Category: Blog

Sarah Pochin, Reform’s first female MP, has been weighed in the DEI balance and found wanting.

However, she inadvertently provided yet another proof of Newton’s Third Law of Motion, not that any further vindication was needed. The law is neatly encapsulated in the phrase “every action has an equal and opposite reaction”, and Mrs Pochin should have invoked it in her defence.

Defence was sorely needed because she stood accused of the most heinous crime ever, racism. And, if one be allowed to play fast and loose with William Congreve’s line, “Heaven has no rage like woke to virtue turned, nor Hell a fury like a Leftie scorned”.

Since I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Mrs Pochin, I don’t know whether or not the charge against her is justified. I am, however, certain that the evidence presented in support falls far short of a prima facie standard.

Mrs Pochin was responding to a viewer on a Talk TV phone-in. That troglodyte dared complain about the demographics of British ads. The mix featured in them, he said, didn’t “represent what this country looks like”.

And – are you ready for this? – the MP not only agreed with the statement but spelled out its meaning: “It drives me mad,” she said, “when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people”.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, she went on: “It doesn’t reflect our society and I feel that your average white person, average white family, is not represented anymore. How many times do you look at a TV advert and you think that there is not a single white person on it?”

The case for the prosecution is clear enough: such statements could only have been inspired by irrational hatred of other races. Ergo, Mrs Pochin is as guilty as Cain.

However, for old times’ sake, let’s remind ourselves that even an obvious villain is still entitled to adequate defence. Mind you, Health Secretary Wes Streeting doesn’t think so, not when the crime is as awful as Mrs Pochin’s. As far as he is concerned, anyone accused of racism is ipso facto guilty as charged.

“I think what she said was a disgrace,” he said. “I think it was racist and the deafening silence from her party leader says it all.” Prosecution rests, m’lud.

Building a case for the defence, I’d first ask whether advertising visuals are obligated to “represent what this country looks like”. The answer is no. There’s no such duty, either legal or moral. The advertiser pays his money and he makes his choice of the kind of people he’d like to see in his ads.

However, even if the common law is silent on this subject, common sense isn’t. And common sense, along with over a century’s worth of experience amassed by advertising agencies, says that every consumer should feel that the ad is speaking to him personally.

It’s not the cosmos at large that ads should address, but you, Tom, and you, Dick, and you, Harry. You have an urgent need for the product advertised, even though you may not yet be aware of this. So please watch this commercial to the end – it’s talking to you.

To achieve this intimacy, agencies try as hard to establish the correct target audience for an ad as they do to produce it. This is done through extensive market research, as a result of which the clients hope to get a reasonably accurate picture of whom they are talking to, what they have to say to produce the desired response, and which media are best suited to saying it.

For example, an ad showing a burly tattooed chap flogging a power drill would be a waste of money if run during a broadcast of the Royal Ascot races. Conversely, a commercial touting Chanel No 5 would find few takers during a televised darts competition.

Sorry about dwelling on such arcana, but this leads us to the main point: the proper demographic makeup of the models featured in advertising. Ask any adman, and he’ll tell you that these should fall into two categories: either people who closely resemble the target audience or those whom the target audience could aspire to be.

Now, blacks and Asians make up 13.3 per cent of UK population. Hence common sense would suggest that they should be similarly represented in advertising. ‘Similarly’, by the way, doesn’t mean ‘identically’.

Back in New York I was once working on a brand some 80 per cent of whose consumers were black women. We naturally assumed that our ads should feature black models, but market research disagreed. It showed that black women weren’t turned off by images of upmarket white women, quite the opposite – and that was one of the few times in my career that I didn’t bitch about focus groups.

Such exceptions apart, the concept is clear. Adverts should feature mostly the kind of people with whom the target audience can instantly identify. However, blacks and Asians add up to about two-thirds of models appearing in UK advertising. The disparity with the aforementioned 13.3 per cent is so vast that one is stuck for a rational explanation.

There isn’t one. It’s as if British advertisers suddenly decided that some things in life are more important than money. However, such disinterested selflessness is so atypical that one is justified to wonder what it is that they hold in so much esteem, what metaphysical values are more precious to them than filthy lucre.

I’m afraid I have to agree with Mrs Pochin: this demographic imbalance is caused by the advertisers’ commitment to DEI wokery. In its name they enact the worst form of censorship by censoring themselves.

No regulator exists who could tell advertisers they’d be in breach of some code of practice if they didn’t use mostly black or Asian models. They act of their own accord, responding to the clarion call of the DEI zeitgeist.

A company that uses too many white people in its adverts could be accused of being institutionally racist, and this is the kind of brand no brand could survive. Should a stigma of racism be attached to a company, its spokesmen could scream till they are blue in the face that they were simply reflecting the composition of their audience.

This is sheer madness, and sinister madness at that. It’s exactly the kind of action that’s bound to produce an equal and opposite reaction.

Neither the chap who made that provocative comment to Mrs Pochin nor she herself really cares about the models appearing in British ads, not as such. They were reacting to the prevalence of collective madness mandated by the kind of people Mrs Pochin calls the “woke liberati” in the “arty-farty world”.

Speaking through them is vox DEI that’s at present outshouting vox populi. Yet using the same polling techniques that advertising originally borrowed from politics, we find out that the people have had enough. There are signs that the silent majority won’t stay silent for long.

Newton’s law will work, but my concern is that it may work too well. The people’s reaction to tyrannical woke insanity could be not only opposite but also equal. And since the action is extreme, the reaction may be extreme too.

I shan’t cite historical examples of what can happen as a result – you know them as well as I do. Let’s just say that being governed by the Tommy Robinson types or the likes of Wes Streeting would be equally unpleasant – but the latter act and the former react. Sir Isaac Newton shouldn’t let us forget that.

First, let’s agree that Starmer’s Labour government is a huge success. I realise that some of you may be reluctant to proffer such agreement, but bear with me for a minute.

How can you call it a success, I hear you ask, if [the economy is on the verge of a collapse, the flow of illegal immigrants keeps coming at a growing rate, the NHS isn’t working, neither do any other public services, our education doesn’t educate, our defence doesn’t defend, wokery is strangulating free speech, universities are nothing but brainwashing laundries – and so on, ad nauseam]?

However, I insist on my original statement even though I can’t dispute any of the outrages mentioned in the brackets. Instead, I’ll draw support from my trusted dictionary. In fact, I suggest you do the same.

You’ll find this entry: “success: the accomplishment of an aim or purpose”. Implicitly, this is the aim or purpose as defined by the person setting it, not by someone else, not even by you and me.

Thus, one can say “John finally succeeded in killing himself” even though suicide isn’t everyone’s idea of success. But, by jumping off a high bridge, John achieved success on his own terms.

When listing all those bracketed calamities as failures, you thereby assume that the aims and purposes the government set for itself haven’t been accomplished. That’s where you’d be making a mistake. For our Marxist government has been acting on its own inner imperatives and accomplishing its own goals that have nothing to do with anything you and I find desirable. Its successes are our disasters and vice versa.

Churchill defined socialism as “the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy”, and each part of this triad has entered the common parlance. Calling socialism ‘a religion of envy’ in particular has become an overused cliché, but only truisms that are actually true ever achieve that status.

Socialism, especially in its logical, ineluctable Marxist development, emits and hides itself behind a smokescreen of bien pensant verbiage, but then so has every evil doctrine in history. Yet once the smoke has dissipated, the wicked animus of socialism floats into sharp focus. Essentially, its aim isn’t just to expiate the deadly sins, but to make them irrelevant, perhaps even commendable. Vindictive envy is high on that list.

When socialists talk about helping the poor, they actually mean punishing the rich, a category they define as anyone who isn’t indigent and therefore dependent on the state. The idea Marxists see in their mind’s eye is the omnipotent state lording it over the impotent individual.

Some individuals refuse to remain impotent. They stick their heads above the parapet by bettering themselves economically, culturally or intellectually and hence claim a measure of independence. When that happens, the natural instinct of the socialists is to cut that head off – either literally, as happens in totally victorious socialist states, or figuratively, as in states still fighting for total victory.

However, whatever evolutionary stage a particular species of socialism occupies, it depends on the state’s corrupting power even more than on the punitive kind. A socialist state can only survive by brainwashing people to seek, or at least welcome, revenge on anyone more accomplished than they are.

Socialism isn’t so much an economic theory as a form of mandated revanchism elevated to moral virtue. Just look at how the British feel about the NHS and you’ll know what I mean. The socialist lord and master pushes a button, and human sheep baa on cue that they are proud of the NHS, easily the worst health system in Europe.

If one tries to decorticate that statement, they’ll admit they aren’t proud of the three weeks it may take to get a GP appointment, of the months it may take to get the necessary tests, of the more months it may take to get essential operations, of the Third World hospital wards where men and women are dumped together (that is, the lucky ones: the unlucky ones stay in the corridors).    

So what exactly are you proud of, Daisy? Whatever Daisy baas in return, you’ll know what she means: the NHS is socialist, and she has been brainwashed to be proud of that.

The same Daisy may bitch about frozen fish fingers costing more at supermarkets, but she is happy to see the biggest exodus of wealthy people in British history. Good riddance to bad toff rubbish, she’d think – exactly what our Marxist government has house-trained her to think. Daisy won’t see the link between the increasing prices and the exodus — she has been conditioned not to.

Use taxes to get rid of a third of public schools? Brilliant. Now the toffs’ children will have to go to those comprehensive moron-spewing factories, just like Daisy’s own nippers. Slap a tax on private medicine, to force the toffs into the same year-long waiting lists? Excellent. Strangle private businesses with the garrote of red tape? Super. Those bastards can go to work like everyone else.

That epithet isn’t a rhetorical flourish on my part. I’ve heard proles on mid-six-figure salaries plus bonuses thus describe anyone sounding ‘posher’ than Bill Sykes.

Why? I’d ask. You hate people you don’t even know just because they sound different. That’s hatred by category, which is typologically similar to racism. You what, mate? Who are you calling a racist? You see, they’ve been indoctrinated to believe that hatred by race is wrong but hatred by class is virtuous.

And then a political group, a party whose every leader and most members share that pent-up rancour and resentment, campaigns on smoke-screen slogans that do a bad job hiding the hatred behind them. Whatever its politicians say, that hatred comes through, and it overrides reason, decency, even self-interest.

The people who don’t mind dying because of lousy medical care as long as the toffs die too vote those villains in, sometimes with a huge parliamentary majority. And the villains proceed unimpeded to act on their evil instincts, smiling every time they succeed.

Economy taken to the verge of a collapse by extortionist taxes, suffocating red tape, creeping nationalisation, industry-destroying net zero and tyranny masquerading as social care? Success.

Cultural aliens arriving in swarms to overburden the economy and destroy social cohesion? Success.

The bottomless pit of the NHS into which trillions are thrown to see it get worse and worse? Success.

Children leaving school without learning how to read without moving their lips? Success.

Britain leading the West in the number of people arrested for what they write? Success.

Universities teaching, nay indoctrinating, hatred for everything civilised people love? Success.

I’m not going to go over a full list of our Marxist government’s systematic attempts to replace virtue with vice, sound thought with blithering idiocy, morality with contrived despotic rules, goodness with evil.

All I am trying to do is offer a methodology for understanding our state and realising how successful it is on its own vile terms. I maintain that you can’t fail when applying this methodology to everything our governors do.

Today’s news, for example, is that our Marxists are going to slap a 15 per cent tax (coyly called National Insurance) on law firms. Anyone with half a brain – and we must give Keir and Rachael credit for that much if not more – knows that any country ruled by law is shored up by legal services.

Britain still fits that description, although not as much as in the past and not for long if we continue to be ruled by Marxists. Hence pricing already expensive legal services out of reach will make the whole structure of society totter, and it’s rickety already.

Excellent. That’ll be another rip-roaring success for this government. As long as those blood-sucking solicitors lose custom, who cares if every legal transaction in the country will be so expensive that many Britons – the same those Marxists call ‘working people’ – won’t be able to afford them. Good. That’ll learn them a lesson (I assume this is how our Marxists talk – I already know that’s how they think).

Joseph de Maistre had Russia in mind when he said that every people gets the kind of government it deserves. I suppose this applies to Britain too, although I don’t really think we deserve this Marxist cabal. We’ve just been brainwashed to think we do.

Even though I’ve been out of advertising wars for 20 years, the old wounds still ache.

Most of them were caused by clients always wanting to cut their advertising budgets. You see, deep down they weren’t sure advertising works.

I’d join the battles with the abandon of someone watching his pension fund shrink before his very eyes. However, my armour-piercing persuasion powers seldom made a dent.

Yes, some brands, notably cosmetics and soft drinks, live or die by advertising. But chaps running most of the others have primal doubts, and agencies find it hard to make them change their mind. Hence, when a company isn’t doing well, advertising falls first victim to budget cuts.

That’s why my colleagues today should pin Donald Trump’s photo to the notice board and genuflect before it every morning. For the Donald proved in one fell swoop that advertising packs so much punch that a single ad can change the foreign policy of a major country.

The ad in question was sponsored by the government of Ontario, Canada’s biggest province and one that does more trade with the US than any other. Consequently, Ontario was hit hard by Trump’s imposing 35 per cent tariffs on many Canadian imports, as well as additional levies for some industries, such as steel and car manufacturing.

In response, Ontario ran a 60-second commercial showing changing images, including the New York Stock Exchange, cranes flying US and Canadian flags and Americans going about their various jobs. The voiceover was provided by excerpts from Ronald Reagan’s 1987 radio address on foreign trade.

“When someone says ‘let’s impose tariffs on foreign imports’, it looks like they’re doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. And sometimes, for a short while it works, but only for a short time,” says Reagan off-camera.

“But over the long run, such trade barriers hurt every American, worker and consumer. High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars… Markets shrink and collapse, businesses and industries shut down and millions of people lose their jobs.”

Canada’s PM Mark Carney needed that commercial like the proverbial hole in the head. Ever since Trump introduced the tariffs, Carney has been playing the supplicant, begging the president to reconsider.

Even though he is relatively new to politics, the Canadian found the right tone for dealing with the US president. He spotted the key difference between Trump and the Pope: with the latter you only have to kiss his ring.

Applying osculation to appropriate places, Carney has had some success. Notably, Trump seems to have abandoned his plan to annex Canada and turn her into the 51^st American state. Nowadays he only mentions that possibility for humorous effect, even though his Canadian counterparts fail to laugh.

And just as that advertising bomb exploded, Carney was in the middle of trade negotiations, with the health of Canada’s economy hingeing on the outcome. Alas, the PM and anyone who had ever followed Trump’s career knew exactly how he’d react.

The Donald sees global politics in terms of personal relationships, meaning he responds positively only to those who offer what I call gluteal obeisance. He sees any disagreement or criticism, however mild, as a sign of disrespect, and that’s not something Don Trump can ever countenance. You let one opponent get away with it, and you’re dog meat – he learned that when building Atlantic City casinos for you know whom.

Running that offensive ad was worse than any old disrespect. Implicitly, Trump was being compared unfavourably to another US president, one venerated by American conservatives. This though everyone knows – or SHOULD KNOW!!! – that the Donald is not only the greatest president America has ever been blessed with, but the greatest political leader of any country in history.

That’s why his response on Truth Social was especially abundant in capital letters: “TARIFFS ARE VERY IMPORTANT TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY, AND ECONOMY, OF THE U.S.A. Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED.”

Personally, I miss exclamation points, another essential feature of Trump’s orthography. But the message is clear enough: no one disses the Donald and gets away with it.

All this is par for the course, but what I found baffling was the reaction of The Ronald Reagan Foundation, an outfit charged with preserving the late president’s legacy. The Foundation rebuked the Ontario government for releasing an ad that uses “selective” material to “misrepresent” Reagan’s address.

Now, the address in question lasted over five minutes, making it impossible to avoid selectivity when using it in a 60-second spot. Yet, having listened to that address, I can assure you that no misrepresentation is in evidence.

Reagan was explaining his decision to impose duties on some Japanese imports. The measure was retaliation for Japan’s doing the same to US imports, which ran contrary to the trade agreement between the two countries.

That step was one Reagan was “loath to take”: relying on protectionism went against the grain of his commitment to free trade. However, as he said in the address, “our commitment to free trade is also a commitment to fair trade”. America expects her trading partners to keep their end of the bargain, and will only consider trade barriers in response to flagrant violations.

Other than that, Reagan reiterated his unwavering belief that trade duties ultimately hurt the nation imposing them, not just the one on the receiving end. This happens to be the ABC of conservative (aka classic liberal) economics, which primer must have escaped Trump’s attention.

As he said recently, “Tariff is the most beautiful word in the dictionary”. This notion isn’t new to the US president. He first stated his aesthetic appreciation of trade barriers back in the 1980s, when he first began to enlarge on such subjects in public.

The Ontario commercial simply uses Reagan’s words to remind Americans of the long-term damage a trade war can cause to their prosperity. Rather than misrepresenting the former president, the ad encapsulates his core belief based on the works of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Milton Friedman, George Gilder and every other liberal-conservative economist on record.

Yet I can see today’s admen rubbing their hands with glee. Next time a client questions the power of advertising, they can cite this incident to great effect. Look, Mr Client, they’ll be saying, how a single 60-second spot can change the foreign policy of a superpower. Just imagine what we could do for your sales with, say, six or seven of those.

QED. Where do I sign, says the client, reaching for his Mont Blanc pen.

Last year, Gavin Stephens, the chairman of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), owned up to it.

He mournfully admitted the police are institutionally racist, although he added graciously that this doesn’t mean every officer is a bigot. Rather, the miasma of racial prejudice pervades every pore of the police body as an institution.

Surely, you have proof of that, Chief Constable? Why, isn’t it self-evident? Fine, if you insist, but brace yourself for some upsetting facts.

The number of black people stopped and arrested by the police is out of proportion to their share of the population. If that doesn’t prove institutional racism, CC Stephens doesn’t know what does.

I for one am satisfied. What other reason can there possibly be for such a gross imbalance? I can think of no other, and neither can you if you know what’s good for you. Vox DEI thundered from the sky, and you’d better sit up and listen.

Institutional racism is indeed an awful thing, holding a whole race, creed or nationality collectively culpable just because of their group identity. And such is the context in which we must evaluate the action of West Midlands Police.

While scouring its ranks clean of institutional racism, that organisation saw fit to bar followers of Maccabi Tel Aviv from attending their Europa League match against the pride of Birmingham, Aston Villa.

The police cited safety fears, and I can understand their concern.

Those Israeli thugs have that sort of reputation: getting wasted on 15 pints of kosher lager, screaming “Ref is a putz!!!” or “You are dreck and you know it!!!”, then engaging all and sundry in riotous post-match brawls. Café furniture flying through the air, broken Manischewitz bottles seeing the light of day, blood and gore everywhere, gevalt all around — Jews are on a rampage again.

Spokesmen for the local police explained that their decision was based on “current intelligence and previous incidents”, which must be the first time ever that the words ‘intelligence’ and ‘West Midland Police’ were used in the same sentence.

The previous incident they had in mind occurred in Amsterdam last year, when Ajax ultras attacked followers of Maccabi Tel Aviv who were wearing provocative yarmulkas. Accusing the Israelis of the resulting fracas is like saying that Jews have only themselves to blame for the Holocaust. The scale is different, but the underlying sentiment isn’t.

I’m not going to follow CC Stephens’s example and accuse West Midlands Police of institutional anti-Semitism, although the temptation to do so is strong. Moreover, their fear of mass violence isn’t groundless.

You see, almost a third of Birmingham’s population are Muslims, a group not widely known for their philo-Semitism. Compared to the national average of 6.5 per cent, that proportion is both impressive and fraught with a potential for anti-Semitic, or certainly anti-Israeli, violence.

I wouldn’t dare suggest that there is anything wrong with that kind of Muslim presence in Britain’s second largest city. It’s that Vox DEI again. But there is something definitely wrong with a police force self-admittedly impotent to contain some of the less commendable instincts of that group.

Even PM Starmer thinks so, in spite of feeling the breath of Corbyn’s anti-Semitic faction on the back of his neck. “This is the wrong decision,” said Sir Keir. “We will not tolerate anti-Semitism on our streets. The role of the police is to ensure all football fans can enjoy the game, without fear of violence or intimidation.”

These true words, however, received a strong rebuttal from Birmingham MP Ayoub Khan, Corbyn’s best friend. Starmer, he said, was “clearly wrong” to intervene in the decision to ban “violent fans”, meaning the Jews, collectively known for football hooliganism.

“With so much hostility and uncertainty around the match,” added Mr Khan, “it was only right to take drastic measures.” Whose hostility to whom exactly?

Muslim preacher Asrar Rashid answered that question today by telling his audience that “mercy has its time and place”, but not when Israelis show their mugs at Villa Park. No wonder Maccabi’s chief fears for the safety of his players.

Still, it’s hard to argue against the need for drastic measures, except that those I have in mind wouldn’t involve a ban on Israelis.

Holding the match behind closed doors has been mooted as one possibility, but it strikes me as a palliative measure (half-arsed, in the language of those uncouth Maccabi fans). I’d propose kicking Aston Villa out of international competition and keeping it out until West Midlands Police learn to put a clamp on the fans’ innermost urges.

As far as I know, Aston Villa’s biggest fan, Prince William, hasn’t spoken out against this clear-cut example of two-tier policing. But his office has stated that prior engagements won’t allow HRH to attend the match.

Quo vadis, Britain? is a question long overdue. Public outbursts of anti-Semitic sentiments are more prevalent now than they’ve been at any time since Mosley’s fascists marched through Cable Street on 4 October, 1936. At that time, the police battled with the fascists. Today, they’d be more likely to attack the Jewish protesters, especially in places like Birmingham.

It’s a matter of arithmetic. While Muslims make up over 30 per cent of Birmingham’s population, Jews account for only 0.1 per cent (compared to a national 0.5 per cent). So whose vote is more vital to Mr Ayoub Khan and other aspiring Brummie politicians?

The local police know which side their Halal bread is buttered and act accordingly, which raises another anguished question: Is this Britain? In any other than the purely geographical sense? Walk through the streets of Birmingham, and you may wonder. See what’s going on all over the country, and you’ll know for sure that Britain isn’t quite British any longer.

Institutional racism and two-tier policing indeed plague British law enforcement. But not in the way CC Stephens meant.

Literary critics often amuse themselves by arguing which first sentence in which great novel is the best of all.

Those arguments strike me as futile because such qualitative judgements as ‘best’ imply the existence of objective criteria to be applied. Since no such criteria exist, ‘good’, ‘better’ and ‘best’ are fated to remain subjective statements of taste.

This isn’t to imply that all tastes are equal, far from it. But any comparative aesthetic judgement ultimately has to boil down to an ad hominem.

Thus you can’t prove to your opponent that Franz Schubert is a greater musician than John Lennon. By insisting that Winterreise is superior to Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, all you are saying – correctly, as it happens – is that your taste is superior to his.

Following this logic, I steadfastly refuse to join the arguments about the relative merits of Austen’s “It is a truth universally acknowledged…”, Dickens’s “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” and any number of other celebrated opening lines.

However, defying that logic, I can identify categorically and in a manner brooking no dissent the greatest last sentence in a work of fiction. None of all those ‘to my taste’, ‘arguably’ or ‘one could suggest’. Down with equivocation: the greatest last sentence ever written concludes Tolstoy’s novelette Hadji Murat.

My relationship with the author is complex. In my book, God and Man According to Tolstoy (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009), I tore to shreds Tolstoy’s philosophical and religious works, which, alas, take up half of his 91-volume legacy.

However, I never concealed my veneration of the other half, his works of fiction whose artistry, in my view, has never been matched by any other novelist in any language.

His longer novels, War and Peace, Anna Karenina and especially Resurrection are overburdened with Tolstoy’s hectoring asides on history, education, agriculture, morality, religion and other subjects close to his heart. Most of those digressions are as silly as his non-fiction. Yet even they can’t damage the works of art shaped by Tolstoy’s masterly hand.

I’ve never read such piercingly moving depictions of new life coming and old life going as the scenes of Andrei Bolkonsky’s dying in War and Peace and Kitty’s giving birth in Anna Karenina. Still, the sheer length of these masterpieces, and the intrusion of Tolstoy’s asides, take something away from the artistry, though mercifully leaving enough left for us to admire.

Tolstoy’s late novelettes, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Hadji Murat, each under 150 pages long, are free from annoying pseudo-philosophical distractions, which makes them arguably the most flawless gems in the treasure trove of prose fiction.

You see, I too can hedge my aesthetic judgement with ‘in my view’ and ‘arguably’. Yet, as I’ve mentioned earlier, I’m not going to do that when identifying the greatest last sentence in world literature. It appears in Hadji Murat, which I recently re-read after a hiatus as long as the average life expectancy in Russia.

The protagonist was a historical figure, a prominent independence fighter in the Caucasian wars Russia started in the early 19^th century and has continued, on and off, ever since. Hadji Murat was a controversial character who intermittently tried to get rid of the Russians by using Imam Shamil and then to get rid of Imam Shamil by using the Russians.

Both men were Avars, one of the Muslim tribes in the Caucasus. However, Shamil was a proponent of Muridism, an ideology that combined Sufi tenets with a call to jihad against Russian imperialism. Hadji Murat saw that ideology as a threat to their common cause, which eventually drove him away from Shamil.

The last straw came crashing down when Shamil named his son as his successor. To Hadji Murat that meant the perpetuation of Muridism, something he couldn’t accept. Shamil knew that and decided to have his rival killed.

Yet one of Shamil’s men warned Hadji Murat and he managed to escape. But his family, including his beloved son, was left behind and held captive.

Hadji Murat surrendered to the Russians who both admired and mistrusted him. Russian generals saw him as one of history’s great cavalry commanders; their wives swooned when that dark romantic hero floated into the room with his exotic entourage.

The Russians effectively kept Hadji Murat under house arrest and remained deaf to his pleas for men and arms he needed to rescue his family from Shamil. When one day Hadji Murat found out that Shamil was about to have his son blinded, he could wait no longer.

He escaped again, this time from the Russians, and rode out with a handful of his trusted comrades to rescue his family or die in the attempt. But the Cossacks and Caucasian tribesmen hostile to Hadji Murat tracked them down. In the ensuing firefight the outnumbered great warrior was killed, and his embalmed head was sent to the Tsar.  

These historical facts provide the bare bones of Tolstoy’s story, which he envelops in the luxuriant flesh of his artistry. The first two pages describe the narrator walking through ploughed meadows and admiring the profusion of wild flowers.

Tolstoy paints the field and its flowers with broad, lurid strokes from his endless palette, and the reader can see the blazing glory of the colours, breathe in the redolent aroma, hear the rustle of the grass. And then the narrator, having let us admire the accuracy of his eye and the sure touch of his brush, makes it clear that what he has shown with so much mastery is only a metaphor.

He comes across a thistle bent by the plough but not crushed by it: “ ‘What energy!’ ” I thought. “Man has conquered everything, destroyed millions of shrubs, but this one still doesn’t surrender!

“And I recalled an old Caucasian story, part of which I saw, other parts I heard from eyewitnesses, still others I imagined. Here is that story, as it came together in my memory and imagination.”

What follows is some 120 pages of the narrative I so crudely summed up above. The narrator recedes into the background never to reappear until the last sentence, simple and sublime, and sublime in its simplicity.

His place is taken by Hadji Murat and his comrades; by Russian soldiers, officers and generals; by Tsar Nicholas I, his ministers, courtiers and viceroys. (One of whom, Mikhail Vorontsov, has a street in London’s St John’s Wood named after him.) The pages are filled with love and hate, lust and betrayal, life and death – all drawn with the artistry so admired by, among many others, Vladimir Nabokov.

In his Lectures on Russian Literature, he calls Tolstoy “philosopher of the flesh” and compares him favourably to Flaubert. The Frenchman, writes Nabokov, takes a whole page to draw the portrait of Monsieur Bovary. By contrast, Tolstoy could have done it by creating with just one telling detail a compelling visual image that would stay with the reader for ever.

Such mastery animates every page of Hadji Murat.

The reader feels almost embarrassed: it’s as if he were a Peeping Tom, spying through the window on other people’s lives. Tolstoy’s is the kind of stark, laconic realism that draws the reader in and forces him to live the life of the protagonist, feel his feelings, die his death.

The narrative is a kaleidoscope of lurid colours, a whirlwind of penetrating insights, a maelstrom of human strengths and weaknesses, of good and evil. The narrator, the ‘I’ of the story, is nowhere to be seen, seemingly leaving the reader to do his own feeling, his own living and his own dying.

And only in that last sentence does he let his presence be known again: “It was that death that I was reminded of by the thistle crushed in the ploughed field.”

The metaphor, by now forgotten, reappears in a few short words, so unassuming that one could be deceived into thinking that anyone else could have written them. But no one else has ever written with so much power packed in so few words.

I gasped and slowly closed the slim volume that’s worth infinitely more than all the 50 volumes of Tolstoy’s ‘philosophy’ put together. Such is human nature, I suppose, never satisfied with God’s gifts, no matter how lavish, always reaching for something God withheld, in Tolstoy’s case the mind of a philosopher.

This is the kind of hubris God invariably punishes by turning the sinner into an easy target for criticism. This, to paraphrase Tolstoy, is the sin I was reminded of by re-reading Hadji Murat and trying to catch my breath taken away by that last sentence.

Recently, I finished reading a 900-page biography of William F Buckley by Sam Tannenhaus, and this was a labour of love.

Not so much for the book, although it’s good enough, but for its subject. I feel indebted to Buckley and his magazine, National Review.

When I found myself in the US in 1973, I was a callow ignoramus. My reading in Russia, where good books were rarely available, had been sporadic. My instincts were conservative, but I had no idea how to relate them to any coherent philosophy. I knew exactly what I hated, communist tyranny, but had a hazy notion of what I loved.

National Review, with its staff of the brightest conservative writers in the West, pointed me in the right direction. Thanks to Buckley and his friends, I found out what I should read, what I should think about, what conservatism really meant. At least, as they saw it.

Years have passed, I’ve struck out on my own, written my own books and developed my own take on conservatism. In many ways, I’ve outgrown Buckley and National Review, but not the feeling of gratitude for the guidance they unwittingly offered a young lad trying to find his own feet.  

Hence, reading Tannenhaus’s book was a bit like repaying a debt of honour. Truth to tell, I doubt I would have finished the book had it been about anyone else. It was a case of what youngsters today call ‘TMI’, too much information. Everything I found of interest could have been told in half the number of pages, but I soldiered on dutifully.

As I said, the book is still good enough, and other readers may find all that profusion of everyday details fascinating. But one thing was jarring, and it had to do not with content but with orthography.

Whenever the subject of race came up, which was often, considering that the book was about an American conservative with Southern roots, the author spelled ‘Black’ with an upper-case initial and ‘white’ with a lower case one.

That struck me as eccentric and inexplicably inconsistent. After all, both races should receive equal treatment – it’s initial cap for both or neither. In fact, I’ve always spelled both ‘black’ and ‘white’ in the lower case, unlike such technical terms as ‘Negroid’, ‘Caucasian’ or ‘Mongoloid’.  

I mentioned this oddity to my American friends, and they treated me in a frankly condescending way, like an alien from a faraway planet who has a lot to learn about the Earthlings and their mores.

It turned out that this incongruous spelling is mandated by all publishers and news agencies. They are driven by higher concerns than grammar and orthography: an urgent desire to establish their woke credentials. This is a kind of password granting admission to the inner sanctum of wokery, like Kipling’s Mowgli and his four-legged friends saying to one another: “We be of one blood, ye and I.”

Well, as Americans like to say, different strokes for different folks. If this is what the publishing powers that be get off on, who am I to take issue? However, I do wonder if they realise that this orthographic anomaly betokens a worse kind of racism than the inspiration for the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

This is a curious modern phenomenon: in the past, those who mauled the English language were illiterate folk who didn’t know better. These days, it’s chaps with advanced university degrees who don’t want to know better. They just want to score points in the wokery stakes.

Yet in the process they admit for all intents and purposes that they regard blacks as culturally, intellectually and psychologically inferior. Blacks are simpletons who need to be thrown sops from their superiors’ table lest they may be traumatised.

Only a single-cell humanoid would be offended by traditional, and correct, spelling. Hence, assuming that blacks en masse would riot in the streets if their race didn’t rate a capital ‘B’ is tantamount to denying blacks the status of full humanity. This is the most flagrant racism one could imagine – the sort of thing that was widespread in the South when Buckley was growing up, but not since then, certainly not to the same extent.

I’m not proposing to delve into the entire complexity of race relations in the US. My concern is the survival of our civilisation, of which language is, if you will, the binding agent. When educated people are prepared to destroy their language, they thereby signal not their virtue but their anomie, alienation from a civilisation they hate.

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.”

What’s happening now is even worse: those language destroyers understand one another’s speech perfectly well, but it’s no longer speech. It’s a desemanticised semiotic system signalling the triumph of evil.

I wonder whether Thomas Sowell, one of the best living thinkers, would throw his toys out of the pram if he saw his race spelled with a lower-case ‘b’. Something tells me he wouldn’t, and he probably feels about this abomination the same way I do.

He grew up in an impoverished black family that knew old-style racism at its worst. Many of their neighbours probably regarded them as less than human, or at least as inferior humans. But he must cringe at the sight of woke racism, where white folk make all the same assumptions but translate them into condescending superciliousness, camouflaged as virtue.

It pains me to see signs of that in a book about one of the foremost conservative figures of the 20^th century. Buckley himself would be scathing about this racism masquerading as namby-pamby wokery.

Writers should rebel against this orthographic vandalism. Joining forces, they should tell publishers and editors that they would refuse to have their books, articles or essays published with such affronts to cultural and intellectual decency.

People who take pen to paper or put fingers on computer keys have the duty of acting as guardians of our language, and hence of our civilisation. “Vandalism shall not pass” ought to be written on all manuscripts, not just those submitted by conservative writers.

Any writer who acquiesces to grammatical and orthographic vandalism becomes its accomplice. He should be drummed out of the profession and, if he treats ‘black’ and ‘white’ differently, charged with fomenting racial hatred.

In April, 1945, Hitler was becoming increasingly unhinged in his bunker. The war had been lost, but he was stubbornly trying to grasp a ray of hope.

That proved to be as futile as trying to grasp a ray of light. Yet until almost his last moments, Hitler kept repeating the same mantra, or rather two of them.

One was “Where is Wenck?” in reference to Gen. Walther Wenck whose Twelfth Army was trying in vain to break through the Allied encirclement to relieve Berlin’s garrison. The other was about the secret Wunderwaffe, a wonder-weapon that would arrive in time to save the day.

Originally the term was used in reference to the V-rockets expected to bring Britain to her knees. They didn’t, but in his last days Hitler was talking about something else. He hoped German scientists would beat Americans to the atomic punch, with mushroom clouds rising over the Allied troops.

That hope turned out to be forlorn, and since then the word Wunderwaffe has been used in German to describe an illusionary panacea. Donald Trump should look it up.

Flushed from his much-touted triumph of ending the war in the Middle East for ever, meaning for the next few months, Trump told the Knesset that now “we have to get Russia done”.

When Trump’s hot, he’s hot. But Putin’s bloody-mindedness regularly throws cold water over the Donald’s world-saving mission. At first, building on his experience of striking property development deals with shady characters, Trump thought that “great guy”, his friend Putin, would meet him halfway and agree to a peace deal Trump was trying to broker.

The deal seemed to be a no-brainer for the Russians. They’d have their ownership of the Crimea officially recognised. They’d get to keep all the Ukrainian territory they’ve occupied – and would also get the sweetener of some lands still in the Ukrainians’ hands. The Ukraine would undertake never to join NATO. And so on, stopping just short of the Ukraine being incorporated into Russia.

Yet Putin rejected the deal, beating Zelensky to it. Since then he has been giving his friend Donald the runaround and playing for time. You see, incorporating the Ukraine into Russia de facto, better still de jure, is precisely what Putin wants, the only kind of deal he’d accept.

That made Trump disappointed, and he said so. His whole lifetime career has been built on personal relationships based on mutual benefits or, that failing, coercion and threats. His personal relationship with his friend Vlad not getting him any closer to the Nobel Peace Prize, Trump decided it was time to talk tough.

If Putin continues to play silly buggers, Trump would arm Zelensky with Tomahawk cruise missiles, and see how Vlad would like that. The threat was expressed in Trump’s usual chatty manner:

“I might say, look, if this war’s not going to get settled, I’m going to send them Tomahawks,” he said on Sunday.

“I might have to speak to Russia, to be honest with you, about Tomahawks. Do they want to have Tomahawks going in their direction? I don’t think so… I might tell him [Putin] that if the war is not settled, that we may very well do it.”

I think that’s a good idea, as far as it goes: the more damage the Ukraine can do to Russia’s strategic infrastructure, the better. For purely sentimental, and therefore invalid, reasons I wouldn’t like to see the centre of my native city, Moscow, turned to rubble, and it’s easily within the Tomahawk range from the Ukraine.

Still, if that’s what the Ukrainian High Command wanted to do, I wouldn’t object: war leaves no room for sentiments. But suppose this isn’t an idle threat and, against his best judgement, Trump does deliver a couple of dozen Tomahawks to the Ukraine.

Would that swing the war in the Ukraine’s favour? Would the Tomahawks prove to be Zelensky’s Wunderwaffe? I don’t think so, for any number of reasons.

First, I don’t think Trump would deliver thousands or even hundreds of Tomahawks out of America’s total stockpile of some 9,000. Dozens would be more like it, but even if it’s hundreds, this weapon won’t win the war for Zelensky.

If you are unsure about that, put the boot on the other foot and ask yourself this question: “How come Russia hasn’t won the war yet?”

After all, the Russians have plenty of missiles that have the range to hit every square inch of Ukrainian territory, all the way west to Lvov, Uzhgorod and Mukachevo. And indeed, those places have suffered some damage, though nothing as drastic as the devastation of Mariupol, a city that lost 95 per cent of its buildings and 25,000 of its civilian inhabitants.

Yet the Ukrainian army is still fighting, still holding the aggressor at bay, still inflicting heavy casualties. (Just the other day, the Ukrainians wiped out a column of Russian armour, destroying 13 vehicles and killing dozens of soldiers.) And the Ukrainians are still united in their resolve to save their country’s sovereignty from Putin’s fascists.

Putin knows this, which is why he won’t be swayed by Trump’s threat. Even if Ukrainian Tomahawks hit Moscow, what does he care? Putin’s own bunker is impervious to such weapons.

Tomahawk missiles are about as likely to change the course of the war as the weapons that gave them their name would be. Putin will remain as deaf to Trump’s threats as he has been to Trump’s cajoling.

The only way the US can help the Ukraine is to state its full, unequivocal commitment to the Ukrainian cause – and to act accordingly. That would entail using full congressional appropriations for Ukrainian aid, rather than merely about a quarter of them actually used.

This is increasingly becoming a PlayStation war, with swarms of unmanned drones buzzing over the battlefields, factories and infrastructure facilities. The Ukraine more or less pioneered this remote-action warfare, and she has started and stepped up the mass production of various drones.

Russia has been playing catch-up there, and Iran’s Shahed drones, both imported and homemade, helped considerably. But still Russia lagged far behind – until recently, when she suddenly acquired a huge numerical superiority in drones, five to one in some sectors of the front.

This suggests that China has begun to provide direct aid to the Russian war effort, and stopping this assistance is something Trump could do. For example, he could act on his threat to slap 100 per cent tariffs on Chinese exports, which would serve a dual purpose.

First, it would stop the flow of Chinese aid to Russia. Second, it would enfeeble China economically, by effectively ending her trade with America and her allies. But there are tough choices to be made, and I doubt Trump, or any other Western leader, would be ready to make them.

Over the past several decades, Western prosperity has been built on a seemingly endless supply of cheap labour, mainly from China, but also from Vietnam, Malaysia and other countries in the region. Cutting that supply off would mean Westerners having to accept a greatly reduced standard of living – and still continuing to vote for the politicians responsible.

Here I’m always reminded of Jean-Claude Junker’s epigram, one of the best political adages in recent times: “We all know what to do. We just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.”

Quite. The thing about hard political choices is that they are, well, hard to make.

It’s so much easier to wave simple solutions around, such as this or that Wunderwaffe. Such things may help, but they don’t win wars. Only courage and commitment do, and the Western arsenal of such weapons seems to have been depleted.

As Trump’s bandwagon, aka Air Force One, arrives in Israel to celebrate the return of the Israeli hostages, even our own ‘Dear’ Keir Starmer hastens to jump on.

Peace at last, is the general theme of the festivities. Here one should remember that their Latin derivation is the only thing that peace and appeasement have in common. Moreover, when it comes to long-term prospects, appeasement is the exact opposite of peace.

Trump’s appeasement of Hamas, along with its Qatari and Turkish paymasters, is morally repugnant and strategically doomed (as is Starmer’s appeasement of China, but that’s a separate subject). Even as they sing, dance, and hug the returning victims of Hamas evil, Israelis know this perfectly well. But their hands are tied by their dependence on US support.

When the Marquis de Custine visited Russia in 1839, he gasped: “This country is always at war. It knows no peace.”

The same could be said about Israel, but there is an important difference. Russia was, and remains, bellicose by choice; Israel, only because bellicosity is thrust upon her.

So don’t talk to Israelis about peace: they know no such thing. All they know and welcome is the odd ceasefire, a temporary break in hostilities. How temporary? That depends.

War may resume in weeks. Or in months. Or in a couple of years. And no number of treaties can change that for as long as that tiny enclave of civilisation is surrounded by hordes of savages with hatred in their hearts and murder on their minds.

No matter how many American presidents declare peace and do a Chamberlain by proudly waving pieces of paper, Israelis know their enemies are loading their guns and sharpening their knives in anticipation of the right moment to start killing Jews again.

Still, they are grateful. The breather they are getting may prove short, but they want to enjoy it while it lasts. This though there is every indication that it won’t last long.

In exchange for their surviving skeletal hostages, Israel has been forced to release over 2,000 Palestinians, including 250 Hamas criminals, each covered head to toe in blood. Many of them were involved in the 7 October raid, both as planners and perpetrators.

That was no ordinary attack on civilians. Hamas raiders cut foetuses out of women’s bellies, raped men and women alike both before and after murdering them, devoured parts of their victims’ bodies. It was the greatest anti-Semitic atrocity since Treblinka.

Israel’s response didn’t just wreak devastation on Gaza. It degraded a great deal of Hamas’s ability to resume their onslaught in the near future. Many of their munition factories and dumps were bombed, many of their tunnels destroyed, many of its most experienced leaders assassinated.

‘Many’ is the operative word here, and its difference from ‘all’ is vital. Hamas’s ability to murder Israelis was degraded, but it wasn’t eliminated. Yet again, Israel’s hand was stayed by her Western allies eager to score publicity stunts by declaring themselves to be the kind of peacemakers who are to be blessed.

Instead, they’ve once again shown themselves as betrayers of Israel to be damned. This happened every time Israel was about to finish off her enemies: in 1956, 1968, 1973 and every couple of years ever since. Now it has happened again.

As Israeli troops withdrew to the prearranged line, a power vacuum was formed in the areas they vacated. That was instantly filled by Hamas declaring mobilisation and reasserting control over new tracts of land.

Their phone calls and texts went out, saying: “We declare a general mobilisation in response to the call of national and religious duty, to cleanse Gaza of outlaws and collaborators with Israel. You must report within 24 hours to your designated locations using your official codes”.

Heeding the message were 7,000 gunmen who had been hiding in plain sight as poor, oppressed Palestinian civilians. They filled the gaps created by IDF and immediately began to do the only thing Hamas can do: murder.

Even as Israeli hostages return, Hamas are publicly executing, in their favoured baroque ways, everyone suspected of collaboration with Israel. They’ve also appointed five new governors, all Hamas militants implicated in the worst crimes.

This is only the beginning. Some of the released murderers heading back to Gaza will fill the leadership vacancies created by Israeli bombs, and a mass recruitment drive will begin.

Tempers among Israel-haters are running even hotter than before the current war, and Hamas will have little trouble finding crazed volunteers ready to die for the noble cause of murdering Jews and their supporters. Moreover, the on-going mayhem of pro-Palestinian, in fact anti-Semitic, marches and riots all over Europe suggests that not all new recruits will be Muslims.

The peace deal of which Trump is so proud stipulates Hamas disarmament. Yet one has to be deluded to believe those murderers will lay down the tools of their gruesome trade. They aren’t going to disarm, and I doubt they’ll even pretend to be doing so.

Quite the contrary, Hamas are likely to be open about violating the terms of the peace treaty, hoping this will provoke Israel into renewing her offensive. Once the provocation has succeeded, Western malcontents will again hit the streets, this time in even greater numbers and with even more incendiary violence – aimed not only at Israelis but Jews everywhere.

Israel is the focus of anti-Jewish and anti-Western hatred. This will continue to fester like a boil until it bursts into violence yet again. No appeasement will ever appease, no accommodation short of annihilation of Israel and another Holocaust will ever suffice.

Witness the fact that pro-Palestine, in fact anti-Semitic, marches haven’t abated since the recognition of the ‘Palestinian state’ and the signing of the ‘peace treaty’. Quite the contrary, they’ve flared up with new force.

Hamas, its supporters within the ranks of Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslims in general and anti-Semites in and outside the Middle East, don’t want peace, though they occasionally don’t mind being appeased.

They want, for starters, to murder millions of Jews “from the river to the sea”, as their chant frankly admits. According to London mayor Sadiq ‘Sadist’ Khan, that chant isn’t anti-Semitic. No, of course not. It’s philo-Semitism in action, along with its companion slogan, “Death, Death to IDF”.

Now I mentioned Muslim Brotherhood, many Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain and Egypt, have disowned it, not wishing to upset the apple cart of Western trade. One Arab country that has consistently supported Muslim Brotherhood and its cutting edge, Hamas, is Qatar.

That’s good to keep in mind as Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is negotiating with Hamas about the postwar shape of Gaza. For Qatar is a valued partner of Kushner’s investment firm, Affinity Partners.

Kushner has raised billions in Qatar, and his firm’s wealth has tripled since Trump was elected, with similar gains in the Trump clan’s other businesses. This sort of thing may be called a conflict of interest in some quarters, one even greater than Trump accepting that gilded airliner from Qatar.

That gives Trump a personal stake in the on-going orgy of appeasement. His political opponents in the US have shown a voracious appetite for attacking Trump through the courts. After he was re-elected, Trump has gone after his enemies with even greater vigour.

It doesn’t take a crystal ball to predict that Trump and his family will be prosecuted if he is succeeded by anyone other than a MAGA Republican president. This consideration makes it vital that Trump not lose control of both Houses of Congress in next year’s mid-term elections.

If he does, he’ll effectively become a lame duck president – and a sitting duck for his detractors baying for his blood through either impeachment or post-tenure prosecution. Trump knows this, and hence his frantic efforts to become known as a man who brought peace to the Middle East.

He must keep his fingers crossed that Hamas desist from provoking Israel for at least a year, ideally two. Then he’ll be able to retire as the pater familias of his extended clan and live out his remaining years in peace. Something that will be denied to Israel.

You’ve doubtless detected a note of pessimism in this narrative. I can only redeem myself by hoping with all my heart that I’ll be proved wrong. If I am, Donald Trump will merit not only the Nobel Peace Prize but indeed canonisation. Should that happen, I’ll be the first to genuflect.

The best way of hurting Putin would be for the West to take a more direct part in arming and supporting the Ukraine. That would entail either sending troops out there or, barring that, giving the Ukraine all the tools to do the job.

But let’s be serious here, now that’s it’s just us boys. That’s not going to happen, is it? You know it, I know it – more important, Putin knows it.

The hope that Russia will eventually bleed out in the on-going war of attrition is only marginally more realistic. Blood is one thing that’s always in ample supply in Russia. The country lost 27 million people in the Second World War and still didn’t exsanguinate.

A human life is worth next to nothing there, which the rulers assert with cynicism and the masses accept with fatalism. If the Russians have lost about 1.5 million people since 2022, it’ll take another 20 years at the same casualty rate for anyone there to worry.

Sanctions? There Russia resembles a boxer who smiles at his opponent after being rocked with a hard blow. Russia too pretends she isn’t hurt by the sanctions imposed by the West, but she is.

Yet she still remains upright, able to go on fighting. The only sanctions that really sting are those that limit the flow of high-tech products into Russia, especially those vital to armament production. Sanctions on Russian hydrocarbon exports are painful too, but countries like China, India and some EU members provide helpful analgesics by buying Russian oil and gas at dumping prices.

Commentators who insist that the Russian economy is tottering ought to descend from the ivory tower of Western economic criteria. Yes, the inflation rate is high there, the people’s living standards are rapidly going down, some staples including petrol are in short supply, the average monthly salary outside Moscow is around £200 – and millions don’t even get that.

Should a similar situation arise in Europe, Frenchmen, Spaniards and perhaps even Britons would be building barricades, torching cars and attacking politicians. But Russia isn’t like France, Spain or even Britain.

Her rulers don’t care about the plight of the people and never have. And the people are either too docile, too brainwashed or too scared to do anything about it.

No money, no jobs, no prospects? Not a problem. Young men, egged on by their mothers and wives, seek income opportunities by enlisting to kill Ukrainians or, more likely, to be killed by them. The mothers and wives don’t mind either way: wages are high on the frontline, while death benefits make their loved ones even more valuable dead than alive.  

So how can the West really hurt Putin, perhaps enough to force him into acting less aggressively? I have an answer, or rather 300 billion answers. That’s how many Russian dollars are currently frozen in the West.

These assets shouldn’t be frozen or impounded. They should be punitively confiscated and used as military aid for the Ukraine.

When this idea is floated from time to time, politicians, lawyers and bankers wince and throw up their hands in horror. Confiscating privately owned assets smacks of illegality, which isn’t a nice thing at all. We don’t do that sort of thing.

Such concerns shouldn’t be dismissed lightly. If civilised countries stop being ruled by law, they stop being civilised. Fine legal points matter, especially these days, when legality often replaces and sometimes contradicts morality.

But what if all legal obstacles in the way of confiscation were removed? What if it could be shown that taking that money isn’t only moral but also legal? This is what I propose to do, step by step.

The first step is to state that the Russian economy defies all the categories used by political scientists and economists. It’s not capitalist, socialist or corporatist because the sui generis Russian state is none of those things.

Russia is ruled by an organised crime group (OCG) formed by a fusion between assorted mafias and the secret police, KGB/FSB. No major country has ever had such a government, which makes null and void all the criteria, standards and terminology used to classify other economies.

One such defunct term is ‘privately owned assets’. This term has some validity in Russia only at the lower economic tiers, at the level of personal savings or income from a corner shop, a small one.

Any assets reaching millions and especially billions can be owned by private individuals only nominally. In reality, they belong to the OCG, which has total control of the money. Like any other mafia, it’s set up as a pyramid, with the godfather, in this case Putin, sitting at the very top.

Most major wealth in Russia derives from businesses linked to either natural resources, finance or infrastructure. As we climb up the steps of the aforementioned pyramid, we’ll find that ultimately and in effect they all belong to Putin.

All such businesses without exception have got rich by methods that would have produced multiple criminal convictions in any civilised country. By our standards, every Russian ‘oligarch’ is a felon – but he isn’t really an oligarch.

That term describes a man whose financial virility buys him political power. That’s not the case in any OCG and it’s certainly not the case in Russia. Power in Russia belongs to Putin, and he exerts it through intermediaries. The latter have influence for only as long as Putin lets them have it.

The same goes for their wealth. Russian ‘oligarchs’ don’t really own the capital currently in their possession. They are simply money launderers, frontmen given the task to legitimise the money by passing it as their own.

Their role is especially important because a great deal of those assets are invested in the West, impervious to the vagaries of fickle Russian politics. The nominal owners of that capital are people close to Putin, his accomplices in every crime committed by Russia, including her pouncing on her neighbours.

Some of them become Western citizens, like Leonard Blavatnik. Others may even ascend to the upper House of Parliament, as Lord Lebedev will testify. And they all live high on the hog off Putin’s money.

That means they are allowed to use some of it, calling it their own. Their cut varies depending on their proximity to Putin and their status in the OCG. According to experts, the range runs from 10 to 25 per cent, but never higher than that.

All these frontmen use some of their ill-gotten lucre to buy Western politicians, judges and journalists retail and wholesale. Such efforts differ in scale but not in kind from the usual mafia practices everywhere. There is a salient difference though.

Most of the Putin frontmen who hold his assets in Western institutions are under personal sanctions. They aren’t allowed to travel to the West and, if already living here, are denied access to their assets, other than paltry amounts (by their standards) they need for basic living expenses.

Those who manage to buy or trick their way around the personal sanctions use the money to fund the war in the Ukraine whenever Putin tells them to do so, and in the amount Putin specifies. The money belongs to him after all.

Some of those ‘oligarchs’ occasionally fall out with Putin and then, as a rule, out of the window. This pattern is familiar to anyone who has watched The Godfather and its sequels.

It’s important to realise that those personal sanctions would be instantly removed if the ‘oligarchs’ publicly severed all ties with Putin’s OCG, denounced the criminal war in the Ukraine, left Russia if still living there and refused to fund the Russian war effort. However, the Russian version of omertà, reinforced by the certainty of retribution, doesn’t allow them to do that.

When I refer to Putin’s war on the Ukraine as ‘criminal’, this isn’t just a figure of speech. On 17 March 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC) found Russia guilty of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity, and issued arrest warrants for Putin and his closest associates.

The upshot of all this is that the $300 billion sitting in Western banks (a number that doesn’t include vast property holdings, many at some of the best London addresses) is money acquired by criminal means and used to perpetrate further crimes, on an increasingly greater scale. Practically all of it belongs not to private individuals but to the OCG run out of the Kremlin – and ultimately to its boss, Putin.

Every Western country has a law allowing confiscation under such circumstances. This is what British jurisprudence says: “The primary British law allowing the confiscation of criminally acquired assets is the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 (POCA). POCA provides powers for criminal confiscation… The Act’s goal is to deny criminals the use of their assets, and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has a specialised unit to handle asset recovery”. 

I say let’s get that specialised unit busy. Considering that a good chunk of the OCG’s assets are held in Britain, it’ll have its work cut out for it.

How many wars does Trump have to bring to a peaceful conclusion for him to win the coveted Nobel Peace Prize?

More to the point, how many peace treaties has María Corina Machado, this year’s winner, negotiated? Has she ended the Punic Wars, the Hundred Years’ War, the Thirty Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars, either World War?

She hasn’t – and Donald Trump has. Or, if you insist on being pedantic about it, none of those wars would have started had he been US president at the time. I can just see him calling his best friend Hannibal and telling him, “C’mon, Hanny, give me respect and I’ll give you a zillion dollars. Yeah, yeah, I know Scipio is a douche, but lay off and I’ll owe you a favour. One hand washes the other, know what I mean? Pony up, okay?”

And just look what Donald has done for the Gaza conflict. Israel has signed the peace treaty, Hamas so far haven’t but have said they would, and 20 hostages will be returned to Israel dead or alive. Moreover, Trump has agreed to put 200 US servicemen in harm’s way by deploying them on the demarcation line, where any chap with a dinner napkin on his head and an AK in his hands will be able to take potshots at them.

Trump has also appointed our own dear Tony Blair as his peace-keeping viceroy in the region, but that’s where Hamas have drawn the line. Thereby they’ve shown a great deal of discernment, and for once I applaud their decision. No undertaking headed by Tony can ever succeed, other than his prodigious efforts to enrich himself.

Still, though I doubt Trump has brought lasting peace to the Middle East (to achieve that he’d have to get rid of the feral hatred ‘Palestinians’ feel for Jews, which is an impossible task), he has certainly done more than Joe Biden. That, admittedly, isn’t saying much, but it is saying something.

Nobel Peace Prizes have been awarded for less, as Barak Obama could confirm, not to mention such a tireless champion of peace as Yasser Arafat. So what do those Scandinavians have against Trump?

At this point, I have to withdraw myself from any consideration as a potential winner of this accolade. If nominated, I’d have no chance – according to insiders, most of the things that turned the Nobel Committee off Trump are the things I like.

He cut US foreign aid, which would have won the approval of the late Peter Bauer. Prof. Bauer defined foreign aid epigrammatically as a transfer of money from the poor people in rich countries to the rich people in poor countries. Trump is reluctant to transfer money into the numbered Swiss accounts belonging to assorted tinpot tyrants, and I can’t blame him.

Then Trump pulled the US out of the World Health Organisation, much to my enthusiastic approval.

His executive order said the US was withdrawing “due to the organization’s mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic that arose out of Wuhan, China, and other global health crises, its failure to adopt urgently needed reforms, and its inability to demonstrate independence from the inappropriate political influence of WHO member states”. And that’s putting it mildly.

My shouts of approval went up several decibels when Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement on climate change. I share his conviction that this whole net zero nonsense is an elaborate unscientific scam perpetrated by professional malcontents who hate the West and everything associated with it.

As circumstantial support for this point of view, consider the ease with which eco-zealots float from one anti-Western cause to another. Just look at Greta Thunberg, and you’ll know what I mean.

Meanwhile, our own fanatics led by Ed Miliband, a worthy son of his Stalinist father, are dead set on destroying what’s left of the British economy by making us all drive electrical appliances and go back to the good old times, when energy was only produced by sun, wind and water.

Obviously, the Nobel Committee disagreed with me and, more important, with Donald Trump. Neither party is likely to concede the point, meaning that the Donald will have to redouble his peace-making efforts if he wants to have another shot at that prize.

The Committee had more legitimate concerns as well. Trump’s wholehearted attempts to start a global trade war, whatever their economic justification (which I think is scant), can hardly be described as peaceful. The Donald has been laying about him like Macduff, wielding the broadsword of tariffs, smiting friend and foe alike but, unlike his prototype, failing to kill the murderous king, this time called McPutin.

One way or another, the Donald has lost this time around – and to a woman, which adds insult to injury. Boy, would he like to grab that Venezuelan by her Nobel medal and show her who’s boss…

But not to worry – not all has to be lost if the Nobel Committee were to act on my modest proposal. If the Peace Prize has so far evaded Trump, the Committee ought to consider endowing a new category: the Nobel Gurning Prize.

Trump would be the odds-on favourite for this accolade, something he deserves for his talent and life-long application. No other politician I know, indeed no other person, boasts such a vast array of unlikeliest facial expressions – and does so naturally, without any visible signs of effort.

Endowing this new category would enable the Committee to reward Trump’s efforts without courting any controversy. This is what the potential winner would describe as a “WIN-WIN SITUATION!!!”