Category: Blog

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

That the Rev Martin Luther King often ministered to his female flock in ways more Bacchanal than Christian was widely known when he was still alive.

Nor was it a great secret that King was short of temper and, when he lost it, sometimes used his wife Coretta for a punching bag.

But both the scale of his transgressions and the sordid details weren’t known, which reduced all those stories to the level of reliable gossip at best. Now the details have been filled in, but no one wants to know.

David Garrow, King’s biographer, has found this the hard way. Having analysed thousands of documents in the FBI archives, he put together a picture that falls rather short of being iconic.

King had affairs with 40 to 45 women and sired an illegitimate child with one of them, which is pretty good going for a man of the cloth. He also drank in prodigious binges and organised drunken orgies in his hotel rooms, involving his friends, female parishioners and prostitutes.

The orgies, recorded by police transmitters, involved a dozen participants or more, and perpetrated there were what FBI assistant director Sullivan described as “acts of degeneracy and depravity”.

“When one of the women shied away from engaging in an unnatural act, King and several of the men discussed how she was to be taught and initiated. King told her that to perform such an act would ‘help your soul’.”

Now what is Christian ministry if not helping people’s souls? It’s good to know that King took his pastoral duties seriously and that his aims were spiritual and not carnal.

FBI surveillance also shows that King treated consent as strictly optional. Once, for example, he attacked a female member of his staff in her flat and tore her clothes off in an apparent rape attempt.

On another occasion, FBI bugs picked up a rape that actually succeeded. King’s friend, Logan Kearse, also a Baptist pastor, invited King and his retainers to meet women, “parishioners of his church”, he had brought to Washington with him.

The female parishioners weren’t invited for strictly evangelical purposes. This is how the FBI summarised the tapes of the ensuing proceedings:

“The group met in his room and discussed which women among the parishioners would be suitable for natural or unnatural sex acts. When one of the women protested, the Baptist minister immediately and forcibly raped her. King looked on, laughed and offered advice.”

There we’re talking about a serious crime, not the common-or-garden frivolity that’s these days considered criminal by the MeToo movement. I wonder why the FBI listeners didn’t intercede. Perhaps they didn’t want to blow the whole operation (no pun intended). Or else they weren’t listening in real time.

One way or another, the secular saint who has a public holiday named after him in the US, turns out to be not quite so saintly. Does this throw a shadow over his cause of fighting racial discrimination?

As a little aside, the word ‘discrimination’ now has only pejorative connotations. Left out is the essential modifier, without which the notion becomes ambiguous: ‘unjust’.

Left to its own devices, the word means something commendable: an ability to distinguish between good and bad, beautiful and ugly, moral and immoral, vice and virtue. Discriminating taste, for example, would enable a person to judge the quality of a musical performance or to know that Damien Hirst is no artist.

However, if a black actress were cast as Hamlet in a West End production (don’t think I’m kidding), one would be within one’s rights to support discrimination on the grounds of both race and sex.

Yet unjust discrimination is downright wrong and inexcusable. I had a black friend my age in Houston back in the ‘70s, who told me he had had to ride in the back of the bus as a child. I was as enraged as he was, even though I don’t think I ever saw a single bus during my 10 years in Houston.

Discriminating against people because their skin is a different colour is unjust, even as viewed in the difficult historical context of the US South. Injustice must be fought, and Dr King’s cause was good.

Nevertheless, I detested him. It’s a little idiosyncrasy of mine: I have a physiological aversion to loudmouth demagogues who choose rabble-rousing as a means to their end.

While Dr King’s cause was more noble than those of the equally gifted demagogues Trotsky and Hitler, aesthetically they were too similar for my comfort. I prefer people who have their dreams in private to those who scream about them to the multitudes (which is why I’m not, nor could ever be, a modern politician).

It was to a great extent because of King’s gushing, thunderous demagoguery that the originally good cause turned into something else. Rather than healing the racial wounds, it made them even worse.

While institutional manifestations of racism were stopped, the militancy of the civil rights movement and the ensuing culture of reverse discrimination (‘affirmative action’ in the American parlance) have created other social and cultural problems that are gnawing at America’s body politic.

Bad means can compromise the end, and a bad man can hurt a good cause. David Garrow’s research shows that King was indeed a bad man, and one would think that editors, supposedly truth seekers one and all, would be falling over themselves to publish his findings.

Yet one would be wrong to think that. For all American ‘liberal’ publications, including The Atlantic and The Washington Post turned Garrow’s essay down.

To them, King, good, bad or indifferent, isn’t a man. He’s a secular saint painted in the Byzantine style on an icon.

Besmirching his reputation, even – especially! – if the besmircher’s every word is true, thus falls into the category of apostasy. That makes the guilty party a heretic whose place is on the metaphorical pyre, not in the pages of reputable publications.

Such secular idolatry is always despicable, regardless of the idol’s human qualities. Upholding it by supressing the truth is even worse, much worse.

Unable to worship real God, people are these days trying to find profane surrogates, hoping that way to fill the spiritual vacuum in their lives. Yet no man, even one less flawed than King, can provide this service, and publications that perpetuate such cults are hitting our civilisation on its way down.

Anyway, if something happens and I’m unable to talk to you before 20 January, happy Martin Luther King Day!

P.S. Speaking of discriminating tastes, 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

Now that an official investigation into Labour anti-Semitism has been launched, only one thing surprises me: that so many people are surprised.

Their astonishment has two components. First, anti-Semitism is nasty, whereas socialists are widely believed to be nice, both personally and in their political aspirations.

They stand for equality, fairness, help for the poor, comprehensive education, free medical care, clean air, not too much warm weather and in general every good cause mankind has ever conceived.

This is the message, and it has been sold so successfully for so long that people tend to overlook the obvious facts that, since socialism came into its own, the most satanic atrocities – including genocide of the Jews – have been committed by socialists of either national or international variety.

As to the good causes supposedly championed by socialists, upon close examination they turn out either not to be so good or else championed insincerely and for nefarious reasons.

Democratic egalitarianism, that deformed child of the Enlightenment, begat the worst features of modernity, those that collectively add up to the sabotage of cultural, intellectual and spiritual tradition.

At its base is a quest for uniformity in every sphere of life, not just in politics. This quest became frantic with the Enlightenment, but it started when the democratic idea first appeared. Thus ostracism, as a form of social opprobrium in ancient Greece, was mainly applied to outstanding individuals, and Socrates was one of the earliest victims of democratic egalitarianism.

“Equality is a slogan based on envy,” wrote Tocqueville, adding that nowhere is a citizen as insignificant as in a democratic state.

I can’t think offhand of a single serious political thinker, from Plato onwards, who didn’t express a similar idea, including those who aren’t generally believed to be hostile to democracy. For example, the principal architects of the American republic, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and Adams, detested democracy with unbridled passion – specifically because of what they presciently identified as its egalitarian, which is to say dehumanising, potential.

Democracy is bound to produce egalitarianism, egalitarianism is bound to produce socialism, and socialism is bound to produce a giant central state enforcing uniformity at all levels – such is the simplified chain that binds the individual, especially the outstanding one, hand and foot.

Jews are generally believed to be different, thereby distorting the desirable uniform picture. Thanks to their traditional and doctrinal emphasis on book learning, Jews also tend to resist the democratic tendency towards mass imbecility, or at least not to succumb to it as thoroughly as most other groups.

Also largely because of their commitment to serious education, Jews are widely successful in different walks of life, from corporate boardrooms to scientific laboratories to symphony orchestras. That encourages the egalitarian envy so presciently spotted by Tocqueville.

The more extreme the socialism, and the more logically does it develop the notions of the Enlightenment, the more pronounced this trend – especially since Marx, that charming combination of Jew and anti-Semite, explicitly equated the bourgeois and the Jew.

The syllogism he put forth was attractively simple, and simplicity appeals to small minds. Thesis: capitalists are despicable; antithesis: Jews are capitalists; synthesis: Jews are despicable.

Thus, in addition to the time-honoured garden variety anti-Semitism, socialists intuitively dislike Jews for resisting uniformity; and Marxist socialists also hate them for ideological, scriptural reasons.

Corbyn’s Labour party is virulently Marxist, which is why it absolutely has to be virulently anti-Semitic. But even non-Marxist socialists gravitate to that form of hatred. For example, people who know David Steele, the Liberal politician, tell me he hates Jews so viscerally he can’t even stand being next to one at an official dinner.

The second component of the surprise people feel about Labour anti-Semitism is that that form of bigotry is generally seen as the prerogative of right-wing conservatives.

Now even discounting the lunatic fringe of BNP types, which is more left than right anyway, anti-Semitism is certainly not alien to some conservatives, but it’s usually a different type of anti-Semitism.

(‘Usually’ is the operative word: the instinctive, irrational anti-Semitism of some conservatives, such as Chesterton in Britain or, in our own time, Pat Buchanan in the US, is typologically close to that of non-Marxist socialists.)

By and large, conservative anti-Semitism is more akin to snobbery than to hatred. Since true conservatism includes Christianity as a key constituent, it’s hard for a true conservative to be a fully paid-up anti-Semite.

After all, doctrinally the Old Testament is an essential part of the Christian canon; and historically, Christianity was originated and spread by Jews (the first 15 bishops of Jerusalem, for example, were circumcised Jews) – not to mention that Jesus himself was born to a Jewish woman and raised as a Jew.

If socialists look up to the Jews and hate them for being intellectually and professionally superior, conservatives look down on them for being socially inferior. The difference is vital: socialists kill Jews; conservatives don’t admit them to some clubs.

It stands to reason that the British Union of Fascists was founded by a socialist, Oswald Mosley, while the most conservative British (or for that matter any other) cabinet in living memory, that of Margaret Thatcher, was dominated by Jews, such as Keith Joseph, Leon Brittan, Nigel Lawson, Malcolm Rifkind, Michael Howard and David Young – to say nothing of her principal speechwriter, my late friend Sir Alfred Sherman.

Anti-Semitism has always been with us and always will be – people are fallible and susceptible to the full gamut of biases, both good and bad. But, if one is to generalise, its most virulent forms are more likely to be found in the ranks of socialists.

So what’s the big surprise? Corbyn’s Labour, by far the most extreme socialist incarnation of that party, aren’t bucking a trend. They are proving it.

An instant disclaimer is in order: incompetent and lachrymose Mrs May isn’t a bog-standard criminal.

She hasn’t killed anyone, and I’m sure she has never stolen anything. She did play fast and loose with Brexit, but though despicable, that isn’t a crime in itself. In short, she has committed neither malum in se nor malum prohibitum.

These ancient legal categories describe, respectively, acts criminal in themselves (such as murder) and those criminal only because the law says so (such as snorting cocaine).

Yet I propose another term: malum effectum – an act that’s criminal neither in intent nor mode of execution, but because it produces disastrous effects. And, under some circumstances, incompetence can be malum effectum.

Think of a surgeon killing patients because of his ineptitude, a bad driver losing control and ploughing through a crowd, a cowboy builder whose house buries people under the rubble.

All these individuals would have a case to answer, a moral one definitely, a legal one probably, a criminal one possibly. But what about an incompetent prime minister causing untold damage to the realm?

It’s in that sense that Mrs May is a criminal, but she had plenty of accomplices, both before and during her tenure. It’s because of their collective efforts that the Tories are finished.   

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think the party called Tory is finished. It may even still win the next general election and, considering the only realistic alternative, I hope it will.

It’s just that the party called Tory isn’t Tory. It hasn’t been that for half a century at least, but I only accepted that situation in 1991, when John Major succeeded Mrs Thatcher as party leader (and this is the only way John Major and ‘succeed’ can ever be used in the same sentence).

In his first speech as party leader, Major pledged commitment to ‘classless society’, which was inane on more levels than I can count. For no society can be classless, meaning without a vertical social structure.

People historically stratify themselves into groups, and these arrange themselves not only horizontally but also vertically. Had Major given the matter any thought, he would have discerned the difference between classlessness and social mobility.

He might have also wondered how a monarchy, even a constitutional one, can be classless – the very fact that our head of state is called Her Majesty the Queen precludes that possibility even if it existed otherwise.

But the statement didn’t come from his brain, such as it was. It came from his viscera, which is why he didn’t realise that what he was saying was tantamount to declaring that the Tories were committed to not being Tories.

John Major and the subsequent Tory prime ministers have lived up, or rather down, to that commitment. Nothing they’ve said or done has resembled Conservatism even remotely.

It’s not just because it rhymed that David ‘Dave’ Cameron described himself as ‘heir to Blair’, not, say, to Canning, Wellington or Disraeli (harrowing news: Dave is considering a comeback). At least he was being honest, for once in his life.

When the term was first used, the Tories were the party of aristocracy. They believed in a social order based on traditional hierarchy, Christian values and paternalism towards the lower classes, although not without a potential for social mobility.

The Whigs, aka Liberals, while also respectful of tradition, believed in laissez-faire economics at home and free trade abroad. They were opposed to protectionism, and their success in having the Corn Laws repealed spelled Britain’s economic growth.

At the same time Tory rearguard action was modestly successful in attenuating the shock waves of that growth and keeping the now threadbare social fabric from being torn to tatters too quickly.

Then in barged the twentieth century, heralded by the roar of howitzers. Out went the aristocracy, gassed in Flanders, taxed in Whitehall. And real Toryism went with it.

So what does the word ‘Conservative’ mean these days? Take aristocratic social order and Christian values out of it, and paternalism is all we have left. That, in today’s terms, means a gigantic welfare state, which is to say socialism.

The late Tory Alan Clark unwittingly confirmed this observation. “Almost lost to sight,” he wrote, “remain the… principal functions of the state: to ensure that its citizens are… gainfully employed, and that they are enlightened.”

The first of these functions is another word for wholesale nationalisation (the only way for a state to ‘ensure’ total employment), the modern for socialism; the second,  another word for ‘free’ education, wherein the government makes us pay through the nose for the illiterate nonsense pumped into our children’s minds. That, too, is the modern for socialism.

The functions of the state can thus be reduced to one: being socialist.

Those who beg to differ have to acknowledge that the word ‘Conservatism’ is semantically inoperable, and add to it a typographic dimension by describing themselves as conservative with a lower-case ‘c’, thus renouncing knee-jerk loyalty to the upper-case Conservative party.

Most definitions of that small ‘c’ include some aspects of what in Britain is inaccurately called Thatcherism: limited government, laissez-faire economics at home and free trade abroad. In other words, things that circumscribe the traditional domain of Whiggish liberalism or the present one of economic libertarianism.

Indeed, Britain has followed America’s lead in identifying the right side of her political spectrum with libertarianism rather than conservatism. There used to be a seminal philosophical difference between the two political dispensations, but not any longer.

Thus Mrs May didn’t kill Toryism, as many are alleging. At worst, she drove the last nail into its coffin. What she might have killed with her Brexit shilly-shallying is any semblance of political tranquillity.

Brexit has acted as the catalyst of a deadly implosion, but not its cause. The cause is the tragic parting of ways between Britain’s political – I’d even say national – essence and her actual politics.

The British character gravitates towards pragmatism, moderation and distrust of ideologies, which used to be reflected in Tory politics. But, in the able hands of today’s politicians, pragmatism has become opportunism, moderation has turned into an absence of any principles, and distrust of ideologies has developed into a contempt for ideas.

The only thing now going for the Tories, whoever is at the helm, is that Corbyn is even worse. But because that’s the only thing, we’ll probably end up with the calamity of a Marxist government.

If making that likely isn’t a crime, I don’t know what is.

Much to the chagrin of John Major, whose favourite PM Chamberlain characteristically is, old Neville hasn’t come back in the flesh. Yet the toxic spirit of appeasement associated with him is very much in the air.

On 29 September, 1938, Chamberlain et al. primed a bomb under Europe. Less than a year later, the bomb went off.

Instead of delivering “peace in our time”, which Chamberlain promised the next day, waving a piece of paper in the air, the Munich agreement pushed a button for the most devastating war in history.

That ought to have taught people a useful lesson: though the words ‘peace’ and ‘appeasement’ are cognates in etymology, in real life they are mutually exclusive. Appeasement is a path to devastation, not to peace.

However, the lesson was never heeded, vindicating Paul Valéry’s aphorism: “History teaches precisely nothing.” For further vindication, consider the recent actions by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) and Donald Trump.

Both have taken the course of appeasing Putin’s kleptofascist regime, reversing their original opprobrium of Russia’s crimes. These are numerous and richly varied.

As John Kampfner writes in today’s Times, “For the past five years, the Kremlin has masterminded a campaign to undermine western democracy. It has been spectacularly successful, helping to boost the far right and far left (Putin is Catholic with his tastes) from France to Hungary, from Italy to Finland, from Germany to the UK. Fake news, the feeding of conspiracies, the denigration of institutions, the bullying of individuals. All of these are now the political norm.”

(If I knew John, I’d buy him a drink. None for his sub-editors though: it should be ‘in’, not ‘with’, his tastes, and in this context Putin’s tastes are catholic (meaning universal, and not Catholic, meaning beholden to the Vatican.)

And let’s not forget trying to affect elections in Western countries, committing acts of nuclear and biological terrorism, sending soldiers to prop up Maduro’s regime in Venezuela and so on, ad infinitum.

Yet quite apart from the overall criminality of the Putin regime, relevant to the appeasement theme are two items currently in the news.

The first one deals with PACE’s intention to readmit Russia into that august organisation from which she was expelled following the theft of the Crimea in 2014.

Since committing that crime, Putin’s regime has attacked the eastern Ukraine, killing 13,000 Ukrainians in the process; got involved in the Syrian war with murderous consequences; attempted to engineer a coup in Montenegro, complete with the murder of her PM; used a nerve gas on British subjects; interfered with elections in the US, UK and elsewhere; and, most recently, successfully bribed Austria’s vice-chancellor to plunge the country into a political crisis.

(Leaders of the Freedom party there are happy to canoodle not only with Putin but also with frankly odious figures, such as Dugin, the principle ideologist of Russian fascism; Malofeyev, its active practitioner; and Kadyrov, the Chechen chieftain taking care of some of Putin’s ‘wet work’. So much for freedom. A bit of a misnomer, isn’t it?)

Putin has been a busy boy, and he has done many things along those lines. However, one thing he hasn’t done is return the Crimea to its legal owner, the Ukraine.

In other words, he hasn’t eliminated the reason for which Russia lost her PACE vote five years ago. This, however, hasn’t prevented Heiko Maas, German foreign minister, from announcing that Russia is about to be readmitted.

That way, he explained with most refreshing cynicism, “millions of Russians will be able to appeal for protection to the European Court of Human Rights”. If Maas really believes what he said, either he’s monumentally stupid or thinks we are.

The real function of the ECHR isn’t to protect the legal rights of European citizens but to override the legal institutions of the EU members. In that role it’s succeeding famously, while any salvation acts, if they have occurred at all, are few and far in between.

That’s in reasonably free countries, whose legal institutions are more than just a rubber stamp in the leader’s hand. In Russia, an appeal to the ECHR would be as effective as one to Zeus.

What we’re witnessing here is the EU inhaling the spirit of Munich with both nostrils, as the ghost of Neville Chamberlain floats overhead in thin air, whispering “appeasement in our time”.

As to Donald Trump, I’m not going to comment on his possible collusion with Putin, other than saying that so far no corroborative evidence to take to court has surfaced. But this doesn’t mean there’s no evidence, full stop.

The president has had his arm twisted by Congress to introduce sanctions and other punitive measures against Russia. But he has always done his level best to sabotage such measures, taking particular care never to utter a single derogatory word about Putin (America’s NATO allies don’t rate a similar courtesy).

Yet in November 2018, Trump cancelled a meeting with Putin following an act of piracy committed by the Russian navy in the Strait of Kerch, where it seized three Ukrainian naval vessels and imprisoned 24 sailors.

That was the only reason for the cancellation, explained Trump, adding he’d be happy to meet Putin when this little problem has been solved. One could infer that, until it has been solved, no meetings would take place.

Half a year later the situation hasn’t changed. Those sailors and their ships are still in Russian captivity, and yet Trump is now ready to talk to Putin face to face. The ghost of Chamberlain is looking on, whispering “That’s my boy”.