Category: Blog

Fancy a nice, cuddly Tory MP? Or a bloodhound ready to chase your detractors to the ends of the earth? A whole pack perhaps?

Come to the Tory Kennel in Westminster – we won’t let you down.

We have plenty to choose from: front bench, back bench, dogs, bitches, black, brown, white, all ages from puppy to pre-taxidermy, all looks from well fit (bitches) to shaggy (dogs) – you name it.

Lately we’ve had a large intake of particularly good-looking bitches, all perfectly groomed, able to walk on hind legs and… Well, what more do you need?

Every one of our MPs, dog or bitch, is paper-trained and also taught to obey simple commands: sit, stand, vote, bark, play dead and so forth.

Each has many previous owners and a pedigree of unwavering, if short-term, loyalty to every one.

Looking for a plump, juicy defence contract with bells on? Just shout ‘fetch’, and your new MP will deliver it to your doorstep in his mouth.

Want to hide billions in dubious cash somewhere in the City? Just toss the bone to your best friend and he’ll bury it for you, having first gnawed on it a little.

Need a guide dog to lead you to your local laundromat? We have the right bitch.

Or you may just fancy paying £160,000 for the privilege of playing a game of fuzzy yellow balls with our top dog – whatever your heart desires.

Prices are negotiable, varying from a large one-time donation to a lease-to-purchase plan involving smaller monthly contributions.

We also accept payment in kind, such as a Mediterranean cruise on a 300-foot yacht, the use of a castle in France, Italy or Spain, free flights on private jets. 

Our kennel has satisfied customers all over the world, from China to Saudi Arabia, from Columbia to Russia (references available upon request).

It’s our Russian customers, all hailing from the picturesque town of Putingrad, who have been particularly satisfied with our goods and services. That’s why they come back for repeat business time and again.

And, are you ready for this?

We’ve helped our loyal Putingrad clients to save themselves a lot of roubles by offering not single MPs retail but large portions of the whole kennel wholesale.

In addition to having first pick of the MPs they require, our wholesale customers join the ranks of Friends of the Tory Kennel. This entitles them to a prominent seat at our annual sales conference, where they can meet all our MPs and choose those who can best serve their needs.

Depending on the services you require, and the trouble with the law from which you wish to be protected, the down payment may vary from £90,000 to £400,000.

But you wouldn’t be paying this money – you’d be investing it in the kind of protection only our MPs can provide.

The initial outlay may look rather large, but not when you divide it by 305, the number of MP dogs and bitches we have on offer.

There are also tax advantages, for we can classify your investment as a charitable donation, or else as an operating expense. One way or the other, you save.

Suddenly, rather than having just one or two MPs to serve you, you have the whole kennel at your disposal, starting with our top dogs (and bitches) on the front benches.

But don’t take our word for it: hear what our happy customers from Putingrad have to say about our MPs and the services they provide.

Dmitri ‘the Hammer’, Putingrad banker:

“When I decided to move from Putingrad to Londongrad, I needed someone to guard my money from the pol…, well, I mean from those who wanted to get their teeth into it.

“And you know what? For a mere £450,000 in pocket change I became a Friend of the Tory Kennel. Now my money is secure, whatever is left of it after my boss in Putingrad gets his cut.”

Alexei ‘the Garrotte’, aluminium producer, also from Putingrad:

“My enemies from back home were after me, and I needed round-the-clock protection. Then my associate Dmitri ‘the Hammer’ told me of the great experience he had had with the Tory Kennel, so I decided to give it a go.

“At first I bought just a few MPs, at £10,000 each, and they did a good job. But then Dmitri told me not to be a putz. ‘Only a schmuck pays retail,’ he said, and it made sense to me.

“So for ‘a few bob more’, as my English mates put it, I got a great deal. I became a Friend of the Tory Kennel for just £100,000, the price of 10 MPs. For that I got the services of all 305 of them, and they’ll chase away any beast coming after me.”

Ivan ‘the Beast’, laudromat owner, formerly of Gorbachevka, then of Putingrad:

“I came to settle in Londongrad because my boss ‘Polonium’ wanted to ‘whack me in the shithouse’, as he put it. For just £65,000 I got a whole pack of guard MPs, and sure enough, they’re real sons of bitches, just as advertised. I feel safe now.”

Write to us for more testimonials – we have hundreds of them, even more than that other kennel from across the aisle.

So whether you need protection or just a playmate, become a Friend of the Tory Kennel. We’ll find just the right MPs to serve your needs.

The Tory Kennel. No job too low, no donation too high, no paying customer turned away. We’re always at your beck and call, Mr Comrade.

 

Although Churchill in his later life couldn’t conceal his admiration for Stalin, he accurately described Lenin as a ‘plague bacillus’ transported by the Germans from Switzerland to Russia.

The bacillus caused an outbreak of a deadly disease that claimed more lives than any other pandemic in history.

Calculating the exact number of those devoured by the Bolsheviks over decades of tireless labour is difficult: the Russians have never been the most meticulous of record keepers, and those records the Bolsheviks did keep are still largely classified.

However, difficult doesn’t mean impossible, and in his books Lethal Politics and Death by Government Prof. Rummel used demographic analysis to come up with a plausible number of  62 million – way in excess of the 20 million Khrushchev acknowledged.

One way or another the physical damage caused by Bolshevik infestation is possible to calculate with various degrees of precision. What’s utterly incalculable is the metaphysical, moral damage.

Yet I submit, while praying for the millions of innocent people slaughtered by the ghastliest regime in history, that the moral damage it caused is even greater and longer-lasting.

Years of brutal, murderous slavery corrupts slaves and masters alike. The two groups intermingle, and after a few decades their members become largely indistinguishable. The slaves often think, occasionally act, like their masters, and the masters are themselves slaves in their mentality, morality and tastes.

The mark of Cain isn’t indelible, and the same book that tells us the story also shows ways in which the ugly imprint can be expunged. Yet, though a person can do so quickly, a society can’t.

The disease that infected it in the first place may go into remission for a while, but then it’ll always flare up – and it’ll remain for ever contagious.

In its acute phase, the bacillus of Leninism reinfected the West whence it had come. And it wasn’t just thousands of ‘useful idiots’ who were the carriers of the contagion. Russia in her Bolshevik phase vastly expanded the boundaries of the possible and trampled over the old taboos, which affected not just witting individuals but also unwitting societies.

By elevating institutional amorality to a level of secular religion, Bolshevism claimed millions of post-Christian Western victims, now bereft of the only source of collective morality possible in the West.

Those at the epicentre of the pandemic, the Russians, suffered immeasurably more than anyone else. But Westerners reinfected with the bacillus suffered too – and they continue to do so.

Russia is undergoing a new massive outbreak of the plague, with the bacillus of Leninism having returned in a modified version called Putinism. But those at the periphery of the pandemic, Westerners, aren’t free of the disease either.

The West is smiling smugly at the ego-stroking thought of being safe from a direct physical attack by Putin’s kleptofascist state. This sense of security may or may not be false, and I’ll leave it to the experts to weigh our military capabilities against Russia’s.

But the West has neither any natural immunity nor any effective vaccine against the bacilli of moral corruption emanating from Putin’s Russia.

These are carried and spread by Russian ‘oligarchs’ who don’t just gobble up properties in London’s better boroughs. These messengers of Putin  are buying up, both retail and wholesale, Western politicians and their parties, journalists (along with their papers), businessmen, present and former heads of states and even members of our royal family.

Every purloined banknote passed on by the gangster ‘oligarchs’ (and all their banknotes are purloined) is crawling with the germs of moral plague. These infect the recipients as surely as the real physical bacilli would.

An article in today’s Mail doesn’t tell me anything I don’t know or haven’t written about. But it catalogues nicely the British VIPs who have fallen victim to the germs that have rubbed off on them from dirty Russian money.

The contagion doesn’t discriminate along party or class lines. It affects with equally lethal power prominent Tories like Douglas Hurd and Lord Powell, Labour grandees like Lord Mandelson and Lord Myners, independent leftie Lord Owen, Lord Ponsbie, George ‘I’ve-never-seen-a-disgusting-cause-I-couldn’t-love’ Galloway, Lord Truscott – and it even reaches our royal palaces, infecting their past and present inhabitants, like Sir Michael Peat, until recently Prince Charles’s Private Secretary, and Prince Michael of Kent, who has been taking Russia’s rouble since the time Putin was a student at the KGB academy.

It’s not just about the individuals though. The disease pervades the whole society, for we all sully our hands with filthy Russian lucre, even if it’s not passed into our proffered palms directly.

The City of London, which produces almost a quarter of our GDP, receives and launders billions in infected cash, as does the booming property sector of London and the Home Counties. Our pension funds are awash with dirty money, and there’s enough sewage left over to float our football clubs, newspapers and chains of bookstores.

With money comes political influence. Since Putin’s kleptofascism veils itself in the mantle of democracy, however threadbare, even the Tory party doesn’t flinch when accepting millions in plague-infested cash.

By taking money from Russian disease carriers, our tennis-loving politicians Dave and Boris are spreading the disease as surely as does Germany’s ex-chancellor Schröder who’s paid millions by the Russians, France’s president Hollande who’s selling Mistral helicopter carriers to the Russian fleet based in the annexed Crimea – as surely as all those European governments who won’t do anything to stop Putin’s aggression because they want Putin’s gas.

They are all doing an Esau and a Faust simultaneously, by selling both the West’s birthright and its soul to the highest bidder, in this instance Russia.

Money doesn’t just talk, ladies and gentlemen. When crawling with plague bacilli, it also infects.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shattered shop fronts in Jewish neighbourhoods. Shards of glass crunching underfoot. Jews attacked in the streets. Synagogues and Jewish cemeteries vandalised. Marauding crowds screaming “Kill Jews!” and “Slit Jews’ throats!”, with police looking on.

This isn’t Kristallnacht in Germany, 1938.

This is Paris, London, Rome and Berlin today. Seventy years after six million Jews were murdered by the Germans, with the acquiescence and avid participation of most countries under German control.

Some new shouted chants provide the accompaniment to the riots. For example, Germans didn’t shout “Hitler was right!” and “Gas the Jews!” in 1938.

The former was impossible for grammatical reasons: as Hitler was still in power, the past tense would have represented a solecism. The latter would have been implausibly prescient: the Nazis hadn’t yet discovered the delights of Zyklon B.

The firm that produced it was also the first to synthesise aspirin, but during the war most of its profits came from satisfying the needs of Germany’s growth industry. That, however, isn’t mentioned much these days, while the aspirin sideline is touted as yet another vindication of progress-happy post-Enlightenment modernity.

Since true progress must be built on past achievements, it’s good to see that the European crowds are acknowledging their debt to their Nazi predecessors. The reference to gas is particularly popular in Berlin, proving that the spirit of pan-European unification hasn’t yet diminished the nation’s pride in her days of glory.

These outbursts are supposed to have been provoked by Israel’s self-defensive counterattack against Palestinian terrorists.

Personally, I find it hard to think of a recent military action anywhere in the world that’s more richly justified. There are only so many rockets fired into her territory, so many of her citizens murdered or kidnapped that any nation can tolerate.

Yet I realise that some may assess the Israeli-Palestinian conflict differently. I’m also man enough to admit that I don’t react to the murder of an Englishman and, say, a Columbian with the same dispassionate objectivity. The latter upsets; the former enrages.

Likewise, the Arabs and other Muslims who make up the majority of European rioters probably feel more upset about a few hundred Palestinians killed by the Israelis than about the thousands of rockets raining on Israel from Gaza every year.

Hence one can understand a peaceful demonstration outside the Israeli embassy, with people holding up placards saying things like “Hands off Gaza”. The romantic in me would still yearn for a few strategically placed machineguns, but the realist would acknowledge that such protests are both legal and excusable.

But to use Israel’s actions, no matter how objectionable one finds them, as a pretext for attacking European Jews is neither legal nor excusable. It’s monstrous and, which is worse, illogical.

When some African tribes murder hundreds of thousands from other tribes, as they do from time to time in places like Rwanda or Burundi, one doesn’t see many demonstrations in Europe under the slogan of “Kill blacks!”

An understanding exists, as in civilised countries it should, that Europeans who have ethnic or religious links with foreign governments aren’t to blame for such governments’ actions, no matter how much one dislikes them.

Such moderation, however, doesn’t extend to Jews, all of whom are held collectively responsible for any Israeli action that can be construed as a pretext for rioting.

This means that the savage crowds screaming “Kill Jews!” don’t do so to express a geopolitical preference for Hamas over Israel. They do it because they hate Jews.

This means that European anti-Semitism is leaving its latent phase for an acute one. For it’s not just the Muslim screamers and bottle-throwers who are at fault.

The riots would be instantly and, if need be, violently quashed should the non-Muslim populace close ranks against the anti-Semitic brutes. Alas, one observes exactly the opposite.

A recent study shows that 37 per cent of the French, 25 per cent of the Italians and almost 30 per cent of the Germans are openly anti-Semitic. Add to them those who are reticent about expressing the anti-Semitism they feel, and one can understand why riot police forces in Europe, such as the normally uninhibited French CRS, are being so polite to the rioters.

A few days ago I commented on Europe’s blatantly biased press coverage of the current conflict. Yet my friend Tony, who reads French (and any other) papers more regularly than I do, objected that Le Figaro tends to be fair on such matters.

Yet here I am, reading a Figaro article written by the award-winning journalist Natacha Polony, who this once has stepped outside her speciality area of education.

Sure enough, in the first couple of paragraphs she deplores the anti-Semitic riots in Paris, especially their slogan “Mort aux Juifs!” However, two column inches down comes the good stuff:

“Of course, Israel’s policy of colonialism and militarisation is unsupportable and suicidal…

“Of course one would like to see the international community taking a firmer stand on banning the iniquitous wall that cuts off Palestinian villages with no regard for the borders established by the UN…

“Of course one would like to hear more Jewish voices denouncing Israel’s policy…

“Of course one hopes that any criticism of the State of Israel… would not be taken as a sign of anti-Semitism…”

Mlle Polony is hereby using the rhetorical device of anaphora (the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of every clause) to shatter Tony’s claim that Le Figaro covers the conflict with unbiased detachment.

Well, I can do anaphora too:

What she calls ‘colonialism and militarisation” are the Israelis’ desperate attempts to save themselves from annihilation, to which all her neighbours are firmly and vociferously committed.

What she calls “the iniquitous wall that cuts off Palestinian villages” is Israel’s attempt to stem the flow of terrorists across her borders.

What she calls a dearth of “Jewish voices denouncing Israel’s policy” is a fiction that can only be believed by those who never open leftie papers, which are alive with such voices.

What she calls “any criticism of the State of Israel… [being] taken as a sign of anti-Semitism” is simply the failure of every attempt to find a different explanation for the shamefully pro-Palestinian bias in most newspaper articles.

Such as her own.

 

 

 

Foreign agents murdered a British subject on British soil in 2006. The murder weapon wasn’t a gun, a garrotte or a knife. It wasn’t even any traditional poison.

Alexander Litvinenko, the KGB defector naturalised in the UK, was murdered with a radioactive substance called polonium-200.

That, and the widely assumed fact that Litvinenko was working for MI6 at the time, added some piquancy to the crime. The case became big news, for the usual five minutes.

The victim’s widow was insisting that a public inquiry be held: the murder had been clearly committed by two FSB spies who had spiked Litivinenko’s tea with the esoteric isotope.

The man who probably did the actual spiking, Andrei Lugovoi, fled back to Russia. When the British police tried to summon him for questioning, Putin’s government flatly turned down the polite request for extradition.

Just to be on the safe side, Lugovoi was hastily elected to the Duma, thereby gaining parliamentary immunity. This confounded the slanderous vipers who maintain that the Russian parliament is good for nothing. It’s actually extremely good for the criminal underworld, whose many stars use it in lieu of forged identity papers and false moustaches.

After the half-hearted attempt to get Lugovoi back, the case was passed on to a coroner. Last year Home Secretary Theresa May agreed that a public inquiry would be par for the course in such a case, but she ruled it out for fear of hurting ‘international relations’ and upsetting ‘our foreign partners’.

Presumably, she wasn’t referring to Brazil or Hong Kong. Contextually it was clear that the hypersensitive ‘foreign partner’ Mrs May had in mind was Putin.

God forbid we should offend the good colonel. Yes, no such action could have gone ahead without his approval, and ordering an act of nuclear terrorism in London was a bit naughty. But there was only one victim involved, not the thousands Putin could have killed just as easily by using more of the same chemical.

He didn’t though, which speaks highly for his restraint. So by all means do let’s go through the motions of some sort of investigation. An obscure coroner working sub rosa is the right man for such symbolic gestures, provided he doesn’t come up with the wrong, which is to say correct, answer: that the real murderer was Putin, the chap from whom Angie buys all that cheap gas.

That was pretty good going for a country that prides herself on her legal system. On past record, the pride is eminently justified. On that performance, there wasn’t anything to be proud of. Justice wasn’t served – it was mocked.

For, in a civilised country ruled by law,  justice and the legal procedures serving it must not be held hostage to political expedience. In a country like Britain, which gave the world the example of an uniquely just constitution, such an outrage is borderline criminal. When the political expedience is grossly misconstrued, it’s stupid as well.

Fascist rulers like Putin understand only one kind of language: that of force. Give them an inch, such as de facto immunity for the murder of Litvinenko and, appropriately emboldened, they’ll grab a mile – or rather quite  a few miles of sovereign foreign territory.

Two years after the murder, Putin attacked Georgia and gobbled up a chunk of her territory, receiving nothing but an avuncular rebuke from the West. Another five years, and he attacked the Ukraine, for which he was punished with derisory sanctions.

Then his lads went a missile too far. They shot down an airliner full of what is regarded in the West as premium human material. Culling all those Georgians, Chechens or even Ukrainians is one thing, killing Dutchmen, Brits and Americans is something else again.

The former is the equivalent of a dog biting a woman: unpleasant but hardly big news. That’s what dogs do, isn’t it? The latter, however, is more like a woman biting a dog: enough news value to keep the papers going for a week at least.

When the papers get going, the government has to react, especially with a national election just round the corner. Its natural reaction would be to accept the boldfaced lies concocted by Putin and his henchmen, spread by Russian media and eagerly picked up by the BBC.

Alas, in this instance there’s too much hard and incontrovertible evidence. Flight MH-17 was destroyed by a Russian SAM, smuggled into eastern Ukraine by Russia and apparently fired by Russian military personnel.

The crime wasn’t committed by the Ukrainian government, the CIA, Nato or the Martian Air Force. It was committed by Russia or, considering that she is a dictatorship whose parliament’s sole function is to act as a safe house for murderers, by Putin personally.

Hence HMG has to sigh mournfully and admit that the political situation has changed. Dave in particular, what with the national election just round the corner, feels he must act or, to be more exact, be seen to act.

This means that temporarily Putin is no longer a ‘foreign partner’ whose delicate sensibilities have to be spared to make sure Angie gets her gas at an affordable price. The KGB colonel has become a really naughty boy whose wrists must be slapped – but not so hard that he may slap back.

Thus the crime of yesteryear, or rather eight yesteryears, will now be subject to a public inquiry. I find it hard to decide which constitutes the greater travesty of justice: the refusal to hold such an inquiry eight years ago or the decision to do so now.

What’s easier is to propose the next punitive steps to be taken to bring Putin in line or, barring that, to make Dave look like a decisive leader.

For example, British banks should decline to accept deposits in excess of one billion pounds from any Russian citizen (unless he asks nicely).

Mayfair casinos must refuse admission to any customer who doesn’t know that ‘blackjack’ is the English for ochko (unless said customer owns a Premiership football club or a mainstream British newspaper).

Russians residing in London must be told in no uncertain terms that no bid for Buckingham Palace, St James Palace, Kensington Palace and Marlborough House would even be considered (unless it’s way in excess of the market value).

These would be sufficient to be going on with and, if they don’t do the trick, I have many other ideas in store.

Sooner or later Putin will cotton on that he can’t just attack sovereign European countries whenever the spirit moves him (unless he really wants to).

 

 

 

    

One wonders what, short of a Russian air attack on Western capitals, would make Putin’s Western admirers shut up.

Prime among them is Peter Hitchens, who has an almost homoerotic longing for a ‘strong leader’. In his younger years he venerated Trotsky; now it’s Putin’s turn.

Hitchens has been singing tuneless hymns celebrating the KGB colonel for several years now, and the volume of said performances is unaffected by any cannibalistic act perpetrated by his idol.

(I mentioned a few random examples the other day, absentmindedly leaving out many others, such as Putin’s unprovoked aggression against Georgia in 2008.)

Thus he absolves Putin’s clique of any guilt for the vicious attack on the Ukraine, of which the 298 victims of a SAM, fired by Putin’s troops or proxies, are the most widely publicised casualties.

The logic Hitchens applies to the whitewashing task is staggering in its inanity, and his piece in this week’s Mail on Sunday provides a perfect sample of it.

He starts with a manifestly false statement: “In any war, the aggressor is the one who makes the first move into neutral or disputed territory.”

This may have been true 300 years ago, and even there one could argue that this view of casus belli is simplistic. Applied to modern conditions, it’s simply spurious.

This logic dictates, to cite a current example, that the hundreds of rockets fired into Israel from Gaza don’t constitute an act of aggression, but Israel’s resultant self-defensive ground offensive into enemy territory does.

But let’s be kind and accept Hitchens’s schoolboyish definition of aggressor. Surely then it’s Putin’s Russia that’s guilty of aggression against the Ukraine?

Technicalities apart, it’s Putin’s troops (or proxies) that occupied the Crimea, a legitimate if relatively recent part of the Ukraine’s territory. Wasn’t that ‘the first move’?

And what about the subsequent move into the east of the country? Doesn’t it tally with Hitchens’s definition of aggression? Of course it does.

However, ideologues never let facts obscure their line of vision. Hence, while insisting on his definition of aggression, Hitchens claims that its perpetrators ought to be sought elsewhere:

“And that aggressor was the European Union, which rivals China as the world’s most expansionist power, swallowing countries the way performing seals swallow fish (16 gulped down since 1995).”

Now Hitchens dislikes the European Union, as do I and most intelligent people of my acquaintance. But it’s silly to blame this admittedly vile entity for all our ills, such as the storms we’ve been having for the last few days, my current ache of tennis elbow and Putin’s attack on a sovereign European state.

Expansionist the EU may be, but it’s a serpentine seducer, not a rapist. It doesn’t yet launch military offensives to draw countries into its orbit. It more or less bribes them with our money.

The countries, however, retain freedom of choice. They can either join or refuse to do so. Those stupid or desperate enough opt for the former, those sage and farsighted enough for the latter.

It’s sheer dishonesty to equate an invitation or even enticement to join the EU with military aggression. The first may have been hasty and irresponsible; the second is criminal.

By way of an analogy, imagine a girl living in a bad neighbourhood where it’s unsafe to walk after dark. Her friends living a few streets away invite her to a party, and the girl accepts even though she can only get to the party on foot.

She goes out and is raped. Who’s to blame for it? One could say it’s her own fault – she should have known better than to walk at night wearing a revealing party frock.

The people who invited her, without making sure she could get to their place safely, aren’t guiltless either. Nor are the police and the city council whose responsibility it is to make our streets free of crime. One could even use the standard defence of ‘it’s all society’s fault, gov’, a phrase our criminals seem to learn before they can say ‘Mum’.

But it takes moral idiocy of epic proportions not to see that the party most responsible for this vicious crime is the degenerate thug who raped the girl.

In this analogy, the Ukraine is the girl who should have been more cautious, the EU is the party host who issued the invitation but didn’t bother to escort the girl through the mean streets, Putin is the rapist – and Hitchens is the moral idiot who can’t tell the difference.

Moreover, he directly blames the Ukraine for the rape she has suffered. She herself provoked the crime by having got rid of Putin’s puppet installed to steer the Ukraine back into the Soviet Union Mark 2 Putin is putting together:

“It did so through violence and illegality, an armed mob and the overthrow of an elected president.” Hitchens’s moral compass is going haywire because it’s too close to his magnet of ‘strong leader’.

Ukrainians, whose parents and grandparents were deliberately starved to death in their millions by the very organisation Putin is currently spearheading, tried to break free of their de facto bonds of vassalage. Violent overthrow of the puppet Yanukovych government was the only way of doing so, what with Putin and his stooges being past masters at rigging elections.

It’s for this that Hitchens feels the Ukraine must be raped and her violator exculpated. How dare they rebel against the kind of ‘strong leader’ Russia is blessed with and we so lamentably lack in our own country?

Hitchens illustrates the point I make often: converts from communism are always suspect, especially if they saw the light in their mature years. If a grown-up man feels it’s justifiable to murder, torture and enslave millions for the sake of an abstract idea, he isn’t just mistaken. He’s fundamentally flawed.

Eventually he may change his views, or profess to have done so. But the basic flaw will remain, and sooner or later it’s reveal itself.

Col. Putin unwittingly agrees with me. When once described as ex-KGB, he objected: “There’s no such thing as ex-KGB. This is for life.” The same evidently goes for an ex-Trotskyist.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was all perfectly legal, in strict compliance with time-honoured legal principles.

A Sharia court in a Syrian province under jihadist control charged a young woman with adultery a few days ago.

The case was tried according to the due process of Islamic law, and the defendant was found guilty.

Since her crime carried a mandatory death sentence, she was taken out to the market square and publicly stoned to death. Justice was served.

Now I happen to have in front of me the transcript of a similar case tried in the same region some 2,000 years ago.

There too the prosecution appealed to the judge asking that a woman taken in adultery be sentenced to death by stoning. In those barbaric times, however, the judge’s response was different, which the transcript confirms:

“So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”

This closing argument carried the day: “And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one…”

The judge then pronounced his own verdict on the woman: “Go, and sin no more.”

These two legal precedents illustrate what any sane person would see as an unbridgeable gap between Muslim and Christian law.

If we accept that the gap is self-evidently unbridgeable, and also the equally indisputable fact that English common law is predominantly based on Christian antecedents, then the aforementioned sane person would have to conclude that Sharia law has no place in our country.

Yet here I am, looking at a Telegraph article written by a French Muslim Myriam François-Cerrah, a journalist doing something or other at Oxford University.

Miss François-Cerrah laments that there are merely 85 Sharia courts acting in Britain, a number she finds woefully inadequate. There “could be more”, she suggests, though demurring at suggesting the exact desirable number, or by which order of magnitude the present number should be increased.

To be fair, she doesn’t quite argue that Sharia should replace English common law altogether. All this reasonable woman wants is for Islamic law to be incorporated into the law of the land.

She then proceeds to explain the history and nature of Sharia in terms that would make a reasonably bright 10-year-old feel he’s being talked down to. According to her, Sharia law is nothing but a sort of marriage counselling service for women seeking divorce.

She cites one such woman saying that her husband “would never have listened to a relationship counsellor. But a shaykh, an older man with Islamic knowledge, that he respects”.

Now if the shaykh has not only Islamic knowledge but also Islamic faith, he must feel in his heart that it’s advisable for a man to have four wives. However, if one of them is unhappy about receiving only a quarter of his attentions and consequently takes a lover, she must be stoned to death.

Is this the nature of marriage counselling he offers? After all, adultery is by far the most common grounds for divorce.

At an unkind moment, one could feel that our ancient law may conceivably have problems with a situation wherein a man legally gets his rocks off with four wives, while a woman must be stoned to death for having enjoyed a single lover.

Miss François-Cerrah acknowledges that a certain unbalance exists, although she chooses to refer to rather more modern legislation: “There is undoubtedly real discrimination – some readings of Sharia promote principles which run counter to UK equality legislation.”

Quite. However, at the risk of being accused of bigotry, racial and religious discrimination, little-Englandism, political incorrectness and other capital sins, I may go a bit further than that.

Not ‘some readings’ of Sharia but Sharia tout court ‘runs contrary’ not only to ‘UK equality legislation’ but to common decency, as traditionally understood in the West generally and England specifically.

This is a law that says, among many other such things, that an apostate to Islam must be given one chance to return to the fold. If he turns it down, he must be killed.

The same goes for a kafir (infidel) who has never been a Muslim to begin with. He too must be offered one chance to convert, and failure to do so is again punishable by death.

One suspects that Miss François-Cerrah wouldn’t advocate these aspects of her beloved jurisprudence to be incorporated into English common law, though some pronouncements by the Archdruid Williams suggest that he might.

According to her, Sharia all boils down to a sort of counselling service with a religious dimension. What’s wrong with a pious woman seeking advice from an elder qualified to give it?

Nothing at all, I dare say. Some people whose marriage is on the rocks talk to a shrink. Some bore their friends, asking for advice they never intend to follow. Others buy drinks for strangers and barmen, demanding a sympathetic ear in return. Still others will listen to their priests, rabbis, imams or gurus, while really desperate (and tasteless) individuals may even attend group therapy.

Whatever makes them happy, I’d suggest, but with one important proviso. None of such sessions has – nor should ever be allowed to have – legal power. This in any civilised land can belong only to a duly instituted court of law translating into action the country’s constitutional principles.

Our constitutional principles are rooted in Christianity, which, as I tried to show earlier, is under no circumstances compatible with Islam. Muslims themselves agree with this uncompromising position, which is why they persecute and kill Christians all over the Islamic world.

Considering the source, I’m not unduly bothered by Miss François-Cerrah’s affection for Sharia – she’s a Muslim, so it’s par for the course. I also share her concern for the plight of Muslim women, who even in Britain are routinely treated like dirt in full compliance with Islam.

But it saddens me to see that she fails to understand something that ought to be taught in any elementary school: in Britain, any legal restitution for such mistreatment must be sought in British courts, whose understanding of the law goes back to the Middle East, circa first century AD.

I’m upset even more that a formerly reputable paper would see fit to publish such ignorant, childishly argued gibberish, thereby conferring on it some implicit respectability.

It won’t take many such rants for us to wish that freedom of the press be replaced with freedom from the press.

The answer is, none. Or, to be more exact, none that was reported.

One can begin to understand the reluctance to acknowledge industrial, especially nuclear, accidents.

After all, as is universally known, Soviet science and technology were by far the most advanced in the world.

Hence any reports of disasters could only have been concocted by the capitalist scum plotting to besmirch the reputation of the mother of all progress.

This goes ten-fold for any mishaps in the area of weapon production. Soviet nuclear weapons and means of their delivery were as safe for the Soviet Union as they were deadly for its enemies.

Anyone spreading rumours to the contrary had to be a hireling of world capitalism. Consequently he had to be imprisoned if inside Russia, or ignored if outside. If facts are a stubborn thing, said Comrade Stalin, so much the worse for facts.

Alas, facts persisted both in their stubbornness and their frequency. Thus the Mayak nuclear-bomb factory near Cheliabinsk had 34 accidents between 1953 and 2008. The worst of them, in 1957, released 100 tonnes of high-level radioactive waste, contaminating an area the size of Western Europe.

None of the disasters was officially reported. All were emphatically denied when ‘vicious and unfounded’ rumours began to circulate.

Note, however, that the Mayak accidents began on Stalin’s watch and continued well into Putin’s, with the same veracity of reporting throughout. This proves the point I often make: post-perestroika Russia is but a continuation of the Soviet Union by other means.

Who is in charge at any particular point makes no difference whatsoever. Thus Mikhail Gorbachev, universally elevated to secular sainthood for replacing a communist state with a kleptofascist one, lied with customary Soviet ease about the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

Had the westward winds not made Geiger counters go haywire in Scandinavia and Scotland, the catastrophe would have been hushed up like so many others.

Such, for example, as the one in 1960, when a Soviet ICBM R-16 exploded at Baikonur test range, killing many high-ranking officers, including Marshal Nedelin, commander of the Soviet strategic rocket forces.

Official announcement? I remember it well: Marshal Nedelin died ‘a sudden and unexpected death’. Sudden yes, but hardly unexpected considering the Soviet safety record. 

As I suggested, though one can’t condone such industrial-scale lying, one can understand it. No socialist projects, be it at their mildest (e.g. the NHS) or most extreme (e.g. the USSR), are about reality.

They are all about make-believe, hot air enveloped in a tissue of lies. A word of truth would pierce the bubble, exploding the whole shebang.

But the beauty of Soviet lies was that they went way beyond what’s to be normally expected from any old socialism. Specifically, they extended not only to man-made disasters but also to acts of God (who, as any good socialist knows, doesn’t exist).

God, who everyone knew didn’t exist, had to keep smiling at the USSR.

Thus Soviet citizens were spared the information of the 1948 earthquake in Turkmenistan. Registering 7.3 on the Richter scale, it levelled the city of Ashgabat and its environs, killing 176,000 people.

The same goes for the calamitous 1966 Tashkent earthquake, the peat fires around Moscow at the same time, when black smoke descended on the city killing thousands of asthmatics, and countless other calamities.

Soviet leaders, from Lenin to Putin, didn’t just practise deceit, the hushing up of truth. They’ve always told active lies with a fluency putting to shame even our own experts Tony Blair and Dave Cameron.

Thus Soviets tanks rolled into Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968 only to pre-empt an impending aggression by Nato forces, that is a capitalist USA and an unreconstructed Nazi West Germany.

The Soviet Union never installed missiles in Cuba, all its dissidents were in the employ of the CIA, no Soviet citizens ever wished to emigrate, only American millionaires could ever afford medical care, Western unemployed starved to death in their thousands, lynching was the favourite pastime in the American South…

Now that the organisation directly responsible for cooking up and spreading such lies is in charge, one shouldn’t be unduly surprised at the cynical ease with which KGB Col. Putin is lying about the horrific murder of 298 innocent people in the skies over eastern Ukraine.

Russia’s mainstream media, wholly controlled by Putin’s gang, are laying the blame on the ‘Nazis’, ‘fascists’ and ‘Banderites’, the only terms used to describe the independent Ukraine and her legitimate government.

One is amazed that the Banderites aren’t also taking the rap for shooting down the Korean airliner in 1983 or, come to that, all those disasters I mentioned earlier, including the Ashgabat earthquake.

The radio intercepts published two days ago leave no room for doubt: Flight MH17 was shot down by a BUK-M missile launched from the territory controlled by the bandits Putin is using as his proxies.

Moreover, the intercepts published this morning prove that the BUK-M system was operated not by a ‘separatist’ crew but by a Russian one. In a conversation with GRU colonel Petrovsky, the ‘separatist’ commander on the ground reports the safe arrival  from Russia of the BUK-M launcher complete with its crew.

Later the same commander first rejoices at shooting down the plane, then swears when he found out which plane he hit. (All parties to the exchanges swear after every other word, as most Russians do.)

Two members of the BUK-M crew, both spotters, were later arrested at the Ukrainian border, trying to get away from the murder site. They were carrying Russian passports and papers identifying them as soldiers in the Russian armed forces. The spotters have been charged with terrorism, a charge that can be justifiably levelled at Putin and his whole gang.

That the crew shot down the airliner by mistake, having incompetently taken it for an Antonov transport plane, is irrelevant. At best, it’s a mitigating, not exculpating circumstance.

Actually, considering the safety record of Antonov aircraft, it’s surprising the Russians would bother to fire on it in the first place. All they had to do was wait until it gained altitude and then come down of its own accord – naturally to a thunderous silence in the Russian press.

 

 

I hope Peter Hitchens and other Western admirers of Russia’s ‘strong leader’ ‘committed to upholding conservative values’ are happy now.

Before they rejoice though, they ought to scrub themselves clean of innocent blood spattering all over them.

For, but for the West’s criminally craven and feebleminded response to Putin’s aggression against the Ukraine, the 298 victims, a third of them children, would still be alive.

It’s the West I hold responsible, for blaming Putin is like blaming bloodhounds for chasing rabbits. That’s what they do. That’s what they are.

The evil leader of an evil state will commit evil acts, that’s the inviolable rule. The scale of such acts doesn’t depend on how evil he is: evil is absolute and unquantifiable.

The enormity of an evil leader’s behaviour depends on two variables only: what he feels he needs at the moment and what he thinks he can get away with.

In 1999 Putin felt he needed a second Chechen war to solidify the KGB hold (and specifically his own) on Russia. The ledger sheet shows 250,000 murdered Chechens, Russians and whomever else was in the vicinity.

Then he needed to extinguish the inchoate liberties the Russians had enjoyed for a few years. He needed to turn the country into the kleptofascist monstrosity, the greatest-ever gangster syndicate so beloved of Peter Hitchens and other Useful Idiots Mark 2.

To that end he stamped out the free press, having dozens of recalcitrant journalists murdered without even a Stalinist travesty of trial.

The ledger sheet is short compared to Putin’s quarter-million victims in Chechnya, but he didn’t need anything bigger to achieve his aim. Doesn’t matter whether it’s millions or dozens. Whatever it takes.

When in 2006 the KGB defector Litvinenko threatened to publish compromising documents, he was murdered in the middle of London. Just one man, but on that particular day Putin didn’t need to murder anyone else.

The West’s response to those, and many other, atrocities was that of avuncular bemusement.

Regrets were expressed that the birth pains of Russian democracy were lasting longer than ideally expected. Sympathy for the victims was felt. Confident hopes for the speedy advent of Russia’s liberal future were expressed.

Otherwise it was business as usual.

The criminal regime was allowed to build up its military and financial muscle by flooding Europe with its oil and gas. Russian thugs, acting as Putin’s proxies, were allowed to turn Western capitals into laundromats for purloined wealth. Putin’s poodles were buying up Western estates, newspapers and football clubs – no one minded. Blood may smell, but money doesn’t.

It doesn’t take much for a murderous ghoul to develop a sense of impunity. Just like his Soviet predecessors justifying their monstrosity by appealing to the wicked myth of communism, Putin ran up on his mast the flag of a holy Russian empire and blew the bugle of conquest.

He needed the Ukraine because no Russian empire can ever be truly imperial without it. And he knew he could get away with boldfaced aggression – hadn’t the West allowed him to get away with everything else, including nuclear terrorism on its territory?

Hence the rapid annexation of the Crimea by Putin’s storm troopers armed, trained and led by Russian officers courtesy of the KGB/FSB and GRU good offices.

Hence also the subsequent attempt to gobble much of the Ukraine’s territory, specifically the part containing most of the country’s industry and natural resources.

The West’s response to this warmongering in the heart of Europe? Typically resolute. A dozen or so of Putin’s poodles were barred for a while from befouling Zurich banks and Côte d’Azur beaches.

The Western press has happily ceded the lexical ground to the kleptofascist monster. Russian paramilitaries led by Russian officers and wholly reliant on Russian arms, training, communications and logistics are being described as ‘separatists’ and ‘rebels’, half a step short of ‘freedom fighters’.

Like Dutch papers referring to the Muslims’ recent anti-Semitic riot in Paris as ‘friction between two groups’, such misleading terminology implies a certain parity, not to say barely veiled sympathy for the aggressor.

The BUK SAM launcher (‘Grizzly’ in Nato nomenclature) used to shoot down Flight MH17 is as Russian as the Sukhoi fighter-bomber that shot down Korean Flight 007 in 1983.

The troops that perpetrated this crime are neither ‘rebels’ nor ‘separatists’. They are the paramilitary extension of Russia’s armed forces. Their commander is Igor Girkin (aka Strelkov), the GRU colonel extensively trained by the KGB/FSB.

Apparently they mistook the Boeing 777 for a Ukrainian transport plane An-26. That’s a hard mistake to make, considering that the An-26 is half the size of the 777 and that the BUK radar is programmed to distinguish friend from foe.

But, considering that Putin’s proxies are hastily trained paramilitaries, it’s conceivable that they indeed misread the radar.

The communications intercepts certainly suggest this is what happened. At first, Girkin-Strelkov and his henchmen danced with joy, screaming “We downed a plane!” (naturally in Russian, not Ukrainian).

When they realised what kind of plane they had downed, their immediate reaction was expressed with a vile Russian expletive for which there’s no equivalent in English. Then Strelkov tweeted “We warned you – don’t fly in our sky”.

I don’t know whether they did or not issue such a warning, but in either case Malaysian Airlines displayed criminal negligence in choosing a flight path over a combat zone. They aren’t the only one: many reputable companies, including Air France, don’t mind overflying eastern Ukraine on the way to the Far East.

Giving it a wide berth would burn more fuel, eating into the airlines’ already slim profit margins. What’s risking a few lives compared to losing money? If, following Putin’s attempted anschluss, the West didn’t boycott Russia for fear of having to pay more for gas, why can’t Western airlines risk lives to save a few pennies on fuel?

All this is highly predictable. What took even me by surprise, and I harbour no illusions about Putin’s Russia, was the astonishing cynicism and stupidity of Putin’s response to the crime his lads had committed.

He didn’t bother to deny that the airliner had been shot down by his paramilitaries. However, according to the KGB colonel, it wasn’t their fault: “Certainly, the state over whose territory it happened is responsible for this terrible tragedy.”

Precisely. ‘It happened’ over Russian-held territory whose independence from the Ukraine has been proclaimed by the Russian paramilitaries.

And the Korean Flight 007 was shot down over Russian territory, yet Putin’s sponsoring organisation is still denying Russia’s culpability. Evidently the principle of geographic responsibility is highly selective. (In both instances, the Russians lied that the airliners were on a spying mission.)

“This tragedy would not have happened,” continued Putin, “if there was peace in the country, if military operations had not resumed in the south-east of Ukraine.”

In other words, it’s the fault of the country that has the gall to resist being occupied and annihilated by Putin’s proxies. How dare they? Most uncooperative, that.

‘This tragedy would not have happened’ if Putin’s Russia hadn’t committed an act of aggression against a sovereign state.

It would not have happened if Putin’s regime didn’t seek to perpetuate its power by appealing to the Russians’ well-documented delusions of grandeur springing from a richly justified sense of historical inferiority.

It would not have happened had the West understood the kleptofascist nature of Putin’s regime and stopped it in its tracks.

It would not have happened if the West still had the mind to tell good from evil and the moral strength to resist the latter.

And it would not have happened if the West had fewer useful idiots misreading Putin’s Russia as disastrously as they had earlier misread Lenin’s and Stalin’s.

Peter Hitchens and his ilk ought to be ashamed of themselves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sorry, I’ve misread the news item. Or else I’m displaying prophetic powers. Most likely, both.

His Grace’s valiant efforts to admit women anywhere they wish to go, including places they hadn’t wanted to go until his valiant efforts began, haven’t quite extended to men’s loos yet.

However, dusting my crystal ball off, I can just see the Archbishop in the near future, explaining his self-admittedly “somewhat controversial” campaign:

“We are all equal before God, brothers and sisters.

“In God’s eyes there is no difference between, say, a shifty oil trader and a saintly Anglican prelate, between a person who says ‘lavatory’ and one who says ‘toilet’, between a righteous and self-righteous liberal man, sorry, person and a revolting conservative sinner.

“And especially there is no difference between male and female persons, at least none that I have so far been able to discern even with God’s help. And yet throughout history female persons have suffered egregious discrimination.

“Even Christian churches are guilty of this outrage. They haven’t allowed female persons to become monks, friars, priests or – until now – Archbishops of Canterbury.

“As you know, I have reversed all those millennia of injustice by insisting that henceforth female persons will be consecrated as Anglican bishops. Thank God for this. Alleluia!

“Yet some injustices still persevere in the lay world. Some grave sinners still bar female persons from half of the world’s public toilets (as we must call those facilities in deference to our underprivileged brothers and sisters).

“The prominently displayed letters M and W, or their pictorial equivalents, are offensive symbols of injustice. They symbolise the oppression of female persons in the same way in which the swastika once symbolised the oppression of persons of the Jewish persuasion.

“Therefore I am declaring that henceforth I shall be boycotting all public toilets that insist on discriminating against female persons.

“And I shall bear any ensuing discomfort with the same fortitude and stoicism as that displayed by Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley and other Anglican martyrs. Like them, I am prepared to make sacrifices for my deep Christian convictions.”

Pushing the crystal ball aside and turning instead to the morning papers, I discover that, though not yet going quite as far as my fortune-telling appliance predicts, Archbishop Welby has made a significant step in that direction.

His Grace is withdrawing his membership from Travellers, one of Pall Mall’s most venerable gentlemen’s clubs. He’s taking this drastic measure in protest against members’ having voted against admitting women in any capacity other than guests.

This raises a number of interesting questions, such as why His Grace chose to join the club in the first place, all those years ago.

At that time the issue of female membership had neither been put to a vote nor even discussed. And yet Bishop Welby, as he then was, grudgingly agreed to rub shoulders with such outrageously anachronistic members as the Duke of Edinburgh.

This can only mean that the Archbishop, as he now is, has changed his views, just as one of his predecessors has rethought the issue of bumping off frail crumblies.

It’s good to see that our prelates refuse to sink into the morass of complacency signposted by calcified attitudes. Like all spiritual people, they develop, inching closer and closer to the ultimate truth, in this instance that the W is but the M tipped over.

I for one am looking forward to the time when Justin Welby delivers the speech I saw refracted through my crystal ball.

Meanwhile, we should ponder the issue of gentlemen’s clubs, which has long been exciting the flaming consciences of those who have little else with which to occupy their minds.

Mostly these are the same people who feel that the elderly should be culled when they become a burden to the NHS, that any combination of mammals should be allowed to marry and that a foetus isn’t a human being but something akin to a benign tumour.

A private club is just that, private. Hence its status is closer to a private residence than to a neighbourhood social.

Just as you and I haven’t yet been told whom we may or must not invite to our homes, no one has the right to tell members whom to admit to their club or not, as the case may be.

The only reasonable, legal or indeed sane way of protesting is not to join a club whose admission policy one finds objectionable.

For the government to enforce egalitarian measures at that level is fully tantamount to, say, prosecuting you for not having invited so-and-so to a dinner party.

An exclusive Muslim club is entirely within its rights to exclude Christians, a Christian club to exclude Muslims, or either of them to exclude Jews. The outcasts can then form their own clubs, admitting or not whomever they like. It’s no one’s business but their own.

Fair enough, His Grace hasn’t yet called for legislation banning gentlemen’s clubs – so far he has left that to others, whose take on such matters is the same as his own.

But his institutional position gives any such pronouncement a weight comparable, if not exactly equivalent, to a state diktat. The Archbishop is after all also a member of the House of Lords, and one who can lay a legitimate claim to a higher spiritual and moral authority than any other member’s.

Are you getting the impression that the good prelate is a professional wrecker infiltrated into the Church hierarchy for subversive purposes? If you are, banish that thought.

He is merely a quintessentially modern man, whose mind has been replaced with knee-jerk Pavlovian instincts and attitudes. Just the man the Church needs to give it a gentle push as it’s teetering at a precipice.

 

 

Angela Merkel got in bed with Putin. Because of it she was hit with a flash bomb.

Alas, I have to disappoint both those of you who like juicy gossip and also my Eurosceptic friends whose affection for Frau Merkel is rather subdued.

For neither statement is literal.

As far as I know, my friends Angie and Vlad haven’t consummated their otherwise intimate relationship in any carnal way. They got in bed figuratively, in the sense of pursuing a common policy.

In their recent meeting, immediately after Angie had finished French-kissing every member of the German World Cup team, they agreed to put pressure on the Ukraine. Specifically, they want to nudge her government towards opening negotiations with the ‘separatists’.

Actually, these chaps aren’t separatists at all. They’re Vlad’s storm troopers. Few of them are from the Ukraine, some have never been anywhere near the place before. All, however, are trained and equipped by the Russian army or, mostly, Putin’s colleagues in the KGB/FSB.

The equipment is fairly sophisticated, including SAMs, tanks, flame throwers, artillery, Grad multiple rocket launchers and of course a life’s supply of AKs.

The training includes standard infantry tactics, urban terrorism, communications, interrogation techniques.

Presumably, this academic curriculum doesn’t cover torture, rape and robbery, but Putin’s lads don’t need any tuition there. As numerous field tests have shown, they do famously in those disciplines. Their natural talents are sufficient to make them star pupils.

These paramilitary thugs aren’t pursuing any objectives of their own. They don’t want political autonomy, secession from the Ukraine or anything like it. They want just one thing: whatever Vlad wants.

Being a forthright chap, something rare in the ranks of the KGB, Vlad makes no secret of his desires. He wants to undo what he calls “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century”, the collapse of the Soviet Union.

One would have thought that the twentieth century saw worse catastrophes than the weakening of an empire that had enslaved half of Europe and all of its own people, murdering about 60 million of them. But Vlad is entitled to his own opinion.

The empire that Ronald Reagan once called evil would have remained evil even without the Ukraine, but it wouldn’t have been an empire. The Ukraine meant even more to the Soviet empire than India did to the British one.

Since the only way to undo the ‘catastrophe’ is to rebuild the empire, the Ukraine must be brought back into the fold. That’s what Vlad wants, and that’s why he has trained, armed and inspired the ‘separatists’.

They are his proxies, and he needs them because a straight blitzkrieg by the Russian army would make Vlad a pariah in the West, cutting his access to the billions he keeps in Western banks. That simply won’t do, not yet anyway.

No self-respecting government would negotiate with such ‘separatist’ scum. For example, the US administration wouldn’t have negotiated with al-Qaeda after the twin towers had gone down. This though Osama had no plans to occupy Washington DC the way Putin wants to occupy, or at least control, Kiev.

Under such circumstances to negotiate means to surrender, and this is what the Poroshenko government refuses to do. That’s where my friend Angie comes in, at Vlad’s request.

Germany is largely keeping the Ukraine afloat with loans that are unlikely ever to be repaid. Hence Angie feels that she’s paying the piper and is thus entitled to call the tune. This happens to be Vlad’s favourite song too.

The figurative bed partners are two jaws of the same vice, crushing the Ukraine between them. Since Ukrainians feel there’s nothing real they can do to resist the two giants, they resort to symbolic gestures.

Hence the ‘flash bomb’, which in this instance means a spam attack against the enemy Facebook page.

Every post on Angie’s page instantly draws thousands of messages from Ukrainians, all saying the same thing: “Danke, Frau Ribbentrop”.

At a guess, Angie probably resents being compared with Hitler’s Foreign Minister. She’d probably rather be compared with other Germanic figures, such as Charlemagne, Frederic the Great, Bismarck or, at a pinch, a Lorelei.

But Ukrainian flash bombers doubtless feel the comparison is justified. Ribbentrop, after all, co-signed with his Soviet counterpart Molotov the infamous Pact dividing Europe between the two predators, crushing the continent as if Germany and Russia were two jaws of the same vice.

I doubt the parallel is 100 per cent exact. Parallels seldom are. But, vindicating Lobachevsky, Ukrainians obviously feel that these parallel lines do intersect.

In any case, I’ve always been fascinated by the platonic intimacy between my friends Angie and Vlad. They speak each other’s language, using Christian names and familiar personal pronouns during their cosy chats.

I’ve also been known to speculate that this intimacy just may be of long standing. You see, Angie hasn’t always been a great champion of European democracy under Germany’s aegis.

In her East German youth, she held a nomenklatura position of agitprop chief in a regional committee of  Freie Deutsche Jugend, the youth organisation typologically similar to its predecessor that also had jugend in its name.

Just as Hitlerjugend had close links with the SS, the FDJ was the breeding ground of the Stasi. The two organisations always worked hand in glove, even though the FDJ nominally reported to the party.

Any holder of a nomenklatura position in the FDJ, such as young Angie, had to work in close contact with the secret police, which in turn was but an extension of the KGB.

At exactly the same time Vlad ran the KGB station at Dresden, just over 100 miles from where Angie did her thing. It’s pure conjecture, but they could well have known each other professionally then, especially since Angie was responsible for the purely KGB function of agitprop.

It’s also not beyond the realm of possibility that Vlad has some leverage over Angie, possibly over a few FDJ skeletons in her cupboard.

In any case, Angie and Vlad may go back a long way, and it’s no wonder that they are so close. Or at least they seem so close to Ukrainians, which is too close for their comfort.