Category: Blog

So Donald Trump Jr’s 2016 meeting with a Putin lawyer wasn’t just a humanitarian mission after all.

Until now Daddy’s official line has been that Don Jr met Natalia Veselnitskaya to discuss US adoptions of Russian orphans, something Putin’s government banned in response to American sanctions.

Considering that Russian orphanages are death factories, where children are malnourished, maltreated and molested, that countermeasure would strike any civilised person as odd. The underlying message seems to be: “If you don’t let us export our goods, we’ll starve our orphans to death.”

Had Don Jr discussed this moral disaster with Putin’s agents, I’d be full of admiration, only slightly leavened with a dash of incredulity.

There we were, in the middle of a bitterly fought presidential campaign, and the leading candidate’s closest confidant took time off to discuss such worthy issues with agents of a hostile power? Anything is possible, I suppose, but some things are hard to imagine.

Now Don Sr has owned up to what everyone has known all along: his son, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his campaign manager Paul Manafort (currently on trial for his life) met Veselnitskaya because she had promised some juicy dirt on Hillary Clinton.

However, the president didn’t make that admission with contrition. His dominant emotion was anger, especially since various sources had reported that he was concerned about his son’s role.

Those reports were “fake news”, screamed Trump’s tweet. He wasn’t concerned because there was nothing to be concerned about: “This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics – and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!”

This last statement sounds dubious: it’s unlikely that his closest advisers would of their own accord and without informing their boss have met an agent of a foreign power – even if the Trumps didn’t consider that power hostile.

However, being a credulous sort, I’m happy to believe that Donald Sr knew nothing about the meeting, nothing came out of it anyway, and the meeting was “totally legal”.

Similarly, it would have been “totally legal” for Trump’s emissaries to triple-team Natalia in her hotel room and then post the video of the orgy on the Internet. It would, however, have been immoral and, even worse, ill-advised.

Alas, the president’s whole experience of life, especially in business, has taught him that legal is whatever one can get away with, and moral is whatever is legal.

Since I don’t know as much about American legal loopholes as he does, I shan’t venture an opinion on the legality of that meeting of minds, although to my layman’s eye it looks dodgy. But what Trump’s lads did was much more immoral than my imaginary orgy scenario would have been.

Yes, trying to get compromising material on a political opponent is a practice as old as politics itself.

Some might question its probity but, come on chaps, we live in the real world, don’t we? Objecting to this practice in principle is like objecting to tax avoidance: might as well take issue with the wind and the rain.

The problem here isn’t what the lads tried to get but from whom they tried to get it. Allow me to illustrate with a hypothetical example even Putin’s most devoted fans won’t find contentious.

Suppose for the sake of argument that Don Jr was contacted not by Veselnitskaya but by the godfather of a major Mafia family. Let’s call him Don Corleone.

When they met, Don Corleone said to Don Jr: “You’re a good boy, Donny, your father must be proud of you. And is this pezzonavante your consiglieri? Heard a lot about you, Paul. Now I got stuff on Hillary to make your eyes water. But what have you got for me? One hand washes the other, capisci?”

Suppose further that the fact and the nature of the meeting were leaked after Donald Sr became president. What would be his response then?

That there was nothing illegal about that get-together? That the promise of dirt didn’t materialise?

How many people would have believed that Don Corleone’s proposed generosity to Don Jr had no quid pro quo involved? The dirt would have been on the president, covering him head to toe – this even if everything he said about the meeting were true.

Now, any Mafia family is a Rotary Club chapter compared to the Kremlin kleptocracy. Practically the whole Russian economy is criminalised, with Putin and his gang collecting protection money in trillions of dollars.

Whatever loot is left over from buying palaces and yachts, and stuffing Panama cellos with laundered cash goes to wage worldwide electronic war against the West, especially the United States. As we speak, the US government is trying to stop Russia’s meddling in the mid-term elections.

Even if some useful idiots deny the aggressively hostile nature of Putin’s kleptofascist regime, only those refreshingly ignorant of basic facts will deny its organic fusion with organised crime.

Natalia Veselnitskaya is a faithful servant and paid agent of that regime, whose principal function until then had been trying to get the Magnitsky Law overturned. And neither organised crime nor the KGB (FSB/SVR is its current moniker) offers anything for free.

If Veselnitskaya dangled the dirty carrot of information in front of Don Jr’s eyes, she was pursuing the interests of the Kremlin kleptofascist gang that thought – however wrongly – that Trump’s victory would also be theirs.

Accepting the best possible scenario, that no useful dirt materialised and, whatever did, had no effect on the elections, that meeting was still revoltingly immoral.

Illegal? Probably not. But President Trump ought to realise that his new job comes with higher moral expectations than his old one, building casinos in Atlantic City.

Do Jeremy Corbyn and his jolly Labour friends really hate Jews? An interesting question, that. And probably an irrelevant one.

This in spite of the seemingly never-ending anti-Semitic scandals livening up the Labour Party at every level, from the grassroots to the shadow cabinet.

I’d guess that the proportion of principled anti-Semites among socialists has to be higher than among conservatives, which isn’t to say that the latter are free of blame in that respect.

Socialism is a religion of envy and it can only ever emerge victorious by appealing to that unenviable emotion. And envy needs targets – it’s impossible to envy in the abstract.

Jews are natural candidates for that role, canonised as such by the founding texts of modern socialism produced by its apostles, Marx and Engels, both rank anti-Semites. The two chaps used the words ‘Jew’ and ‘bourgeois’ almost interchangeably – a Jew was to them a bourgeois even if poor; a bourgeois implicitly a Jew even if gentile.

Because Jews place a stronger emphasis on learning than just about any other ethnic group, and a weaker emphasis on drinking and debauchery, they tend to be more economically successful on average. Thus hating them comes naturally to socialists, who can build a tower of class envy on the traditional foundations of religious enmity.

It’s amusing to hear gentile atheists refer to Jewish atheists as ‘Christ killers’. The former don’t care about Christ any more than the latter care about the religion in whose name Christ was condemned. But the aforementioned tower wouldn’t stand without its historical foundations.

This isn’t the most attractive example of modernity developing and modifying traditional values, but a telling example nonetheless.

I realise that I’m oversimplifying a complex phenomenon, but my aim here isn’t to analyse the historical and psychological roots of anti-Semitism in any great depth – not that I’m certain I’d be able to do so even if this were my aim.

I’ve read a few books on the subject, and none of them quite succeeds. For there’s more to anti-Semitism than just class envy or “poor man’s snobbery”, as Sartre described it.

Otherwise it would be hard to explain upper-class anti-Semites, such as the Duke of Windsor, Oswald Mosley and practically the whole Cliveden set. Or, crossing the Atlantic, neither Henry Ford nor J.P. Morgan, both anti-Semites, had a compelling reason to envy Jewish wealth.

Be that as it may, my aim is more modest: trying to understand not the nature of anti-Semitism within Labour, but why such sentiments have come to the surface. Homo politicus, after all, is a peculiar animal, brought into this world for one purpose only: winning elections.

Corbyn may be an anti-Semite of Nazi proportions, but he wouldn’t let it show, and neither would he fail to impose a gagging party discipline on other anti-Semites within Labour ranks, if he felt that expressing overt anti-Semitism hurt his electoral chances.

Even the zoological anti-Semites among the Labour high command would have been told to put a sock in it and desist from comparing Netanyahu to Hitler – even if they felt strongly in their hearts, as Corbyn manifestly does, that the comparison was justified. Let’s win the general election first, lads, would be the message. Then and only then can you have a go at those Jewish Nazis.

The reason the scandals were allowed to develop and enter the public domain has to do with one discipline only, and it’s not history, philosophy, religion or psychology. It’s arithmetic.

There are about 3,000,000 Muslims in the UK, and the number is growing. There are about 250,000 Jews, and the number is dwindling. Subtract the second number from the first, and you’ll get 2,750,000 reasons for overt Labour anti-Semitism.

Labour in its present form has to harvest votes at the margins of the electorate. I never overestimate the intelligence of the average voter, but I still doubt that, for example, Corbyn’s economic ideas will get him many mainstream votes.

Nationalise everything possible, soak the rich with high taxes, give more power to the unions, print and borrow even more billions – such time-honoured ideas have too rotten a track record to have enough mass appeal for Labour to get into government.

You and I aren’t going to vote for them no matter how disappointed or even disgusted we are with the Tories. Such feelings made me vote UKIP at the latest election, but the thought of voting Labour never even crossed my mind.

So which large blocs will vote Labour? Certainly the déclassé welfare recipients, those who favour printing or borrowing billions to beef up the social budget. Probably most ethnic minorities, with the possible and partial exception of the British Indians. Readers of The Guardian (circulation 148,169). The leftie lunatic fringe. Union activists. State employees who have a vested interest in the big state.

And definitely the Muslims, who lap up the anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic noises being made by Labour. The Muslim vote may well prove as decisive nationally as it did in the London 2016 mayoral election.

For this vote isn’t spread evenly throughout the country. In many constituencies, especially in the northern half of Britain, it’s dominant, and these may well be regarded by Labour pollsters as swing groups.

Tory pollsters realise this as well, which may be one reason Home Secretary Sajid Javid is widely mooted as Mrs May’s likely successor. This son of Pakistani immigrants just may syphon off some of the Muslim vote, even though Mr Javid is no anti-Semite or Israel-hater.

Alas, most Muslims in the UK are, and it’s for their votes that Corbyn has uncapped the well of Labour anti-Semitism. This stratagem may or may not come from the heart, but it definitely comes from dispassionate calculations.

It’s the arithmetic, stupid, to paraphrase James Carville, Bill Clinton’s strategist. He actually said ‘the economy’, but Corbyn doesn’t have that option.

In the 1960s, the West underwent a moral catharsis, as a result of which the death penalty was abolished in most places.

One might find it hard to understand why morality peaked at that particular time, in the middle of a century during which more people died violent deaths than in all the previous centuries combined.

After all, before people began to kill one another on an industrial scale, and when society and community were more than just figures of speech, the moral validity of the death penalty was never in doubt.

It was understood that murder sent shock waves throughout the community, and the amplitude of those destructive waves could be attenuated only by a punishment commensurate with the crime.

That’s one salient point in favour of the death penalty; deterrence is another. Many commentators dispute the deterrent value of the death penalty, counterintuitive as it sounds.

But even they would agree that it undoubtedly deters the executed criminal. He won’t come out of prison and kill again, which nowadays happens with every-increasing regularity.

Some arguments against the death penalty do make sense. Such as that condemning an innocent man to death leaves no room for correcting the error.

That’s true, although, unlike Stalin’s Russia, civilised countries don’t execute criminals directly the verdict is announced.

In the US, for example, criminals may spend years, sometimes decades, on death row. That strikes me as sufficient time to get to the bottom of the case.

Still, no system of justice is 100 per cent reliable, and innocent men still may be executed. However, my first instinct would be to improve a malfunctioning system, rather than abandon it altogether.

Hence I’d give serious consideration to tightening the required standard of proof in the sentencing stage, when the death penalty is possible – for example, by replacing ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ with ‘beyond all doubt”.

Another interesting argument highlights the moral effect of the death penalty on the executioner. “You wouldn’t invite him to dinner, would you?” I’m often asked. My usual reply is that neither would I invite a sewer cleaner, but sewers still need to be cleaned.

Such discussions may be interesting because neither interlocutor would have reason to believe that only a fool or a knave would disagree with him. Thus a serious debate is possible – unlike, for example, on the issue of abortion or euthanasia.

Arguments in favour of those simply don’t hold water, and those who put them forth can’t be taken seriously.

The issue of the death penalty is different – in a secular context. However, in a Christian context, doctrine on this issue was established centuries ago, starting from Scripture itself.

That’s why I was surprised to read that Pope Francis has declared the death penalty “inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person”.

There now exists, he added, “an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes”.

It’s much better, according to His Holiness, to imprison a criminal for a long time because this doesn’t “definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption”.

Whenever senior church figures make such pronouncements nowadays, I smell a rat, and not just because they go against principles established long ago and happily accepted by great men for centuries. What makes me suspicious is why such statements are made.

The Pope’s language invites such suspicions. ‘Increasing awareness’ among whom exactly? Among serious theologians? Or among those who keep afloat such newspapers as The New York Times, The Guardian and Le Monde?

More and more, rather than leading the masses to salvation, various denominations, including the Catholic Church, kowtow to secular opinion, no matter how puerile and immoral.

The Church should tell the people what’s moral, not be told by them. How long before a Catholic priest officiates a homomarriage, one wonders? Other confessions are already doing it.

And what does ‘the dignity of a person’ have to do with anything? A criminal is punished not for any deficit of dignity but for murder or some such. As anyone who has read Charles I’s scaffold speech will know, it’s possible for a condemned man to go to his death with his dignity intact.

As to ‘the possibility of redemption’, what does the word mean? In a Christian context it usually refers to deliverance from sin and subsequent salvation of the soul. Any believer, and certainly a prelate, ought to know that death, however it occurs, doesn’t ‘definitively deprive’ anyone of this possibility.

Taking a stab in the dark with no statistical evidence close at hand, I’d guess that most opponents of the death penalty in the West are atheists, to whom death is final and irreversible.

Christians, on the other hand, believe that, just as there’s death in life, there’s life in death. And in that life redemption is always possible. Understanding the word as commuting the death sentence to, say, life imprisonment strikes me as a tad vulgar – for a Christian.

It has to be said that many modern Popes found the death penalty abhorrent – none more so than Benedict XVI. His Holiness expressed such views even when he was still His Eminence. But he didn’t go so far as to declare the death penalty ‘inadmissible’ in all circumstances.

To wit: “There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia.”

That ‘legitimate diversity’ is now off-limits for Catholics because Pope Francis has changed the catechism to make the capital punishment ‘inadmissible’. The debate is closed, with the door slammed in the face of prudence, wisdom – and tradition.

The tradition didn’t develop by itself. It’s a long, meandering road signposted by scriptural sources and their great interpreters. Looking at two of the greatest, St Augustine of Hippo and St Thomas Aquinas, neither reached the high moral ground apparently occupied by Pope Francis.

Thus Augustine writes in his City of God: “The agent who executes the killing does not commit homicide; he is an instrument as is the sword with which he cuts. Therefore, it is in no way contrary to the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill’ to wage war at God’s bidding, or for the representatives of public authority to put criminals to death, according to the law, that is, the will of the most just reason.”

Aquinas is as unequivocal in his Summa: “The life of certain pestiferous men is an impediment to the common good which is the concord of human society. Therefore, certain men must be removed by death from the society of men.”

And, just as Aquinas pre-empted most (though not all) theological arguments, he pre-empted Pope Francis’s facile statement about redemption. If the murderer didn’t repent when killing his victim, he’ll probably never repent: “How many people are we to allow to be murdered while waiting for the repentance of the wrongdoer?”, asks St Thomas.

Pope Francis evidently doesn’t trouble himself with such questions. That leads some to ask literally a question that’s often posed figuratively: Is the Pope Catholic?

Flashback: the year is 1990. Britain, still without a firm EU hand on the tiller, resembles a rudderless ship cast adrift in rough waters.

Here I am, my hands, still as firm as the EU’s hands are now, are on the steering wheel of our Audi (I think that’s what I drove then), achieving a feat few now believe would have been possible in the pre-EU days: motoring through Europe.

On that particular run I established a personal best, which I’m unlikely ever to repeat, much less better: driving through seven countries in one day.

Italy, Switzerland, Germany, France, Luxembourg, Belgium and Holland all flashed by… I almost said ‘without a stop’, but that’s not quite accurate. We did stop for lunch in France and for petrol in Luxembourg.

But no one stopped us at any of the border crossings. In fact, when we missed a ‘Welcome to [insert country name]’ sign, only the language of the road signs made us realise we were in a different country.

I remember us saying that the order to turn on the lights at the entrance to a tunnel sounded so much better in Italian than in German.

Comparing Accendere le luce with Achtung! Lichten! tells you all you need to know about the two national characters. The Italian version sounds like a line from a Donizetti opera, whereas the German equivalent evokes a film where a black-clad Gestapo man says: “Ve’ve got vays to make you talk.”

This fond recollection was brought on not by a pang of nostalgia, but by Sky News. This network, in common with its elder brother, the BBC, is committed to drawing in lurid strokes the macabre, dystopic future awaiting us all when (or if) Brexit comes into effect.

To that end the station keeps running snippets of young Britons expressing heart-felt concerns about life in that hopeless future. One such concern is repeated over and over: “How will we be able to travel in Europe a year from now?”

Now the important thing to understand about our young is that they live outside history.

History to them is what happened last Saturday when they went on that pub crawl; the dial is reset in every generation. “It was before my time” is seen as a sufficient excuse for boneheaded ignorance.

Hence they either don’t know or don’t care that British tourists somehow managed to crisscross Europe when the EU wasn’t even a twinkle in anyone’s eye.

The twinkle was already sparkling in 1990, but we can go a bit further back, can’t we? For example, in 1860 a well-known thoroughfare in Nice was named the Promenade des Anglais. I don’t think this name suggests that les Anglais couldn’t travel there, do you?

Not just Nice, but also Biarritz. Not just France, but also Italy, Spain, Greece, Switzerland, Germany all heard their native languages spoken with English accents throughout history.

And what do you know? Britain didn’t have to belong to any supranational monstrosity for Britons to go to San-Sebastian or Paris.

And it’s not just tourists. In the pre-EU days we spent several holidays in Tuscany, not far from Arezzo. A mile down the road from us was the house where the British novelist Muriel Spark was spending her later years. How was that possible, I hear those youngsters ask.

And such areas as the Dordogne, Costa del Sol, Brittany, Algarve, Tuscany and Côte-d’Azur were colonised by British retirees long before John Major put his signature on that treasonous treaty.

But hold on a second, says Sky News. Only 20 per cent of Britons living on the continent are retired wrinklies. Most of the expats are young, thrusting people who earn their crust there. Surely they’ll get the dirty end of the stick?

In reply, please allow me to get personal again. My wife Penelope lived in France for 10 years, from age 17, when she entered the Paris Conservatoire, got her degree (like the French students, she paid no tuition fees) and then pursued her concert career from the Paris base. I don’t want to date her, but it was long before 1992.

Though Penelope preferred to live in a monoglot French environment, she regularly bumped into fellow expats working in France. My own recollections are more recent but, when I was still in the advertising business, many of my colleagues had done stints of several years in French, Italian and German agencies – when the EU still went by its maiden name, the EEC.

So my reply to all the inane questions asked by those historically challenged youngsters (“How will we be able to [insert activity]?) is simple. Exactly the way we always did it for centuries before this abominable Leviathan was born.

However, that reply isn’t proffered, nor even mooted, by Sky News, BBC and other mainstream TV channels. Their bias is by itself an answer to another question: “How come TV jobs are only ever advertised in The Guardian, our leftmost broadsheet?”

I’m not talking about elephants, pandas, blue whales or snow leopards, even though they doubtless need protecting too.

However, the most endangered species on earth is Homo sapiens. Homos still roam the earth in large numbers, but sapience is rapidly becoming extinct.

I was reminded of this looming ecological disaster by today’s reports, highlighting the plight of a British professor who emigrated from England to New Zealand to teach physiology at Auckland.

The professor moved house lock, stock and barrel, taking all his worldly goods with him. Among them was a 120-year-old upright piano played by the professor’s wife and children. The heirloom had been in the family for 30 years.

However, the musical family ran into a veritable cacophony at the border. The piano was impounded because it was cursed with having ivory keys.

Therefore the antique instrument was in violation of the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. It has to be that inanimate object that’s the culprit, not the professor, who – by way of mitigation – was born some 70 years after the piano committed its crime against modernity.

It took the family eight months to get the instrument out of the pound. But the ivory keys had been removed and buried in the ground, a procedure for which the academic had to pay £100, with the bill for administrative costs yet to come. That’s like the families of executed men in China, who had to pay for the bullets with which their loved ones had been shot.

It’ll cost the academic another £200 to have plastic keys put in, for a piano without the keys loses much of its purpose, although it can still be used as a mute piece of furniture.

This acute outburst of the chronic madness of modernity shows mental collapse on several counts, leaving the clinical diagnosis in no doubt.

The first symptom is practical: ignoring human needs.

Any pianist will tell you that there’s no real substitute for ivory. Plastic keys, even though they’re now better than they were when the madness was first diagnosed, simply don’t provide the same purchase for the fingers – especially when they’re damp, as they often are during a performance.

However, I’m prepared to accept that the plight of pianists striking wrong notes in concert is minor when compared with the plight of elephants losing their tusks posthumously.

The second symptom is legal: ignoring the fundamentals of jurisprudence.

Vandalising an antique piano violates every precept of legality by making the law protecting elephants retroactive. No such law existed at the time when the key-producing animal was killed – people still hadn’t acquired the ersatz morality of which modernity is justly proud.

The third symptom is commonsensical: losing touch with reality.

The elephant that sacrificed its tusks for the keys of that particular instrument is undeniably dead. It has been dead for at least 120 years. Ripping portions of its tusks out of the piano isn’t going to bring the elephant back to life. It’ll remain dead, buried and thoroughly decomposed.

Vandalising an antique piano isn’t going to deter poachers by itself. They’ll continue to shoot elephants, taking the risk of the resulting ivory being buried in the ground when their great-grandchildren are old.

This isn’t to say that elephants or other endangered species shouldn’t be protected. But this should be done by effective policing, not by state-sponsored vandalism.

This is how a reasonably sane person would object to this Kiwi insanity, although my sanity may be doubted in some quarters, namely by my wife Penelope.

But the good professor has been caught in the same pandemic of lunacy that’s destroying the sapiens aspect of man. Hence he objected by saying that the vandalism was “unfair and highly disrespectful for the animal that was slain to give its tusks to make this ivory.

“Ivory on a piano in a sense is a monument which reminds us of the atrocities that have occurred. It’s a bit like removing the names off a war memorial – you have lost the reason for it.”

Let me see if I understand. The elephant’s memory must be cherished the same way the memory of soldiers who died for their country must be cherished. Just as those uncountable cenotaphs remind us of the evil of war, ivory keys remind us of the equally reprehensible evil of elephanticide.

Have I got this right? If so, the professor isn’t just a victim of this lunacy but also its promulgator. For this kind of anthropomorphism, equating humans and animals, is another clinically significant symptom of the modern disease.

Allow me to be unforgivably retrograde for a moment by using the kind of terminology and references that are nowadays decidedly uncool.

Both man and elephant are God’s creatures. However, they occupy different places in the pecking order established in Genesis and accepted as true in the subsequent millennia.

Man is close to God because he’s created in God’s image and likeness. The elephant, even though undeniably cute, is typologically closer to a palm tree than to Homo, formerly sapiens.

Just like the palm tree, the elephant was created to serve man, and the way it can render such service is by providing ivory for piano keys or for decorative purposes.

I also understand that parts of elephant feet and trunk are quite delicious. If so, this is another service the animal can provide, in addition to acting as public transport in some parts of the world.

Getting back to modern notions, 99 per cent of all species that have ever inhabited the earth are now extinct. So far we’ve managed to soldier on without their company and, in the tragic event the elephant sinks into extinction too, I suspect we’ll somehow muddle through.

Personally, I’d like my descendants to be able to enjoy watching elephants in the zoo, as much as I did as a child.

But looking on from wherever I’ll be residing at the time, it’ll give me much greater pleasure to see that my descendants haven’t lost – or rather by then have regained – the notion of the uniqueness of man and subservience of all other living creatures.

Modernity can’t raise beasts to the level of man. Hence the only way of equalising them is to pull man down to the level of beasts.

And not just any old beasts but specifically herbivorous ones: eating animal flesh is another uncool thing, so considered by modern savages in the grip of the modern strain of lunacy.

But even if they accept, begrudgingly, the possibility of eating hamburgers or even – at their most permissive – of wearing mink pelts, they still make ivory not only illegal but also immoral.

Let me tell you, our crazed modern barbarians do draw moral distinctions in funny places. Oh the good old times, when that task was taken out of their hands.

Fred and Ginger. Laurel and Hardy. Morecambe and Wise.

History knows many great double acts, but none as illustrious as Mandy (Peter Mandelson) and Georgie (George Osborne).

Imagine George as Fred and Mandy as Ginger tap-dancing all over Europe, their arms around each other, twins umbilically linked, swirling to the music piped through Oleg Deripaska’s yacht.

Indeed, Mandy & Georgie first became famous as a duo some 10 years ago, when they were entertained by the Russian gangster Deripaska on his yacht in the Mediterranean.

Georgie was Shadow Chancellor at the time, and he probably came along to solicit some well-laundered donations for his party. Mandy, then the EU Trade Commissioner, had known Deripaska since at least 2004, although as far as I know not in the Biblical sense.

Even without the physical part, the relationship thrived and it’s still going strong: Mandy has gone private since then, and his company is doing brisk business with Deripaska’s concerns.

The piquancy of that Mediterranean get-together was that Deripaska, presaging such developments later, was already banned from entry to the United States because of his links with organised crime.

But hey, who said such paid-up British patriots have to follow the Yanks’ lead? What was poison to the Yanks was meat to Mandy & Georgie.

Since then the former aluminium king has been sanctioned all over the civilised world, along with other Russian gangst… sorry, I mean oligarchs, many of whom are on Mandy’s books even as we speak. (For example, he gets $325,000 a year to represent Russian interests fronted by another ‘businessman’, Vladimir Evtushenkov.)

I don’t know which set of books, but, considering that Mandy was twice sacked from the Labour cabinet for corruption, it’s fair to surmise he has more than one. As they say in sports, form is transient, class is permanent.

Nor do I know if George got the donations he was seeking. One way or the other, a couple of years later he found himself at 11 Downing Street – only to be unceremoniously kicked out by Mrs May in 2017.

He landed on his feet to become Editor of The Evening Standard, nominally owned by Evgeny Lebedev, but in fact by his father Alexander, a career KGB officer. (How scum like that are allowed to take over venerable British institutions is beyond my scope today.)

I don’t know if Mandy and Georgie have kept in touch all these years. But the chemistry between the two is still there: two hearts beating as one. The double act is again on the road.

Mandy came out first, getting to the personal nitty-gritty. He doesn’t care about the merits and demerits of the EU – it goes without saying that Britain must continue to be governed by the likes of Juncker, his hands full of fat pension cheques.

Mandy is more interested in the human element. What kind of people would want to leave that particular Garden of Eden, and why?

“They are nationalists in the sense that they hate other countries, and they hate foreigners.” In other words, the 17.4 million Britons who voted to leave the EU are all xenophobes, which is the only reason they want to leave.

Now xenophobia is perhaps the only vice Mandy himself can’t be accused of, as his Brazilian boyfriend (and quite a few prior ones from every corner of the world) will doubtless testify. But on what basis has he reached the conclusion that, say, my friends and I hate foreigners?

I’m willing to bet a small fortune that we know more about Europe, and therefore love it more, than Mandy does.

Both I and my close friend, also a writer, spend half our time in France and travel widely all over the continent. We speak several European languages. Does Mandy?

My other close friends are also cultured, multilingual people, which by definition means they love the place of their culture’s origin. Many of my friends are Catholic Christians, which would make xenophobia rather awkward for them. Yet we all detest the EU.

I’d suggest there are fewer nasty xenophobes among the Leavers than there are pernicious socialists among the Remainers.

Or even socialists like Mandy, who have their fingers in every European pie, including the most rancid ones. He’s welcome to his brand of internationalism – until it lands him in prison, that is.

Unlike Mandy, Georgie talks not personalities but issues: “I think the Brexiteers are essentially being found out.

“They promised this nirvana, this taking back control, so suddenly we’d be in charge of our money; our borders, our immigration policy and all that.

“But the actual result is that they can’t make a decision because the real cost of leaving the EU and the single market is so high they don’t dare do it.”

All that expensive education, funded by flogging enough wallpaper to wrap the globe, has gone to naught. Buddhists achieve nirvana, George, only after death. I don’t think the Brexiteers, at least those I know, are quite as morbidly mystical as that.

As to the substance of George’s puffery, I can only repeat the simile I offered a couple of days ago. He’s like an arsonist who sets fire to a house and then lectures the weeping owners on the dangers of home ownership.

It’s not the Brexiteers who have been found out; it’s those like Georgie, Mandy, their greasy eminence Blair et al., who set out to subvert the will of the people and tie Brexit up in knots.

The cost of leaving the EU isn’t high at all, George, if you compare it with what we’ll be gaining, or rather regaining: the constitutional sovereignty lovingly refined over centuries. That ‘nirvana’ hasn’t yet been delivered only because of saboteurs like you.

It is of course true that, as Georgie points out, our government is trying to dilute Brexit to a point where we’ll lose membership in the EU without gaining independence from it. That’s like the kettle calling the kettle black.

This is happening because those who lead our government don’t want to leave. They’re members of the same apparat (if you don’t know what this Russian word means, George, ask your KGB Standard owner) to which our double act belongs.

It’s they who have been waging the scare campaign, screaming at the people that they’ll starve if we leave the EU, especially without a trade deal. It’s they who come up with one legal and parliamentary challenge after another, trying to make Brexit appear devilishly complicated.

“The actual result” that George is talking about isn’t that of Brexit – after all, we haven’t left yet. It’s the result of the disgustingly underhanded, perfidious effort to nitpick Brexit to death, undertaken in cahoots with the apparat’s EU branch.

But I’m glad our double act has come together again. Birds of a feather, and all that. Mandy and Georgie deserve each other.

Britain’s wartime food shortages? Not worth speaking about.

Ditto, the Irish potato famine. Ditto, the famines that throughout history afflicted Russia on average once every seven years. Ditto, the famines either caused or deliberately organised by the Soviets. Ditto, Mao’s Great Leap towards mass starvation.

All these will pale into insignificance compared to the blight that’s bound to devastate Britain should we leave the EU without a trade deal.

As a believer in forcing the Queen to abdicate, disbanding Parliament and introducing direct rule by Jean-Claude Junker, I’d like to point out that we’ll suffer dire consequences even if we leave the EU with a deal.

Any student of history will be aware of the extent to which the country’s well-being has depended on the goodwill of Luxembourg, Estonia and Slovakia. Without them telling us how to run our affairs, Britain has always been reduced to impotence and penury.

But at least we more or less managed to keep mass hunger, malnutrition and alimentary dystrophy at bay. That will instantly come to an end if we exit the EU without first securing a promise to feed us.

That’s why Mrs May and her able ministers are doing us all a favour by issuing their distress warnings. Instead of accusing them of dishonest scaremongering – something those Brexiteer vipers indulge in – we should do as we’re told and be thankful.

Specifically, we must do privately what our supermarkets are already doing institutionally: stockpile staples. Tinned food, packets of pasta and rice, soap, condoms, sugar, salt, Vaseline, candles – things we could do with and especially things we couldn’t do without.

However, such prudent foresight will only delay the disaster, not prevent it. A moment will come when we’ve put the last drop of Vaseline on our last candle and eaten the last morsel of the food we stockpiled.

What then?

The most recent solution to that problem was provided by the British novelist Simon Raven (d. 2001). He was once married for a short while, only long enough to produce a son before absconding.

At some point his abandoned wife sent him a telegram: “Wife and baby starving send money soonest”. Raven’s reply should provide succour to all those who heed Mrs May’s warning about impending post-Brexit starvation: “Sorry no money suggest eat baby”.

An immeasurably greater earlier novelist promoted a similar hunger-relief programme. In his 1729 essay A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift advocated the use of children for nourishment as a way of alleviating a famine in Ireland:

“A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.”

If you doubt that we’ll be reduced to infanticidal cannibalism if we fall out with the EU, consider the facts (or better still, don’t consider them and listen to what your auntie Theresa is telling you).

We import 30 per cent of our food from the EU. (And, speaking specifically about Penelope and me, 100 per cent of our wine. I also import 100 per cent of my whisky from Scotland, which, as we know, will split away from the UK after Brexit and probably declare war on England.)

And – are you ready for the truly hair-raising data? – the average British family spends a staggering 10 (ten) per cent of its income on food!!! Juxtaposing this number with the previous one, three per cent of our income is spent on food imported from the EU!!!!!! (I’m running out of exclamation marks.)

In average absolute numbers, rather than those deceptive percentages, the average UK family spends £60 a week on food, of which a mind-blowing £20 is spent on food imported from our benefactor, the EU.

Now suppose that our unauthorised exit upsets Jean-Claude Junker so much that the EU stops all food exports to the UK, making us look for replacements elsewhere.

Suppose also that those greedy Africans and South Americans will fleece us into paying a devastating 10 per cent more for our food imports.

Again, percentages don’t give you an accurate idea of the full scale of the looming disaster. Let me spell it out for you in capital letters, so that the message will remain emblazoned in your mind:

THE AVERAGE BRITISH FAMILY WILL HAVE TO SPEND AN EXTRA £2 A WEEK ON FOOD. THAT’S TWO QUID!!!!!!!! (May I borrow some exclamation marks from you?)

There, I hope you’re now aware of the depth of the nutritional abyss into which Britain will stumble if Mrs May’s darkest… sorry, I mean realistic predictions come true.

Prepare to see a chain of baby abattoirs in our cities. Be ready to hear waiters describe today’s special as: “Shropshire Lad: a thigh of an ethically slaughtered milk-fed one-year-old Anglo baby raised in Shropshire, marinated in garlic and lemon, herb-crusted, slow-roasted in Kent white wine and served with ratatouille – sorry, I mean vegetable stew.”

And especially brace yourself for suffering the worst deprivation of all: drinking colonial wines. Why, the other day I sent a sample of a cheeky Californian Mountain Chablis to the lab and got back the report saying “your dog is diabetic”.

But let’s not go into that: you’ve heard enough horror stories for one day. And auntie Theresa has many more where those came from.

Our political vocabulary is confused to a point of being meaningless.

Hence the answer to the question of whether fascism is left-wing or right-wing really depends on who’s asking.

A person who perceives himself to be on the right tends to brand as left-wing anyone he doesn’t like, while those he likes are fellow right-wingers.

And those on the left do exactly the same thing in reverse.

In other words, such definitions have a strong element of subjectivity to them, to a point of becoming nebulous. Thus, depending on circumstances, one group may describe another as either left or right – this even though the latter might never have changed its policies or philosophies one iota.

Take Hitler’s National Socialist Workers’ Party. Until 22 June, 1941, it was universally recognised that the word ‘Socialist’ in the party’s nomenclature meant something concrete.

And so it did: the Nazis’ economic programme (Four-Year Plan) was indistinguishable from FDR’s New Deal and barely distinguishable from Stalin’s Five-Year Plan.

Thus the conservatives regarded Hitler as a socialist, while socialists and communists saw him as a socialist heretic, but a socialist nonetheless.

On 23 August, 1939, Hitler reinforced his socialist credentials by signing a pact with Stalin, who was undeniably left-wing.

However, when Hitler attacked Stalin on 22 June, 1941, he became a right-winger overnight. The underlying syllogism was irresistibly simple.

Thesis: Stalin is left-wing. Antithesis: Hitler is at war with Stalin. Synthesis: Ergo, Hitler is right-wing.

Hitler had offered no change in philosophy or rhetoric to justify such a re-branding. What had changed was the left-wingers’ attitude.

I’d suggest that, given such weather-vane inconsistency, it’s best to look at what the Nazis and other fascists said about themselves. This taxonomic method isn’t fool-proof either, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

So, in no particular order:

“The whole of National Socialism is based on Marx.” Adolf Hitler

“I have learned a great deal from Marx, as I do not hesitate to admit.” Adolf Hitler

“We are Socialists, enemies, mortal enemies of the present capitalist economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, with its injustice in wages, with its immoral evaluation of individuals according to wealth and money instead of responsibility and achievement, and we are determined under all circumstances to abolish this system! And with my inclination to practical action it seems obvious to me that we have to put a better, more just, more moral system in its place, one which, as it were, has arms and legs and better arms and legs than the present one!” Georg Strasser

“The Capitalist system with its exploitation of those who are economically weak, with its robbery of the workers’ labour power, with its unethical way of appraising human beings by the number of things and the amount of money they possess, instead of by their internal value and their achievements, must be replaced by a new and just economic system, in a word by German Socialism.” Georg Strasser

“We are against the political bourgeoisie, and for genuine nationalism! We are against Marxism, but for true socialism! We are for the first German national state of a socialist nature! We are for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party!” Josef Goebbels

“Lenin was the greatest man, second only to Hitler, and… the difference between communism and the Hitler faith was very slight.” Josef Goebbels

“Socialism as the final concept of duty, the ethical duty of work, not just for oneself but also for one’s fellow man’s sake, and above all the principle: Common good before own good, a struggle against all parasitism and especially against easy and unearned income…” Adolf Hitler

“We want to start by implementing socialism in our nation among our Volk! It is not until the individual nations are socialist that they can address themselves to international socialism.” Adolf Hitler

“We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions.” Adolf Hitler, echoing Georg Strasser

“If you love our country you are national, and if you love our people you are a socialist.” Oswald Mosley

“Tomorrow, Fascists and communists, both persecuted by the police, may arrive at an agreement, sinking their differences until the time comes to share the spoils. I realise that though there are no political affinities between us, there are plenty of intellectual affinities. Like them, we believe in the necessity for a centralised and unitary state, imposing an iron discipline on everyone, but with the difference that they reach this conclusion through the idea of class, we through the idea of the nation.” Benito Mussolini

“The outbreak of a socialist revolution in one country will cause the others to imitate it or so to strengthen the proletariat as to prevent its national bourgeoisie from attempting any armed intervention.” Benito Mussolini, echoing Lenin

So why are fascists routinely described as right-wing? I’m afraid there’s another false syllogism at work here.

Thesis: socialism is nice. Antithesis: fascism isn’t nice. Synthesis: Fascism is right-wing.

Start with a wrong thesis, and this is the mess you get. For socialism isn’t nice in either its national or international incarnation.

Both Nazism and communism are logical developments of socialism, they are the harbours towards which socialism sails. Or are they the reefs?

This statement may anger most of my friends, with slings and arrows already pinging through the air.

In my defence, I’ll point out that the title above doesn’t say that the EU isn’t evil. Quite the opposite: I’m confident it is.

A Europe bossed by a giant unaccountable bureaucracy, using a tissue of lies to cover up its Marxist, or at least quasi-Marxist provenance, is wicked in so many ways that simply listing them would require more space than this format allows.

Hence I hope that this wicked contrivance will burst like a helium balloon touched by a needle – and the sooner, the better.

Many good people share this hope, but the trouble is that they sometimes don’t think beyond it. They forget that, like most things in life, evil has a hierarchy.

They don’t ask themselves what’s going to happen after the EU balloon is pricked. My contention is that this very much depends on what kind of needle does the pricking.

Alas, we’ve been infected with the contagion of presumptive progress, which is the central tenet of our post-Enlightenment modernity. We’ve been brainwashed to believe that any change can only be for the better.

This Panglossian mentality with a forward-looking dimension puts blinkers on people’s eyes and brakes on their thought. When they don’t like something, they want it changed, full stop. And then what? is a question seldom asked.

They ought to remind themselves that the two most satanic regimes in history came into being largely because of this kind of misapprehension, widely held. What we have is bad, was the battle cry, which means that anything else could only be better.

Messrs Lenin and Hitler went on to demonstrate the fallacy of such thinking. They proved that things can always get worse. And superficial thinking driven by emotions, if sufficiently widespread, guarantees that things will get worse.

Of the two examples, that of Hitler is more relevant to today’s situation. For Nazism was to a large extent a reaction to the weak-kneed internationalism of the Weimar Republic.

Hitler screamed and harangued his way to public support by appealing to German nationalism, promising the revival of German dignity and the downfall of all those who had stamped Germany into the dirt.

Under his leadership the German nation did indeed do a Phoenix – for a short while. What happened afterwards should have disabused everyone of the notion that any change is always for the better if the starting point is deeply unsatisfactory.

This brings us back to the metaphorical needle that may puncture the EU balloon. Unfortunately, many good people I know are ready to welcome any such implement, as long as the balloon is indeed punctured.

This position is, to me, neither conservative nor wise, and I use those two adjectives almost interchangeably. I dearly wish to see the EU collapse – provided the collapsing is done by good people and for good reasons. And I’d rather the EU survived than be replaced by something even worse.

Our present situation is fraught with danger. European countries, including Britain, lack real conservative forces (never mind mainstream parties) that could dismantle the EU in the name of everything conservatives hold dear.

Germany at the time of the Weimar Republic had exactly the same problem.

There were plenty of conservatives who detested Weimar and went on to detest the Nazis. But they lacked the political force and energy to reshape the country in their image. The political force was with Hitler, who in temporary alliance with Stalin plunged Europe into its bloodiest catastrophe ever.

One doesn’t espy a potential Hitler anywhere in Europe, but there are plenty of fascisoid parties that alone seem to present a realistic threat to the EU. If the EU is the disease, these groups are the only likely cure. But the cure may well be worse than the disease.

Much as I detest the EU, I’d rather be governed by the European Commission than by the likes of Tommy Robinson, formerly of the BNP and the EDL. The EU is evil, but at least it’s the evil we know.

Looking at the manifestos of some such parties, one finds things with which any conservative would agree: patriotism, national sovereignty, appeal to traditionalism and Christianity, etc.

But underpinning it all is hatred, not love.

The two sometimes coexist dialectically: when something we love is threatened, we hate the threat. However, for conservatives love is primary and hate is strictly derivative. For this lot, it’s the other way around.

One detects fascistic impulses there, the same urge to externalise evil and ascribe it to easily identifiable groups. For the Nazis it was mostly Jews; for today’s fascisoid groups, it’s mostly Muslims (anti-Semitism is only a footnote for the time being); for both it’s homosexuals.

Now any good conservative bewails the importation of millions of those whose view of life is typically hostile to ours. A desire to curtail, or better still stop, Muslim immigration is therefore a normal conservative impulse. However, hatred of Muslims isn’t.

Hate the sin, love the sinner is the quintessence of the Christian position on such matters – and it also applies to homosexuality.

Any real conservative would refuse to regard sexual perversion as an equally valid ‘lifestyle’, and he’d see homomarriage as an obscene abomination. However, and this is a critical distinction, he wouldn’t hate homosexuals. But the fascisoids do.

Interestingly, few such groups are economically conservative, in the modern sense of championing free enterprise, free trade and small government. Most of them, such as France’s National Front, are both nationalist and socialist, which isn’t my favourite combination.

Until such parties take over, their nastiness comes across mostly not in what they say but in how they say it, their style, their passions, their methods. It’s only when they get into government that the torrent of hate rushes out in full flow.

Hitler circa 1932 also said many things that made sense to most Germans and even to German conservatives. They missed the nuances of hatred and vicious malice – they forgot that, as Buffon put it, the style is the man.

Given that historical precedent, Steve Bannon’s self-appointed mission to Europe is worrying. In general, I don’t think it should be up to foreigners to call for a popular revolt against anything in Britain, including the undoubtedly wicked EU.

We don’t need foreign powers to sort out our problems, and that goes not only for eurocrats but also for Americans. However, when asked whether his animadversions represent a call to arms, Bannon replied: “Absolutely”.

Nor should foreigners be allowed to offer tangible support to British politicians they happen to favour, in Bannon’s case the eminently likeable Jacob Rees-Mogg and moderately likeable Boris Johnson. If we oppose foreign meddling in our affairs, we should oppose all such meddling. Nothing else is logically and morally sound.

But Bannon, who until a year ago was one of Trump’s closest advisers, goes beyond supporting nice people like Rees-Mogg and rather less nice ones like Johnson.

He’s out to promote a sort of fascisoid International of France’s National Front, Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, Germany’s AfD, Austria’s Freedom Party and other likeminded groups (incidentally, most of them are financed by that great friend of the West Col. Putin).

These include British parties like the English Defence League, led until recently by the out-and-out thug Tommy Robinson, whom Bannon calls “the backbone of England”. The backbone of Britain boasts a string of criminal convictions for hooliganism and is currently serving time for breaching bail conditions.

Some of my friends have petitioned the government to free Robinson, and I haven’t studied the details of the case enough to argue against them with any forensic precision. But on general principle I’d rather see the likes of Robinson in prison than in government.

I’d caution those good people against adopting an attitude similar to that popularised by the French Left in the early twentieth century: pas d’ennemis à gauche (no enemies on the Left).

Pas d’ennemis à droite is potentially as dangerous a slogan – especially since most of those fascisoid groups are no more on the real Right than the Nazis were.

Those who allow their hatred of the EU to drive them towards supporting groups like the EDL and cheering people like Bannon, ought to remember another popular saying:

Be careful what you wish for: you might just get it.

Modern governments have refined the art of saying one thing and doing another. Never in the history of Western politics have actual policies diverged so sharply from official lines. (For illustration, may I suggest Brexit?)

So much more enthusiastically must we rejoice whenever the two overlap – as they seem to in the declaration issued by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

The State Department has seldom been so unambiguous: “…the United States reaffirms as policy [my emphasis] its refusal to recognise the Kremlin’s claim of sovereignty over territory seized by force in contravention of international law,” said Mr Pompeo.

And, “…the United States rejects Russia’s attempted annexation of Crimea and pledges to maintain this policy until Ukraine’s territorial integrity is restored.”

And, by way of a parenthetical comment: “Through its actions, Russia has acted in a manner unworthy of a great nation and has chosen to isolate itself from the international community.”

Well put, and never mind the tautology. Putin’s Russia is thereby recognised as a criminal pariah state and, by the sound of it, slated to be cast in that role until it changes its ways.

Does this mean that all those ugly suspicions about Trump being Putin’s agent or at least doormat have been dispelled? Different interpretations of the Pompeo Declaration are possible, but mine is that, if anything, such suspicions have been reinforced.

The contrast between the Pompeo Declaration and Trump’s recent obsequious comments on Putin is too sharp for them to coexist within the framework of a single coordinated policy. When it comes to Russia, the president is clearly at odds with his own State Department, intelligence and counterintelligence services – and, most important, Congress.

In fact, they seem to be at war, and what we’re hearing is echoes of the salvos fired in the raging battle. The unequivocal, steadfast resolve of the Pompeo Declaration suggests that one side is winning, and it isn’t Trump.

There exist other signs as well, such as the two draft laws currently before Congress, both proposed or at least seconded by members of the same party to which Trump belongs, nominally at any rate.

One proposes that, if sufficient evidence of wrong-doing, especially election meddling, is provided by the intelligence community, Congress will be empowered to impose sanctions on Russia without presidential approval.

That bill also represents a rebuke of the president by giving Congress new veto powers to block him from removing sanctions on Russia – something the president apparently wouldn’t mind doing.

Last year, Congress did levy new sanctions on Russia and, when Trump tried to ease them, restricted his authority to do so.

Since an overwhelming congressional majority supported the imposition of sanctions, there was nothing Trump could do about it, but the White House protested vigorously – and has since tried to do all it can to sabotage the bill’s implementation.

According to the president’s staff, the bill includes “a number of clearly unconstitutional provisions” that “purport to displace the President’s exclusive constitutional authority to recognize foreign governments, including their territorial bounds.”

That’s God’s own truth. But the whole point is to curtail the president’s authority to kowtow to Putin. Congress simply doesn’t trust Trump to serve American interests in dealing with Russia and, implicitly, conducting foreign policy in general.

This was re-emphasised yesterday, when several senators introduced a bipartisan bill to prevent Trump from pulling out of NATO without first securing the approval of two-thirds of Senate members.

The bill is a response to Trump’s numerous attacks on NATO, including threats to pull out.

The president in general doesn’t have much time for international organisations, which is a good thing. What’s bad is his evident inability to see the difference between giant supranational contrivances like the EU and purely military alliances like NATO.

However, this bill too is playing fast and loose with the Constitution. Traditionally congressional approval is only required for a president to enter treaties, not to leave them.

Such cavalier treatment of political scripture is another proof of Congress’s manifest lack of trust in Trump. US senators don’t encroach on those sacrosanct tenets – unless there’s clear evidence that a president abuses his constitutional mandate.

Republican leadership may not allow a vote on any such bills, but the very fact that they’ve been put forth suggests the gestation of an inchoate duopoly in foreign policy. And, should the forthcoming half-term elections return a Democratic majority on one House or even both, Trump may well become the first strictly ‘domestic’ president.

I’d pay good money to be a fly on the wall when Trump explains the Pompeo Declaration to his friend Vlad. Putin must be incandescent: after all, if Russia is destined to remain a pariah state for any foreseeable future, Putin’s Crimean triumph becomes a Pyrrhic victory.

In general, watching politicians squirm is among the greatest pleasures of my life, and something tells me that Trump may sooner or later provide a lot of material for my delectation. This, even if I can’t overhear his grovelling chat with Putin.