Category: Blog

Sometimes one loses sight of etymology, which is a shame. Tracing borrowed words back to their origin is a good way of gaining an insight into the mentality of both the lender and the borrower.

‘Petty’ is one such borrowing. It comes from the French petit which in its native habitat simply means a non-judgemental ‘small’.

That’s what it initially meant in English too, when it came into the language in the fourteenth century. Throwbacks to that obsolete usage still survive in words like ‘petty cash’ or ‘petty officer’.

It took the English two centuries to attach a derogatory meaning to ‘petty’, and in its current sense of ‘small-minded’ it no longer sounds like a naturalised French word. That’s why the linguist in me is grateful to the French customs officials for issuing a useful reminder of the word’s Gallic provenance.

I come in contact with those people several times a year, when taking the Channel Tunnel either at Folkestone or, on the way back, at Calais. This I’ve been doing for a quarter-century, which is long enough to develop certain expectations.

For example, it has usually taken no more than five minutes (a bit longer at peak times) to clear passport control on either side of the English Channel, which the French vindictively call La Manche.

Once every 20 crossings or so I’m asked to pop the boot open for the douaniers to make sure no illegal aliens full of heroin and armed to the teeth are hiding there. That adds another five minutes to the procedure, which barely qualifies as even a minor irritant.

Yet arriving at the Folkestone terminal the other day, we found a serpentine queue of cars at least half a mile long, and a helpful sign informing the drivers that clearing passport control would take at least 30 minutes.

As it turned out, that was an optimistic assessment. In the end it took us an hour and a quarter, which meant we missed our crossing and several after that.

“What’s going on?” I asked the ruddy lass in the English booth one passes on the way to the French one.

“Well, there are no problems on the English side,” she said. The stress on the adjective was so pronounced that my next question was redundant. But I asked it anyway: “You reckon it’s revenge?” She nodded ruefully.

That takes us back to the etymology of petty. It’s as if the French are reclaiming the word, but this time in its derogatory English meaning. How much pettier can you get?

Those douaniers manning passport-control booths aren’t acting on their own initiative. Their superiors must have issued stern instructions that life must be made hard for les sales Anglo-Saxons who dared to defy the EU.

And I don’t mean their immediate superiors either. This pettiness reflects policy passed down from the ministerial level at least, if not from Manny Macron himself.

That is a hostile act, one of many to follow, as I hope you don’t doubt. And the only way to preempt such acts is to counter with some of our own.

My imagination isn’t vindictive enough to think what they might be, but possibilities abound. Our customs officers could, for example, search every French car and its passengers thoroughly enough for them to miss that day’s crossings altogether, which would exert upward pressure on the petty ministers.

Or else… well, I’d rather not think along those lines: I’m not French. Nor would I like to draw far-reaching generalisations about the French character – I have many French friends, and none of them is petty.

But some near-reaching generalisations are irresistible. When finally reaching the French passport control at Folkestone, I already opened my mouth to offer some, but Penelope wisely made me shut it.

If she hadn’t, we’d still be there.

I have long argued that Russia is in many ways a mirror image of the West. Because the mirror is both concave and convex, it distorts the picture, but not beyond recognition.

That can serve as a useful lesson for us, if only by making our salient traits exaggerated and therefore more visible.

One such trait is an almost complete absence of true conservatism as a viable social dynamic and intellectual force.

In Russia the word is associated with everything Putin does or at least preaches: the worst features of the Russian Empire fused with what he sees as the best features of Stalinism.

In Britain it’s associated with the Conservative party, which has as much to do with conservatism as the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea has to do with the people, democracy or republicanism.

Hence decent Russians who see the Putin kleptofascist regime for what it is oppose all its policies and pronouncements as a matter of course. There they run headlong into the same problem as the one we face in Britain.

We see what we hate about our weak, unprincipled, vacillating, manifestly unconservative government as clearly as those Russians see what they hate about Putin’s junta. But what is it that we love?

Suddenly a fog descends and clarity disappears. We want to change things – so do those Russian opponents of Putin. That much is obvious. But to change them for what?

No one can answer this question sensibly without first laying a coherent philosophical foundation on which to build a complex intellectual structure. In Britain, we have precious few people capable of doing so. In Russia, they don’t exist at all.

At least in Britain we have something to fall back on, what with the seminal contribution the country’s thinkers have made to political science over centuries. The Russians have no such tradition: their thinkers have always tended to busy themselves with metaphysics above everything else.

That goes a long way towards explaining Russia’s awful political history. But we shouldn’t feel too smug either: our own tradition of political thought has been debauched and marginalised.

But the Russian opponents of Putin don’t realise this. Trying to mimic Western politics, they tropistically reach out for ‘liberalism’, the only trend they see as being opposite to Putinism.

Since they know little about Western conservatism and understand even less, they assume it’s sort of like Putinism, mutatis mutandis. Hence, proceeding apathetically from the negative, they use as their sources of political wisdom Western ‘liberal’ publications, such as The Guardian, Le Monde or The New York Times.

In Britain, one would think that, drawing on the legacy of Burke, Canning, Coleridge, Eliot, Chesterton et al, conservatives would be able to win any debate against their mock-liberal opponents. That, however, isn’t the case.

Political conservatism can only thrive in a fertile traditional – which is to say Judaeo-Christian – soil. When that soil was strewn with the coarse salt of atheism, it became barren.

Conservatives were no longer sure what it was they wished to conserve. ‘Liberals’, on the other hand, were dead certain about what it was they wished to destroy: every offshoot of Christendom, including its political legacy.

This being a short article rather than a long book, I’ll have to skip some intermediate steps describing the road to our political perdition. Suffice it to say that, as a direct result of the emasculation of conservatism, Britain is likely to get a Marxist government, which is a logical development of post-Enlightenment ‘liberalism’.

The Russians understand none of this.

Putin runs the Russian Orthodox Church in the best traditions of the KGB – the ‘liberals’, who constitute the only visible opposition, have to be militant atheists almost to a man.

Putin proclaims his commitment to ‘traditional values’ as camouflage for running the greatest organised crime gang in history – the ‘liberals’ turn to The Guardian and everything it represents.

Putin’s thugs beat up homosexuals in the streets – the ‘liberals’ support homomarriage with abandon. And so forth: if tomorrow Putin were to say that the sky tends to be blue, the ‘liberals’ will insist it’s polka-dot.

These thoughts crossed my mind yesterday, when the on-line magazines of the Russian opposition were full of obituaries for the liberal blogger Evgeniy (Zhenia for short) Ikhlov, who died a writer’s death, having suffered a heart attack at his computer.

I’ll translate a portion of one of the obits, while assuring you that they all say roughly the same things:

“Zhenia and I both belonged to the same camp… The camp of those who defend the values of the Enlightenment, rationalism, humanism, progress, liberty and human rights…

“Zhenia believed in them. He believed in liberty. He believed in human rights… In the rights of man and citizen – in the very sense of 1789…Just like me, Zhenia belonged to the liberté, egalité, fraternité camp.”

Allow me to paraphrase in a language closer to the real meaning of this excerpt.

Both the deceased and his obituarist belong to the ‘camp’ of those who destroyed our civilisation, turned France into a bloodbath, proceeded to murder further untold millions around the world in the name of the very slogans produced in that fateful year, have prostituted our culture in the name of egalitarianism, replaced ratio with rationalism – the very same ‘camp’ from which the only possible foray will lead its followers to socialism, eventually its extreme forms.

The Russians don’t realise this, but they have a good excuse: they have no serious tradition of political thought. We have no such excuse – and yet our ‘liberalism’ is about to culminate in the victory of what for all intents and purposes will be a communist government.

We were supposed to teach the Russians how to think about politics. Instead, because we’ve forgotten everything we used to know, they’re teaching us how not to do so.

If you aren’t familiar with this popular acronym, the outside letters stand for ‘not invited’, and I’ll let you guess what the middle letter stands for.

The invitation that never came was for the celebration of the 75th anniversary of D-Day yesterday. Predictably, Vlad whinged about the West underplaying the Soviet sacrifices and, according to The Times, “he may be right”.

This is ridiculous in so many respects that I’ve run out of my fingers and toes trying to count them. It’s true that the Soviet losses of at least 24 million outnumbered those of Britain – 450,000 according to The Times, 650,000 according to most history books I’ve read.

That’s a fact, and no educated Westerner I’ve ever met “diminishes the huge Soviet role in defeating the Nazis”, a Kremlin claim that the paper tacitly accepts.

Yet neither should we diminish ‘the huge Soviet role’ in arming the Nazis, providing them with the necessary strategic materials and acting as their faithful allies from 1 September, 1939, to 22 June, 1941.

The Russophones among you would be well-advised to scan the book Fashistkiy mech kovalsia v Rossii (The Fascist Sword Was Forged in Russia) a compendium of documents gathered by the Russian historians Diakov and Bushyeva.

The documents show how the two rogue regimes, defeated Germany and Bolshevik Russia, formed an alliance in 1922 aimed at turning Germany into what Lenin called “the icebreaker of the revolution”.

Germany rebuilt her armed forces on Russian territory, and many of the great German commanders of the Second World War, such as Guderian and Manstein, trained there together with Soviet officers.

Stalin’s plan was to turn a revanchist Germany against the West, wait until the warring parties exhausted themselves and then launch the Soviet juggernaut across Europe.

As Walter Krivitsky and other high-ranking Soviet defectors testified, things seamlessly segued from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich. The notorious Soviet-Nazi pact of August, 1939, wasn’t the beginning of that process but its culmination, a fact completely missed by Western intelligence services.

Just a few days ago the Russians finally published the facsimile of the secret protocol to the Pact, according to which the two allies agreed to carve Europe between them, dividing it into spheres of influence.

Nazi Germany would have been in no position to attack the West without massive supplies of Soviet grain (1.5 million tonnes), oil (865,000 tonnes), strategic metals, such as nickel and tungsten, raw rubber and so on.

Thus reassured, the Nazis attacked Poland from the west and, a fortnight later, their Soviet allies attacked her from the east. So I agree with The Times: we shouldn’t downplay ‘the huge Soviet role’ – in starting the war.

Having crushed Poland, the two jaws of the same vice met at Brest-Litovsk and held a joint victory parade, with Gen. Guderian and his Soviet ally Brig. Krivoshein in command (see the photo opposite).

During the Battle of Britain, the Nazis quickly ran out of bombs, which were then supplied by the Soviets. Let’s not forget that it was Soviet bombs that rained on London from German planes.

It wasn’t just the bombs. The Soviets also provided their Nazi allies with intelligence and meteorological reports, making the bombing raids more effective.

British shipping in the North Sea was attacked, with murderous effect, by the Nazi U-boats and raiders supplied by Basis Nord (Base North) just west of Murmansk. The base was rendered redundant in April, 1940, when the Germans invaded Norway. But without that Soviet base, the invasion would have been much costlier.

On direct orders from Stalin, communist parties throughout occupied Europe welcomed the Nazi invaders and helped them root out the early resistance. The situation changed only when the Nazis finally realised what Stalin’s plans were and hit the Soviets with a knockdown preemptive strike.

By varying accounts they beat the Soviets to the punch by no more than a fortnight, possibly by just a couple of days. And then a highly predictable miracle happened: after all the mass murders, concentration camps and deadly famines, the Soviet people didn’t want to fight for Stalin.

The Soviets enjoyed an overwhelming superiority in tanks, artillery, planes and personnel. Yet it’s neither numbers nor machines that fight wars – people do. The Soviets didn’t want to fight for Stalin, but the Germans were screaming Heil Hitler!!! with deep conviction.

The German army not only enjoyed a higher morale – it was also infinitely better trained and led. The Soviets only began to approach, without ever achieving, similar standards towards the end of the war, but at the beginning of it a perfectly organised professional army was fighting an armed mob that didn’t want to fight.

Such was the nature of the Soviet wartime suffering that has been elevated to the status of religion in Russia. In those first months of the war the Nazis took 4.5 million POWs, many of whom hadn’t put up any resistance. At least as many were killed or wounded.

Stalin only managed to reverse the course of the war by extreme violence. Soviet soldiers who staggered out of encirclement were treated as deserters and traitors; those who dared retreat, ditto.

All in all Soviet military tribunals passed 157,000 death sentences, with easily twice as many executed without even that travesty of justice, or else machine-gunned in the back by the NKVD ‘blocking units’.

(At the same time, the troops were told that their families back home were hostages to their performance. The family of any inadequate soldier would be deprived of its ration cards – starved to death in other words.)

That means the Soviets probably killed more of their own soldiers than Britain lost altogether, which is nothing to be proud of or celebrate. Many of their other casualties were also self-inflicted.

Soviet generals had scant regard for soldiers’ lives, driving them on suicidal attacks, often for no good military reason. Dwight Eisenhower remembered how he was appalled when talking to the Soviet butcher-in-chief Marshal Zhukov.

Eisenhower complained that the Allied thrust through western Germany had been slowed down by the profusion of minefields. Zhukov couldn’t see what the problem was. “When I run into a minefield,” he explained, “I simply clear it by marching some penalty battalions across.”

Stalin would routinely order that such and such city must be captured by such and such date, usually some communist anniversary. When his generals meekly suggested that waiting a few days would save 100,000 lives, their objections were waved aside.

The Times readily repeats Sir Max Hastings’s fallacy that “between 1941 and 1944, the western Allies, with a considerable degree of cynicism, left the Russians to fight the Germans on their own.”

I would have been tempted to add that, with even a greater degree of cynicism, between 1939 and 1941, the Soviets not only left the Western Allies to fight the Germans on their own, but actually aided and abetted the Nazis.

But even factually his assertion is wrong. The Allies were fighting in Africa throughout the war, drawing huge German resources. Sir Max ought to remind himself how Rommel, one of the German top commanders, earned the nickname of Desert Fox.

Nor was it just in Africa. On 3 September, 1943, the Allies landed in Italy and began a massive northward offensive. Has Sir Max heard of Monte Cassino?

It was then, not in June, 1944, that the second front was opened in Europe. Sir Max (and The Times) simply repeat a Soviet lie, which has a pernicious background to it.

Churchill intended for the Allied force in Italy to push all the way up, cutting southern Europe from Stalin’s reach. Hence the Italian landing didn’t count, as far as Stalin was concerned. It had to be Normandy, leaving eastern and southern Europe to Stalin’s tender mercies.

And this is the main point: the Allied landings in Italy and France led to the liberation of western Europe. In the inimitable Soviet dialectic, Stalin’s ‘liberation’ of eastern Europe was in fact replacing brown with red slavery.

So yes, the victory over the Nazis is something to celebrate. But the Soviet victory isn’t, at least not to the same extent.

Internally, Putin and his little Goebbelses have already sacralised the butchery of millions that the Soviets helped to initiate and then made much worse than it had to be. It’s a good job that the erstwhile Allies resisted letting them do the same externally.

D-Day was the West’s operation. And it’s the West’s to celebrate.

People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw epithets like ‘fascist scum’ around.

Yet members of our future government ignore this simple wisdom with blithe consistency. This shows unwavering loyalty to the Bolshevik heritage of today’s Labour.

Here’s a list of epithets used in just three issues of the Pravda (some may not sound pejorative, but were contextually used in that spirit) when Lenin was still alive, and most of them came from Lenin’s published works:

Fascist, social-fascist, reactionary, magnate, enemy agent, spy, destroyer, pickpocket, hypocrite, cynic, thief, millionaire, Jesuit, demagogue, cretin, throw-out, dollar diplomat, imperialist, crook, imbecile, rascal, rogue, charlatan, corruptible, adventurer, sell-out, trash, cheat, mercenary, ambush, liberal, provocateur, sadist, parasite, reptile, Trotskyite, fleecer, scum, horror, dog, Janus, saboteur, coward, dolt, microbe, ass, bandit, schismatist, lord, speculator, Yankee, Fritz, gangster, degenerate, scamp, ignoramus, oppressor, torturer, blackguard, inquisitor, idiot, traitor, executioner, riff-raff, assassin, cosmopolitan, slimy rat, salacious viper.

This is the level of intellectual debate on which Corbyn and his jolly friends operate, whenever their opponent isn’t an admirer of socialist hell. Donald Trump is one such, and the hysteria whipped up by Labour functionaries during his state visit is revoltingly emetic.

The aforementioned ‘fascist scum’ was flung at Trump by London’s mayor Sadiq Khan. I’m sure if probed he won’t be able to define ‘fascist’ tightly, much less show how Trump fits whatever definition he’d concoct.

But that’s not the point, is it? This lot are as full of hatred as they are lacking in brainpower. It’s pointless looking for some sense in anything they say – venom is all there is.

Thus Emily Thornberry, our future foreign secretary and head of British diplomacy, described Trump as “a racist and a sexual predator”. The latter he might be (most driven men are), but the former?

Let me think. What could have possibly earned Trump that soubriquet? Two things spring to mind: his support for Israel and his attempts to put an end to illegal immigration from Mexico.

Now, if choosing the only civilised, Western state in the Middle East over crazed fanatics who blow up public transport, fly airliners into tall buildings and openly proclaim their desire to kill all Jews (starting with all Israelis) is racism, then that word is fully synonymous with human decency.

Of course doctrinal Muslim anti-Semitism rings a mellifluous chord in the hearts of today’s Labour – in this too they are faithful to their Marxist legacy.

As to illegal immigration, if we realise that the operative word there isn’t the noun but its modifier, then this brand of racism is fully synonymous with upholding the rule of law. So call me a racist on both counts, and a proud one to boot.

Corbyn, his former paramour (and our future home secretary) Diane Abbott, our future chancellor John McDonnell and John Bercow, Speaker of the House of Commons, boycotted Her Majesty’s state banquet in honour of President Trump – throwing the Queen’s invitation back into her face.

People used to dance the Tyburn jig for lesser acts of lèse majesté, and something in me feels nostalgic for those good old times.

Now Corbyn and his henchmen have happily broken bread with Putin, Maduro, Xi and other murderous dictators. And of course Corbyn counts among his friends the leading lights of such terrorist gangs as Hamas, Hezbollah and our own dear IRA.

The lines are thus clearly drawn: Britain’s enemies are Corbyn’s friends and vice versa. And if you think for a second that such feelings won’t be transformed into policies should this lot ascend to power, think again.

Say what you will about Trump (as I do every now and then), but he’s easily one of the most effective US presidents in my lifetime. More important in this context is that he’s one of the best and most sincere friends Britain has had on the other side of the Atlantic for a long time.

By contrast, Barack Obama, one of the most useless US presidents in my lifetime who didn’t even bother to conceal how much he detested Britain, was welcomed with open arms by Labour then, as he certainly would be today. And should FDR, another Britain-hater, do a Lazarus, I doubt he’d be snubbed by Corbyn et al.

On this anniversary of D-Day it’s useful to remember that America is Britain’s ally, massive trade partner and, as the lynchpin of NATO, a significant factor in our country’s security (this, though the much-vaunted special relationship is at times too one-sided and insufficiently special).

It doesn’t take a crystal ball to predict that none of these will be the case should the top four posts in the British cabinet be occupied by Corbyn, McDonnell, Thornberry and Abbott.

The multi-trillion trade deal Trump mentioned during his visit would never happen if he is re-elected, which, considering the available options, I sincerely hope he is. Yet even any other resident of the White House would be unlikely to enter into that level of commitment with a government openly hostile to America and dedicated to wholesale confiscation of assets and capital.

That would be catastrophic, especially if Britain managed to limp to some sort of Brexit, with or without a ‘deal’. America’s trade and her friendship are vital now; in a year or two they’ll be a matter of life or death.

Neither Trump nor his country lets insults slide. Both suffer from some touches of provincial insecurity characteristically manifested through pursuing global power. Hence they won’t forget this state visit – and nor will America’s allies and partners who value her friendship more highly than ours.

Brexit won’t make us isolated in the world, but a Corbyn government will. Turning history’s greatest trading power into a pariah sounds impossible, but, as Lenin put it, “there are no fortresses Bolsheviks can’t storm”. I’m sure this is Corbyn’s nightly mantra, in lieu of prayer.

Our likely next chancellor John McDonnell describes himself as working class because he doesn’t “own any means of production”.

I had some fun at his expense yesterday, pointing out that according to that Marxist orthodoxy, the Queen is working class too: I don’t think she owns any factories, plants or forges.

It takes a Trotskyist zealot like McDonnell to persist in applying to modern societies criteria that were already obsolete when Marx first thought of them, in the early days of the Industrial Revolution.

But that doesn’t mean class distinctions don’t exist, even if class barriers are now few. A cleverer Marxist than McDonnell (any Marxist can be clever only comparatively) would probably come up with his own social taxonomy, most likely based on wealth.

Yet, as Paul Fussell so brilliantly showed in his 1992 book Class, money plays only a tangential role in social identification. He wrote about specifically the American status system, but many of his observations apply in Britain as well.

The principal one among them is that visible class is defined more by the person’s tastes, demeanour, vocabulary, clothes and general culture than by his wealth. It’s not the amount of money but how it’s spent that matters.

Fussell wrote before Donald Trump graced the international scene, but, had he waited some 25 years, he could have used America’s 45^th president as an illustration.

Trump is a multi-billionaire if you believe him or at least a multi-millionaire if you believe his detractors. Yet in every tell-tale characteristic of class he is what Fussell called a ‘prole’. Trump talks like one, walks like one, dresses like one, eats and drinks like one – he is one.

His tweets are full of both grammatical and lexical solecisms, and they betray a crass personality – this, irrespective of whether he’s right or wrong (it’s more usually the former).

Trump wears red baseball caps with dark lounge suits, and his caps display legible slogans, usually Make America Great Again. One wonders if his car features furry dice dangling off the rear-view mirror, deer antlers on the roof and a bumper sticker saying Honk if You Love Jesus.

Trump’s ties are a foot longer than normal, which is a dead giveaway of the lower social orders, while his casual clothes were designed for a man half a century younger.

All this becomes especially painful when he comes in contact with British royalty. The other day the president was photographed wearing white tie next to a similarly attired Prince Charles.

Although HRH is also working class by McDonnell’s criteria, his clothes always look as though he first visited Savile Row shortly after learning to walk. His tailcoat was impeccable, as all his suits always are.

By contrast, the front of Trump’s tailcoat was a good foot shorter than it should have been, and the suit looked as though it had been hired at Moss Bros. He also needed something at least two sizes larger. Trump too fits McDonnell’s criteria of working class, but unlike HRH he actually wears it on his sleeve, as it were.

The same goes for food. When Her Majesty treated the president to dinner, the menu was a steamed fillet of halibut with watercress mousse, asparagus spears in chervil sauce, followed by Windsor lamb with herb stuffing, spring vegetables and a port sauce. One of the wines was a 1990 Chateau Lafite, costing, depending on where you shop, between £1,400 and £2,000 a bottle.

Trump’s dinner for Her Majesty at the US ambassador’s residence was rather different: beef, potatoes and vanilla ice cream, washed down with a £30 bottle of California red.

However, Trump is teetotal, which means he sampled neither the Napa Valley product nor the Lafite.

I don’t know why he is teetotal. It could be because he’s a recovering alcoholic scared of falling off the wagon. He may also be under doctor’s orders, although I’ve never met a heartless medic who’d ban a glass of Lafite. He may be afraid to reveal some dark secret under the influence. Or else he’s a control freak who hates to lose even a modicum of self-restraint.

I’ve seen all such types, miserable individuals who sip soft drinks throughout dinner. Yet that by itself isn’t a class indicator. But the kind of soft drink they sip is.

The old principle of the drier the drink, the higher the class applies to non-alcoholic beverages as well. A teetotaller of taste drinks mineral water with or without a wedge of lime. Orange juice is also possible, just.

But Trump drinks Diet Coke, which is revolting prole muck even outside the elevated context of dinner with royalty. In that context it’s barbaric.

US presidents routinely employ professional style consultants. But even a rank amateur of some taste could correct all those class aberrations in a lazy afternoon. The illiterate tweets would take longer to fix, but even that problem isn’t insurmountable.

But – and here we strike outside the narrow confines of class tastes – Trump clearly doesn’t feel the need. On the contrary, he knows that projecting the image of a man of the people is a known vote-getter in America.

And unfortunately not only in America. Democratic politics throughout the West have been reduced to rabble-rousing, and today’s rabble are roused more readily by someone they perceive as one of their own.

In Trump’s case his vulgarity is genuine: he displayed it even when he was merely a property developer on the make. But even many politicians who know better still feel obliged to compete in the Prolier Than Thou stakes. They know what they are up against.

It’s commonplace now for TV interviewers to ask an aspiring candidate for political office if he knows the price of a pint of milk or has ever changed a nappy. Someone whose response shows him for the toff he is loses votes, perhaps even the whole election.

Yet I can’t think offhand of many great statesmen of the past who could have passed such a test, not in Britain at any rate. Wellington? Pitt? Churchill? Be serious.

This modern tendency activates mechanisms of Darwinian natural selection in the political class, first bringing to the fore individuals who feel they have to pretend to be vulgarians and then those who don’t need to pretend.

Le style, c’est l’homme même, wrote Buffon. Vulgar style is often a result or precursor of vulgar thoughts, vulgar feelings – and eventually vulgar actions.

Still, by modern criteria, Trump is as good a president as a country can get, which says less about him than about our times.

P.S. Now we are on the subject of good taste, you can prove yours by attending Penelope Blackie’s recital tomorrow. Even though she’s married to me, she is a sublime pianist of the kind of noble sensibility that is almost extinct among today’s pianists. For details: penelopeblackie.com

Actually, a nightmare is more like it. For John McDonnell, our likely next chancellor, dreams of overthrowing capitalism.

Thus his entry in Who’s Who openly states that his life’s work is “fermenting the overthrow of capitalism.” He probably means ‘fomenting’, but it’s the thought that counts.

McDonnell’s worthy goal has earned him a sympathetic, nay fawning, profile by Rachel Sylvester in The Sunday Times, formerly known as a conservative paper and now filled to the gunwales with leftist slow learners.

He emerges as the powerful brain behind Corbyn, a man driven by pursuing noble, quasi-religious ends made so much more laudable for being daring.

Thus Miss Sylvester passes without comment McDonnell’s story of his spiritual progress from Christ to Marx. “John McDonnell has always been a believer,” she explains, first in Christ, then in Marx, which is sort of the same thing.

McDonnell was raised as a Catholic, but at age 16 “I just came to the conclusion that I didn’t believe there was a deity.” Other than Marx, that is.

To his credit, McDonnell is generous with his theological insights: “The New Testament is about transforming society, tackling poverty, all those things that are embedded in socialism… I always looked on Jesus as a socialist.”

I always looked on Jesus as Our Lord, but then I can’t remember off-hand a single line in the Gospels pointing at his ambition to run a poverty programme. I do remember his saying “The poor you will always have with you”, but perhaps I haven’t studied the Scripture as closely as McDonnell did in his childhood.

There’s this slight problem that, wherever socialism was tried in earnest, it failed miserably. How would McDonnell explain that?

Simple. “Of the failures of the Soviet Union, Cuba and Venezuela… It was never socialism.” No, of course not. Had it been socialism, it would have succeeded – that’s axiomatic.

Then there’s another small matter of the millions murdered by Marxists around the world. Hold on, I get it: those hundreds of millions of murders had nothing to do with Marxism.

“You wouldn’t read the New Testament and blame Jesus Christ for the Spanish Inquisition”, explains McDonnell. He’s right for once, we wouldn’t.

First, a minor point of historical arithmetic. The Holy Inquisition never sentenced anyone to death. When it found a defendant guilty, it passed his case on to the secular authorities, with a specific recommendation not to put him to death.

The secular authorities didn’t always comply: in the roughly 400 years that the Inquisition was in business, about 10,000 people were executed. Compared to the 60 million murdered by Soviet Marxists alone in just 50 years, this number is trivial (if any death can be so described).

Second, a more important point. There’s no doubt that Christians have committed many crimes, including murders, throughout history. Such, alas, is the human propensity that always remains constant.

However, it takes monumental ignorance or else evil chicanery to trace such crimes back to anything Jesus and his disciples taught. Love one another as I have loved you – this message permeates the whole New Testament.

Christian criminals thus act against their Scripture. On the other hand, Marxist criminals uphold both the spirit and the letter of their founding documents.

They have brought to fruition Marxist dictates on concentration camps (Engels called them “special guarded places”), slavery (Marx: “Slavery is… an economic category of paramount importance”), mass murder (Marx: “the victorious party must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries”), anti-Semitism (Marx: “…the Polish Jews… this dirtiest of all races,” “Thus we find every tyrant backed by a Jew”) and genocide.

Here are a few other choice quotes from McDonnell’s idols:

“All the other [non-Marxist] large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary holocaust. For that reason they are now counter-revolutionary… these residual fragments of peoples always become fanatical standard-bearers of counter-revolution and remain so until their complete extirpation or loss of their national character… [A general war will] wipe out all this racial trash.”

 “…only by the most determined use of terror against these Slav peoples can we, jointly with the Poles and Magyars, safeguard the revolution… there will be a struggle, an ‘inexorable life-and-death struggle’, against those Slavs who betray the revolution; an annihilating fight and ruthless terror – not in the interests of Germany, but in the interests of the revolution!”

“We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.”

A far cry from “love thy enemy”, isn’t it?

McDonnell’s economic ideas come straight from Marx, no deviations from the general line for him: “Eventually you will get to a situation where goods will be held in common, so workers will own their own companies.”

Quite. But at present the companies are owned by others, either private individuals or shareholders. For the workers to gain ownership, the current owners would have to be dispossessed, meaning robbed. And, if they resist, killed.

He also plans a land grab, forcing owners to sell at the prices set by McDonnell or else using extortionate property taxes as a kick up the owners’ backsides.

Anticipating this development, many ‘capitalists’ are already fleeing Britain at an accelerating pace. When their worst fears of a Marxist government become a reality, they’ll leave in droves, taking their capital, and therefore jobs, with them.

Nor will investors, foreign or domestic, be encouraged to risk their capital in a country committed to confiscating it.

All that will instantly shrink the taxation base, scuppering McDonnell’s grandiose plans for spending an extra £48 billion on public services and £250 billion on infrastructure development, to be financed by taxation and (suicidally inflationary) borrowing.

The question arises, as it always does with a government committed to robbing the populace, making private property insecure and forcing people into economic slavery: what if the people resist?

The most cursory of glances at every Marxist government in history provides the answer, which has to include concentration camps as an essential component. This inhuman, satanic doctrine of hate and envy can only ever be enforced by violence – to this rule there are no known exceptions.

That McDonnell is evil ought to be clear to anybody. But this “brain behind the Labour party” is also obtusely ignorant and not conspicuously bright.

Just look at his explanation of why he’s working class: “Do I own or control the means of production? No, I don’t. So I’m working class.”

My financial advisor doesn’t own any means of production either. Neither does my doctor. Neither does any banker. Neither does the Queen. Are they all working class then?

McDonnell’s underdeveloped mind is firmly lodged in Marx’s fallacies produced in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, and widely seen as obsolete even then. The poor chap doesn’t realise, or else pigheadedly refuses to accept, that in our post-Industrial age his economic ideas aren’t just obsolete, but simply cretinous.

Miss Sylvester graciously acknowledges that McDonnell’s dreams aren’t without a potential for risks. I disagree.

A risk describes a situation whose outcome is uncertain. McDonnell’s ideas, even if only attempted and not fully realised, are guaranteed to produce an instant, universal and possibly irreversible catastrophe.

In short, when this evil, illiterate doctrinaire takes over the Exchequer, head for the hills. May I suggest the French Alps?

Brexit Party MEP and former Westminster MP Ann Widdecombe is in trouble. Or rather we are.

For we all live at a worrying time when a perfectly innocuous remark can be tantamount to a crime if it goes against the grain of a modern cult.

Actually, because her views tend to be informed by her Catholic faith, Miss Widdecombe treads on thin ice even before she says anything our pious secularists see as controversial. And if she ever utters anything consistent with her beliefs, the ice cracks under her feet.

Since she’s a forthright woman, tricking her into saying something seen as objectionable by The Guardian and PinkNews is easy. Our TV interviewers can set verbal traps with the skill of a KGB interrogator.

Armed with a full armoury of such techniques, save for rubber truncheons and strategically placed electrodes, Sky News presenter Niall Paterson was questioning Miss Widdecombe about the policies of the Brexit Party.

Except he really wasn’t. What Paterson was trying to do was to trick his mark into ‘incriminating’ herself by saying something ‘controversial’.

In that spirit, he pointed out to Miss Widdecombe that some of her views are at odds with many members of her new party. Specifically, he referred to her 2012 article in which she suggested that one day science may “produce an answer” to homosexuality.

She wrote that: “The unhappy homosexual should, according to gay activists, be denied any chance whatever to investigate any possibility of seeing if he can be helped to become heterosexual.”

“The fact that you expressed [this view],” said Mr Paterson with a well-practised self-righteous grimace, “means that plenty of people would not want to share a platform with you.” The mimicry was so vivid that the viewer was left in no doubt that Mr Paterson himself was talking to Miss Widdecombe only under duress.

All hell broke loose in the aftermath. Independent MP Nick Boles referred to Ann Widdecombe’s remark as “poisonous bigotry.”

Labour MP Chris Bryant added, without even pretending personal disinterest, that: “She clearly thinks there’s something wrong with being gay and wants to cure us or make us disappear.”

That Ann Widdecombe said something reasonable and compassionate got lost in the din, drowned in the venomous spittle sputtered by the paid-up worshippers of modern cults. Clearly, the only acceptable way to talk about homosexuality is to treat it as an ‘alternative lifestyle’, equal, and in some subtle ways possibly even superior, to any other – and certainly as normal as any other.

Anything else is treated as blasphemy against the cult, whose exponents won’t even bother to argue with the blasphemer. ‘Off with her head’ is the only righteous response.

Now I’m not aware of any universally applicable ethical system in the West other than that of Judaeo-Christian moral doctrine. This is the foundation not only of our morality, but also of our legality, which has to be accepted even by atheists.

According to that doctrine, homosexuality is a sin – not the worst sin, but one nonetheless. True, to most people these days sin is nothing but an outdated construct.

However, even they must see that homosexuality falls short of the norm, practised as it is by a small proportion of people (1.4 per cent according to the most extensive study I’ve ever seen). Yet in Britain the attitude to that practice has been lenient for at least a couple of centuries.

Society took the view that in this matter, as in many others, Judaeo-Christian morality shouldn’t be enforced. It was accepted that what two people do in private is their business and no one else’s, provided they don’t impose their morality on everyone else.

That’s where things would have stood had homosexuality, along with everything else that contradicts our moral tradition, not been politicised. It was no longer enough for people to tolerate homosexuals – the new political cult, just like bolshevism and Nazism, wasn’t satisfied with good-natured acquiescence. It demanded enthusiastic support.

Whenever none is offered, the ensuing outrage has nothing to do with the face value of the argument. The response isn’t that of a debater; it’s that of a fanatic whose sacr

So what’s the precise nature of Ann Widdecombe’s “poisonous bigotry”? She said that science could help homosexuals to become heterosexuals. This statement sounds unassailable: if science can change sex, why not sexuality?

If a man who used to be a woman can be impregnated by a woman who used to be a man, it’s counterintuitive to reject the possibility that science will one day be able to scale that particular barrier.

Miss Widdecombe was specifically talking about “unhappy homosexuals”, those who find their sexuality onerous. Do her detractors think such people don’t exist? Do they seriously believe that, while multitudes are supposed to be clamouring for a sex change, no homosexual would wish to change his sexuality?

If they believe that, they are deluded. They should listen to the song Glad to Be Gay by the punk group Tom Robinson Band, which has been considered the national gay anthem since it was released in 1976.

No one can miss the rage and anguish thundering from the lyrics “Sing if you’re glad to be gay, sing if you’re happy that way.” The unmistakable message is that some such people aren’t happy, so why not help them if possible?

If a treatment for homosexuality were available, clearly it would be like any medical help: offered only to those who seek it. In this case, those who aren’t glad to be gay.

One would think that anyone with a modicum of compassion and love would welcome such a scientific breakthrough. But that would be missing the point, which has nothing to do with compassion and love.

It’s all about scoring political points by propping up totem poles with false idols perched on top.

Yet Ann Widdecombe stubbornly refuses to prostrate herself before those idols. So the pyre has been assembled, all the twigs are in. Does anyone have a match?

Or is it sex life? One can get terribly confused trying to keep up with the giant strides English usage is making.

This is the kind of confusion that I, a lifelong student of the language, find unacceptable. That’s why I’m grateful to Prof. Cordelia Fine, the psychologist and author of Delusions of Gender, for helping me work out such lexical nuances.

‘Sex’, according to her, is nature: it refers to biological differences between men and women. ‘Gender’ on the other hand is nurture: it refers to socially constructed roles for men and women that they feel obliged to play.

And here’s the point that has hitherto escaped me: the two have nothing to do with each other:

“About 200 years of feminism has been trying to untie the link between sex and gender, arguing that the former doesn’t and shouldn’t dictate the latter. Using the terms interchangeably blurs importantly distinct concepts, and we need both –  scientifically and socially.”

I agree wholeheartedly that the two terms shouldn’t be used interchangeably; they do mean different things. Yet the real distinction seems to be beyond most people. Some other distinguishing nuances are much easier to grasp.

Such as, what’s worse than a blithering idiot? A ponderous blithering idiot. And what’s worse than a ponderous blithering idiot? One with an ideology.

Ideology has a vast capacity for trumping not only reason but even obvious, scientifically demonstrable facts. Hence it can transform someone like Prof. Fine into an oracle of ponderous blithering idiocy.

A scientist should deal with nature as it is, not as its phantom floating through a hazy mind enveloped in spurious beliefs. Still, if Prof. Fine wishes to abandon science and become a propagandist of feminist zealotry, that’s her right.

But she has no right to pass ideological idiocy for scientific fact, while pretending she’s still acting in the capacity of a scientist. Rather than conferring verisimilitude on her turgid musings, such pretensions compromise not only her personally but also her field of endeavour.

In non-ideological, which is to say proper, English, ‘gender’ denotes only one thing: a grammatical category. Every other use of ‘gender’ is an ideologically inspired solecism. Thus used, the word becomes an impostor usurping the place legitimately occupied by ‘sex’.

It takes an obnoxious bigot, in Domenic Raab’s robust phrase (which may cost him the party leadership contest), to insist that our biological and physiological makeup doesn’t produce distinct behavioural patterns. For example, any secondary school pupil taking biology knows that human aggression is a function of testosterone.

When female mice were injected with a huge dose of the male hormone, they began to display male aggressiveness. The same technique, incidentally, has been known to produce a similar effect on female athletes from the Soviet bloc.

Ever since Eve came out of Adam’s rib, and long before those nasty conservative types began to impose universal compliance with sex roles, men and women have performed different roles in life because they are, well, different.

They are built differently, they think differently, they move differently, they react differently to stress, their approach to life is different. They are different biologically, physiologically, physically, psychologically and even philosophically. This isn’t to say men are better – if anything, I think women are. But the two sexes are complementary precisely because they are not, nor can ever be, the same.

It takes a political zealot to politicise sex the way race has already been politicised. Neither race nor sex is a matter of choice, and any attempt to apply free market laws to such matters is cloud cuckoo land – unless it’s deliberate sabotage.

Speaking of the philosophical difference, consider the act of procreation: it’s the man who initiates conception. Though both he and the woman are essential to it, the man, by impregnating the woman, is the active agent; the woman, by being impregnated, is the passive one.

This determines their relation to the resulting offspring. Because a man procreates outside his own body, he stands outside and above his creation in the sense in which a woman doesn’t. She conceives and gestates the child inside her body, and in that sense the child is a part of her, even though the man also contributes his DNA.

The man is thus both transcendent (standing outside and above his creation) and immanent (present within it). The woman, on the other hand, is only immanent – which is why childcare is her natural domain.

The sabotage committed by the likes of Prof. Fine doesn’t warp merely the disciplines I’ve mentioned. It also distorts the language by, for example, shoving down our throats the misuse of ‘gender’ and also passing as a fait accompli the uncontested positive connotation of ‘feminism’.

Feminism to any non-ideological speaker of English denotes a stridently extremist political movement, dovetailing with all those other ones whose main purpose is to destroy not only the traditional social order, but indeed to perform the same vile deed on human nature.

In that desideratum feminism joins all other inhuman, socialist movements such as communism, fascism and Nazism. All such movements seek to correct God’s oversights in creating man.

Since this aim is by definition unachievable, those who persist in pursuing it degenerate into all sorts of grotesque intellectual perversions – such as insisting that it’s society’s fault that men and women are manifestly different. All in all, Prof. Fine is in good company.

Tonight two English teams, Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur, are meeting in the final of the Champions League, the club championship of Europe.

There’s something odd about two English teams playing each other in Madrid, but the choice of venue was established long ago, when no one suspected that our teams would overachieve so spectacularly.

The English fans of the two teams have made their way to Madrid, yet so far no full-scale riots have been reported. However, I confidently predict they’ll break out eventually, after our football lovers have drunk the city dry. (Take it easy on that San Miguel, lads, it’s quite pokey.)

Their presence in the stands of the Atlético Madrid stadium is guaranteed to give the match a nice homey feel, creating the elegant, calm, polite and humorous ambiance John Cleese believes – correctly! – to be uniquely English.

But here’s the snag: the visiting fans will only take up half the seats in the 68,000-capacity stadium. This makes me worried that the 34,000 Spanish fans will feel left out in their own city.

However, they shouldn’t fret: I’m here to help. All they have to do to fit right in is learn a few stock chants, and Roberto is your uncle, as they say in Spain.

It’s all a matter of etiquette, and who better to give advice on it than someone who has made a lifelong study of charming English idiosyncrasies?

So here are a few suggestions from an inexhaustible reservoir of the football lexicon and chants. Spanish fans should think of John Cleese and other impeccable English gentlemen when following my tuition.

If you support Spurs, sing “You’ll never work again” to the tune of the Liverpool FC song “You’ll never walk alone”. This is a kind reference to the high unemployment rate in that city.

You may then wish to enlarge on your comments about Liverpool and its inhabitants: “Your mum’s your dad, and your dad’s your mum, you’re inbred and you’re benefit scum.”

A comment on the crime situation and its causal links with unchecked immigration wouldn’t be out of order either: “Stand up if an immigrant robbed your house!”.

Now Spurs call themselves ‘Yid army’ because they are based in a vaguely Jewish neighbourhood. Hence if you’re a Liverpool supporter, if only for the night, make sure you scream anti-Semitic invective whenever a Spurs player touches the ball. Making the hissing sound of gas going into the death chamber will also help you sound authentic.

In the same vein you may want to pose the question “Where’s your foreskin gone?// where’s your foreskin gone?// where’s your foreskin gone?” – and so forth.

When the Spurs Korean striker Son is dribbling, chant: “He’ll run and he’ll score, he’ll eat your Labrador.”

Whenever a burly defender has the ball, sing: “His name is [insert player’s name] and he dances on the grass// Don’t take the ball from him, he’ll kick your f***ing arse.”

When the Liverpool Egyptian striker Mo Salah is attacking, sing: “Mo Salah! Mo Salah! Mo Salah!Running down the wing//Salah, la, la, la//The Egyptian King!”

The proper English response to a player losing the ball is to yell “You’re shit, and you know you are!”

Note that this is a ubiquitous and flexible phrase. For example, when England played France in Paris a few years ago, the English fans were singing “You’re French and you know you are!”, much to the home crowd’s consternation. Unfamiliar with the underlying phrase, they just shrugged: “Mais bien sûr nous sommes français”.

If a player doesn’t appeal to you, shout: “Stand up if you hate [insert player’s name].

If a player does appeal to you, sing: “There’s only one [insert player’s name].” If the player has recently admitted to having fashionable psychiatric disorders, instead sing: “There are only two [insert player’s name in the plural]”.

Alternatively, you may sing “[Player’s name] is here, he’s there, he’s everyf***ingwhere!”

If the opposing fans are less loud than you are, scream: “Your support is f***ing shit!”

For a Spurs supporter it’s de rigueur to bring up the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, when 96 fans were crushed to death during a match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest.

This must be done with the characteristic English tact: “Who’s that standing at Hillsborough?// Who’s that turning f***ing blue?// It’s a Scouser and his mates, getting crushed on Hillsborough’s gates.” (For the benefit of Spanish fans, ‘Scouser’ is an affectionate term for a Liverpudlian.)

Whenever a player has incurred your displeasure, sing: “[Player’s name] is queer, he takes it up the rear.” This, irrespective of the player’s sexuality.

If wishing to voice your displeasure at the referee in general or any particular call in particular, shout: “The ref’s a wanker!” Actually, this could be used even if you’re happy with the referee, just to keep him on his toes.

When a black player is in action, you can put forth a mature judgement on Britain’s racial policy by observing, irrefutably, “There ain’t no black in the Union Jack!” But do make sure there’s no Anglophone cop within earshot.

If one is about, reassure him by singing “We aren’t racist, we just don’t like you.”

If the other team is losing, you may thus comment on their fans’ subdued mood: “You only sing when you’re winning!”

However, if your team scores, you should add a new twist to your comment on the opposition’s vocalism: “Can you hear the [insert team name] sing? I can’t hear a f***ing thing.”

There, this should get you started. Just keep in mind that, when an English fan asks you “What you lookin’ at, sunshine?”, this isn’t a request for information. Walk away or you’ll get punched.

P.S. From the gor blime to the sublime, if any music lovers among you happen to be in London on 6 June, do attend the recital of my wife, Penelope Blackie. Take my word for it: nowhere in the world will the piano be played so beautifully on that day. For details: penelopeblackie.com

John Cleese, the quintessential English comedian, created an uproar by observing that “London is not really an English city anymore.”

The amount of metaphorical mud flung at Mr Cleese as a result could have made him look like a metaphorical mud wrestler. His eardrums must have been on the verge of bursting from the thunderous din, but the comedian stood firm:

“I suspect I should apologise for my affection for the Englishness of my upbringing, but in some ways I found it calmer, more polite, more humorous, less tabloid, and less money-oriented than the one that is replacing it.”

And oh, by the way, he added: “I note also that London was the UK city that voted most strongly to remain in the EU.”

Mr Cleese’s observation thus includes both cultural and political components, which in this context don’t necessarily belong together. I know Englishmen as impeccable as Mr Cleese who nonetheless voted Remain, and I also know plenty of foreign-born British subjects who are steadfast Leavers – why, I’m one myself.

Yet his cultural observation is absolutely accurate, which is why our globalists find it infuriating. London mayor Sadiq Khan, who at a guess is less devoted to the preservation of Englishness than Mr Cleese, was positively fuming: 

“Londoners know that our diversity is our greatest strength. We are proudly the English capital, a European city and a global hub.”

The first sentence is ideological twaddle, the second one is true, but none of it contradicts Mr Cleese’s observation. It’s possible for London to be all those things and yet to have lost its indigenous English character, something that justifiably upsets Mr Cleese.

It’s an awful fact in our mayor’s eyes, but a fact nonetheless, that London was founded, developed and over two millennia raised to its global status by predominantly one ethnic group: the white British, especially English.

This group, perhaps more than any other I know, is thoroughly idiosyncratic, and it indeed possesses the traits that have endeared England not only to Mr Cleese, but to most civilised people.

Now this group is in the numeric minority in London, which has ineluctably led to the demise of those idiosyncrasies. White British people make up only 44.9 per cent of London’s population, compared to, say, 93.6 per cent in North East England.

As a result, there exist large tracts of London that don’t even look European, never mind English. But even central London has lost its native character.

My personal observations tally with Mr Cleese’s. Taking the 22 Bus from Parson’s Green to Oxford Circus, one can hardly hear any English spoken at all. Every Romance and Slavic language is there, with a smattering of German, Dutch and Scandinavian.

Hardly a week goes by that I don’t run into service personnel who don’t understand English properly and are unfamiliar with essential British realities. For example, at Paul, the French bakery chain, you’ll have a hard time explaining exactly what you need if you don’t speak French.

Also, both walking and driving have a distinctly un-English character to them these days.

The British instinctively tend to walk on the left side of the pavement. Everybody else is heir to the Napoleonic blockade, part of which legacy is perversely walking on the right. Having lived in London for 31 years, I’ve gone native in this respect (and many others).

This creates a rich potential for collisions: approaching a pedestrian walking towards me on a narrow pavement, I move to my left, he moves to his right, and then it’s a matter of who will apologise first. This may be awkward, but at least it’s not life-threatening.

The profusion of foreign drivers in London streets is. A car of mine was written off a few years ago by a Korean gentleman who misread the traffic signals (and was subsequently banned). When I tried to remonstrate with him in a language I regretted later and Penelope deplored even then, I realised that my invective was falling on uncomprehending ears.

When I first started driving in London, having driven in many other places on two continents, I found London motorists to be by far the best, most courteous and decisive. I’m sure that observation still holds true for native London drivers, but alas there aren’t enough of them to make a difference.

“Variety is the spice of life,” wrote William Cowper, while his contemporary Dr Johnson said: “If you are tired of London, you are tired of life.”

If they were both alive today they’d probably agree that, if London is a dish, it’s way over-spiced, to a point where one can indeed get tired of it. One can see how Mr Cleese got a case of veritable exhaustion, which is why he has moved to Nevis (I suspect the tax-sheltering aspects of the island might have had something to do with his decision as well).

And yet a bit of exotic spice makes a city more interesting. Without some of those additives London would be as bland as the North East of England, and who in his right mind would want to live in Newcastle unless born and bred there?

Some people on the Internet wax nostalgic at the sight of old black-and-white photographs of London tube stations, with all the passengers being white, British and wearing identical clothes.

I, as a passionate Anglophile, would have liked to live in a London like that, but neither would I have minded a bit of livening up. Something like a foreign population of 10 per cent would have added delicious spice in just the right amount.

But 55 per cent is no longer spice and it’s no longer diversity. It’s cultural and social vandalism, the devastation of the breeding ground that alone could have produced Fawlty Towers and Monty Python.

The deracination of London (and of the country in general) didn’t happen haphazardly. It’s a result of a systematic policy designed to dilute Britishness to a point where it could be tossed into a European cauldron as just one insignificant ingredient – while making it possible for the likes of Sadiq Khan to become the mayor of the world’s greatest city.

In God’s eyes, erecting “a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven” with the subsequent disintegration of language was severe punishment: “Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”

It would never have occurred to the Old Testament writers that a time would come when inflicting a Babel on the world would be done not by God as a way of unleashing his wrath, but by some men as a way of controlling others.

There, after rebuking Mr Cleese for mixing culture and politics I’ve done just that myself. Must be hard to avoid, that.

P.S. If any music lovers among you happen to be in London on 6 June, do attend the recital of my wife, Penelope Blackie. Take my word for it: nowhere in the world will the piano be played so beautifully on that day. For details: penelopeblackie.com