Category: Blog

I usually try to come up with my own headlines, but my modest talents have proved inadequate to matching either the poignancy or the comic effect of this contribution in today’s Times.

Few headlines these days make me rejoice, fewer still call for jumping up, punching the air and screaming “Yes!!!”. Yet this one did the trick.

It’s hard to think offhand of any other line that could have a similar effect. Perhaps “RSPCA Staff Guilty of Cruelty to Animals”. Or “Blacks Excluded from Commission for Racial Equality”.

Or “Church of England: Let the Boys Wear Tiaras”… oops, sorry. This last one is another real headline, and it had no air-punching effect – quite the opposite. In fact, that was one of those rare instances when I was speechless.

Surely encouraging transvestism, transsexuality and other gender-bender perversions is the job for the government, not the Church? It’s downright presumptuous of the Archbishop of Canterbury to think that HMG needs God’s help in either reducing or increasing the number of sexes stipulated in Genesis.

So back to the story at hand. Matrix Chambers is the brain child of Cherie Booth, QC, better known as Mrs Tony Blair. If half the stories one hears about her are true, Mrs Blair represents an organic blend of Messalina, Lucrezia Borgia and Rosa Luxemburg, which makes her marriage to Tony one of those made in heaven.

She and a few other lawyers set up Matrix in 2000 to champion diversity and dedicate itself to the “promotion and advancement of women”. Yet a secret internal report proves that laws of nature (not to be confused with natural law) haven’t yet been repealed.

Actually, they have been repealed, but the news hasn’t quite reached the male lawyers of Matrix, who apparently are guilty of the worst, or at least the most fashionable, crimes. The moment those legal gentlemen doff their wigs, they’re out to subject their female colleagues to sexual harassment and salacious innuendo.

Moreover, such felonious outrages are “endemic in our profession”, according to a group of barristers called Behind the Gown. Actually, Under the Gown seems more appropriate.

No wonder the Matrix management ordered its 80 members to hush up the report because spilling the beans would be “highly corrosive”. They obviously know little about justice, at least that of the poetic variety. Nor do they possess sufficient sense of humour to enjoy the delicious irony as much as I do.

A number of female barristers working for Matrix clearly doubt not only the sexual probity of their organisation but also its professional competence. “We need to know,” they wrote, “that if something happened that required us to make a complaint, Matrix is equipped to handle it.”

I dare say that if an outfit employing 80 lawyers isn’t equipped to handle such a situation, criminally monstrous as it is, I don’t know who would be. Perhaps the Church of England – unless it’s too busy promoting degene…, sorry, I mean the equality of sexes, all 10 of them.

It’s also instructive that our female barristers think far ahead. Judging by their wording, and barristers do know how to express themselves precisely, nothing that would require them to make a complaint has happened yet. But, judging by the behaviour of their frisky colleagues, it might.

In the same vein, I’d like to know that, if something happened that required me to make a complaint that my car has been stolen, the police would be able to handle it. No, forget that. I know they wouldn’t be: their time is taken up investigating such crimes as people being called fat bastards, ginger tossers or black anything.

Now that I’ve vented some bile out of my system, two serious comments are in order.

First, the very existence of a legal speciality devoted to human rights is as offensive as the Church of England promoting degene…, sorry, I mean the equality of sexes. For, hard as I try, I can’t recall any great human rights lawyers of the past.

Solon? Cicero? Anyone closer to our own time? Earl of Mansfield perhaps? You’ll find that human rights law is a modern concoction, and a very recent one at that.

In the past, it was assumed that the English Common Law provided adequate protection for the ‘rights of Englishmen’, without any need for narrow specialisation. Simply upholding just laws was enough.

Then, at some point in Mrs Tony Blair’s and Mrs George Clooney’s lifetime, a need arose to defend human rights. Though deemed sufficiently protected before the advent of democracy and equality, they were now in jeopardy.

The idea appeals to me: my human rights are egregiously violated by the very existence of Mrs Tony Blair and Mrs George Clooney as public figures. But the inventors of this revolutionary idea must have had something else in mind.

The second serious observation is that every evil revolution does a Saturn by devouring its children. Many French demons went to the guillotine they loved so much. Many Russian demons perished in the terror they glorified.

The revolution under way now is, so far, less sanguinary, but it’s just as destructive – possibly more so. And it too is beginning to hit out at its perpetrators.

“None of it can be prevented,” wrote Seneca, “but it can all be despised.” And mocked. All we have left.

In 1807, Napoleon and Alexander I met at Tilsit, where they signed the eponymous treaty. Exactly 210 years later, Trump and Putin met in Vietnam – and I wouldn’t dare push the parallel any further than that.

For five years after the Tilsit meeting the two countries were at war. Mercifully, judging by the cordiality between Donald I and Vlad II, no such conflict is on the cards.

In deference to their hosts, both leaders donned local garb, which made them look either like waiters at the fashionable Asian eatery Ho Lee-Fook or else superannuated Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution.

Having served the paparazzi the perennial special Photoop Suey, the two waiters cum leaders had a friendly unofficial talk, making sure that nothing like the post-Tilsit hostilities will ever break out.

The meeting put paid to the greatest obstacle in the way of peace: the seemingly well-established fact that Putin meddled in the US elections. Never mind that all the hackers and trolls did their business from Russia – Vlad had nothing to do with that.

How can Donald be sure? Simple. Vlad told him so, and Donald has no reason not to take him at his word:

“He said he didn’t meddle. He said he didn’t meddle. I asked him again. You can only ask so many times … He said he absolutely did not meddle in our election… Every time he sees me he says I didn’t do that. And I believe. I really believe when he tells me that he means it.”

Given such touching credulity, I’m amazed Donald had to ask so many times. Surely he knows by now that Vlad’s word is his bond.

As a good Presbyterian, Donald follows Christ’s entreaty to be as innocent as doves and as wise as serpents. He’s at least halfway there: serpent-like wisdom still needs a bit of work, but dove-like innocence is there for all to see.

As an old cynic myself, I envy this ability to trust other human beings. Donald must have benefited hugely from his professional life spent in the rarefied moral atmosphere of property development in places like Atlantic City.

It’s clear that Donald can’t even imagine other people lying to him because he himself has never told a lie. And he learned to spare the other man’s feelings too – who in his line of work has ever offended anyone?

Thus Donald understandably rues that Vlad “is very insulted” by such vile allegations. As well he should be: George Washington with his cherry tree has nothing on Vlad’s unimpeachable honesty… sorry, I shouldn’t use any cognate of ‘impeach’ within a few words of mentioning Donald.

Had Donald already achieved serpent-like wisdom to complement his dove-like innocence, he would have stopped to consider Vlad’s form before accepting his words as gospel.

He would have asked himself a question that naturally comes to old cynics like me. Supposing that Vlad did meddle in the elections, how would he have replied to Donald’s point-blank enquiry?

“But of course, Donald, I did. You know it, I know it, the whole bloody world knows it. Are you complaining? Remember I did it for you. You and I, mate. We’re like two jaws of the same vice – we’ll squeeze the living bejeesus out of the world…”?

Donald is no lawyer, but counsel at criminal trials tend to ask a series of questions aimed at establishing the witness’s record of ‘truth and veracity’. If he’s shown to be a serial liar, his testimony is either thrown out or at least treated with caution.

Still, even without the benefit of legal background, Trump ought to have reminded himself of Vlad’s professional life, spent in a considerably less rarefied atmosphere than Donald’s own.

It started in the KGB Second Chief Directorate, responsible for combatting dissent. Fair enough, Vlad had no need to tell any lies there. He could tell any dissident that he’d send him to a camp, where murderers would queue up for his favours – and keep his word.

But then Vlad was transferred to the First Chief Directorate, whose remit was spying on the West and spreading disinformation, which is to say lies, about the Soviet Union.

Hence lying can’t possibly be as alien to him as it seems to be to Donald. In fact, the ability to lie believably was an ironclad requirement in Vlad’s pre-government job.

His first government job was that of deputy mayor of Petersburg, where in 1992 the Council commission headed by Marina Salye investigated Vlad’s record of truth and veracity.

Among other choice bits, the resulting dossier shows that Putin signed deals to export $100 million worth of raw materials in exchange for food. The raw materials dutifully left Russia. No food came back in return – this at a time of rationing in Petersburg.

The dossier also states that Putin’s “quest for personal enrichment and absence of any moral barriers became obvious at the very onset of his career.” But people do change, and it’s possible Vlad had his Damascene experience when becoming the national leader.

Alas, he didn’t. He has lied about every major event occurring in Russia on his watch, and quite a few minor ones.

He lied about those blown-up apartment blocks, staged by the FSB to kick off the second Chechen war and tighten Putin’s grip on power.

He lied about having nothing to do with any murders of dissidents, from Politkovskaya and Starovoitova to Litvinenko and Nemtsov – and hundreds of others, including dozens of journalists.

He lied that the Crimean invasion was executed by the ‘little green men’ who had nothing to do with the Russian army.

He lied that pogroms had been committed against Russians in the Ukraine.

He lied that the Russian army played no role in the subsequent aggression against the Ukraine.

He lied that the airliner Flight MH17 wasn’t shot down by a Russian missile.

He lied about his state sponsoring industrial-scale doping of Olympic athletes.

He lied about having nothing to do with money laundering, through Panama and other offshore havens.

We could be here all day: a tissue of lies is being spun every hour of every day by every Russian spokesman, every print and broadcast medium, and Putin personally.

Then again, we could echo Bertie Russell and argue that the sun doesn’t have to rise tomorrow just because it rose yesterday. Yes, that was a clear-cut fallacy, but still: just because Vlad has never uttered a word of truth in his life, it doesn’t mean he’s lying in this case.

I am trying to develop Donald’s innocence (and Bertie’s philosophical depth) to believe that. I’ll let you know how I get on.

Now that, courtesy of President Trump, some archival data on the Kennedy assassination have been declassified, interesting documents are coming to light.

Some of them were published in The New York Times on 26 October, and I have the Russian journalist Piontkovsky to thank for bringing the article to my attention.

Those who are constantly on alert for conspiracy theories needn’t worry. Yes, the uncovered documents confirm what any Russian (or anyone who really understands Russia, which in practice means, well, a Russian) knows anyway, that Oswald was a KGB agent. But no, they don’t prove that killing Kennedy was his assignment.

The documents prove the existence of only one conspiracy: that of staggering ignorance on the part of Western intelligence services and their academic consultants when it comes to Russia – in her Soviet or post-Soviet incarnations.

They may know the facts, but they typically don’t have a clue how to interpret them, including those in the public domain. For any Russian, the whole Oswald story smells fishier than Billingsgate first thing in the morning.

In 1959 Oswald, a young American left-winger, emigrated to the Soviet Union in search of millenarian happiness. So far so good – quite a few Western ‘idealists’ were tropistically attracted to the land of concentration camps.

However, and here Oswald’s story again follows a familiar pattern, by 1962 he realised that millenarian happiness was too elusive. So much so that even Oswald, a man of limited intellect, realised it might not exist.

Unlike Adam, he wanted to leave the paradise of his own accord, of which desire he informed the KGB. Nothing earth shattering there: the KGB supervised Oswald’s stay.

At this point the official story becomes less credible. For the KGB magnanimously allowed Oswald to leave, even at the risk of the Americans squeezing a lot of propaganda value out of the incident.

Such generosity wasn’t completely out of the question, but it was unlikely. At that time, thousands of Americans, some former ‘idealists’ like Oswald, some POWs stuck in Eastern Europe at the end of the war, some kidnap victims, were languishing in Soviet concentration camps or in exile.

They were desperately trying to return home, but to no avail – partly because the State Department wasn’t really interested. The peace process had to survive at any cost, didn’t it?

But fine, Oswald got lucky. The doors of the paradise were flung open, and he was ready to leave. What follows crosses the fine line separating unlikely from impossible.

For this Adam had his Eve, a model Soviet citizen called Marina Prusakova. Lee and Marina fell in love, got married and wanted to leave together. And the KGB let them.

Now anybody who lived in the USSR at that time will tell you that this is neither unlikely nor improbable – it’s utterly impossible. As a rule, Westerners married to Russian women could never get them out. In those few instances when they could, it took the man many years of banging on every door and finally getting the support of his government to see his beloved again.

Yet here we have, for all intents and purposes, an American traitor to the Soviet paradise, who’s not only allowed to leave but gets the divine dispensation to take his wife with him. This could only be possible if the happy couple – or at least Oswald – had been recruited as KGB agents.

On 26 September, 1963 (Kennedy was shot on 22 November), Oswald travelled to Mexico City, where he met officials of the Soviet embassy – this much is known.

However, the newly declassified documents identify his contact there: Valery Kostikov, of the KGB Thirteenth Chief Directorate, responsible for assassinations and sabotage. At first, Kostikov, the Directorate’s principal officer in the Western hemisphere, talked to Oswald in the presence of two other Russians, then for the next 20 minutes on his own.

What did they talk about? Mexican food? We don’t know. So far there’s no proof that the KGB told Oswald to shoot Kennedy, and we should deal with facts, not conjecture.

One such fact is that less than two months later Oswald did shoot Kennedy, and the Russians quaked in their knee-high boots, thinking that a friendly visit from SAC (US Strategic Air Command) was imminent.

The last thing they wanted was to be in any way implicated in the assassination. And here we’re treated to another declassified document that puts to shame the Brothers Grimm, Hans-Christian Andersen and all other spinners of fairy tales.

On 4 December, 1963, a CIA agent in Moscow submitted a report based on “reliable information” from “a highly placed source”. US intelligence services accepted this information as authentic – which would have been risible to any Russian child at the time:

“A source who has furnished reliable information in the past advised on Dec. 4, 1963 that the news of the assassination was greeted in Moscow by great shock and consternation and church bells were toiled in the memory of President Kennedy. According to our source, officials of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union believed there was some well-organized conspiracy on the part of the ‘ultralight’ in the US to effect a ‘coup’.”

He meant ‘tolled’, not ‘toiled’, and ‘ultra-right’, not ‘ultralight’, but never mind the language. Feel the lies.

The Soviet Union was a militantly atheist country. Churches there were razed or converted to warehouses. One anti-religion campaign followed another, and in fact one such was at its peak in 1963.

Only 38 churches were still open in Moscow, a city of seven million people – and their bells never tolled (take it from me, I was 16 at the time). That church bells would toll for Kennedy would have been as likely as Khrushchev ending one of his interminable speeches by crossing himself and saying “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit”.

Any CIA analyst, in fact any halfway educated person, should have instantly identified the source of the “reliable information”: the KGB First Chief Directorate, responsible for disinformation.

That art involves telling the enemy what he wants to hear and therefore is likely to believe. Westerners, Americans in particular, have always wanted to believe that at heart the Russians are just like them. At the time, many Americans were religious, and hence even their Russian experts were ready to swallow the canard of those bells ‘toiling’ all over Moscow.

Just as now they’re eagerly swallowing the canard of the veteran of the same First Chief Directorate leading Russia on a path to Christian virtue. It’s the same bells, ‘toiling’ just as deafeningly.

First, let me offer you some in-depth political insight, based on my intimate familiarity with Westminster ins and outs, extensive life experience, understanding of human nature and acute aesthetic sense:

There’s no doubt that our new International Development Secretary Penelope ‘Penny’ Mordaunt is tastier than Theresa May, Andrea Leadsom and even David Davis. Her thighs in particular are most noteworthy.

If you wish to contest this conclusion, I suggest you Google numerous photographs of Penny wearing swimsuits. The pictures show her to be slightly on the heavy side, but generally falling into the ‘I would’ category.

Considering that our field of political talent currently lies fallow, with little chance it’ll ever be sown again, this ought to be a sufficient qualification for a cabinet position. Add to this Miss Mordaunt’s impeccable Brexit credentials and the fact that she has the same Christian name as my wife, and I dare you to find a better candidate.

However, reading the newspaper accounts of Miss Mordaunt’s elevation, one gets the impression that she wasn’t promoted on the basis of her thighs, cleavage or Christian name. Her Brexit credentials did have something to do with it, but in a convoluted way.

Apparently, “Theresa May bowed to Eurosceptic demands to maintain the delicate Cabinet balance on Brexit,” and “Former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith said it would be wrong to tip the balance in the cabinet further [my emphasis] in favour of Remainers.”

Verily I say unto you, our political system is getting more nervous by the minute. So our cabinet shouldn’t be balanced in favour of Remainers more than it already is.

Suddenly it dawns on me that my grasp of politics isn’t as firm as I hubristically thought. In fact, I realise I understand nothing, even though I’m still clinging on to my aesthetic appreciation of Miss Mordaunt’s thighs.

My whole world has gone topsy-turvy, with every certitude stamped into the dirt. However, out of sheer nostalgia, let me tell you what those certitudes were.

Brexit is one of the most critical constitutional issues in British history and by far the most critical one in the past 25 years. At stake here is the sovereignty of the realm, which is exactly the situation Britain faced in 1940.

The parallel shouldn’t be pushed too far. Mrs Merkel is no Hitler, and her country today isn’t exactly the Third Reich. While Germany is again the principal agent of European unification, she so far achieves her goal without relying on Stukas and Tigers. And, though we’re constantly bombarded with pro-EU propaganda, we aren’t being bombarded with anything more explosive.

But that doesn’t mean that no parallel exists. If Brexit doesn’t go through (and there’s every possibility it won’t), Britain will be no more sovereign than she would have been had the events of 1940 gone the other way.

Britain then stuck to the principle best expressed by the great Jesuit Matteo Ricci (d. 1610): “Simus, ut sumus, aut non simus” (We shall remain as we are or we shall not remain at all). And the War Cabinet was formed to put this principle into practice.

Though led by the Conservatives, the cabinet was an ad hoc coalition including such arch-Labourites as Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin. Hence different parties were represented in the cabinet – but not different approaches to the problem at hand.

Churchill didn’t strive to balance the hawks and doves in his cabinet. All its members were united in their unwavering commitment to preserve Britain’s sovereignty founded on her ancient constitution.

In fact, Churchill delivered a most unbalanced speech, explaining his philosophy of cabinet appointments: “If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”

And he practised what he preached: Churchill didn’t appoint Neville Chamberlain, Ramsey MacDonald and Oswald Mosley to maintain a ‘delicate Cabinet balance’ between defence and appeasement. He welcomed the diversity of party affiliation, but not the diversity of patriotism.

This brings us to the present day, when Britain’s sovereignty is imperilled as much as it was then, albeit with no Luftwaffe bombs levelling London’s East End.

However, the need for a balanced cabinet seems to be taken for granted even by the conservative press, such as it is. I don’t get this.

There’s no more important function in any government than defence of the realm, meaning the safeguarding of the realm’s sovereignty. Following the plebiscite of 23 June, 2016, HMG undertook to do just that and, in due course, activated Article 50, thus pushing the button for exit.

We’re out, which is the opposite of in. The two opposites are mutually exclusive. What’s there to balance? The commitment to sovereignty and absence thereof? As I say, I just don’t get this.

A message to Honourable and other members of the cabinet: Brexit is no longer an issue to argue about. It’s an official policy to carry out. Those who disagree with this policy or refuse to carry it out don’t belong in government – it’s as simple as that.

I’d argue they don’t belong in Parliament either, but, to use the wishy-washy jargon of our politics (and so many editors I’ve met), such a view is too ‘controversial’ and ‘not at all helpful’.

So I won’t say it. Instead, I’d like to redirect your attention to Miss Mordaunt’s thighs, which, as far as I can tell, are in perfect balance.

Fire-eating republicans must be blessed with a heightened moral sense, reaching cosmic altitudes inaccessible to most people.

This conclusion is hard to escape looking at the people who are most vociferous in castigating the Queen’s investment strategy. Apparently, Her Majesty “minimised her tax exposure”, to use City jargon, by putting some of her money into offshore shelters.

In some quarters, this practice is called tax avoidance, which is legal, as opposed to tax evasion, which isn’t.

Now not even the Queen’s fiercest critics think that Her Majesty personally makes her financial decisions, or issues to her advisers instructions along the lines of “One wishes to screw one’s government out of every penny one can.”

Nor do they suggest that tax avoidance is illegal. However, they insist that there exists a higher morality than that codified in statutes.

As a Christian, I welcome this sentiment on general principle. In case of conflict, heavenly morality laid down in Exodus and Matthew does trump human laws any day of the week and twice on Sundays. (Yes, I know it’s a tired cliché, but it seems appropriate in this context.)

The trouble is that Her Majesty’s detractors are guided by a higher morality of a different sort from that laid down in Exodus and Matthew and widely reaffirmed on Sundays. Their God isn’t that of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They worship at the altar of another deity: the state.

Their main, one is tempted to say only, article of faith was tersely formulated by that great socialist Benito Mussolini: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

Comrade Corbyn, who’s particularly aghast at the Queen’s sharp practices, hasn’t to my knowledge professed admiration for Mussolini. His sympathies gravitate more towards Lenin and Trotsky, which is understandable.

Mussolini is seen in Corbyn’s circles as a heretic who betrayed true socialism. As proof of his treachery, he only managed 1,624 political convictions in the 20 years he was in power.

What kind of socialism is that? Where’s the red on tooth and claw? Comrade Corbyn’s idols murdered tens of millions – now that’s really keeping with Marx’s prescriptions.

Yet, acknowledged or not, Mussolini’s adage is the leitmotif of all types of socialism, be it communist, democratic, fascist or Nazi. Whatever their differences (and these shouldn’t be downplayed even in the heat of debate), they all converge on state worship. Guided by this creed, they logically regard as either illegal or at least immoral anything that diminishes the power of the state over the individual.

Obviously, the more money the state extorts from an individual, the less independent from the state will the individual become. Hence socialists are doctrinally compelled to define taxation not so much in fiscal as in moral terms.

Taxation for them has above all a punitive purpose: it punishes individual pursuit of financial independence, just as socialised medicine and education punish individual pursuit of health and learning.

If socialists are pressed on the issue of, say, the NHS, they’ll spin a fine yarn about equality, fairness and whatnot. But at the heart of their animadversions lies fanatical adoration of state power.

The type of state doesn’t really matter. Charles Lindbergh, for example, used to add 10 per cent to his tax bill because he was “proud to be an American”. He must have been equally proud of being an ardent fan of that great statist Adolf Hitler.

Logically, socialists see no difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion. Legality be damned – it’s their perverse notion of morality that they use as the yardstick. They may even agree that a chap can spend his money better than the state can spend it for him. That point doesn’t become any more relevant for being true.

One has to emphasise here that, unlike Lindbergh, our socialists feel that way about other people’s money, not their own. When it comes to their personal finance, wealthy socialists look for tax shelters as intently as do Her Majesty’s advisers. Hypocritical?

Not really. That’s like saying a priest who lusts after women (or even men) has no right to celebrate Mass. When he’s at the altar, he’s no longer an individual but a conduit of higher truth. Except that, unlike socialism, his higher truth is indeed both high and true.

Intelligent socialists, which may be an oxymoron, have to be republicans. They correctly see monarchy, blessed by the Church even if it may not be ordained by God, as a denial of the modern political state – or at least a natural check on its excesses.

Because they hate our monarchy, socialists jump at any chance to besmirch our monarch. That Corbyn, whose hatred of traditional institutions is nothing short of maniacal, should lead the charge stands to reason.

He isn’t even smart enough to conceal his animus. For example, the other day Comrade Corbyn took some time from the celebration of the Bolshevik centenary to express his admiration for Mary Wollstonecraft (d. 1797).

Miss Wollstonecraft rated Corbyn’s love for two reasons: she was a precursor of feminism and “was excited by the radical opportunities the French Revolution could bring.”

The Revolution actually realised one of the radical opportunities so exciting to Wollstonecraft and Corbyn: the beheading of the king and queen. Corbyn doubtless casts a wistful retrospective eye at that event and sees our own sovereign laying her head on the block.

The republican, monarchy hater and state worshipper come together within Corbyn’s breast, and it’s this convergence that animates his harangues about Her Majesty’s investments.

I’d suggest a different take on the morality of taxation. It’s the moral duty of any intelligent conservative, which may be a tautology, to shield every possible penny from the state’s grubby fingers.

The same logic followed by Corbyn here applies in reverse. By exhausting every legal means of avoiding taxes, we assert the power of the individual over the state. When it comes to politics, I know of no higher morality.

Rather than being lowered to 16, the voting age should be raised to at least 25. This seems like an unassailable idea, based on empirical evidence and common sense.

Grown-up decisions must be made by grownups. However, those same people who’d laugh at the idea of letting 16-year-olds dispose of their family budget believe that the youngsters are amply qualified to make potentially vital decisions for the whole country.

Rather than being told to do number one and go to bed, children will soon be told they can stay up until they decide who should govern us. Voting is their inalienable right, and somehow our franchise is woefully incomplete without them.

Shadow (meaning next) Home Secretary Diane Abbott, whose claim to fame is mainly based on her past cohabiting with Jeremy Corbyn and posing nude for his friends, certainly thinks so.

“I believe in votes at 16,” she declared recently. “If you’re old enough to fight for your country, you’re old enough to vote.”

Diane was widely mocked for not knowing that soldiers can’t be selected for combat until they’re 18, and this indeed is a lamentable lacuna in our next Home Secretary’s education. Yet few argued against the essence of her argument, or its logic.

Few noticed that the erstwhile beauty’s statement is an out-and-out non sequitur. My usual counterargument is that 16-year-olds can play professional football, but they can’t manage a professional football team. And if, by some mad oversight, one were allowed to do so, the team would be playing pub football next season.

Then again, I consider the source and crack an indulgent, avuncular smile. I suspect that posing nude for Jeremy’s friends just may be the most intelligent thing Diane has ever done or said.

Yet apparently the Tory MP Dominic Raab agrees with her: he believes puberty is a sufficient qualification, and I thought he was a reasonable, Brexit-voting young man.

I suggest Dominic and other paedocrats read Golding’s Lord of the Flies or, if they prefer a shorter statistical account to a longer fictional one, the recent poll published in The Washington Times. They’ll know exactly what to expect when children get the vote, which is to say power.

The survey asked 2,300 ‘millennials’ (those aged 16 and 17), whether they’d prefer to live in a socialist, communist or fascist nation rather than a capitalist one.

The poll was flawed because the right end of the political spectrum was identified by a Marxist term, as if liberal movement of capital were fully synonymous with political goodness. It isn’t, as anyone who knows anything about today’s China can confirm.

But ‘capitalism’ is widely used shorthand, and of course many Americans do see it – rather than, say, the rule of law, limited power of the state, Christian virtue or keeping the US equivalents of Diane Abbott from government – as the most inclusive single-word term.

Be that as it may, a landslide majority of 58 per cent opted for one of the three awful systems, with socialism leading the other two by a wide margin. Do you understand now why the Left are so passionate about expanding the franchise?

Their thinking is the same as it was when Tony Blair cynically enlarged the voting population by inviting a million Muslims into the country. He and his jolly friends knew they’d benefit from any expansion of the franchise beyond the small core of Her Majesty’s subjects who may vote responsibly.

Why the nice Mr Raab supports this frankly subversive idea is less immediately obvious, but then one must consider the generally low grade of human material out of which our governments are constructed. This observation is genuinely cross-party, and it applies just about everywhere.

Granted, a similar poll in Britain might yield different results, but somehow one doubts it. Hearing grown-ups almost invariably talk infantile, inane, illiterate rubbish whenever politics comes up makes one shudder at the thought of their children choosing our governments.

Incidentally, the same poll showed a wide admiration for communist icons. Thus 31 per cent had a favourable view of Che Guevara, 32 per cent of Karl Marx, 23 per cent of Lenin and 19 per cent of Mao.

Incomprehensibly, Stalin polled a mere six per cent, and my friend Vlad Putin is going to hear about this. His propaganda machine must have stalled at some point. I told you to put me in charge of RT, Vlad: American youngsters would now think Stalin was the best friend the West ever had.

Raising the voting age wouldn’t prevent a catastrophe (such as Diane Abbott as Home Secretary and her ex-paramour as PM), but it might delay its advent. Lowering it, however, is guaranteed to hasten a catastrophe so much that even wrinklies like me may see it in their lifetime.

Perish the thought.

Perhaps I should have written “prior history’s” for the evil of Bolshevik Russia went on to be matched by others: Nazi Germany, Mao’s China, Khmer Rouge and so forth.

But they were all inspired by the event whose centenary is still celebrated today by many Russians, including those who run the country. And the mummy of the syphilitic ghoul Lenin, the principal energumen of the satanic event, still adorns Red Square, holy relics to be worshipped.

The putsch of 7 November, 1917, introduced not just a new regime, but a new concept of a regime: one declaring war on its own people and the rest of the world, and waging that war with inhuman savagery on a scale never even approached before.

Historians are still arguing whether Bolshevism was a denial of Russian history or its natural continuation, which generally follows the line of debate between ‘Slavophiles’ and ‘Westernisers’ in the nineteenth century.

Over the past 30-odd years, the late Solzhenitsyn and his like-minded followers have been preaching the ideas of the first group, according to which Russia was destined to carry out a messianic mission. Granted, she wasn’t perfect in every respect: serfdom, for instance, had few supporters. But on balance Russia was better than the West, more godly, more spiritual, less mercantile.

Had Judaeo-Masonic-Western Marxism not been transplanted onto Russia’s sacred body, the country would have eventually become something like Norway, larger and marginally less prosperous, but with an extra spiritual dimension.

This school sees pre-Revolutionary Russian history as a steady march towards a mystically tinged bright future – suddenly interrupted by alien revolutionaries (many of them Jews, an important factor for the Slavophiles), in no way linked with Russia’s people or history.

The other group, best represented in the West by the Harvard professor Richard Pipes, insists on a steady, organic evolution of the Russian state from its inception to the present day. Most of the Soviet institutions are therefore traced back to their embryos as conceived in old Russia.

The Cheka thus goes back to the nineteenth-century Privy Chancellery or possibly even to Preobrazhensky prikaz (Peter I’s secret police), Soviet internal troops to Ivan IV’s oprichnina, the GULAG to the Tsar’s penal colonies (katorga), collective farms to the peasant communes, and so forth. Underpinning them all is the Russian national character that, though slightly corrupted by some 70 years of bolshevism, has remained virtually unchanged through the centuries.

Both groups are partly right, meaning they’re both partly wrong.

The Russian state has been variably wicked from its inception. The great poet Lermontov’s reference to “unwashed Russia, a land of masters, land of slaves” has pertained throughout history. Thus Russia’s body always carried within itself the cancerous cells of the worst tyranny the world has ever known.

However, pre-Revolutionary Russia wasn’t the worst tyranny the world has ever known, and only a rank determinist would argue that those cells absolutely had to metastasise. It’s a fallacy to think that, because things happen, they were bound to happen.

Russia would never have developed a Western-type state because it isn’t a Western-type country. Its political ethos was formed by a volatile mix of Byzantium and the Mongol Horde, not by Western polity. The resulting millennium of enslavement has left an indelible mark on the national character, corrupting both masters and slaves.

But there’s no reason Russia couldn’t have become a more or less benign autocracy and a decent place for people to live. In fact, it began to show signs of becoming just that towards the end of the nineteenth century.

Then several tectonic plates slammed together, and the volcano of evil tyranny bubbling at Russia’s core erupted. There were indeed several plates: humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, the tsar’s incredible stupidity in dragging Russia into the meat grinder of the First World War – and of course the demonic energy of a small group of cannibalistic ghouls led by Lenin.

Because a similarly evil group had never taken over a major country before then, neither the Russians nor anybody else quite knew what to make of it. Evil is the operative word here, not Marxism.

To be sure, Marxism is an evil ideology, and Lenin’s gang used it almost to its full potential. But for them, Lenin and Stalin in particular, Marxism was a weapon, not the target.

The target was to spread the same brand of evil over the whole world and, when Marxist slogans served that purpose, they were used. When they got in the way, they were abandoned, as, for example, when Lenin introduced the NEP (New Economic Policy), mitigating to some extent state control over the economy.

Once they took over, the ghouls proceeded to do what ghouls do: eat human flesh. They did so figuratively; millions of peasants had to do it literally – murderous famines broke out immediately after the putsch, claiming millions of victims.

Parents were eating their children, scavenging was rife: corpses were routinely used for nourishment. You can find on the net many harrowing photographs to that effect.

The ghouls did their bit by more direct action too: some two million were executed judicially on Lenin’s watch (he died in 1924, but was effectively out of power at least a year earlier), but that doesn’t begin to tell the story.

Untold and uncounted millions were simply shot out of hand or tortured to death without even a travesty of justice; millions more perished of starvation and disease; 10 million died in the war Lenin started against his own people (this is known as the Civil War). And Stalin was still to come.

Slated for total annihilation were the educated classes: aristocracy, intelligentsia, professionals, officers, clergy. Of the latter, 40,000 priests were murdered during the same period.

The official version is that they were shot, but few were so lucky. Priests were crucified, flayed alive, cut to ribbons, eviscerated, turned to ice by having cold water poured over them in minus 20 weather – and I’ll spare you the really graphic details.

The Soviet Union was formed in 1923, and its national emblem provided a pictorial statement of intent: hammer and sickle superimposed on the whole globe. Under Stalin, the ghouls tried to make it a reality, and only Hitler’s preemptive strike stopped them in their tracks. In the end they had to content themselves with only half of Europe, not all of it.

Altogether, during the 70-odd years they were in business, the ghouls murdered some 60 million of their own subjects (the most credible estimate) and, under Stalin, turned the whole country into a blend of concentration and military camps. At least five, but more likely 10, million perished in the famines the Soviets created deliberately in the Ukraine and elsewhere – and don’t think for a second the Ukrainians have forgotten this.

Democide was accompanied by genocide: whole peoples were deported to uninhabitable parts of Siberia and Kazakhstan. Some 25 per cent of the Balts were killed, imprisoned or deported, along with practically all the Chechens and Crimean Tartars – and don’t think for a second any of them have forgotten this.

The untold misery produced by the Soviets is well-documented, but less understood is the moral damage that pure evil has done not only to Russia but to the whole world. For the birthday boy of a state expanded the boundaries of the possible ad infinitum.

The Soviets lit the path for evil to triumph on a scale never before imagined. Murdering people in their millions by category set a fine example to follow, and many did follow it.

The Nazis, for example, were eager and able pupils. Soviet maestros happily shared with them their experience of setting up and running concentration camps, for example. The NKVD and Gestapo even formed a Friendship Society, with Stalin’s and Hitler’s blessing. Amazingly, it remained active, if on a limited scale, throughout the war.

Such an eruption of evil doesn’t just kill bodies; it corrupts souls – and not only at its epicentre. All those fellow-travellers in the West, Lenin’s ‘useful idiots’, proved one didn’t have to be Russian to be morally infected by Soviet wickedness. Churchill correctly identified Lenin as a ‘plague bacillus’, but the spread of the contagion was global, even if it created the worst pandemic in Russia proper.

Such was the regime whose collapse Putin described as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century”. It wasn’t. There were two real geopolitical catastrophes on the same site: the birth of Lenin’s satanic regime and its continuous survival in a new incarnation.

Any sin can be forgiven if sincerely repented. Yet no such repentance has occurred in Russia, as it did in Germany. And no wonder: vindicating the First Law of Thermodynamics, the Soviet regime hasn’t disappeared – it has merely changed its form.

And the new form is reverting to the old, for Putin’s propagandists in the media, academy and education are slowly restoring Lenin’s and Stalin’s reputations. Yes, they say, there might have been a downside to the Soviet regime, but think of its pluses.

Woe to anyone who can believe that a satanic regime devouring millions has any pluses at all. Such a person hasn’t just set his moral scales wrongly – he has thrown them out of the window. Vindicators of evildoers become their accomplices.

Stalin’s self-panegyric is repeated ad nauseam: he took the country with a wooden plough and left it with an atom bomb. Personally, I prefer the plough, especially if the atom bomb is used for the evil purpose of blackmailing the world – and if, for it and its equivalents to be created, tens of millions were murdered and hundreds of millions enslaved.

Bolshevik ghouls are officially portrayed in Russia as honest idealists, dedicated if at times misguided nation builders. Admittedly, they might have committed some crimes (this is whispered, not said). But do let’s keep things in balance.

Putin’s mouthpiece-in-chief Kisilev put it in a nutshell on Russia’s main TV channel: “We can’t, nor should, condemn everything Soviet… Our Lenin. And our USSR. Lenin moved Russia to make a megadream come true. He staged a great social experiment… In that sense, Lenin is a hero.”

Now imagine the worldwide outcry if Merkel’s mouthpiece said something similar about Hitler, who also ‘staged a great social experiment’. Yet Kisilev’s harangue went unnoticed and unreported in our press.

Part of the reason is that Putin has his own herd of Western ‘useful idiots’, except that his lot come from the Right. These people, driven to despair by their own governments, are eager to swallow, feathers and all, the canard of a new Russia run by a new KGB (85 per cent of Russia’s leadership including its church hierarchs are career KGB officers or agents).

Because the current evil government advances its cause by using nationalist, rather than internationalist, slogans, it appears to some as a useful alternative to our own globalist spivs. For similar reasons many Westerners saw Hitler as the only viable alternative to Stalin.

Overlooked is the frankly criminal nature of Putin’s regime, different as its criminality may be from the Soviets’ in some details. Unlike Lenin and Stalin, Putin only murders his opponents in their thousands, not millions. Unlike them, he allows Russians to leave – and millions have taken advantage of that laxity, many of them to spread the tale of the present good tsar over the West.

But in every moral sense, Putin and his gang are worthy heirs to the blood-sucking Bolsheviks. They don’t even bother to conceal it: Lenin statues are standing where they’ve always stood; Stalin statues are coming out of warehouses and going up all over Russia; Russian schoolchildren are taught that Stalin was above all an administrator of genius, a fair if stern father of the country.

Putin’s sponsoring organisation, now under a new name if the same management, is involved in global subversion as actively as the Soviets ever were. Just like Stalinists, Putinists viciously pounce on their weaker neighbours. And just like Stalinists, they find themselves on the opposite side to the West in every conflict.

Though seen as a useful laundromat for ill-gotten gains and a source of yachts, good medical care and education, the West is still demonised in Russia, still portrayed as its implacable enemy.

Not only Putinism but even unvarnished Bolshevism still has its fans in the West, the latter at the Left end of the political range. I’m sure, for example, that today’s anniversary is wildly celebrated at our Labour headquarters, with Comrade Corbyn presiding over the festivities. The very thought that his Trotskyist gang may well take over my country gives me the creeps, an allergic reaction that millions of Corbyn voters are spared.

In my childhood, Moscow was adorned with posters saying “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live”. Replace ‘Lenin’ with ‘evil’, and the statement still rings true. It’s the centenary of that satanic evil that so many demons celebrate today, dancing around fires.

The on-going orgy of suicidal sex hysteria in Westminster has attracted much coverage and received many explanations, most of them correct.

People talk about feminism spinning out of control, and they’re right. Others highlight power struggle in Parliament, with sex ‘impropriety’ used as a weapon, and they’re right too. Still others argue that our politicians merely reflect the rapacious decadence of modern Britain, and they definitely have a point.

The more intrepid commentators even mention the possibility of a conspiracy aimed at paralysing the government, forcing a new election, putting Corbyn into 10 Downing Street and derailing Brexit – and, much as one is wary of conspiracy theories, they may have even more of a point.

All such commentators are telling the truth, but none of them is telling the whole truth. They can’t be blamed for that: the whole truth has too many strains to cover in a format short enough to hold the attention of our newspaper readers.

There’s enough material there for a longish book, and I hope some publishers are reading this and taking note. Meanwhile, let me point out another strain that largely goes unnoticed.

Here’s a simple question: why is it that the current hysteria over ‘sex pests’ behaving ‘inappropriately’ or ‘talking out of turn’ affects mostly the US (as represented by Hollywood) and Britain (as represented by Westminster)?

Now Hollywood actresses waxing indignant about powerful men making passes at them scales the heights of hypocrisy that no satire can reach.

From the time the first film was made in Hollywood, there has hardly been an actress who hasn’t slept and/or munched her way to the top. All, well, most, of those enraged Valkyries ought to take a look at their careers, realise how cloyingly phony they sound, and shut up.

But are Americans and Englishmen in general friskier than, say, Italians or Frenchmen? No one who has observed the flirtatious, sex-charged atmosphere at dinner parties in those countries will believe so. Do ‘les anglo-saxons’ have stronger libidos? Oh please.

Compared to, say, Berlusconi, Mitterrand or Hollande, not only a run-of-the-mill Tory MP but even King Priapus is a eunuch. Moreover, most of those chaps’ shenanigans have been lovingly covered by the press in their own countries and beyond.

So were their political careers destroyed by their amply publicised proclivity to stray? Of course not. No one gives much of a damn. People read such accounts for entertainment value, not as lessons in morality.

Then why the US and UK? You’ll notice one common feature in the two countries: both are predominantly Protestant. That is both are predominantly atheist now, but before they realised that man was created not by God but by Darwin, they had had centuries of Protestantism behind them.

By now they’ve produced the worst possible hybrid: religiously atheist and culturally Protestant. Their atheist side wants to lay every woman they see, except perhaps Diane Abbot. Their Protestant side says they’re going to burn in hell for it – and, in this life, may well be punished by bankruptcy.

That most don’t even believe in hell in particular or God’s punishment in general is neither here nor there: the genetic memory of that belief lives on. As a result, they combine sexual profligacy, unrestrained by any universal moral tethers, with revoltingly sanctimonious hypocrisy.

Consequently, they tend to tinge eroticism with the kind of sleaze one seldom encounters in the southern part of Europe. One doesn’t see in Paris, as one does in Amsterdam, seventeenth-century windows decorated with ugly half-naked whores grinning lasciviously at passers-by.

The French these days are no more religious than the British, but they too have genetic, or is it cultural, memory. Thus they tend to treat sex with cavalier insouciance, and are generally relaxed not only about persistent flirtation but also about adultery.

Those who still believe seem to think that the odd confession will wipe the slate clean. The atheists apologise not to God but to themselves, thinking they can absolve themselves.

In spite of widespread and generally condoned fornication, families in those countries tend to be stronger than in Protestant lands. Divorce rates in France and Italy, for example, are 40 per cent lower than in Britain.

Ex-Protestants do do sex – but they do it badly and clumsily. And what goes for actual sex goes tenfold for its prelude: banter, flirtation, courtship.

French women, for example, accept flirtation as a natural part of discourse between men and women. This is as basic, and usually as meaningless, as a man bending to kiss a woman’s hand and stopping an inch before his lips make contact.

Both men and women know the ritual, as they know it may go beyond flirtation, but probably won’t. Equally accepted there is the natural, physiological fact that, though the woman may hint at her interest, it’s the man who must be more explicit in asking for sex.

The question may be posed semantically, in words, or semiotically, in gestures. The words may vary from, say, an invitation to dinner to something less open-ended. The gestures may include brushing or perhaps taking a woman’s hand or – and here we’re approaching our turmoil-riven shores – putting a hand on her knee.

Now my modest experience in such matters suggests that a knee isn’t the most erogenous of zones. Thus touching it, provided the hand doesn’t wander any farther, isn’t a sex act. It’s a question: Would you consider having sex?

French women are as adept at answering such questions as the men are at posing them. They may encourage the aspiring swain or discourage him, but either is usually done with grace, humour and subtlety.

Thus a French woman is unlikely to respond to a hand on her knee the way that journalist rebuffed Sir Michael Fallon, by threatening to punch him in the face. The message would be just as clear, but it would be more civilised. (I hope you and my wife realise that I’m talking strictly as an outside observer, not an active participant.)

If the French regard flirtation, with all its sexual overtones, as natural, the English are predisposed to regard it as suspect and intrusive. That’s why they don’t mind being told that a bawdy joke is ‘inappropriate’, flirtation is rude, a hand on the knee is a mortal insult, a pass is assault, and assault is a crime worse than murder.

The modern ethos, especially in formerly Protestant countries, imposes many inhibitions on sexual behaviour. These are ignored, but profligacy dialectically coexists with treating sex as something inherently dirty and violent. Hence, young British women on the make often have to get fall-over drunk before responding to sexual advances – drunkenness is considered expiatory.

Hence also, when punters are told that, look, our high and mighty abuse women in dirty and violent ways, they nod their understanding – even though nothing worse than a crude pass or a ribald joke has occurred. The French would shrug and smile.

This is an attempt not to countenance loose sexuality proscribed by the founding documents of our civilisation, but to try to understand why accounts of ‘sex pests’ have created such a deafening resonance. Then of course no one has ever accused modernity of a surfeit of taste and restraint.

P.S. A note to Andrea Leadsom: You can take your hands out now; they must be warm enough.

The other day I had to collect my resident’s parking permit from the Hammersmith & Fulham Council.

I resented having to go: they were supposed to post the permit to me, but hadn’t. However, I was amply rewarded for the bothersome trip. Thanks to it I learned what modernity is about, a knowledge I’m happy to share with you for didactic purposes, and I hope you’ll be thankful.

The Council building is an architectural tribute to Corbusier’s fascist brutalism. Hence the building sits on pillars acting as piles, and there’s no ground floor.

Corbusier’s idea was to have traffic moving underneath buildings, which in this case it doesn’t. Since the Council is located at the intersection of two streets, with plenty of traffic on one of them, the architects were plainly after an ideological statement, rather than a functional one.

The Council confirms this impression by using one of the pillars as a sort of poster board. The pillar, about ten feet high and seven wide, serves as a cogent exegesis of modernity.

Each of its four facets is densely covered with poetic statements of the Council’s take on modernity, which word they use interchangeably with modernism. Rather than quibbling about this lexical imprecision, I was so impressed with the messages that I whipped my phone out and photographed them for posterity (and your benefit).

Facet 1

So modernity is about wiping out national borders and universities. The latter will be moved out of campuses and into the streets, where, by the sound of them, the authors of this message were educated. It’s also about magic and Spanish guitar music. What, no rap? I feel deprived.

Facet 2

My poetic sense isn’t acute enough to understand much of this. As far as I can tell, rather than crying in our sleep, we should dream about free education and racial equality. Since I’m unable to police my dreams, I’ll have to go on wetting my pillow every night. Pity.

Facet 3

If the the first part means anything at all, which it doesn’t, it certainly has little to do with modernity: the message does confirm that the Earth is ancient. The second part insists on the beauty of wind turbines (a matter of taste, I suppose, or rather absence thereof) and suggests, in a rather surreal way, that their vanes be used to give Mr Trump a haircut. Since one doubts that the vanes can achieve the requisite accuracy, we must be talking not about coiffure but about beheading, which is fine because Mr Trump is a troglodyte. Alas, he’s a short troglodyte compared to wind turbines, so I see physical problems here. Never mind: the message is pure metaphysics.

Facet 4

In addition to free education and racial equality, we are advised to dream about fair (meaning extortionist) taxation and gender equality. No civilisation is possible without all of the above, and therefore none has so far existed.

I’m so happy to see that not all our taxes are used for crass material purposes. I also now understand why the Council messed up my parking permit. Who can worry about petty practical details when his mind is occupied with higher, philosophical concerns? I certainly can’t, and neither can the Council.

You have your marching orders now. Go and get your dreams in order, modernity commands. And, since none of us is capable of the same poetic subtlety and philosophical depth, we must obey – even those of us who don’t fall under the jurisdiction of the Hammersmith & Fulham Council.

Jeremy deserves my gratitude, as does anyone who refines my understanding of the world.

I’ve often maintained that leftwingers are either fools or knaves. Yet Jeremy has disabused me of this ‘either… or’ notion. He proves it’s possible to be both.

Four years ago he protested against the government spending “shedloads of money” on commemorating the centenary of the First World War. “I’m not quite sure what there is to commemorate about the First World War,” he said, “other than the mass slaughter of millions of young men and women – mainly men – on the Western Front and all the other places.”

Now it goes without saying that every leftie, especially one of the hard variety, despises his country’s past, which he invariably sees as an uninterrupted history of oppression, slavery, bellicosity, homophobia, misogyny, social injustice, racism, ageism, obscurantism, religious bigotry and so forth.

At the hard end of the leftie range, the negative pole of contempt is offset by the positive pole of fondness – for assorted Shangri-las of human goodness, such as the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and Cambodia.

Professing such admiration openly has lost some street cred after the weight of evidence documenting the cannibalistic nature of those regimes reached critical mass. However, a son doesn’t necessarily stop loving his father just because the latter is doing time for murder.

Thus the Corbyns of this world keep fanning in their hearts the smouldering affection for the most murderous, oppressive and dehumanising regimes in history. This is the kindling for their burning desire to transplant the animating mentality onto their native soil, producing as close an approximation of concentration camps as is feasible at the time.

This is evil at its purest, and the word ‘knavery’ doesn’t do it full justice. Yet history’s most evil men weren’t necessarily stupid. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mao were clever men of indisputable abilities. Both their cleverness and abilities served evil purposes, but that’s a separate point.

Jeremy, on the other hand, may be perfidious, but he isn’t clever. If he were, he’d mask his unadulterated hatred for Britain much better – and he’d also avoid saying such monumentally idiotic things that his true animus becomes clear for all to see (except for those who won’t see).

This poppy-shunning cretin could have explained his actions in a marginally cleverer way. For example, he could have said that, much as he cherishes the memory of “the millions of young men and women”, this is an occasion not so much for commemoration as for retrospective slings and arrows aimed at Britain’s imperial past.

Yet the way he so stupidly put it suggests he has no clue as to what exactly is commemorated on the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month”.

I’ll give you a clue, Jeremy. Armistice Day? Does that ring any bells? No? How about Remembrance Day? Still not a tinkle?

Fine, let me spell it out for the slow learners. On 11 November we celebrate not the First World War but the end of it, the time when “the mass slaughter of millions of young men and women” stopped. That’s when the Armistice was signed, get it? Hence it’s called Armistice Day, which ought to be a giveaway.

And it’s also called Remembrance Day because we use this occasion to bow our heads to the memory of those millions who perished for their country in that war and all others.

We may not like some of the causes for which they died. But that doesn’t prevent us from cherishing their memory. Nor does it prevent us from praying for them.

Pacifism is a doctrine worthy of contempt on many levels, rational, moral, practical and religious (in the Western sense of religion at any rate). But selective pacifism is much, much worse.

Corbyn can’t climb on the high horse of nonviolence while staying mired neck-deep in the putrid swamp of his ideology, the most violent the world has ever known.

It goes by various names: hard Left, Marxism, Leninism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, Maoism or even fascism. But by any name it smells as foul. At the heart of it lurks loathing of all those who shun this form of Satanism – which emotion is accompanied by the concomitant urge to exterminate them all.

Years ago I knew a woman, an active member of the Labour Party, who every 22 April held a party for Lenin’s birthday. Nice in every other respect, she felt compelled to commemorate the ghoulish, syphilitic murderer of millions, who set the stage for murdering millions more.

In the same vein, I bet in four days Comrade Corbyn will be celebrating the centenary of the greatest ever eruption of evil, the Bolshevik putsch in Russia. He won’t bother to explain how such jubilations tally with his disdain for his countrymen fallen in various wars. Demons, after all, don’t have to explain why they worship Satan. They just do.

Nor does Corbyn mind belting out the lyrics of such songs as Internationale and Bandiera Rossa, with blood dripping from every word. And he certainly doesn’t mind attending rallies of Muslim organisations with known terrorist links, as he did the other day.

Yet I’m grateful to Comrade Corbyn, and not only for his proving that, when it comes to his ilk, no dichotomy between stupidity and evil exists. I’m also thankful to him for being so transparent about his nature and his plans.

One hopes that as a result the British will get cold feet when next going to the polls with Corbyn’s name on the ballot. A cross next to that moniker may well spell (or rather hasten) the end of Britain as a civilised Western commonwealth – and the beginning of a British Soviet Socialist Republic, complete with violent oppression.

You don’t think evil can triumph here because we’re too civilised? Neither did those civilised denizens of the Weimar Republic, circa 1933 – nor, for that matter, those millions of Russians who in 1917 were duped by evil propaganda.