Category: Blog

As the last two millennia show, Christianity can survive heresy, agnosticism and atheism. I’m not so sure about its ability to resist systematic vulgarisation within itself.

This melancholy thought was brought on by the poster outside St Martin-in-the-Fields, one of London’s most central churches. “We understand…,” it begins.

The first part of the sentence is dubious theology; the second, pernicious politics. Both are so irredeemably vulgar that I’d almost prefer a message saying that the rector of that venerable institution doubts the existence of God.

Since the poster’s first statement is theological, it can only be discussed in theological terms. Being the supreme science, theology is the epitome of reason in that it’s impeccably logical. Yet the poster takes the ‘logical’ out of ‘theological’.

The cliché of everyone being equal in the eyes of God is the curate’s egg: good in parts. But those parts are much smaller than those where it’s wrong.

Is one to assume that, say, Adolf Hitler and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (the pastor killed in a Nazi concentration camp) are equal in the eyes of God? Or, say, Lenin and the thousands of priests murdered on his orders? Or St John Newman and Jack the Ripper?

If they were, one would find it hard to justify the Christian doctrine of heaven and hell. Surely God displays the ultimate discrimination by consigning bad people to one destination and good ones to the other? Verily I say unto you, on that evidence alone it’s hard to claim God to egalitarianism.

Equality before God exists to begin with, but it expires some time after a person leaves infancy behind and starts to make free choices between good and evil, virtue and sin, right and wrong.

Mankind’s ability to exercise free will in that fashion is God’s great gift, and one struggles to understand why he’d bother to give it to us if we had nothing to gain from good choices, nor nothing to lose from bad ones.

I don’t know what God’s ledger sheet looks like, but I do know that some people are more good than bad, some the other way around, and some have no discernible good traits at all. To claim equality among them all is tantamount to claiming equality among the choices they’ve made, which strikes me as illogical.

The poster would have been theologically unassailable had it said that God loves us all. But that would only mean ensuing equality if we all loved God in return and tried not to transgress against his commandments too much.

Since that’s demonstrably not the case, the unqualified egalitarian claim collapses – but not as loudly as the second, secular part of the poster about everybody being equal in the eyes of humanity.

What does it even mean? Clearly the chaps who displayed that bunkum hadn’t asked themselves that question before putting pen to paper.

Since, not being myself divine, I can’t vouch for God, I can only rely on prayer, doctrinal sources and my own reasonable conjecture to grasp his feelings. But – and I know some may disagree – I do see myself as fully human.

Moreover, in the course of a long life I’ve met thousands of people who could make the same claim with equal validity. Yet neither I nor anyone I know has ever regarded everybody as equal in our eyes.

Murderers and their victims? Savants and ignoramuses? Geniuses and hacks? Statesmen and spivs? Athletes and weaklings? Hard workers and parasitic idlers? Everywhere we look, people are unequal in our eyes, morally, intellectually, physically – you name it.

None of us can claim equality of outcome. And, since we are all born with different genes and to different families, we can’t even claim equality of opportunity. If at birth we are indeed equal in the eyes of God, we can’t claim even such short-lived equality in the eyes of humanity.

I try – with variable success, it has to be said – using my free will to stay in God’s good graces. But, at 5’7’’, I’ve never had a shot at playing goalie for a Premiership team, and no amount of effort would ever have addressed this glaring inequality.

By the same token, I doubt that any degree of application would enable many Premiership goalies to do what I do, so where’s the equality in that?

In other words, if the first part of the poster is highly debatable, the second part is simply idiotic – and ideologically idiotic at that. But it would be wrong to think the two parts aren’t connected.

The key message, one that the authors really wanted to convey, is the political statement of secular equality. The preceding nod in God’s direction is there merely to add verisimilitude to the subsequent deep bow in the direction of left-wing politics.

I don’t know what sort of liturgy, if any, St Martin-in-the-Fields uses, but I suspect its clergy probably think that 1642 is a PIN code, and I’m sure the female Bishop of London doesn’t mind.

If the Anglican Church used to be called the Tory Party at prayer, it has certainly changed not only its prayers, but also its political allegiance. On the plus side, Anglican churches are emptying so fast that not many parishioners will be affected.

Thank God for small favours.

I’ve taken the liberty to compile into a single article a few quotations from the man whose spirit still animates the European Union.

If you don’t recognise his photograph, try to guess his identity – and no peeking into the last two paragraphs where all is revealed. I’ll give you a clue: the writer inspired not only the EU but also Jeremy Corbyn.

The world economic and political development tends to gravitate toward a unified world economy, with its degree of centralisation dependent upon the existing technological level.

The economic and political unification of Europe is the necessary prerequisite for the very possibility of national self-determination.

On the all-European scale, the principle of the “right” to self-determination can be invested with flesh and blood only under the conditions of a European Federative Republic.

The United States of Europe – without monarchies, standing armies and secret diplomacy – is the most important integral part of the peace programme.

It would truly be a miserable petty-bourgeois utopianism… to think that the fate of development in Europe and the entire world will finally be secured if the state map of Europe is brought into correspondence with the map of nationality, and if Europe is split into more or less complete nation-state cells ignoring geographic conditions and economic ties.

The task is to combine the claims to autonomy on the part of nations with the centralising requirements of economic development.

Europe is not a geographical term; Europe is an economic term, something incomparably more concrete than the world market. Now the time has arrived for stating definitely and clearly that federation is essential for Balkanised Europe.

The national community, arising from the needs of cultural development, will not only not be destroyed by this but, to the contrary, it is only on the basis of a republican federation of the leading countries that it will be able to find its full completion.

Recognition of every nation’s right to self-determination must be supplemented by the slogan of a democratic federation of all the leading nations, by the slogan of a United States of Europe.

The necessary conditions for this presuppose emancipation of the limits of the nation from those of the economy and vice versa. The economy will be organised in the broad arena of a European United States as the core of a worldwide organisation. The political form can only be a republican federation, within whose flexible and elastic bounds every nation will be able to develop its cultural forces with the greatest freedom.

The capitalist forces of production had outgrown the framework of European national states.

What is perfectly obvious is that the customs barriers must be thrown down. The peoples of Europe must regard Europe as a field for a unified and increasingly planned economic life.

Germany had set herself the task of “organising” Europe, i.e., of uniting economically the European continent under her own control…

But France cannot stand aloof from Germany, nor can Germany stand aloof from France. Therein lies the crux, and therein lies the solution, of the European problem. Everything else is incidental.

Of course, the United States of Europe will be only one of the two axes of the world organisation of economy. The United States of America will constitute the other.

It must not be overlooked that the very danger arising from the United States of America (which is spurring the destruction of Europe, and is ready to step in subsequently as Europe’s master) furnishes a very substantial bond for uniting the peoples of Europe.

I shan’t keep you on tenterhooks any longer. The author is Leon Trotsky, born on this day 140 years ago.

Happy birthday, Leon! Thank you for your inspirational insights – and sorry you can’t be with us today. But fear not: as you Bolsheviks used to say, our comrade is dead, but his cause lives on. Your legacy is in safe hands, your prophecies are coming true, and your disciple may well be Britain’s next prime minister.

Her Majesty, God bless her, has taken bad advice and, as her loyal subject, I’m sorry about that.

The palace has announced that the Queen’s new garments will henceforth use only fake fur. Yet Her Majesty will continue to wear her existing fur outfits, of which one suspects she has a lifelong supply.

That has encouraged some columnists to reassure the few remaining conservatives out there that the gesture was merely symbolic. That’s true – but it’s the wrong kind of symbolism.

The argument against furs, meat, leather, hunting and so forth is merely symbolic too. Few New Agers shed any other than crocodile tears at the plight of minks: their rancour resides not in the text but in the subtext, in connotation rather than denotation.

At base, this is the sartorial extension of class war. It’s not that they love furry animals; it’s that they hate people who wear their pelts to keep warm and look good.

More broadly, they hate the civilisation that historically worships God, not animals, one weaned on the Genesis belief that all living creatures were created to serve man – and only for that purpose.

Arguing against New Age savages logically is pointless. Logic is helpless against statements emanating not from reason, but from the putrid swamp of sinister emotions.

Logically, the argument against furs doesn’t hold water for a second. To inject a modicum of sense into it, one would have to explain why wearing a coat made of ewe’s skin is wrong, while wearing shoes made of the same material or eating meat from the same animal is acceptable.

Pretending to be reasonable, some New Agers make the next step and also denounce both the shoes and the meat, which idiocy is lamentably acquiring some following. But that next step is a giant leap into neo-paganism: worshiping animals and even claiming they aren’t qualitatively different from man.

Whenever I hear this, I praise the New Agers for their ability to judge themselves so realistically. What’s important to remember is that this lot are typological equivalents of all anti-Western fanatics, whatever their ostensible cause. As often as not they are the same people.

Whether they demonstrate against furs, meat, nuclear power, capitalism or fossil fuels, in their viscera they are screaming hatred of our civilisation and its religious, intellectual, moral and legal underpinnings. All those things, in other words, that Her Majesty has undertaken to uphold.

Lest we forget, she’s not only the head of our state but also the Supreme Governor of our established church, which, for all its oil-trading hierarchs, female bishops, bouncy castles and increasingly demotic liturgy, remains residually Christian.

It’s possible that the Queen is our last monarch to accept the traditional title of defensor fidei, Defender of the Faith. But accept it she did and, from what one hears, sincerely.

That’s why it’s her sacred duty to defend not only the faith itself, but also the culture and civilisation based on the faith. And, while Genesis is unequivocal on the role of animals, I struggle to find anywhere in the West’s historical, religious and philosophical sources an injunction against wearing furs, eating meat or wearing leather shoes.

‘Western’ is the operative word because other civilisations encourage the worship of animals, such as cats or cows, and even some insects. That’s their privilege, and I’m not going to be my usual cultural supremacist self and claim that their creeds are inferior to ours. Suffice it to say in this context that they are alien and frequently hostile to ours.

Western civilisation has existed for about 3,000 years, yet only in the past few decades has enmity to furs begun to claim a high moral ground.

The underlying assumption seems to be that modern people, who managed to kill the better part of 300 million people in just one century, more than in all other centuries combined, have raised morality to a dizzying height their predecessors were unable to scale.

Our monarchy’s remit is to act as the bulwark against deadly neo-pagan perversions, not as their conduit and endorser. Defaulting on that duty, in matters big or small, jeopardises the very existence of the monarchy.

If, as is possible, our next government will be fervently atheist, anti-monarchy and borderline communist, our royalty will have their work cut out anyway. Any sign of weakness, and the savages will pounce – more than they’ve already been pouncing.

I’m sure Her Majesty had her arm twisted to sign her name to that New Age nonsense. One wonders if there’s still enough spunk left among the British to untwist it.

P.S. Speaking of our borderline-communist government to come, perhaps ‘borderline’ is superfluous. While the papers attack Johnson’s adviser Dominic Cummings for being an extremist bully, his Labour counterpart, Corbyn’s top man Seaumas Milne, was a member of the Communist party until 2016, when his boss had already been Labour leader for a year.

This is how Milne feels about communism: “For all its brutalities and failures, communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality. It encompassed genuine idealism and commitment… .”

Be afraid.

A general observation first: an intelligent villain can do more damage than a stupid one. Stupid villains kill old women for their pension money. Clever ones murder millions.

Just look at the greatest evildoers of the 20^th century, which is to say in history: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot et al – not an idiot in the bunch. It’s only because they combined wickedness with intelligence that they were collectively able to murder hundreds of millions.

The evil of our aspiring prime minister is beyond doubt for anyone who knows anything at all about Comrade Jeremy. I shan’t bore you with a long list of evidence for this assertion – you could probably compile one yourself.

On the off-chance that you can’t, just Google CORBYN in combination with words like TROTSKY, MARXISM, VENEZUELA, MADURO, IRA, ANTISEMITISM, HAMAZ, HEZBOLLAH, HARD LEFT, TERRORISM – take your pick.

Once you’ve taken it, think of the damage this creature could cause given half the chance. But then heave a sigh of relief and thank your stars that his evil doesn’t come packaged with intelligence. Give us a stupid enemy over a clever one any day.

If you wish to contest this assessment of Comrade Jeremy’s mental faculties, I can recommend cranking up your trusted Google again to search for a compendium of inanities Corbyn has uttered in the course of his undistinguished career.

Actually, you don’t need a compendium. Just his current tweet should make a sufficient case for the prosecution. Here it is:

“There are 150 billionaires in the UK while 14 million people live in poverty. In a fair society there would be no billionaires and no one would live in poverty.”

The first sentence implies a causative relationship. Comrade Jeremy clearly believes that it’s the 150 billionaires who consign 14 million people to poverty. Now I realise I may be overusing the word, but this is, well, stupid.

Corbyn subscribes to the zero sum view of economics, which even anyone studying the subject in secondary school knows for the nonsense it is.

Zero-summers see the economy as a pie whose size is constant. Hence anyone having a big slice means someone else having a small one. Except that this assumption is demonstrably false.

Western economies constantly grow, the odd slump notwithstanding. All major share indexes are now 10 to 15 times as high as they were when I first cursed the West with my presence in 1973, meaning that some serious dough has been added to the pie to make it rise.

Then of course there’s the issue of how those 150 despicable vultures got their billions and what they do with them. Let’s just look at one of them, Sir James Dyson, of the vacuum cleaners fame.

Sir James made his billions by giving millions of households a better version of the essential appliance. He currently employs about 7,000 people in the UK, all of them on decent incomes and benefits. I don’t know how much they contribute to the Exchequer but, in round numbers, it must be a hell of a lot.

Hence, rather than increasing the number of the poor, Sir James actually reduces it. The same can be said about all the 150, even those who use their money only to make more money, which to Comrade Jeremy brands them as blood-suckers or, which is the same thing, Jews.

Yet even such reprobates increase not only their own wealth but also that of the whole nation. They are the ones who provide essential investment for the Dysons of this world, vicariously creating prosperity and keeping millions of people employed – including many in the financial industry that provides a quarter of our GDP.

Jeremy’s bogeymen also surround themselves with a vast cocoon of service industry: restaurants, hotels, shops, dry cleaners, hairdressers, designers, tailors, florists, shoemakers, builders, drivers, decorators, pilots, accountants, lawyers, travel agents – millions of people who otherwise could be among the putative 14 million poor.

Corbyn’s second sentence is equally moronic. The implication is that some people being richer than others testifies to society’s unfairness.

Now, fairness means everybody getting his just deserts. Hence Corbyn is in effect saying that Dyson doesn’t deserve to be rich and the poor don’t deserve to be poor.

That this is untrue ought to be clear to anyone with an IQ above that of a courgette. Most of those 150 pernicious billionaires didn’t inherit their wealth, but earned and multiplied it by their talent, application and commitment.

Since such qualities aren’t immediately associated with most of the poor, by and large both groups get what they deserve. Hence a society that takes on the impossible task of eliminating both the rich and the poor may be all sorts of things, good or bad depending on one’s priorities. One thing it can’t be is fair.

What it absolutely has to be is tyrannical, using fiat to put a lid on ambition, talent and enterprise, while drawing its support from a growing parasitic mob. That’s Corbyn’s ideal of fairness, and it has been gloriously achieved in Maduro’s Venezuela that Comrade Jeremy openly admires.

Since Corbyn is manifestly stupid, only stupid people support him. That doesn’t necessarily mean they have no intelligence – only that they don’t use it to vote.

I know some perfectly competent individuals who support left-wing parties for all sorts of spurious reasons that reason knows not of, to use Pascal’s phrase. Coming to the fore instead are things like ideology, resentments, envy – or simply inertia and mental torpor.

The rest of us hope that Corbyn will be too stupid to mobilise the national reserves of stupidity to drive him into Downing Street. And that the Labour Party is stupid enough to let this creature lead it into the general election.

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.