which I hope you’ll support.

Some seven years ago I founded the ‘Charles Martel Society for Multiculturalism’, of which I proudly remain president and so far the only member. The structure of the Society allows for expansion into adjacent areas, which is why I’m adding a new chapter.

Provisionally called ‘The Dog and Pony Show’ (I felt ‘Go the Whole Hog’ or ‘Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks’ would be too limiting), it’ll be dedicated to worldwide struggle against sexual speciesism and for interspecies marriage.

Donations will be gratefully received – so pony up. Let’s put a new ‘B’ into LGBT: bestiality.

So Donald Trump Jr’s 2016 meeting with a Putin lawyer wasn’t just a humanitarian mission after all.

Until now Daddy’s official line has been that Don Jr met Natalia Veselnitskaya to discuss US adoptions of Russian orphans, something Putin’s government banned in response to American sanctions.

Considering that Russian orphanages are death factories, where children are malnourished, maltreated and molested, that countermeasure would strike any civilised person as odd. The underlying message seems to be: “If you don’t let us export our goods, we’ll starve our orphans to death.”

Had Don Jr discussed this moral disaster with Putin’s agents, I’d be full of admiration, only slightly leavened with a dash of incredulity.

There we were, in the middle of a bitterly fought presidential campaign, and the leading candidate’s closest confidant took time off to discuss such worthy issues with agents of a hostile power? Anything is possible, I suppose, but some things are hard to imagine.

Now Don Sr has owned up to what everyone has known all along: his son, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his campaign manager Paul Manafort (currently on trial for his life) met Veselnitskaya because she had promised some juicy dirt on Hillary Clinton.

However, the president didn’t make that admission with contrition. His dominant emotion was anger, especially since various sources had reported that he was concerned about his son’s role.

Those reports were “fake news”, screamed Trump’s tweet. He wasn’t concerned because there was nothing to be concerned about: “This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics – and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!”

This last statement sounds dubious: it’s unlikely that his closest advisers would of their own accord and without informing their boss have met an agent of a foreign power – even if the Trumps didn’t consider that power hostile.

However, being a credulous sort, I’m happy to believe that Donald Sr knew nothing about the meeting, nothing came out of it anyway, and the meeting was “totally legal”.

Similarly, it would have been “totally legal” for Trump’s emissaries to triple-team Natalia in her hotel room and then post the video of the orgy on the Internet. It would, however, have been immoral and, even worse, ill-advised.

Alas, the president’s whole experience of life, especially in business, has taught him that legal is whatever one can get away with, and moral is whatever is legal.

Since I don’t know as much about American legal loopholes as he does, I shan’t venture an opinion on the legality of that meeting of minds, although to my layman’s eye it looks dodgy. But what Trump’s lads did was much more immoral than my imaginary orgy scenario would have been.

Yes, trying to get compromising material on a political opponent is a practice as old as politics itself.

Some might question its probity but, come on chaps, we live in the real world, don’t we? Objecting to this practice in principle is like objecting to tax avoidance: might as well take issue with the wind and the rain.

The problem here isn’t what the lads tried to get but from whom they tried to get it. Allow me to illustrate with a hypothetical example even Putin’s most devoted fans won’t find contentious.

Suppose for the sake of argument that Don Jr was contacted not by Veselnitskaya but by the godfather of a major Mafia family. Let’s call him Don Corleone.

When they met, Don Corleone said to Don Jr: “You’re a good boy, Donny, your father must be proud of you. And is this pezzonavante your consiglieri? Heard a lot about you, Paul. Now I got stuff on Hillary to make your eyes water. But what have you got for me? One hand washes the other, capisci?”

Suppose further that the fact and the nature of the meeting were leaked after Donald Sr became president. What would be his response then?

That there was nothing illegal about that get-together? That the promise of dirt didn’t materialise?

How many people would have believed that Don Corleone’s proposed generosity to Don Jr had no quid pro quo involved? The dirt would have been on the president, covering him head to toe – this even if everything he said about the meeting were true.

Now, any Mafia family is a Rotary Club chapter compared to the Kremlin kleptocracy. Practically the whole Russian economy is criminalised, with Putin and his gang collecting protection money in trillions of dollars.

Whatever loot is left over from buying palaces and yachts, and stuffing Panama cellos with laundered cash goes to wage worldwide electronic war against the West, especially the United States. As we speak, the US government is trying to stop Russia’s meddling in the mid-term elections.

Even if some useful idiots deny the aggressively hostile nature of Putin’s kleptofascist regime, only those refreshingly ignorant of basic facts will deny its organic fusion with organised crime.

Natalia Veselnitskaya is a faithful servant and paid agent of that regime, whose principal function until then had been trying to get the Magnitsky Law overturned. And neither organised crime nor the KGB (FSB/SVR is its current moniker) offers anything for free.

If Veselnitskaya dangled the dirty carrot of information in front of Don Jr’s eyes, she was pursuing the interests of the Kremlin kleptofascist gang that thought – however wrongly – that Trump’s victory would also be theirs.

Accepting the best possible scenario, that no useful dirt materialised and, whatever did, had no effect on the elections, that meeting was still revoltingly immoral.

Illegal? Probably not. But President Trump ought to realise that his new job comes with higher moral expectations than his old one, building casinos in Atlantic City.

Do Jeremy Corbyn and his jolly Labour friends really hate Jews? An interesting question, that. And probably an irrelevant one.

This in spite of the seemingly never-ending anti-Semitic scandals livening up the Labour Party at every level, from the grassroots to the shadow cabinet.

I’d guess that the proportion of principled anti-Semites among socialists has to be higher than among conservatives, which isn’t to say that the latter are free of blame in that respect.

Socialism is a religion of envy and it can only ever emerge victorious by appealing to that unenviable emotion. And envy needs targets – it’s impossible to envy in the abstract.

Jews are natural candidates for that role, canonised as such by the founding texts of modern socialism produced by its apostles, Marx and Engels, both rank anti-Semites. The two chaps used the words ‘Jew’ and ‘bourgeois’ almost interchangeably – a Jew was to them a bourgeois even if poor; a bourgeois implicitly a Jew even if gentile.

Because Jews place a stronger emphasis on learning than just about any other ethnic group, and a weaker emphasis on drinking and debauchery, they tend to be more economically successful on average. Thus hating them comes naturally to socialists, who can build a tower of class envy on the traditional foundations of religious enmity.

It’s amusing to hear gentile atheists refer to Jewish atheists as ‘Christ killers’. The former don’t care about Christ any more than the latter care about the religion in whose name Christ was condemned. But the aforementioned tower wouldn’t stand without its historical foundations.

This isn’t the most attractive example of modernity developing and modifying traditional values, but a telling example nonetheless.

I realise that I’m oversimplifying a complex phenomenon, but my aim here isn’t to analyse the historical and psychological roots of anti-Semitism in any great depth – not that I’m certain I’d be able to do so even if this were my aim.

I’ve read a few books on the subject, and none of them quite succeeds. For there’s more to anti-Semitism than just class envy or “poor man’s snobbery”, as Sartre described it.

Otherwise it would be hard to explain upper-class anti-Semites, such as the Duke of Windsor, Oswald Mosley and practically the whole Cliveden set. Or, crossing the Atlantic, neither Henry Ford nor J.P. Morgan, both anti-Semites, had a compelling reason to envy Jewish wealth.

Be that as it may, my aim is more modest: trying to understand not the nature of anti-Semitism within Labour, but why such sentiments have come to the surface. Homo politicus, after all, is a peculiar animal, brought into this world for one purpose only: winning elections.

Corbyn may be an anti-Semite of Nazi proportions, but he wouldn’t let it show, and neither would he fail to impose a gagging party discipline on other anti-Semites within Labour ranks, if he felt that expressing overt anti-Semitism hurt his electoral chances.

Even the zoological anti-Semites among the Labour high command would have been told to put a sock in it and desist from comparing Netanyahu to Hitler – even if they felt strongly in their hearts, as Corbyn manifestly does, that the comparison was justified. Let’s win the general election first, lads, would be the message. Then and only then can you have a go at those Jewish Nazis.

The reason the scandals were allowed to develop and enter the public domain has to do with one discipline only, and it’s not history, philosophy, religion or psychology. It’s arithmetic.

There are about 3,000,000 Muslims in the UK, and the number is growing. There are about 250,000 Jews, and the number is dwindling. Subtract the second number from the first, and you’ll get 2,750,000 reasons for overt Labour anti-Semitism.

Labour in its present form has to harvest votes at the margins of the electorate. I never overestimate the intelligence of the average voter, but I still doubt that, for example, Corbyn’s economic ideas will get him many mainstream votes.

Nationalise everything possible, soak the rich with high taxes, give more power to the unions, print and borrow even more billions – such time-honoured ideas have too rotten a track record to have enough mass appeal for Labour to get into government.

You and I aren’t going to vote for them no matter how disappointed or even disgusted we are with the Tories. Such feelings made me vote UKIP at the latest election, but the thought of voting Labour never even crossed my mind.

So which large blocs will vote Labour? Certainly the déclassé welfare recipients, those who favour printing or borrowing billions to beef up the social budget. Probably most ethnic minorities, with the possible and partial exception of the British Indians. Readers of The Guardian (circulation 148,169). The leftie lunatic fringe. Union activists. State employees who have a vested interest in the big state.

And definitely the Muslims, who lap up the anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic noises being made by Labour. The Muslim vote may well prove as decisive nationally as it did in the London 2016 mayoral election.

For this vote isn’t spread evenly throughout the country. In many constituencies, especially in the northern half of Britain, it’s dominant, and these may well be regarded by Labour pollsters as swing groups.

Tory pollsters realise this as well, which may be one reason Home Secretary Sajid Javid is widely mooted as Mrs May’s likely successor. This son of Pakistani immigrants just may syphon off some of the Muslim vote, even though Mr Javid is no anti-Semite or Israel-hater.

Alas, most Muslims in the UK are, and it’s for their votes that Corbyn has uncapped the well of Labour anti-Semitism. This stratagem may or may not come from the heart, but it definitely comes from dispassionate calculations.

It’s the arithmetic, stupid, to paraphrase James Carville, Bill Clinton’s strategist. He actually said ‘the economy’, but Corbyn doesn’t have that option.

In the 1960s, the West underwent a moral catharsis, as a result of which the death penalty was abolished in most places.

One might find it hard to understand why morality peaked at that particular time, in the middle of a century during which more people died violent deaths than in all the previous centuries combined.

After all, before people began to kill one another on an industrial scale, and when society and community were more than just figures of speech, the moral validity of the death penalty was never in doubt.

It was understood that murder sent shock waves throughout the community, and the amplitude of those destructive waves could be attenuated only by a punishment commensurate with the crime.

That’s one salient point in favour of the death penalty; deterrence is another. Many commentators dispute the deterrent value of the death penalty, counterintuitive as it sounds.

But even they would agree that it undoubtedly deters the executed criminal. He won’t come out of prison and kill again, which nowadays happens with every-increasing regularity.

Some arguments against the death penalty do make sense. Such as that condemning an innocent man to death leaves no room for correcting the error.

That’s true, although, unlike Stalin’s Russia, civilised countries don’t execute criminals directly the verdict is announced.

In the US, for example, criminals may spend years, sometimes decades, on death row. That strikes me as sufficient time to get to the bottom of the case.

Still, no system of justice is 100 per cent reliable, and innocent men still may be executed. However, my first instinct would be to improve a malfunctioning system, rather than abandon it altogether.

Hence I’d give serious consideration to tightening the required standard of proof in the sentencing stage, when the death penalty is possible – for example, by replacing ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ with ‘beyond all doubt”.

Another interesting argument highlights the moral effect of the death penalty on the executioner. “You wouldn’t invite him to dinner, would you?” I’m often asked. My usual reply is that neither would I invite a sewer cleaner, but sewers still need to be cleaned.

Such discussions may be interesting because neither interlocutor would have reason to believe that only a fool or a knave would disagree with him. Thus a serious debate is possible – unlike, for example, on the issue of abortion or euthanasia.

Arguments in favour of those simply don’t hold water, and those who put them forth can’t be taken seriously.

The issue of the death penalty is different – in a secular context. However, in a Christian context, doctrine on this issue was established centuries ago, starting from Scripture itself.

That’s why I was surprised to read that Pope Francis has declared the death penalty “inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person”.

There now exists, he added, “an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes”.

It’s much better, according to His Holiness, to imprison a criminal for a long time because this doesn’t “definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption”.

Whenever senior church figures make such pronouncements nowadays, I smell a rat, and not just because they go against principles established long ago and happily accepted by great men for centuries. What makes me suspicious is why such statements are made.

The Pope’s language invites such suspicions. ‘Increasing awareness’ among whom exactly? Among serious theologians? Or among those who keep afloat such newspapers as The New York Times, The Guardian and Le Monde?

More and more, rather than leading the masses to salvation, various denominations, including the Catholic Church, kowtow to secular opinion, no matter how puerile and immoral.

The Church should tell the people what’s moral, not be told by them. How long before a Catholic priest officiates a homomarriage, one wonders? Other confessions are already doing it.

And what does ‘the dignity of a person’ have to do with anything? A criminal is punished not for any deficit of dignity but for murder or some such. As anyone who has read Charles I’s scaffold speech will know, it’s possible for a condemned man to go to his death with his dignity intact.

As to ‘the possibility of redemption’, what does the word mean? In a Christian context it usually refers to deliverance from sin and subsequent salvation of the soul. Any believer, and certainly a prelate, ought to know that death, however it occurs, doesn’t ‘definitively deprive’ anyone of this possibility.

Taking a stab in the dark with no statistical evidence close at hand, I’d guess that most opponents of the death penalty in the West are atheists, to whom death is final and irreversible.

Christians, on the other hand, believe that, just as there’s death in life, there’s life in death. And in that life redemption is always possible. Understanding the word as commuting the death sentence to, say, life imprisonment strikes me as a tad vulgar – for a Christian.

It has to be said that many modern Popes found the death penalty abhorrent – none more so than Benedict XVI. His Holiness expressed such views even when he was still His Eminence. But he didn’t go so far as to declare the death penalty ‘inadmissible’ in all circumstances.

To wit: “There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia.”

That ‘legitimate diversity’ is now off-limits for Catholics because Pope Francis has changed the catechism to make the capital punishment ‘inadmissible’. The debate is closed, with the door slammed in the face of prudence, wisdom – and tradition.

The tradition didn’t develop by itself. It’s a long, meandering road signposted by scriptural sources and their great interpreters. Looking at two of the greatest, St Augustine of Hippo and St Thomas Aquinas, neither reached the high moral ground apparently occupied by Pope Francis.

Thus Augustine writes in his City of God: “The agent who executes the killing does not commit homicide; he is an instrument as is the sword with which he cuts. Therefore, it is in no way contrary to the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill’ to wage war at God’s bidding, or for the representatives of public authority to put criminals to death, according to the law, that is, the will of the most just reason.”

Aquinas is as unequivocal in his Summa: “The life of certain pestiferous men is an impediment to the common good which is the concord of human society. Therefore, certain men must be removed by death from the society of men.”

And, just as Aquinas pre-empted most (though not all) theological arguments, he pre-empted Pope Francis’s facile statement about redemption. If the murderer didn’t repent when killing his victim, he’ll probably never repent: “How many people are we to allow to be murdered while waiting for the repentance of the wrongdoer?”, asks St Thomas.

Pope Francis evidently doesn’t trouble himself with such questions. That leads some to ask literally a question that’s often posed figuratively: Is the Pope Catholic?

Flashback: the year is 1990. Britain, still without a firm EU hand on the tiller, resembles a rudderless ship cast adrift in rough waters.

Here I am, my hands, still as firm as the EU’s hands are now, are on the steering wheel of our Audi (I think that’s what I drove then), achieving a feat few now believe would have been possible in the pre-EU days: motoring through Europe.

On that particular run I established a personal best, which I’m unlikely ever to repeat, much less better: driving through seven countries in one day.

Italy, Switzerland, Germany, France, Luxembourg, Belgium and Holland all flashed by… I almost said ‘without a stop’, but that’s not quite accurate. We did stop for lunch in France and for petrol in Luxembourg.

But no one stopped us at any of the border crossings. In fact, when we missed a ‘Welcome to [insert country name]’ sign, only the language of the road signs made us realise we were in a different country.

I remember us saying that the order to turn on the lights at the entrance to a tunnel sounded so much better in Italian than in German.

Comparing Accendere le luce with Achtung! Lichten! tells you all you need to know about the two national characters. The Italian version sounds like a line from a Donizetti opera, whereas the German equivalent evokes a film where a black-clad Gestapo man says: “Ve’ve got vays to make you talk.”

This fond recollection was brought on not by a pang of nostalgia, but by Sky News. This network, in common with its elder brother, the BBC, is committed to drawing in lurid strokes the macabre, dystopic future awaiting us all when (or if) Brexit comes into effect.

To that end the station keeps running snippets of young Britons expressing heart-felt concerns about life in that hopeless future. One such concern is repeated over and over: “How will we be able to travel in Europe a year from now?”

Now the important thing to understand about our young is that they live outside history.

History to them is what happened last Saturday when they went on that pub crawl; the dial is reset in every generation. “It was before my time” is seen as a sufficient excuse for boneheaded ignorance.

Hence they either don’t know or don’t care that British tourists somehow managed to crisscross Europe when the EU wasn’t even a twinkle in anyone’s eye.

The twinkle was already sparkling in 1990, but we can go a bit further back, can’t we? For example, in 1860 a well-known thoroughfare in Nice was named the Promenade des Anglais. I don’t think this name suggests that les Anglais couldn’t travel there, do you?

Not just Nice, but also Biarritz. Not just France, but also Italy, Spain, Greece, Switzerland, Germany all heard their native languages spoken with English accents throughout history.

And what do you know? Britain didn’t have to belong to any supranational monstrosity for Britons to go to San-Sebastian or Paris.

And it’s not just tourists. In the pre-EU days we spent several holidays in Tuscany, not far from Arezzo. A mile down the road from us was the house where the British novelist Muriel Spark was spending her later years. How was that possible, I hear those youngsters ask.

And such areas as the Dordogne, Costa del Sol, Brittany, Algarve, Tuscany and Côte-d’Azur were colonised by British retirees long before John Major put his signature on that treasonous treaty.

But hold on a second, says Sky News. Only 20 per cent of Britons living on the continent are retired wrinklies. Most of the expats are young, thrusting people who earn their crust there. Surely they’ll get the dirty end of the stick?

In reply, please allow me to get personal again. My wife Penelope lived in France for 10 years, from age 17, when she entered the Paris Conservatoire, got her degree (like the French students, she paid no tuition fees) and then pursued her concert career from the Paris base. I don’t want to date her, but it was long before 1992.

Though Penelope preferred to live in a monoglot French environment, she regularly bumped into fellow expats working in France. My own recollections are more recent but, when I was still in the advertising business, many of my colleagues had done stints of several years in French, Italian and German agencies – when the EU still went by its maiden name, the EEC.

So my reply to all the inane questions asked by those historically challenged youngsters (“How will we be able to [insert activity]?) is simple. Exactly the way we always did it for centuries before this abominable Leviathan was born.

However, that reply isn’t proffered, nor even mooted, by Sky News, BBC and other mainstream TV channels. Their bias is by itself an answer to another question: “How come TV jobs are only ever advertised in The Guardian, our leftmost broadsheet?”