Category: Blog

We were visiting my wife’s mother, and it was she who broke the news, by responding to my cheerful “Good morning!” with: “The Princess of Wales is dead!”

“And I didn’t even know she was ill,” I said rather insensitively. “It was a car accident, in Paris,” said my mother-in-law, obviously shocked. “And Dodi?” “He’s dead too!”

That created an inner conflict for me. My Christian side insisted that I at least feign grief. My secular side, on the other hand, heaved a sigh of relief. Diana died, I thought, so that our monarchy may live a little longer.

De mortius nil nisi bonum and all that, but, once Diana realised that ‘being me’ wasn’t always compatible with her constitutional role as our future queen, she seemed to have devoted every effort to hurting the monarchy.

Whether she did that out of spite or out of sheer silliness is an ultimately moot question. It’s only really interesting to the coterie of Professional Friends of Diana, vociferously led by Rosa Monckton (Mrs Dominic Lawson).

Anyway, the week following the death of the PC Princess-Goddess united all decent people. We were brought together by an acute sense of tragedy over the untimely demise of British sanity.

Even as Diana’s ‘beautiful body’ (in Julie Burchill’s expert evaluation) still lay oozing ichor onto the grimy cement of a Paris tunnel, the nation fell prey to mass necrophilia expertly whipped up by the press.

By the end of the week, hysterical hagiography for halfwits scaled dizzying depths, and there was no getting away. Pursued by nightmares of anorexic, HIV-positive lepers splattered all over the rain forest by land mines, I remember lying awake at night, fantasising about driving my fist through Tony Blair’s diabolical grin as he uttered the words ‘people’s princess’.

It took several years for the royal family to repair the dents to their dignity kicked in by that manipulative, self-serving woman who had no sense of her role in Britain’s history and constitution.

And now the Diana hysteria, bottled for a few years, is about to pop the cork and splash out again. This time the object of public frenzy will be Prince Harry’s fiancée Meghan Markle, who has already laid down a marker for becoming a Diana Mark II.

One would think that the royal family would have learned the lesson the first time around, when Edward VIII married an American actress with a rather colourful past. The monarchy suffered a heavy blow then, and only HMG’s resolute interference managed to avoid a catastrophe, if not embarrassment.

In general, the old tradition of princes marrying other royals, or at least the offspring of high aristocracy, makes sense. Unless trained to do so from the cradle, it’s hard for a young woman to squeeze her hormone-rich personality into the straitjacket of disciplined service demanded of the royals.

‘Service’ is the operative word, for, now they’ve been divested of executive power, the royals’ sole duty is to serve the realm in every way they can. Various charitable and ceremonial projects are vitally important, but by far the most critical service they can provide is maintaining the dignity and honour of the throne.

For the throne is one of the few things that still make Britain British; it’s the adhesive moulding the generations past, present and future into a recognisable continuum. Without the monarchy, Britain may thrive or it may collapse. But one thing for sure: it won’t be Britain any longer.

Any newcomer to the dynasty ought to remember that, though this noble service is well rewarded, it also imposes certain demands. These are especially harsh on today’s people, trained to believe that their own selves are uniquely important and can’t be sacrificed for something nebulous they can’t quite get their heads around.

Diana and her sister-and-law Fergie are prime illustrations of this, and both damaged the dynasty by refusing to subjugate their private urges to the public good. And now Prince Harry, fifth (soon to be sixth) in the line of succession, is bringing another divorced American into the family.

We all know the path B-actresses tread to stardom, and one can only hope Meghan was different, or at least more discreet than most. Chances are, however, that before long we’ll be treated to the kind of stories and photographs that Her Majesty might find distasteful in her granddaughter-in-law.

That, however, would be a minor irritant, not much more damaging than those long shots of a topless Kate appearing in a French magazine a few years ago. The real harm may come not from what Meghan has done in the past but from what I fear she may do in the future.

The past and present aren’t infallible predictors of the future, but they don’t often go wrong, especially when supported by stated intentions. That’s why I fear that Meghan will play her new role according to the script she has followed for years.

Specifically, she has never seen a ‘liberal’ cause she couldn’t love and support, displaying well-publicised energy in doing so. Hence I shudder reading Andrew Morton’s biography of Meghan, in which he confidently promises that she “will make the monarchy seem more inclusive and relevant to multicultural Britain”.

Thanks to the young princes, our monarchy is already ‘inclusive and relevant’ enough, in fact more so. The monarchy, along with the church, represents a factor of constancy, which by definition makes it a conservative institution.

Conservative doesn’t mean unchanging, and God knows our monarchy has changed a lot over the centuries. But whatever changes it has undergone (or suffered, depending on your point of view) have been gradual. It’s not the monarchy’s function to accommodate leftish impulses of an American B-actress who believes in her inalienable right to speak her mind, such as it is.

Mr Morton probably doesn’t even realise how scary he sounds when writing that: “According to family friends, Meghan was intrigued by Diana not just for her style but also for her independent humanitarian mission.”

He turns fear into dread when quoting Meghan’s childhood friend, who says that: “She was always fascinated by the Royal Family. She wants to be Princess Diana 2.0.”

Of course she does. And, call me a scaremonger, I’m almost certain she’ll succeed.

As someone who spent 30 years in advertising, I consider myself an expert in the eponymous technique. But I have to admit that no adman has ever achieved the subtle mastery displayed by The Times today.

The paper was covering the story of yet another miscarriage of justice perpetrated by our legal system, although it clearly doesn’t see it as such.

Richard Osborn-Brooks, 78, was in bed with his disabled wife, when an armed burglar broke into his London flat. The thug forced the pensioner into the kitchen, where a scuffle ensued, in the course of which the criminal was fatally stabbed.

The report makes it unclear whether he was stabbed with his own sharpened screwdriver or a kitchen knife. One way or the other, he died, his accomplice fled, and Mr Osborn-Brooks was charged with murder.

This is what I, or for that matter any sane man, would call a gross miscarriage of justice. Surely a man has a right to protect his family, himself and his property by whatever means at his disposal?

That’s how things used to be in Britain, when an Englishman’s home was still his castle, rather than an arena for social engineering. That’s how things would be in any country where law and justice haven’t yet gone their separate ways.

But, once the balance of power swings from the individual to the state, the state insists on having the monopoly on violence.

After all,  freedom-minded individuals, if allowed to protect themselves from criminals, may at some point decide to protect themselves against the state. That can’t be allowed, and if preventive measures leave people at the mercy of criminals, then so be it.

Of course, self-defence would be unnecessary if the legal system could protect people on its own.

But in a statist society, the state doesn’t see this as its first priority. Its first priority is to protect itself, and that includes emasculating the population by force-feeding the state’s ideology. Ours is based on denying evil and assuming equal virtue all around.

If some people don’t act in a virtuous way, they need help. Hence the police and the penitentiary system increasingly become extensions of the social services, and the whole legal system appears to be designed for the criminal rather than his victims.

That’s why the police in London is led by the useless, not to say actively subversive, Commissioner Cressida Dick, whose only qualifications for the job seem to be based on her sex and sexuality. And that’s why we have the outrage of early release from prison, with some 10 per cent of all London murders being committed by criminals on parole.

In a country where the state can legally extort more than half of the people’s income, the people’s right to protect their property isn’t really recognised as real. Burglary is now seen by many as a kind of redistributive tax, which is why most burglaries aren’t even investigated.

And in any case, we’re supposed to give a thug who has put his foot through our window the benefit of the doubt. How dare we attack him if he ‘only’ came for the TV set? The counter question I always ask is “And how do I know that?”

It’s my moral right – and if my wife is at home, my duty – to assume the worst: the thug has broken in to kill or rape. He isn’t entitled to benefit of the doubt – if he’s penetrated my house with criminal intent, he has left his civil rights outside. That’s how it should be.

Is this how The Times has covered the story? You know that’s not the case by just looking at the title of their article: Pensioner Arrested Over Death of ‘Burglar’.

Why quotation marks? In this context, they’re the same as the negative particle ‘not’. The implication is that the poor young man wasn’t really a burglar. He must have dropped in for a cup of tea, and the beastly pensioner killed him just for the hell of it.

In the very first paragraph the criminal is described as “an alleged burglar armed with a screwdriver”. I dare say, if he’s uninvited and armed, he’s no longer just alleged. Yes, in the legalese language of the courts he remains alleged until convicted. But a newspaper isn’t a court of law, is it?

Most of the rest of the article is a compendium of interviews with the neighbours, who all describe Mr Osborn-Brooks as an extremely nice man.

What does that have to do with anything? He could be the male reincarnation of Mother Theresa or a dyed-in-the wool bastard – it’s utterly irrelevant to the case.

The only relevant question is whether or not he was within his right, moral and legal, to protect himself and his wife from what he could reasonably judge to be a murder attempt.

So was he? Here the paper provides misleading information: “The law allows homeowners to use ‘reasonable force’, which may include a weapon, to protect themselves from intruders. The test applied by prosecutors is that they did what they honestly thought was necessary.”

First, the law no longer talks about just ‘reasonable’ force. That was the case until 2004, when John Monckton, a wealthy financier from a good family, was murdered by a burglar in an expensive neighbourhood.

At that time ‘reasonable’ force was defined as exactly matching that offered by the burglar. The homeowner was allowed to defend himself with a knife against a knife or with a baseball bat against a baseball bat (not with a gun against a gun: we aren’t allowed to have guns).

That has every hallmark of a rotten law eventually boiling down to arbitrary judgement. What constitutes reasonable force? What about resisting a knife with a baseball bat or a baseball bat with a knife? What about a frail old man using either implement on a huge young thug waving nothing but his football-sized fists?

Such questions began to be asked after the Monckton murder, and in 2013 the phrasing was changed, marginally for the better.

Now we’re allowed to use ‘disproportionate’, even lethal, force to repel an intruder. Sounds good, doesn’t it? A thug breaks in, you do what you must, including killing him if that’s what it takes.

Oh, if only things were as simple as that. The law leaves an out for itself by stating that ‘grossly disproportionate force’ is still illegal. Who decides? Well, the state, of course.

In this case the state has decided that an old man who stabbed an armed burglar should be charged with murder, which charge carries a life sentence. The force he used has been judged to be grossly disproportionate.

What force would have been simply ‘disproportionate’ or, for that matter, ‘reasonable’? Letting the thug get on with it, hoping he only came to steal, not to kill or rape?

The article raises no such questions. It’s completely even-handed in judging evil and an attempt to defeat it. I can only applaud the technical mastery involved in such even-handedness.

The paper doesn’t lie – it deceives by omission. The reader is supposed to feel sympathy for the dead young man, who may or may not have been a ‘burglar’. Allegedly.

And Mr Osborn-Brook may spend the rest of his life in prison. As far as the state is concerned, there’s nothing alleged about his crime.

When I moved to Britain from the US 30 years ago, I had an amusing conversation with an impeccable English gentleman.

I don’t recall how we got on that subject, but I mentioned in passing that American blacks tended to be left-wing. “They are left-wing because they are black,” opined my interlocutor. “No, it’s the other way around,” I replied. “They are black because they are left-wing.”

It was one of those flippant paradoxes in which I like to indulge from time to time. But there was also a kernel of truth there, for traditional markers of identity are these days superseded by politics.

In fact, everything is. Our politics used to be defined by the votes we cast and the views we expressed. Now everything is politicised, including the clothes we wear and the food we eat. A chap wearing a legible T-shirt and lunching on a tofu burger with bean sprouts on the side doesn’t even have to open his mouth for us to guess his politics, does he?

The same goes for race and sex (and of course language: anyone using ‘gender’ as anything other than a grammatical category has to be left-wing).

Institutional race discrimination in America and Britain no longer exists. In fact, the races discriminated against in the past tend to enjoy preferential treatment at present. Implicit or explicit quotas that used to apply to the maximum number of minority members in the workplace, now apply to the minimum number.

This is called affirmative action in the US and reverse discrimination in the UK. In both places the hope (forlorn, in my view) is that the emollient balm of present mollycoddling will ease the residual pain of past suffering.

Everyday racism does exist even in Britain, not to mention Texas, where I lived for 10 years. This no doubt stokes up the rankling resentment over things of yesteryear like slavery and riding in the back of the bus (my black friend in Houston had to do that when a teenager).

But resentment isn’t cancer. It can be self-controlled, which some people are more prepared to do than some others.

That’s where political convictions come in, for left-wing politics is weaned on resentment or even, at its extreme, hatred. Political conservatism, on the other hand, rises above such incidentals.

By way of illustration, look up on YouTube the old issue of the US show The Firing Line. Its host, the influential conservative writer William F. Buckley, interviews Thomas Sowell, arguably the greatest social and economic philosopher of his time.

Dr Sowell happens to be black, and he grew up in a dirt-poor North Carolina family, when Jim Crow was in force. His contacts with white people were so limited that, as he writes in his autobiography The Personal Odyssey, he didn’t even know that blond was a hair colour.

No doubt he remembered all that even after he made his way to Cornell, the Chicago School of Economics and Stanford. It’s even possible that he still feels some residual resentment – he wouldn’t be human if he didn’t.

But because he is a conservative Dr Sowell clearly doesn’t define himself as black first and foremost. His race is just a fact of his biography, one of many and not the most important one. His attitude probably runs along the lines of “Yes, I’m black. So what?”

“So what?!?” exclaim politicised blacks. “So you aren’t black at all. If you don’t let your negritude define your whole life, you’re a traitor to your race.”

Real, which is to say politicised, American blacks call people like Dr Sowell ‘Uncle Tom’ or else ‘coconut’ (black on the outside, white on the inside). Our equivalents use Bounty in the same meaning.

In the process, they weirdly apply the philosophy of Jim Crow racists (“a drop of tar, all black”). A man like Barack Obama, whose mother was white, is routinely described as black, not half-black – an image that he himself cultivated as a way of getting to the White House. Mr Obama would have done exactly the same even if he were an octoroon. Blackness is now more political than racial.

This was emphasised by the American woman Rachel Dolezal, who lied about being black to become a prominent activist in the NAACP.

Exposed in 2015, Miss Dolezal defends herself by insisting she’s indeed black – by convictions if not by ancestry. I applaud her: she’s one of the few public figures who have dared to elucidate the true nature of race in today’s world.

The same goes for sex. A conservative woman, especially one in a prominent political position, is seen by the Left as not quite womanly.

When I lived in the US, feminists insisted that no woman could occupy a high post in government. “What about Jean Kirkpatrick, Ambassador to the UN?” “Oh well, we’re talking about women…” was the typical reply.

Mrs Kirkpatrick wasn’t really a woman because she wasn’t a left-wing feminist – not just because she eschewed the allure of femininity to advance her career. Margaret Thatcher, for example, suffered the same fate even though she was an extremely feminine and flirtatious woman.

Neither the chromosomes nor the looks nor the behaviour had anything to do with it. For womanhood, like race, has become a political statement – at least among today’s trend-setters.

Thus, say, Diane Abbott is a woman, and Margaret Thatcher or Baroness Cox isn’t. And if you disagree, you’re a stick-in-the-mud retrograde (just like me).

Trumped up accusations of rape show a certain bias towards wealthy celebrities. I’m sure this is a sheer coincidence – because, if I weren’t so sure, I’d have to suspect bad will on the accusers’ part.

And should I dare express such feelings in public, I’d be accused of (charged with?) misogyny at least, and probably racism, homophobia and xenophobia into the bargain, the assumption being that anyone guilty of one must also be guilty of the whole cluster.

The coincidental tendency to target wealthy celebrities has most recently manifested itself in Northern Ireland, where two international rugby players, Messrs Jackson and Olding, have been cleared of a spurious rape charge.

The two players and their friends were celebrating something or other in the VIP section of a popular Belfast nightclub. There they picked up a few girls with dubious claims to the requisite VIP status.

The party moved on to Jackson’s house, where, according to the claimant, they “kissed consensually” and then ended up in his bedroom, accompanied by Olding. The next day the two athletes exchanged boastful notes about “spit-roasting” the girl.

As Olding put it, “pumped a bird with Jacko last night, roasted her”.

If you understand the culinary reference, you don’t need my explanation, and if you don’t, you’re better off remaining in your state of innocence.

Anyway, the girl claimed she had been raped, the two young men faced trial, the proceedings dragged on for two years, their careers were ruined, and last week the jury acquitted them after deliberating for just under four hours.

The defence was on to a winner. First, there was the general consideration that the imputed cooking method is hard to force on a woman without subjecting one of the perpetrators to the risk of mutilation. Second, and most important, there were eyewitnesses.

One of them, another VIP girl, walked in on the threesome in progress and reported no distress on the girl’s part, quite the opposite. The eyewitness was invited to join the fun but declined, which speaks highly of her moral fibre.

I haven’t read the transcripts of the trial, but the evidence presented by the defence must have been overwhelming for the jury to acquit after so little deliberation. After all, the jurors were under heavy political pressure to convict: rape and all other forms of unwanted sexual attention have moved to the forefront of politicised crimes.

Case open and shut, one would think. Well, one would think wrong.

First there was an outburst of rage in the social media. One irate girlfriend of an Olympic athlete accused rugby players in general and those two in particular of treating women “like meat”.

That’s probably true, but irrelevant in this context. If there’s no rape involved, and the sex is consensual, then it logically follows that the women involved agree to being treated like meat. If they then bring up a spurious rape charge, the man’s meat becomes the same man’s poison, but it doesn’t make him a criminal.

Then the demonstrations came, in Belfast and other Ulster cities. The feminist demonstrators carried placards saying “I believe her”. What was the basis of such credulity?

Did they examine the evidence and find it wanting? Did they interview the counsel? Did they possess information that hadn’t made it to court? Did they uncover new witnesses?

Of course not. It’s just that the placards were abbreviated to the detriment of the message. What the demonstrators really meant was that they believed any woman accusing any man of rape, regardless of evidence.

Hence the demonstrators pursued not justice but a political cause that, if allowed to vanquish, would destroy the foundations of our legal system and therefore society. And good riddance, according to the feminist groups.

One such posted a message on Facebook, saying that our criminal justice system is “not fit for purpose when it comes to dealing with sexual crimes.” Right. It’s good enough to deal with murder, robbery and GBH, but not with rape.

What’s the nature of this disparity? As far as I know, the legal method is the same in all cases. In our adversarial system, the prosecution presents the evidence and arguments for one side, the defence for the other, and the jury decides whose evidence and arguments carry the day.

What makes rape trials so special? Yes, they often boil down to his word against hers, which makes it hard to build an ironclad case. But the same situation arises in other trials as well, if less frequently. And anyway, in this trial there was enough eyewitness evidence not to rely on the defendants’ word.

It’s hard to get rid of the impression that the only legal system that would satisfy the feminists would be one in which the middlemen, the police and the courts, would be eliminated altogether. Anyone accused of rape would be automatically presumed guilty as charged and go straight to jail, Monopoly style.

In this context, I was truly shocked by the announcement made by Cressida Dick, the Commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police.

The Met, said the Commissioner, would no longer blindly believe rape complaints. Of course, she reassured the feminists scorned, “It is very important to victims to feel that they are going to be believed.”

However, “We are, of course, likely to believe you but we are investigators and we have to investigate.”

Does this mean that until now the Met has acted as merely a clerk processing papers on the way to the courthouse without even bothering to check the evidence? No wonder our legal system has blown millions on hundreds of spurious rape cases, like the Belfast one, that should never have reached the courts.

A country in which politics trumps justice is one in which both suffer irreparably. Witness the fact that London has overtaken New York in murder rate, the only crime category in which we have hitherto lagged behind.

Perhaps if the Met spent more time on chasing murderers and less on… Well, I’d better stop here before I too find myself in the dock.

An irate reader of mine complains that I ascribe the eponymous faults to anyone who disagrees with my assessment of Putin’s kleptofascist junta.

That would indeed be rude – unless it were true. I argue it is; the reader believes it isn’t, but without offering any arguments.

He seems to proceed from the assumption that any opinion on this or any other subject is equally valid and therefore meriting a public airing, especially if it tallies with his own.

I, on the other hand, would go so far as to suggest that no opinion merits a public airing. Only sound judgements do, and they differ from opinions in that they offer an intelligible interpretation of reality based on facts.

This distinction is largely lost these days. We’re all supposed to be created equally knowledgeable, intelligent and good. Suggesting that someone may be remiss in any part of that triad implicitly attacks the presumption of equality all around, which is the most cherished shibboleth of modernity.

Yet suppose I were to express an ‘opinion’ that the monster who recently bludgeoned an octogenarian to rob her of her meagre possessions isn’t to blame – for whatever reason. He felt betrayed by society, the victim had jostled him in a bus queue, he didn’t mean to kill her, she had attacked him first, she’s a xenophobe and homophobe – you name it.

How would most readers describe me then? I suspect they’d use the adjectives in the title above. Take your pick: mad, in that I would have lost touch with reality; bad, in that I would have displayed the moral sense of a skunk; stupid, in that I would have lacked the basic cerebral skill to draw conclusions from the known facts.

Yet Putin’s Western fans, such as my irate reader, display all these faults, albeit on a much greater scale. After all, Putin explicitly threatens to obliterate life on earth, which the hammer-wielding monster has neither the means nor, seemingly, the desire to do.

Madness is usually characterised by obsessive behaviour and a divorce from reality. To diagnose the condition, we must first establish the reality of Putin’s regime and then see to what extent his fans are divorced from it. The task is easy.

I describe this regime as kleptofascist, demonstrably so. First the klepto- part.

The Kremlin junta ably led by Putin himself has amassed close to two trillion dollars in various personal offshore havens, with half of it in the US, a quarter in the UK and the rest spread wide, from Panama to the Channel Islands.

This money has been brazenly stolen from the Russian economy, specifically from those 20 per cent of the population, many of them pensioners, who are starving below the poverty line of about £100 a month (the Russians’ own data).

My favourite bit of current news is Vice Premier Shuvalov, whose annual salary of some £90,000 hasn’t prevented him from amassing half a billion’s worth of properties in London and the Home Counties.

Such is the klepto- reality and denying it is a symptom of madness, especially since even Russian putinistas don’t bother to do so.

Now the –fascist part. As my irate reader points out, correctly but irrelevantly, the word has been widely misused by the Left to describe the Right. But that doesn’t remove the word from the lexicon – it still denotes something specific if used correctly.

As it is in this case, for Putin’s regime shows every characteristic of fascism:

Populism combined with chauvinism; externalising evil in alien groups or countries; sacralisation of power: internalising the good of the nation within the person of the leader; state control of the media and their almost exclusive use for propaganda purposes; the leader’s will replacing the rule of law; violent suppression of dissent; acquisitive aggression against neighbours; eliminating all legal means of removing the leader from power; allowing political opposition for window-dressing only, if at all; burgeoning militarisation, used either for actual aggression or blackmail.

Even a cursory familiarity with the last 20 years of Russian history will show how emphatically Putin’s junta ticks all these boxes. Anyone who doubts this should acquire such cursory familiarity – for example, by scanning my pieces on this subject over the past few years. This labour would be rewarded by a compendium of hundreds of facts, along with textual references and video links.

Such is the reality, or rather some of it. For I’ve left out the most relevant part.

In all those traits Putin’s Russia is no different from other Third World kleptofascist regimes, such as Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. There is, however, a crucial difference: unlike them, Russia is threatening the West directly – for example, by amassing troops at the borders of NATO members and threatening to do to them what she has already done to the Ukraine.

Moreover, every day brings new discoveries of the electronic war Putin’s junta is waging against the West, spreading lies and disinformation aimed at subverting our institutions and sowing discord between us and our allies. And any student of warfare will tell you that disinformation is as potent a weapon as any of those that go bang.

To wit, the last man hanged in Britain for treason had never betrayed any of the country’s secrets. It was William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, the mouthpiece of Nazi propaganda in English. (Peter Hitchens, ring your office.)

Electronic war is still war, and so far only one side has been fighting it. But in addition, Putin’s junta indulges in crimes that have throughout history been regarded as a legitimate casus belli.

The latest one is the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal, his daughter, and, by way of collateral damage, a few dozen British bystanders. Here Putin’s useful idiots come up with several lines of defence.

They either claim that there’s no proof of Russia’s responsibility for the crime; that killing traitors is Russia’s internal affair; and that British and other Western governments have ‘overreacted’.

Now, useful idiots would deny Russia’s culpability even if Putin had been caught personally spraying Skripal’s doorknob with novichok. However, millions of criminals have been convicted on much thinner evidence than the evidence in this case.

Russian officials, including Putin himself, had issued numerous threats of murder by poisoning towards all ‘traitors’, and Skripal by name. Then Skripal was poisoned with a nerve agent of uniquely Russian provenance. Hence Russia is the only country that had the motive and the means to carry out this assassination attempt.

All this is circumstantial evidence that may or may not be sufficient to convict in a court of law. But it’s certainly sufficient to believe that Russia has a case to answer: no court would dismiss such a case for lack of evidence.

Yet Russia hasn’t answered the case, or rather has answered it with sarcasm, rudeness, lies and threats – including one of global extinction. The same applies to other murders the Russians have committed on British soil, including that of Litvinenko.

Then too there were lying denials and accusations that Britain was conducting a witch hunt by slandering Russia’s pristine morality and unmatched spirituality.

Of course the easiest way to prove their point would have been to allow Scotland Yard to interrogate the suspected murderers. However, the Russians refused to extradite them and instead co-opted the prime suspect Lugovoi into their sham Duma, where he enjoys parliamentary immunity.

Our useful idiots routinely echo Putin’s propaganda verbatim, including, in this case, references to Skripal as a ‘traitor’. Well, one side’s traitor is the other side’s hero.

For example, we consider Philby a traitor, while the Russians gave him medals and displayed his portrait at Lubianka among other KGB heroes. So it depends on which side Putin’s useful idiots support, and they leave one in no doubt on that score.

Then again, whatever Skripal’s moral fibre, no murder a foreign power commits on our soil, especially of a British subject, is that power’s internal affair. This is so basic that one is almost embarrassed to have to mention it.

As to our government’s supposed ‘overreaction’, I’d suggest that it was both limp and belated. Yet one realises that to this lot any reaction would constitute an overreaction. We’re supposed to sit idle as their role model commits acts of nuclear and chemical terrorism.

Should Western governments have reacted resolutely to Russia’s nuclear terrorism on British soil in 2006, Putin’s junta might not have felt emboldened to proceed to the next steps.

The naked aggression against Georgia in 2008 and the Ukraine in 2014 might not have happened, those 298 people aboard the Malaysian airliner would still be alive, and Sergei Skripal wouldn’t be dying.

Instead, Western governments introduced token sanctions that badly hurt ordinary Russians but had no effect on the ruling junta. For example, when the Rotenbergs’ assets were frozen in the US, Putin simply paid them the same amount from the public purse, thereby blithely stealing more billions from the poor.

This time around, HMG expelled 23 Russian ‘diplomats’, and the Russians retaliated with tit for tat expulsions. However, the US and 20 other countries followed suit, presenting a united front and sending an unequivocal message that further heinous acts would not go unpunished. It’s not much, but it is something.

Such is the reality of Putin’s Russia. If his Western fans don’t know it but still have warm feelings about the KGB colonel, they’re fools. If they know it, but still love Putin, they’re knaves. And if they ignore reality altogether, they are mad.

The other day, a perfectly conservative friend offered an explanation. These people, he said, are so obsessed with their hatred of the EU, that they desperately look for idols wherever they can be found.

That’s indeed an explanation. But it isn’t an excuse. For surely any obsession that overrides reason and morality is in itself a symptom of madness?

Our putinistas ‘argue’ the case by delivering a long litany of opprobrium heaped on every post-Thatcher government (the sainted Lady herself is above criticism, although she did sign the Single European Act). I agree with every accusation they voice, and happily add a few of my own.

However, I can’t for the life of me see how any sane man can build a logical bridge between our several past governments, bad, weak and, in Blair’s case, downright wicked as they have been, and their love for Putin’s kleptofascist regime.

They should realise that I pay them a compliment by calling them mad or stupid. These, after all, are congenital conditions they can’t help. An alternative to that would be calling them ghouls longing for fascism – or else Putin’s paid trolls.

No one can name a year that changed man and his world for ever, a century or an age.

But it’s easy to say which day did just that. Easter Sunday, 2,000-odd years ago today.

Hellenic man had always struggled with death, its finality, its cruelty, its nothingness. Death seemed to render life meaningless, deprive it of any sense of purpose.

Life itself had to be regarded as the purpose of life, and the Hellenes, weaned as they were on logic, couldn’t fail to see a self-refuting paradox there.

To be sure, there were all sort of Orphic fantasies about afterlife, but that’s what they were and were seen to be – fantasies.

And then, on this day, 2,000-odd years ago, people weren’t just told but shown that, just as there is death in life, so there is life in death.

Now they knew there was no such thing as a happy end to life. If it was to be happy, it was not the end.

There had never been such rejoicing, never such an outburst of hope, liberation and energy. Not only was imitating God in Christ just man’s moral commitment. The ability to do so had become his ontological property.

Man was no longer a lodger in the world; he had become its eternal owner. He could now imitate Christ not only by being good but also by being creative. And create he did.

Thus, on this day 2,000-odd years ago a new civilisation was born, the likes of which the world had never seen, nor ever will see. More important, a new family came into existence.

Universal brotherhood became a reality: all men were brothers – not because someone said so, but because they all had the same father.

This unity was a bond far stronger than even the ordinary, what is today called ‘biological’, family. And it certainly betokened a much greater concord than any worldly alliances, blocs, contracts, agreements, political unions – or for that matter nations or races.

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus,” explained Paul, making every subsequent, secular promise of equality sound puny and vulgar.

It has not always worked out that way. Just like the ancient Hebrews who were dispersed because they broke God’s covenant, the world pushed aside the lifebelt divinely offered.

It hoped to find unity in itself – only to find discord, devastation and the kind of spiritual emptiness for which no material riches can possibly make up.

But the lifebelt was not taken away. It still undulates with the waves, still within reach of anyone ready to grasp it.

This makes today the most joyous day of the year – regardless of whether or not we are Christians, or what kind of Christians.

On this day we can forget our differences and again sense we are all brothers united in the great hope of peace on earth and life everlasting. We can all, regardless of where we live, rejoice on hearing these words, ringing, thundering in whatever language they are spoken:

Christ is risen!

Le Christ est ressuscité!

Christus ist auferstanden!

Cristo ha resucitado!

Cristo è risorto!

Kristus on üles tõusnud!

Kristus er oppstanden!

Xристос воскрес!

Chrystus zmartwychwstał!

Kristus vstal z mrtvých!

Cristo ressuscitou!

Kristus ir augšāmcēlies!

Christus is verrezen!

Χριστὸς ἀνέστη!

Krisztus feltámadt!

Kristus är uppstånden!

Kristus prisikėlė!

Kristus nousi kuolleista!

Hristos a înviat!

INDEED HE IS RISEN!

Did you know that Hitler was a Zionist? No? Boy, do you have a lot to learn.

Not only that Adolf was a Zionist at heart, but also that the Holocaust is a hoax. Mossad murdered Kennedy and was behind 9/11. The Rothschilds and George Soros are among the Elders of Zion seeking to take over the world in accordance with the perfectly authentic Protocols. “The millionaires and billionaires of the Jewish persuasion hold dual citizenship, most of them.”

I could go on, but I don’t want you to feel even more embarrassed about your ignorance. But not to worry: you can plug all such gaping holes in your knowledge by enrolling into that great educational institution: the Labour Party.

The Chancellor of this university, otherwise known as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, is amply qualified to supervise your education.

Proceeding from the unassailable assumption that his enemies’ enemies are his friends, Comrade Corbyn is a proud member of every anti-Semitic organisation active in the UK, and some that aren’t. And he publicly supported the rather controversial mural showing fat hook-nosed bankers playing Monopoly on the backs of the poor.

Comrade Jeremy counts among his close friends such renowned experts on Judaism as Ken Livingston (whom even the Labour Party had to suspend for anti-Semitism), Gerry Downing, the Labour activist who got to the bottom of the Jews’ true allegiances (see the quotation above), and of course the entire leadership of Hamas and Hezbollah.

The curriculum will include the aforementioned Protocols, along with selected works by such world-famous scholars as Julius Streicher, Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler, Henry Ford, Roald Dahl, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Fyodor Dostoyevsky – and, most appropriately, a full course on the scriptural source of the Labour Party, Karl Marx.

The general direction of the programme was charted in Marx’s seminal 1844 treatise On the Jewish Question:

“What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money… Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities… The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange… The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.”

If Jews are the question, what’s the answer? Comrade Corbyn so far has shied away from the radicalism of Comrades Hitler, Goebbels and Streicher. At present he has limited himself to producing the peer-reviewed article, Apologia Pro Odio Iudaeorum: Marx Hated’em Too, every time a member of his faculty is accused of anti-Semitism.

And his university cum party has threatened to deselect any Labour MP who took part in last Monday’s Westminster demonstration against anti-Semitism. Such turncoats have no place in today’s Labour, although some of the renegades’ colleagues wish Comrade Corbyn expressed his academic tenets with greater subtlety.

He had to hold back some of his other colleagues, who insisted that the question so poignantly posed by Marx should be answered with a more radical, or shall we say final, solution. But Comrade Corbyn reminded them that the essence of scientific enquiry is going from small to big, arriving at the ultimate truth by incremental steps. “Festina lente, lads,” he postulated. “Giz time.”

When taken to task by some naysayers, Comrade Corbyn vehemently denied any animus transcending scholarly objectivity. “Anti-Semite, moi?” he protested. “Certainly not. Why, some of my best friends are Christ-killers – even though Christ never existed,” he hastened to add.

Oh well, good knockabout fun can be had by all. But when one recalls that these ghouls are half a step removed from government, suddenly the situation isn’t funny any longer.

I am, however, surprised that so many people are surprised. To them, anti-Semitism is supposed to be a proprietary property of conservatives. Yet, whatever conservatives feel about the subject privately, and some of them may not be a million miles away from Corbyn, they refrain from venting such sentiments in public.

The whole ethos of British conservatism precludes preaching or condoning hatred. After all, conservatism is rooted not in Das Kapital but in another book, which teaches that “There is neither Jew nor Greek…: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Where Comrade Corbyn et al can find allies is in various faschisoid groups whose principal animus comes from hatred, no matter how loudly they proclaim their love of Britain. The two ends of the line bend backwards to link up and form a truly vicious circle.

One wonders to what extent Labour’s overt and growing anti-Semitism is genuine, coming from the viscera and Marx, as opposed to purely pragmatic. After all, the electoral arithmetic is simple: there are some 250,000 Jews in the UK and over three million Muslims.

What is democratic campaigning if not appealing to the innermost feelings of the target group? It’s no secret that our Muslim friends’ love of Jews is rather understated. In fact, throughout Europe the number of anti-Semitic incidents tends to be directly proportionate to the number of Muslims in the community.

Is Comrade Jeremy trying to secure even a greater chunk of the Muslim vote, albeit at the risk of alienating his Jewish supporters? Or am I maligning Jeremy by attributing to him cold-blooded cynicism rather than socialist idealism? The questions are purely academic, for the upshot is the same.

One thing I am convinced about is that every Briton casting his vote for Labour is no longer just Corbyn’s supporter. He’s his accomplice.

Chris Goldscheider, who played sixth viola at the Royal Opera House, lost his hearing at a rehearsal of Wagner’s Die Walküre.

The musician sued his employer, and our High Court has just ruled in his favour. The damages are to be determined later.

Goldscheider suffered his problem as a result of acoustic shock. During the rehearsal he sat directly in front of the brass section and was exposed to a noise level of more than 130 decibels, which is about what a jet engine puts out.

The charity Help Musicians UK welcomed the judgement, referring to the 2015 survey, “where 59.5 per cent of musicians said they had suffered hearing loss and 78 per cent said working as a musician was a contributor to their hearing loss.”

At first I found this statement hard to believe. Such incredulity sprang from a lifelong acquaintance with musicians, many of whom played in symphony orchestras. This is only one man’s experience, but not a single musician I’ve ever met has complained of hearing loss.

I do know there are some such unfortunate persons among the musicians I haven’t met. But the proportions cited by Help Musicians sound unbelievably high.

Then it occurred to me that at play here may be the typical statistical trick of merging two categories into one. For example, I could say that, on average, my close friends have had 25.67 wives and girlfriends over a lifetime.

Yet you can’t tell on this basis how polygamous my friends have been, nor even if all of them have been married even once. For you to get an accurate idea, I’d have to do the right thing and separate the wives and girlfriends into different subcategories.

The semantic trick played by the charity workers is using the word ‘music’ to describe, say, both the Adagio from Mozart’s Piano Concerto in A major, K488, and the unbearable electronically enhanced din produced by tattooed, heavily drugged plankton.

I’d venture a guess that pop ‘music’ claims the lion’s share of hearing loss victims, and not only among the performers.

I once worked with a lovely, intelligent woman then in her early thirties. She was almost completely deaf as a result of a youth misspent at discos and rock concerts, a tragedy whose only positive effect was her inability to hear my silly jokes (these days all jokes told in front of women range from silly to criminal).

However, the tragedy that befell Mr Goldscheider was undeniably caused by his exposure to classical music, that of Wagner. The level that did the damage was lower than a peak of 140 decibels sometimes produced by aforementioned plankton, but close enough.

Being congenitally predisposed to look for first causes, I thought the situation over and came to what I consider the right conclusion, but not one I’d be able to defend with requisite intellectual rigour.

Mr Goldscheider suffered his condition as a result of playing not a symphony but an opera. And not any old opera, but an opera by Wagner, whom a wit once described, in one of the best one-liners I’ve ever heard, as “the Puccini of music”.

Could it be that God punishes people able to listen to Wagner or especially those prepared to play him? Could it also be that, though immeasurably more accomplished than pop, the anomie of Wagner’s music makes it philosophically closer to pop than to, say, Mozart?

There’s undeniably more (or less, depending on one’s point of view) to Wagner’s music than music. Jumping backwards, Wagner leapfrogged western culture, landing in the middle of Germany’s pagan past. This couldn’t go unpunished musically, as it didn’t go unpunished philosophically – or, in this case, medically.

I’m always suspicious of people who profess affection for Wagner’s bombastic, manipulative, often blatantly erotic output. The suspicion is mixed with latent envy: it takes the kind of fortitude I don’t possess to sit through one of the Ring operas in its entirety without losing the will to live.

Wagner was capable of producing great music in patches. But one has to be either insane or stoned to sit through, say, the 5.5 hours of Götterdämmerung, although I don’t claim sufficient medical qualifications to make this diagnosis.

As Rossini put it: “Wagner has some beautiful moments but terrible quarter-hours.” This is even better in the original French: to have a mauvais quart d’heure means having a rotten time.

Even my estimation of the sainted Enoch Powell went down a notch when, appearing on Desert Island Disks in 1989, he selected four pieces by Wagner out of the eight he was allowed to take with him. Listening to Wagner on a desert island until one dies? Suddenly suicide appears to be a valid, if manifestly un-Christian, option.

Getting back to the unfortunate Mr Goldscheider, I’m in two minds about his case. On the one hand, a man who chooses as his career playing in a 90-piece orchestra every night and twice on Sundays should know the risks.

Daily exposure to high noise levels can damage one’s hearing, even though I’m sure the proportion of victims among classical musicians is nowhere near as high as that cited by Help Musicians. But, to paraphrase the old saw, if you don’t like the noise, get out of the orchestra.

On the other hand, I hope Mr Goldscheider named the Wagner estate as the co-respondent in the lawsuit – and that he blamed the ROH not only for playing Wagner too loudly but for playing him at all. If so, he can count on me in his corner.

The urge to worship has to be natural to man, for otherwise it would be impossible to explain its constant presence everywhere throughout history.

However, if the need to worship remains immutable, the object of worship changes. For the first, say, 1,500 years after Constantine became the first baptised Roman emperor, Westerners worshipped Christ.

This was accepted as the absolute truth, and any kind of relativism was robustly, sometimes violently, discouraged. That worship was taken for granted, as was the dogma that channelled the natural urge into proper conduits.

Westerners believed, and the dogma taught them what it was exactly that they believed, and how their faith ought to be expressed and practised.

However, in the subsequent couple of centuries Christ was gradually marginalised until for most people his religion became a matter of antiquarian interest only.

Secular bliss arrived, and Westerners, en masse, no longer believed in anything divine. However, the urge to worship didn’t disappear – it was shifted to other, profane, areas.

Neither did the mechanism of worship disappear: old habits and all that. Profane and numerous as the new idols might have been, each was still raised to the absolute to sit at the top of the totem pole until dislodged by a successor or a competitor.

Though it was reasonably clear that the profane idols lacked absolute grandeur, human nature attached to them quasi-absolute dogmatic certainty.

Hence one can observe dogmatic Marxism, Freudianism, Darwinism and any number of other isms, each accepted as inviolable truth until debunked – or not even then.

Not all new idols were as objectionable as those I’ve mentioned. Some, such as economic libertarianism, are quite nice and heart-warming. And, unlike Christianity, the truth of free enterprise requires neither theology nor philosophy nor indeed an intermediary to grasp.

All it takes is a look around, which will show that, by and large, the greater the nation’s economic freedom, the greater and more widespread the nation’s prosperity. For example, Britain became a much wealthier country after her economy was liberalised following the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws.

So far so good. Marxists thought they saw the truth even though they couldn’t prove it; economic libertarians saw the truth and actually could prove it.

And because they could prove it, both intellectually and empirically, they, as people tend to do, elevated it to the level of dogma. That was a mistake.

For no quotidian practice deserves such elevation. Unlike Christianity, none of them can be absolute truth. They all don’t just permit but positively demand numerous relativities; each of them can be superseded by higher considerations.

This ought to be kept in mind when we look at the current debacle involving GKN, our great engineering and R&D firm going back to Napoleonic times. This mainstay of British ingenuity is under attack from the asset-stripping hedge fund Melrose.

Melrose has amassed about 25 per cent of GKN’s shares and now wishes to acquire the company, break it up into pieces, flog the saleable ones to the highest bidders, most of them foreign, and shut down the rest.

How many of GKN’s 58,000 employees will lose their jobs and pensions as a result is anyone’s guess. I’d say most, if the experience of other such takeovers is anything to go by. That’s obviously a problem; for many employees it’s a tragedy.

But the issue is even wider than that. For GKN isn’t just any old engineering company. It’s actively involved in the defence and aerospace industries, which makes it strategically vital to the country at large.

If Britain is to stand on her own two legs, as she will after the Brexit charade finally comes to an end and the country becomes independent again, then she has to be as strategically self-sufficient as our global world will allow.

For that reason, for example, I deplore the fact that the French concern EDF is our second-largest energy supplier. Energy is a crucial strategic reserve, and a country can never remain a great independent power if she depends on foreign powers for much of its supply.

France may be our ally now, but things may change a couple of years from now – as they did in 1940. France was our staunchest ally, and then it became part of our deadliest enemy. I’m not suggesting that the same situation can arise now, but it’s suicidal not to provide for all eventualities.

GKN is another strategic reserve, and it’s entirely possible that the long-term R&D projects for which the company is known may one day save Britain’s freedom.

The conclusion seems to be clear: the government must step in and prevent GKN from the asset strip show. Yet the government in general, and Business Secretary Greg Clark in particular, have so far done nothing.

The government is Tory and it has to pretend that it lives or dies by the dogma of free enterprise – much as it violates it with alacrity whenever the state stands to benefit. GKN’s management wishes to sell (to divide something like a quarter billion pounds among them), Melrose wishes to buy – the God of Economic Liberty is being served.

Except that it isn’t a real God, “than which nothing greater can be thought”. Higher deities exist, such as the country’s freedom that could be under threat should this obscene trade be allowed to go through.

I’m in general opposed to state interference in the economy – except when it’s absolutely necessary. It is now, and I hope Britain isn’t sacrificed at the altar of this relativist deity and its relentless dogma.

…and found it Cold. As in War.

In response to Putin’s use of military-grade nerve gas on British soil, 17 Western countries have joined us in expelling Russian diplomats. The US leads the way with 60 expulsions, and six other countries bring up the rear with one each.

But it’s the thought that counts, not the numbers. The important thing is that Vlad’s latest attempt to put Western allies asunder has failed. The message is unmistakable: the allies are aware of Russia’s threat and are prepared to join forces in repelling it – by effectively turning Russia into a pariah state.

“Why did Putin decide to poison Skripal?” asked a listener at the end of my talk at the Freedom Association conference the other day.

I replied that, in common with many modern aggressors, Putin doesn’t want to push all his chips to the middle of the table at once. “If you don’t know the crossing, don’t go into the river,” says a Russian proverb, and Vlad is acting in that spirit.

Parallels with Hitler have been drawn much too often, but only because they’re obvious. Hitler too proceeded with caution – partly because he was bluffing.

When Germany’s rearmament was still far from complete, the Nazis occupied the Rhineland and held their breath. They needn’t have bothered: the allies, who still enjoyed an overwhelming military superiority, did nothing about it.

The Führer heaved a sigh of relief and took the next step: the Anschluss of Austria occurred in March, 1938. Still nothing?

Fine, on to the next step then. In September the same year, Hitler forced the allies to betray Czechoslovakia at Munich, grabbed the Sudetenland and, in March, 1939, the rest of the country.

That made Chamberlain look silly with his piece of paper waving in the air and promises of peace in our time. His reputation has never quite recovered – this though John Major once singled Chamberlain out as the former PM he held in the highest esteem. (Fair enough: similarities between Munich and Maastricht are obvious.)

Thus emboldened, Hitler upped the ante and attacked Poland later that year. This is now known as the start of the Second World War, but it’s not how the attack was seen at the time – nor what Hitler wanted it to be.

His inference from the previous three years was logical, even if it turned out to be wrong. If Britain and France hadn’t responded to his previous acts of aggression, why not invade Poland next and see what happened? The odds were good.

That sense of security was proved false. Though the allies’ response wasn’t immediately decisive, it was clear: thus far, Adolf, but no further.

Putin too is trying incrementally stepped-up aggression, but that’s where the similarity ends. It’s not for nothing that I refer to his regime as ‘kleptofascist’: stealing Russia blind may be the desired end, while muscular behaviour at home and abroad may be only the means.

For, just as Lenin and Stalin drew their legitimacy from a promise of a future Shangri La as a justification for all the horrendous deprivation the Russians were suffering, Putin must also justify his hold on power in the face of strictly third world conditions of life in his fiefdom.

If the Bolsheviks waved the banners of global communist expansion, the kleptofascists seek self-justification in the promise of restoring Russia to her past grandeur – meaning, and this is a specifically Russian spin on the idea, that the world will again tremble with fear.

Mass domestic violence is in both cases a way of communicating the message to the people so that they’d understand. The amount of such didactic violence was, and is, strictly ad hoc: as much as it takes.

Stalin needed to kill millions because otherwise the Russians might not have put up with being hungry slaves, murdered by their master at will, for the sake of some mythical future bliss.

Putin can so far make do with merely tens of thousands of victims because his aims, both real and PR, are more modest. The real aim isn’t so much personal enrichment any longer (he’s already reputed to be the world’s richest man), but the continuing enrichment of the ruling elite that keeps him in power.

Having jumped on that merry-go-round, Putin can’t get off. He has no illusions: even Stalin lost his war against the apparat, and Putin is no Stalin.

It’s conceivable, and this is pure conjecture on my part, that he may be ready to retire and enjoy his billions. But he knows this option isn’t on the table: his rule is contingent on the good will of his cohort, and their good will is contingent on his staying in power to provide what the Russians call their ‘roof’ (protection, in the language of Anglophone gangsters).

That’s where the PR aim comes in. Once again, the Russians are fed the tall tale of a good tsar making their country feared and respected (in another Russian proverb, these words are fully synonymous), but this time they’re more prepared to accept it.

There are two reasons for that. First, even though Russia is still strictly a third world country in every respect other than her nuclear potential, at least the Russians aren’t being starved, imprisoned and massacred in their millions.

Second, the claim to being a global imperial power is covered with a patina of history. Russia first claimed to be the third Rome back in the sixteenth century, when it was merely Muscovy, not even the united colossus it was to become later.

Therefore the jingoistic promise is ultimately more effective than any purely ideological one – as even Stalin discovered in 1941. In the first months of the war the Russians refused to fight for communism. Instead 4.5 million soldiers meekly surrendered to the Nazis in the first five months. It’s only when Stalin hoisted the banner of Holy Russian patriotism that the heroic resistance began.

Putin and his propagandists are using the same legitimising factor, if more subtly. They’ve started small, and their show of force is less, shall we say, showy. But it is on the road, and it is getting bigger step by step.

The acts include the murder of opposition politicians and journalists, the suppression of free media and any sensible legality at home – and aggression abroad. Hence the criminal attacks first on Chechnya, then on Georgia, then on the Ukraine.

And hence also a string of murders on Western soil, with the Scripals and Glushkov being the latest victims.

Russian diplomats led by foreign minister Lavrov have dropped many broad hints at being able to unleash or curb terror as they see fit. Thus, after the Boston Marathon bombing by two Russian-trained Chechen terrorists, American officials were told in no uncertain terms: “See what happens when you cross Russia?”

The Russians got away with that, as they did with their subsequent acts of brazen defiance of international law. Until now.

The message sent by the current wave of expulsions is that you’ve pushed far enough, Vlad. Thus far, but no further. By all means, flex your muscles at home if that’s what it takes for you to continue to purloin Russia’s resources on an unprecedented scale. But keep away from us and our allies.

The next step, and it should have been taken already, could well be the impounding of the criminally derived Russian assets in the West, all two trillion of them – and there goes Putin’s hold on power.

Let’s hope this is exactly what the message is, and that Vlad has got it. Those waters he’s dipping in may well be shark-infested.