Category: Blog

The Macrons are surrounded with all sorts of theories, some rather plausible, some less plausible – and my own.

In the good tradition of modernity, I’m going to put myself first and start with my own explanation of this unlikely yet enduring romance.

Brigitte’s maiden name, Trogneux, is renowned in and around Amiens, where her family owns a chain of patisseries. These are particularly celebrated for their delicious macaroons (macarons in French). Know what I’m driving at?

When Brigitte, a school teacher of 39, first clapped her eyes on her pupil Manny Macron, she couldn’t help being smitten: not only was the 14-year-old sweet enough to eat, but his surname sounded just like the foundation of the Trogneux family fortune.

Within a few months the couple were having an affair, the delay probably caused by the silly obstacle of the law. I suspect – and this is another theory – that Brigitte was waiting for Manny to reach the age of consent, which is 15 in France. Such respect for the law is exactly what one would expect from France’s future Première Dame.

If divergence in a single letter (between homoiousios and homoousios) has been known to start wars, I don’t see why a similar difference couldn’t have started a tryst. But I shan’t hold it against you if you dismiss my nominalist theory as preposterous.

Another theory was yesterday put forth, or rather hinted at, by Roberto Menia, a member of the Italian senate. He was aghast at Manny’s earlier suggestion that, push come to shove, NATO could put troops into the Ukraine.

“’Peace cannot be achieved even by hypothesising military interventions,” Menia said, “even by muscle flexing, by one who usually proves to be rather feminine, and you know who I’m talking about.” 

Yes, we know who. And we also know what he was talking about, as anyone does who has spent any time in France at all.

In some French circles, Manny’s predilections in matters amorous are treated as a fait accompli – and dismissed with the characteristic Gallic shrug. Following that trend, I’ll dismiss them with a characteristic Anglo-Russian shrug, and I even promise to shun words like ‘smoke’ and ‘fire’ when talking about the French president’s domestic bliss.

Yet another preposterous theory adds a piquant touch to this scabrous narrative. Some malevolent gossips (mauvaises langues) have been spreading a vicious – and unfounded! – rumour that Brigitte Macron is actually a trans, born Jean-Michel.

That theory began to circulate immediately after the happy couple emerged out of the political wilderness, and it refuses to die. The best way to ensure such a demise would be simply to ignore the gossip, but Brigitte made a strategic mistake by suing the hack who first made that claim. She won her case last year, to guarantee the permanent presence of words like ‘smoke’ and ‘fire’ (fumée et feu) in any conversation on the matter.

Enter the American conservative commentator Candace Owens who wrote that: “After looking into this, I would stake my entire professional reputation on the fact that Brigitte Macron is in fact a man.” That fact is in fact interesting, as is Miss Owens’s slipshod editing.

She then tugged on the anti-establishment strings of my heart by adding: “Any journalist or publication that is trying to dismiss this plausibility is immediately identifiable as establishment.”

What’s Brigitte, aka Jean-Michel, supposed to do? She can’t keep suing everyone who questions her sex, and in any case Miss Owens is securely separated from French courts by the Atlantic Ocean.

Being somewhat closer to France, I “dismiss the plausibility” out of hand, but not before peeking with one eye at Miss Owens’s arguments.

They are largely based on an early black-and-white photograph of the Trogneux family, featuring among other members of the clan little Brigitte and her elder brother. According to Miss Owens, the little girl was actually adopted, and her elder brother is actually Brigitte, née Jean-Michel.

Apparently, the Faits et documents investigation used Chinese software to update the photo and cite the facial similarity between the two siblings.

As far as Miss Owens is concerned, the comparison is a “dead ringer”, showing the same face. “It’s crazy to me,” she wrote, “that you would not say that these two individuals look alike.”

Much as I’d like to agree out of sheer mischief, I feel compelled to point out that, first, ‘look alike’ isn’t identical to ‘the same person’, and second, it’s not unusual for brother and sister to look alike. For example, Penelope looks very much like her brother, and yet I have it on good authority she is all woman.

Not being an expert in facial recognition software, I can’t offer my own assessment. However, another argument Miss Owens offers isn’t without merit.

According to her, Jean-Michel became Brigitte by ‘transitioning’ in his/her early thirties. Hence the easiest way of debunking the ugly rumours would be for her to crack her family album open and make public the photographs documenting her first three decades.

However, wrote Miss Owens: “The first obvious thing is the first lady is simply unable to produce any photos of herself throughout the first 30 years of her life.”

She then provided a superfluous illustration of her meaning by sharing with the world the copious photographic evidence of her own gradually budding femininity. As a clincher, Miss Owens added that Brigitte’s first husband who is supposed to have died in 1969 kept such a low profile that he probably never existed.

Interestingly, similar rumours circulate about the Obamas, with Michelle said to be rather more masculine than Barak. That gossip, however, is nowhere near as persistent, and neither have I seen any attempts to analyse any photographic evidence one way or the other.

Manny himself refused to follow my advice to ignore the rumour-mongers. In a speech on 8 March, which he perversely calls International Women’s Day rather than the Mothering Sunday it really is, he said:

“The worst thing is the false information and fabricated scenarios. People eventually believe them and disturb you, even in your intimacy.”

Yes, I can just imagine Manny saying to Brigitte in an intimate situation: “Fancy that, maman. They say you are un homme, and moi,  je suis quelque chose that sounds almost like it.”

“Never mind, mon petit,” says Brigitte, “and just keep doing what you are doing…” And she doesn’t mean running France into the ground either. 

A reader who himself doesn’t see a difference between the two asked me how I could possibly believe there is one.

That question, which my correspondent considers rhetorical, deserves an answer, ideally a book-sized one. But we have the space we have, so let’s make do.

Let’s start with the difference between faith, belief that God exists, and atheism, belief that God doesn’t exist. (We’ll put to one side the fact that ‘God exists’ is a theologically dubious phrase. Actually, God doesn’t exist. It’s because of God that everything else does. But some shorthand is inevitable in this format.)

Neither the believer nor the atheist can provide laboratory-standard, peer-reviewed proof for his assertion. Therefore we are dealing with opposition not between faith and fact, but one between two a priori assumptions, two hypotheses, each raised to a fideistic height.

One of them is based on God’s revelation given by methods both natural (through the possibility of perceiving much of his creation experimentally) and supernatural (through the Scripture and church tradition). The other is based on nothing but man’s own fanciful speculation. As such, it is not even so much faith as superstition.

Even scientists declaring themselves to be atheists, and trying to use science to vindicate their atheism, nonetheless start from the premise of accepting the existence of rational and universal natural laws.

If they wish to be logical, then, while rejecting the existence of a rational and universal law-giver, they are forced to ascribe rational behaviour to nature itself. That is the most primitive pantheism, and only in our crazy world can it pass for serious thought. Strip their frenzied harangues bare of scientific cant, and they descend to the intellectual level of a prehistoric shaman.

It would be foolhardy to deny that, whichever way we go, we are guided in our choice by emotional need, not just a dispassionate weighing of intellectual pros and cons. But Christian belief offers much greater rewards in either area.

The idea of having been created and guided through life by a loving, merciful and self-sacrificial God is more emotionally appealing than the notion of man’s descent from a single-cell organism via an unsavoury mammal that looks like a ghastly caricature of a human being. And intellectually, a thinker who starts from the theocentric premise will be able to explain next to everything that matters, while his anthropocentric counterpart will explain next to nothing.

A Christian has a clear and on its own terms coherent idea of how things, including the world and man in it, got to be. An atheist doesn’t. He may make claims to that effect, but in fact he doesn’t have a clue.

He can come up with one wild guess after another, each refuted by another guess or even itself. For example, ask an atheist what constitutes the human mind and thought, and he’ll either regale you with silence or treat you to an outpouring of gibberish. Or ask him where that original single-cell organism came from, and he’ll spin a yarn tying himself in knots.

Yet even atheists are not entirely anthropocentric. They may believe at a moment of frank self-assessment that man is but a cleverer ape, but unlike their simian brothers they still wish to make the world intelligible – God created this particular ape infinitely inquisitive. In search of the answers they seek they first look into themselves, but find only themselves there.

Such particularism is stifling to a man seeking some sort of universality. So our atheist has to come up with a surrogate theory of everything, or at least almost everything. Once that theory is identified and verbalised, it’s turned first into an ideology and then into a cause – something to assert and, if need be, fight for.

While Christianity imposes intellectual rigour and uncompromising reason, such secular quests are free-for-all. Since they are all products of fanciful speculation, anything goes.

What they all have in common is an agued attempt to debunk God and everything metaphysical associated with him, such as the soul and life everlasting. All of life is brought down to earth and reduced to people’s interactions in a purely material sphere.

The teleological aspect is removed, and life has no purpose. Hence the atheist has to commit the logical solecism of defining the process of life as its own purpose. His aim is only to make this process smoother and more rewarding.

Yet even that reduced task needs solving, such is the innate emotional need of mankind. We must find absolution for our own wickedness somewhere. If God is off-limits, we can only be absolved by some mysterious secular forces, moving us around like pawns on a chessboard and overriding our will at least partly.

Such forces have to be like God but without being God. They must be universal. They must be good, activating a simple syllogism: I can only believe in something good; I believe in n; ergo, n is good. And they must be exclusive, precluding any just competition. If competition does arise, it can only be deemed unjust and thus deserving of annihilation.

Such wobbly thinking will inevitably produce a secular cult disconnected from both reason and reality. The highlighted words are a useful definition of any ideology, wherever on the political spectrum it finds itself.

An exponent of such a cult must himself be disconnected from both reason and reality. This, my psychiatrist friend tells me, is a useful working definition of madness. That’s why I often repeat that any ideology makes people mad. This medical outcome is inherent in the very definition of an ideology.

Thus a V&A curator who thinks Margaret Thatcher is as evil as Hitler is neither thinking nor comparing nor even talking. He is ranting and, as the Russian saying goes, if you see a madman, step aside. Whatever you do, don’t argue with the lunatic. You’ll be appealing to reason and reality, which have nothing to do with his rants.

Exactly the same goes for exponents of blood and soil nationalism, which often overlaps with right-wing populism. Exactly the same goes for any ideology that’s ground-based. Whatever it is, it’s clinically insane.

It’s only things we can’t see that can explain things we can see. In the Western context, only Christianity explains life and man cogently enough to make them intelligible. A philosophy of any kind – moral, social, political etc. – has to proceed from the Christian premise not to lose touch with reason and reality.

Original sin explains man’s behaviour more credibly than any secular theory, from Rousseau onwards. No secular moral teaching can come close to the truth and clarity of Exodus and Matthew. No psychologist (or even economist) will find a better explanation of human failings than the seven deadly sins. And no secular philosopher will be able to define the purpose of life as soundly as any parish priest can.

I’m sure I haven’t answered my reader’s question to his satisfaction. People who ask what the difference is between Christianity and any secular cult, such as socialism or the Masonic triad adorning the facades of public buildings in France, already knows the only answer he’ll accept: no difference at all.

No reasoning can make a dent in such visceral convictions, but one still feels duty-bound to try (Matthew 5: 16).  

A good friend of mine once had the misfortune of marrying a raging Leftie, who came packaged with her friends.

I was chatting with one of them at a party, with him asking what growing up in Russia was like. When I gave him an outline, with key words like ‘concentration camps’, ‘mass murder’ and ‘totalitarian despotism’, he felt my pain.

“I know how you feel,” he said. “I lived under a tyranny myself.” That surprised me because he sounded perfectly English. “Where? When?” I asked. “Right here,” he replied. “Under Thatcher.” Since I was clearly talking to a madman, I muttered “Quite” and moved to another corner of the room, lest he bit me or something.

That was some 30 years ago, and now madness is the new normality, as confirmed by the curators of the venerable Victoria and Albert Museum. Its exhibition of Punch and Judy puppets, along with three-dimensional caricatures of famous people, came with a helpful label:    

“Over the years, the evil character in this seaside puppet show has shifted from the Devil to unpopular public figures including Adolf Hitler, Margaret Thatcher and Osama bin Laden to offer contemporary villains.”

As I read that, the ghost of my erstwhile interlocutor came wafting in, and I wondered whether he had since become a V&A curator. That was a silly thought because he didn’t have to be the author of that message. We have no shortage of lunatics running the asylum, aka Great Britain.

Penetrating the putrid recesses of their minds is as difficult as it is superfluous. There is no point – their ideology comes from the viscera and bypasses reason on its way out into the open. So it’s useless telling them that a Whiggish conservative like Margaret Thatcher has nothing in common with Hitler and bin Laden.

You could keep arguing until you’re blue in the face that Maggie didn’t start a world war and never committed genocide like Hitler, and neither did she blow up public transport or fly airliners into tall buildings like bin Laden. They know all that.

And if they were sane, they wouldn’t equate Margaret Thatcher with satanic ghouls. But they aren’t sane because they are committed to an ideology, and ideology – any ideology – makes people mad, disengaging their minds from reality.

As a result, they see the world in strictly binary terms: those who share their ideology and those who don’t. And they are incapable of seeing those who belong to the second group as wrong, misguided or especially as simply people who disagree. They see them as evil enemies.

Thus Margaret Thatcher is evil to them simply because she wasn’t a woke Leftie. While she might have differed from Hitler and bin Laden in some inconsequential details, in principle they are all much of a muchness. (Lenin is usually given a free pass as someone occasionally misguided but certainly not evil.)

When the scandal about the V&A’s label broke, some commentators suggested that the Exchequer stop funding that loony bin. Alas, aesthetically pleasing though such a step would be, it would serve no useful purpose.

For one thing, I suspect that the V&A’s view of Margaret Thatcher is the majority opinion in Parliament. It certainly is that within the ranks of our ‘liberal’ intelligentsia busily cancelling every remotely conservative speaker, writer or academic. Hence any attempt to punish the V&A by withdrawing public funds would merely make it charge admission.

This morning I chatted with a friend about this outrage, and he asked the sacramental English question: “What’s the solution?” Perhaps he was expecting to hear a suggestion of a good ideology that could counterbalance the bad one. But I couldn’t oblige: there is no such thing.

Any ideology, left or right, is a secular cult. And the opposite of a cult isn’t a different cult but genuine faith. Only allowing Christianity to regain its past prominence as a moral, intellectual, aesthetic and social force could cure the world of ideological insanity.

That would be driving evil spirits out of the possessed, similar to the exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac. People would then relearn the real meaning of words like ‘evil’, ‘good’, ‘tyranny’, ‘liberal’, ‘discrimination’ and ‘villainy’. They might continue to hold up tolerance as a prime virtue, but they’d begin to extend it to views contradicting their own. (Being tolerant of those who agree with you is no hardship.)

Putting it differently, the world – I’m thinking specifically of Britain – would become civilised again. But there’s little hope of that. Barring a miracle, similar to the exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac, we’ll continue on our accelerating downward slide into barbarism.

Prince William, our heir to the throne, provided an indirect proof of such gloomy predictions. Speaking to a charity for the homeless yesterday, he kept referring to his audience as “you guys”, which would be cloyingly demotic even in the US. In Britain, it’s prole slang.

Then, speaking of his wife, he said: “She needs to be sat here to hear this.” This is prole illiterate slang. Either the prince really is illiterate or, more likely, he wants to come across as a man of the people, ingratiating himself to those who naturally speak that way.

That too is an ideological stance, the milder version of putting Maggie Thatcher next to Hitler. If such are the standards set by our royalty, what do you expect from the commoners running the V&A and similar institutions? Exactly what we are getting: nothing but insanely rabid ideology.

P.S. On the subject of my yesterday’s article, the end came faster than we thought. Fr Michael James Daley, RIP.

Penelope and I have been fortunate with priests, friends and priest friends.

Our latter category is impeccably ecumenical: breaking bread with us have been two Anglican priests, two Catholic ones and even a Copt (whom I had the gall to lecture on the evils of Monophysitism).

Last Sunday came the tragic news that one of those friends won’t be with us for much longer. It was announced after Mass that Fr Michael Daley, who has been ill for a while, is dying. As he was receiving treatment for Parkinson’s, he developed an aggressive brain tumour and is now in end-of life care.

Just a month ago Fr Michael rang to tell us he was too unwell to come to lunch. Now we’ll never see him again: he can’t handle any visitors, asking instead for our prayers.

That we’ll miss him as a close friend goes without saying: Fr Michael’s genuine faith, generosity, sardonic wit, and rare combination of all such qualities have been a source of our great joy for years. And he is the only friend I have who shares my taste for dry martinis.

What, however, needs saying is that we’ll miss him as a priest as well, hugely. Last Sunday we found out exactly how much.

Fr Michael is a conservative man, although opponents of Vatican II may not recognise him as a conservative priest. Apart from references to the Pope, his liturgy is indistinguishable from the High Anglican equivalent, and I’ve never heard him utter a Latin word.

Nevertheless, his moving homilies and intercession prayers never lost touch with his mission. He has neither spoken about, nor asked the congregation to pray for, any fashionable causes: climate, negotiations in places where there is nothing to negotiate, rights that are actually wrongs, social justice. Fr Michael serves God, not woke fads, and he has never conflated the two in his life.

On occasion, Mass at our church has been celebrated by visiting priests, one young, the other less so. The young one is very good and the older one is the Vicar General. It was he who broke the tragic news last Sunday – but not before serving an unintended reminder of how much we’ll miss Fr Michael at the altar.

The good VG inclines to the left so much that he sometimes loses sight of God. Unlike Fr Michael, he has been known to ask us to pray for ‘our planet’ and some such, with Penelope and me steadfastly refusing to say “Hear our prayer”.

And during last Sunday’s reading, he made sure God himself spoke with all the right pronouns.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with such uncool things, during readings from the Bible the parishioners have the prayer sheet in front of them, so they can follow the text if the acoustics aren’t up to scratch (or if English isn’t their first language, which is common in Catholic churches).

Hence we had the privilege to hear the VG replace every ‘he’ and ‘his’ with ‘they’ and ‘their’, making one wonder if Jesus Christ was actually a diversity consultant for the NHS, vox DEI and all that. I winced in disgust, which is hardly the grimace and the feeling one expects a priest to elicit from the pulpit. That’s what we have politicians for.

On the way out, I chatted with the VG’s younger colleague, Fr Antony, whose own homilies are invariably inspiring. My side of the conversation was rather limited, what with my throat feeling constricted and words being extruded from my mouth, rather than flowing from it of their own accord.

Fr Antony assured me that Fr Michael, his friend and mine, was lucid, at peace and not in pain, with even his Parkinson’s now gone. But he didn’t know who, if anyone, would replace Fr Michael. Apparently, six local churches are already without priests, which is astounding in an affluent area with a large French and Italian population.

The situation in rural France, certainly our part of it, is even worse. There one priest has to cover up to 40 churches, which among other things means that many pious Catholics are denied the funeral Mass at their death. One wouldn’t expect central London to have similar problems, but that’s globalisation for you.

Should the priest’s personality really matter to his congregation? It shouldn’t. But it does, at least as far as I’m concerned.

When he is at the altar, a priest is an intermediary in the dialogue between man and God, a conduit through which this two-way communication can flow. His own vices and devices should have no effect at all: when he is at the altar, he is the stand-in for God, not a first person singular.

Such is the theory. But in practice it matters when the priest exudes and elicits the warmth and joy of someone celebrating the best news of all. He doesn’t have to be a beloved friend, like Fr Michael is to us, but he should be likeable, someone who never utters jarring, ungodly things.

The sound of such things punches a hole in the aura one feels at Mass, turning one’s thoughts away from God’s love and towards political rancour. That shouldn’t happen, but it does. And when it does, the joy goes, the contemplation disintegrates, and one’s Sunday is damaged, if not ruined.

Mass is all about love, God’s for us and ours for God – that is indisputable. But when a priest says something one hates, a drop of tar drips into a bowl of honey, making it all unpalatable. Yes, one loves God. But it helps if one at least likes the priest.

We love Fr Michael, weeping for him as his friends, praying for him as his parishioners. May his last days be filled with love – God’s and people’s.

Congratulations to Vlad Putin on his knife-edge election victory – and my deep gratitude to him for pointing out the fatal flaws in Western democracy.

Fair enough, not a single Western country can these days boast either a turnout of 77 per cent or a victor with 87 per cent of the vote. Speaking of the latter, I commend Vlad for his modesty and stoic self-restraint. He agreed to settle for a knife-edge 87 per cent even though he could easily have demanded – and received! – 100 per cent or more.

Stalin, for example, often polled 105 per cent in some constituencies. In fact, Putin’s modesty was only ever outdone by Hitler. After winning the 1933 election, Adolf manfully resisted the temptation to hold another one, no doubt wishing to avoid the embarrassment of popular enthusiasm to the tune of 100 per cent of the vote.

But what attracts me most about Putin’s victory is the implicit lesson it has taught our own Tory Party. The Tories should heed the message, what with their own electoral chances currently bringing to mind words like ‘snowball’ and ‘hell’.

However, there is still time to turn things around, and Vlad shows how. After all, a party that has already been in power for 14 years must have been able to grease many proven mechanisms of power. That experience should inspire the campaign slogan to be inscribed on blue Tory banners: “We know where you live.”

Admittedly, there seems to be little the Tories can do to improve their performance in government. The economy, defence, NHS, education, taxation and so forth are all drops in the puddle of spilled milk, and Rishi must be realistic enough to recognise this.

Yet any political consultant worth his salt would tell him to stop shedding tears over that puddle. Instead he should concentrate on the positives, Vlad-style. And Vlad teaches the ultimate lesson of political campaigning: the best opposition is no opposition.

Since, as Vlad explained, we have no democracy anyway, Rishi shouldn’t feel constrained by traditional British niceties. He is still PM, isn’t he? Of course, he is. That puts him in control of the armed forces (including SAS), police, intelligence (MI6) and counterintelligence (MI5). All these institutions are his natural allies and instruments of truly democratic politics. They can pave Rishi’s return to 10 Downing Street with the bodies of his opponents.

This is of course a mere figure of speech (or is it?). There’s so much Rishi could do before having to resort to violence.

For example, yesterday Sir Edward Davy, LibDem leader, said that Britain should return to the single market as a minimum, or ideally to the EU. This effectively means compromising Britain’s sovereignty, and if that doesn’t constitute high treason, I don’t know what does.

We aren’t talking about casuistic details here, as I hope you understand, but about the sacred principles of British politics, what Vlad calls ‘traditional values’. According to those values, Sir Ed must be immediately arrested, charged and banged in Wormwood Scrubs.

The important thing is not to squander public funds on such incidentals as a trial. A quick phone call to a friendly judge, along the lines of ‘we know where you live’, should do the trick. When Sir Ed is safely incarcerated, the warders could promise some of his rougher cellmates conjugal privileges to make sure that once in means never out.

Since a leader speaks for his whole party, the LibDems must be identified as a party of traitors and summarily disbanded. If any of them protest too loudly, they should be asked rhetorically whether they wish to keep the now late Ed company. (We know where you live.) You’d be amazed how quickly they’ll repudiate their past sins and undertake never to campaign against Rishi again.

Another marginal force, the Reform Party, will be even easier to bring to heel. Its driving force, if not nominally leader, Nigel Farage, is known for his close association with Donald Trump.

Hence Rishi must force Nigel to declare himself – and his whole party by association – a foreign agent. As such, the Reform Party could be legitimately disbanded, with all its leaders made to leave the country. After all, emigration is the better part of valour, as the old saying goes. We know where you live!

That leaves Labour, the current runaway leader in the polls, which may present more of a problem but not an unsolvable one. To start with, Sir Keir Starmer should be invited to tea at the Millennium Hotel in Grosvenor Square. That would reduce his life expectancy to about a fortnight, leaving his party both headless and heedless.

Then it could be ascertained that just about every prominent Labour politician used to belong to the CND or other Soviet fronts. Since British jurisprudence provides for no statute of limitations, they could all be arrested, charged with treason and put into Wormwood Scrubs, where by that time the warders will have learned exactly what to do.

Admittedly, that wouldn’t eliminate all potential Labour candidates, but that’s where Vlad’s lesson on polling procedure will come in handy.

Two blue-rosetted armed soldiers (preferably SAS) could be posted as guards at the entrance to every polling station. They should be ordered to flick the fire selector switch on their L85 rifles and ask every incoming voter what he thinks of the Tory Party.

That’s guaranteed to produce an outburst of loving loyalty, to which the soldiers should respond by saying: “On yer way then, mate. We know where you live.” This should guarantee that right people never cast wrong votes. Just in case, the polling volunteers, MI5 officers all, should have close to hand a stack of pre-prepared voting papers, each with a fat cross next to the name of the Tory candidate.

Such are the lessons of Vlad’s victory. I’m not suggesting they ought to be followed in every detail, but on the other hand it’s arrogant and wrong to ignore successful foreign experience. So I hope you’ll all join me in pledging undying support to the ruling Tory Party.

We know where you live!

If Europe ever does become united, it’ll be courtesy of Vlad Putin, not Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman or Konrad Adenauer. For Putin has kindly reminded Europe that she must either perish or stand united in defence.

Defence isn’t just planes, tanks, and missiles. Nor is it just warships, artillery and swarms of soldiers.

Defence starts with resolve and courage, and Europe has been short of these commodities throughout the post-war years. Like a little girl feeling lost without her mother, Europe has been clinging to America’s apron strings – America will provide, has been the infantile battle cry.

Now America herself is suffering from diminishing amounts of those commodities, as is evident from her position on the Ukraine and Israel. Hence the US allows, or rather pretends to allow, her eternal conflicts between hawks and doves to be resolved by bean counters.

If defending Europe through NATO’s good offices used to be understood as the sacred duty of the Leader of the Free World, and also the strategic necessity of counterbalancing Russia’s power, suddenly it has become a matter of balance sheets. Instead of talking about tanks and missiles, US leaders now talk about dollars and cents.

Yet they are still Western politicians, and as such what they say isn’t necessarily what they mean. Biden’s and Trump’s rhetoric on these subjects is different, but one can detect a similar erosion of testicular strength underneath.

Hence all this talk about negotiations, ‘red lines’, reluctance to ‘humiliate Putin’, fear of ‘Russia’s disintegration’. Hence also the increasingly niggardly assistance to the Ukraine, and continuing refusal to supply ATACMS systems, F-16s, heavy tanks, long-range artillery and so forth.

One has to acknowledge that Putin’s ‘hybrid’ war has been much more successful than the usual kind. The non-stop bombardment of American airwaves with threats of nuclear annihilation, fake stories of Ukrainian Nazis, Putin’s commitment to ‘traditional values’ and other disinformation shrapnel is bearing fruit.

Job done – one can just see those ghouls smirking in Lubyanka and the Kremlin. They have been dismissing Europe in their calculations. Europe to them is a degenerate, defunct entity obsessed with homosexual/trans racial minorities on welfare. If European countries are too stingy to commit even a paltry two percent of GDP to defence, they aren’t even part of the conversation.

Neutralise America’s resolve, and Boris is your uncle. Stripped of the American umbrella, Western Europeans will be cowering in their underheated houses as Russia, led as she is by the muscle-bound Putin, gobbles up the eastern part, restoring Stalin’s empire to all its past glory.

The Russians can be forgiven for thinking that, for Europe has done nothing over the past 70 years even to hint at any testosterone content in its bloodstream.

The European Union may be the precursor of a single European state, but let’s be serious now: Europe isn’t really united, is it? Any fly on the wall during a talk between, say, Stoltz, Macron and Orbán would bust its wings laughing at any suggestion of pan-European unity.

So fine, things on the frontline haven’t quite gone according to Putin’s plan. The Russians failed to take Kiev in three days, and it’s reasonably clear they won’t be able to do so in three years either. But the hybrid war seems to have succeeded beyond their wildest imaginings.

The US talks tough (or not even, if you listen to the likely once and future president), but has practically cut off all military aid to the Ukraine. And Europe, who cares about that impo…

But hold on a second. The looming threat of barbaric invasion has suddenly made Europe flex its muscles and realise they haven’t completely atrophied. Europe stood up from its previous genuflecting stance and put some steel in its voice, if not quite yet in its spine.

One European leader after another has spoken of resisting Russian expansion with everything Europe has. Which is significant: Europe’s population is four times the size of Russia’s, and the combined GDP of European countries is 12 times greater.

European military technology is two generations ahead of Russia’s, and most European armies are better trained and more professional than the Russian gang of murderers, looters and rapists. European leaders have begun to mention such facts ex officio, and one, Manny Macron, even spoke about the possibility of putting European boots on the Ukrainian ground.

Nor is it just talk. European countries have started to increase their supplies of ordnance for the Ukraine, and the danger of Ukrainian guns falling silent is diminishing. Meanwhile, the European countries within immediate range of Russian tanks, such as Poland, Scandinavia and the Baltics, have stepped up their armament programmes and troop training. Finland, Sweden and Denmark are even discussing the possibility of conscription.

Suddenly, that rotten Hungarian apple apart, Europe is indeed beginning to look united. Where the EU has failed, Putin might have succeeded.

Should this tendency continue, as I hope it does, the US may face a stark choice between either recovering her masculinity or losing her status as Leader of the Free World, with all the associated benefits. Meanwhile, though still short of resolve, the US has vast reserves of effrontery, as demonstrated by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

In common with many Jewish American politicians, especially those inclining leftwards, Schumer treats Israel as a pet that can sit, fetch and lie down on his orders.

In that spirit, Schumer has demanded that Israel hold a snap election and get rid of Netanyahu, who “has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel”.

Netanyahu, thundered Schumer, “has been too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza, which is pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows. Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah.”

In response, Israel’s ruling Likud party has explained to Schumer that Israel isn’t “a banana republic” and will not be spoken to in that tone.

“Contrary to Schumer’s words,” said the government statement, “the Israeli public supports a total victory over Hamas, rejects any international dictates to establish a Palestinian terrorist state, and opposes the return of the Palestinian Authority to Gaza.”

America should really wipe her glasses and see more clearly who are her friends and especially who are her enemies. Such improved clarity of vision would enable her to do the right thing both in the Ukraine and Israel.

Perhaps she should ask Putin to threaten an imminent invasion, across the Bering Strait if not the Atlantic. Similar threats seem to have put some lead into Europe’s pencil, and I do hope it’s not just an appearance.

Yesterday was the 141^st anniversary of Marx’s death, an event worthy of joyous festivities. God only knows how much more harm he would have caused had he lived beyond age 64.

Since for 70-odd years the most formidable propaganda machine in history was dedicated to spreading Marxism, many feel they know what Marx is all about without having to resort to the primary source. That’s a pity, for if more people had actually read the Communist Manifesto, one hopes there would be fewer innocents insisting that Marx’s ideals were wonderful but regrettably unachievable; or else that Marx’s theory was perverted by Soviet practice.

In fact, Marx’s ideals are unachievable precisely because they are so monstrous that even the Bolsheviks never quite managed to realise them fully, and not for any lack of trying.

For example, the Manifesto prescribes the nationalisation of all private property without exception. Even Stalin’s Russia in the thirties fell short of that ideal. In fact, some 15 per cent of the Soviet economy was then in private hands.

Marx also insisted that family should be abolished, with women becoming communal property. Again, for all their efforts, Lenin and Stalin never quite managed to achieve this ideal either, much to the regret of those who could see an amorous pay-off in such an arrangement.

Then, according to the Manifesto, children were to be taken away from their parents, pooled together and raised by the state as its wards. That too remained a dream for the Bolsheviks who tried to make it a reality, but ultimately failed.

Modern slave labour, such an endearing feature of Soviet Russia, also derives from Marx – and again Lenin and Stalin displayed a great deal of weak-kneed liberalism in bringing his ideas to fruition.

Marx, after all, wrote about total militarisation of labour achieved by organising it into “labour armies”. Yet no more than 10 per cent of Soviet citizens were ever in enforced labour at the same time.

The only aspect of Bolshevism that came close to fulfilling the Marxist dream was what Engels described as “specially guarded places” to contain aristocrats, intelligentsia, clergy, etc. Such places have since acquired a different name, but in essence they are exactly what Marx envisaged.

Here Lenin and Stalin did come close to fulfilling the Marxist prescription, but they were again found wanting in spreading concentration camps to a mere half of the world. So where the Bolsheviks perverted Marxism, they generally did so in the direction of softening it.

All such monstrous practical prescriptions of Marxism lie on the surface, for anyone with eyes to see. None of it, however, explains the influence of Marxist philosophy even in countries described as liberal democracies. One thing for certain: for a philosophy to gain such a lasting influence, it has to inhale the zeitgeist and then exhale it with a tsunami force.

That’s what Marxism did, thereby answering the need keenly felt by post-Enlightenment mankind. The Enlightenment, that great misnomer, was essentially a mass rebellion against Christianity, which was seen as superfluous to the needs of nascent modernity.

That, however, left a philosophical vacuum that had to be filled. Man, after all, is a reasoning creature, and he needs to make the world intelligible. Christianity achieved that end by providing a coherent explanation of life, man and nature that vindicated its founding faith. Now the founding faith was lost, a materialist surrogate was urgently needed.

However, when a religion goes, it’s never replaced by naked materialism. It’s invariably replaced by a determinist cult absolving people of individual responsibility for their salvation and treating history as a sequence of predetermined tectonic shifts, with people at their mercy.

The elements of such a cult were already in place by the time Marx came about. He himself cited as his three major sources Hegel’s dialectics, Smith’s economics, and the utopian socialism of Campanella, Fourier and Saint-Simon.

Hegel equipped Marx with the dialectical method, but Adam Smith did so much more than that. His philosophy posed as sheer rationalism, but was in fact pure metaphysics with a sorcery dimension.

According to Smith’s moral philosophy, each individual must pursue nothing but his own interests, mainly economic. One could get the impression that this would create a society of atomised, amoral individuals, but that impression was wrong, explained Smith. All those private interests would be tossed into a giant pot, where they would be stirred by an invisible hand in such a way that the resulting stew would emerge homogeneous and moral.

That was the beginning of what I call totalitarian economism, allowing economics to claim the universality formerly reserved for religion, theology and priesthood. Thus Smith indeed exerted a formative influence on Marx, but not only on him.

Not just Marx but also Hayek, Mises, Friedmann and other ‘conservative’ economists applied Smith’s ideas to modern needs. As a result, modern man divided into two streams, which I call nihilists and philistines. Both carry Marx’s genes in their DNA, but siblings can be similar without being identical.

Marx interpreted Smith’s invisible hand as class struggle, with people forced to act in a certain way by their demographics, something Marx called “relationship to the means of production”. Since the have-nots are more numerous than the haves, they are slated to emerge victorious in the long run. The long run could be made shorter by physically eliminating the classes putting the brakes on predestined progress.

Hayek et al. ignored the cannibalistic strain of Marxism, but they too tried to fill the void left by Christianity with economic superstitions. If Marx believed that mankind was divided into hostile classes to begin with, only then to arrive in due course at a uniform bliss he called “dictatorship of the proletariat”, Hayek’s society started out as a conglomerate of selfish individuals who were then guided by the invisible hand to collective morality.

Totalitarian economism with a superstitious dimension is evident in both strains, which makes them dislike each other: none so hostile as divergent exponents of the same creed. Yet anti-Marxism is but Marxism with the opposite sign, which is why, much as the two groups proclaim mutual hatred, they continue to survive side by side in our liberal democracies.

Both testify to the barren philosophical insides of modernity. Both try to replace Christian teleology with materialistic determinism, with equally abysmal results. And the struggle between the two siblings of the Enlightenment is still raging, with the outcome far from clear.

Marxism has been so influential over the past century and a half not because its home was in the Soviet Union, but because it is in the heart of modernity. Marxism in economic, social and political thought is the same as Darwinism in biology. It tries to plug a hole left by Christianity, only to find it unpluggable.

But it will persevere for as long as modernity does. In the absence of real, aromatic coffee of philosophy, a surrogate concocted of Enlightenment acorns has to do. And Marx, along with Smith, Darwin and Hayek, is one of the acorns of which that unsavoury beverage was brewed.

“Marx’s teaching is omnipotent because it’s true,” wrote Lenin. It’s neither, actually. But Marxism is a systemic, untreatable malaise of materialist modernity. It will continue to fester until it kills the host organism.  

Everyone knows that too much stress can be lethal. Hence it’s logical to infer that the greatest number of job-related deaths would be caused by the most stressful jobs.

These, according to my painstaking research, are (in this order): military personnel, police officer, firefighter, social worker, broadcaster, newspaper reporters, emergency dispatcher, mental health counsellor, anaesthesiologist, A&E nurse.

Well, let me tell you: comparatively speaking, all of these are sinecures involving no health risks whatsoever. Relegating them to that lowly status is the most dangerous job in the world: top executive in the Russian oil industry.

In the two years that have passed since Putin decided he had had enough of Ukrainian sovereignty, 18 holders of such jobs have died under mysterious circumstances. The latest such demise was announced yesterday by Lukoil, one of Russia’s biggest oil companies.

Its vice president, Vitaly Robertus, died at 53, for reasons not divulged. Robertus is the fourth Lukoil executive to die since the beginning of Putin’s war. One of his colleagues, Chairman of the Board Vladimir Nekrasov, died of a heart attack last October. But the other two deaths were rather, shall we say, baroque.

Nekrasov’s predecessor, Ravil Maganov, was treated for a cardiac complaint in hospital. His condition was so serious that he fell to his death out of a sixth-floor window, a known side effect of heart trouble. And in May, 1922, another top manager, Alexander Subbotin, died during an ESP séance run by a shaman.

Lest you may think that Lukoil is the only Russian oil company suffering such personnel attrition, Gazprom is giving it a good run for its money.

A few days before the invasion, Leonid Shulman, manager of Gazprom Investa, was found dead in his bathtub. He had died of multiple knife wounds, all of them, according to the suicide note, self-inflicted. One would think that an obviously intelligent chap should have thought of a less demanding method of suicide than using himself for knife practice, but there you have it.

Then the day after the invasion, Alexander Tulyakov, Deputy Treasurer, was found hanged in his Petersburg flat. The contents of the suicide note haven’t been revealed, possibly because no note existed.

Doing business with Gazprom can be as dangerous as serving on its board. Thus Yuri Voronov, Director General of a major Gazprom contractor, was found floating in his swimming pool. He had been shot in the head point-blank, which had to be ruled suicide even in the absence of a note.

On 18 April, 2022, former vice president of Gazprombank, Vladislav Avdeyev, his wife and 13-year-old daughter died by what was described as murder-suicide.

Avdeyev was believed to be so jealous of his wife that, before topping himself, he shot not only her but also their daughter. Shakespeare could have got to the bottom of that family drama, but I can’t. All I can do is speculate about the daughter’s role in that triangle, but shan’t for fear of offending your sensibilities.

Another murder-suicide at about the same time involved a company in a different line of work. Vasily Melnikov, head of the medical technology concern MedStom is supposed to have done the deed with a knife. He first killed his wife, then his two little sons, then himself. According to the family and neighbours, theirs was a loving close-knit family, but hey, what do they know?

But back to the hydrocarbon industry and its jinx. That Russian gremlin seems to ignore international sanctions and travels globally with ease.

Former head of the gas company NOVATEK, Fyodor Protosenya, and his family settled in the Catalan resort town Lloret de Mar. On 18 April, 2022, the police of that town reported that Mr Protosenya had first killed his mother and sister, then hanged himself in the garden. His son categorically stated that his father was no murderer.

Closer to home, almost exactly a year ago another oil magnate, Michael Watford (né Mikhail Tolstosheya) was found hanged in the garage of his Surrey house. He emigrated to Britain in the early 2000s, changing his name and citizenship, but there is no statute of limitations in Russia. Shortly before his death, Watford had told his friends he was scared of Putin’s kill-list, to which he had been “added two years ago”.

In January, 2023, Dmitry Pavochka, former Lukoil manager, provided material proof of the government warning ‘smoking kills’. He fell asleep with a lit cigarette in his hand and burned himself to death.

A month later, Vyacheslav Rovneiko, co-founder of Ural Energy, was found unconscious in his house. For all the doctors’ efforts, he died in hospital of indeterminate causes.

The most recent oil death, on 5 February this year, struck Ivan Sechin, 35, whose father Igor owns Rosneft, where Ivan himself was an executive. Igor Sechin isn’t just any oil billionaire, but also one of Putin’s closest cronies whom many regard as the dictator’s unofficial deputy. Ivan’s death was ascribed to the same diagnosis as Alexei Navalny’s: blood clot.

Please remind me not to apply for any top position in the Russian oil industry. Such jobs seem to be too demanding by half.

Then again, similar death rates have been recorded among Russian journalists, dissidents and any opponents of Putin who didn’t manage to flee Russia in the nick of time (and even some who found what they thought was a safe haven in the West).

I think the annals of medical science should be expanded to include a new phenomenon, ‘sudden Russian death syndrome’. My innate modesty won’t let me claim all credit for this vital contribution to medicine. One, I must add, that’s denied by such a respectable expert as Mark Galeotti.

Prof. Galeotti points out any number of possible explanations for that spate of mysterious deaths, from the general Russian propensity to suicide to professional hits commissioned by business competitors.

The first possibility is refuted by Russian immigrants in the West who rise to high positions in the oil industry (when I lived in Houston, I knew quite a few). All of them courageously resist the temptation to kill themselves and their whole families. The second possibility may well be a factor, but again, during my 10 years in Houston, I never once heard a story of, say, an Exxon president ordering a hit on a Tenneco chairman.

In any case, Prof. Galeotti ought to know that the Russian energy industry doesn’t function according to the laws of competition and free enterprise. It’s wholly controlled out of the Kremlin, where Putin and his closest cronies decide who prospers, who goes bust and, more to the point, who lives and who dies.

Russia is a fascist gangster state, a megalomaniac crime family with global ambitions. So we shouldn’t look for far-fetched explanations. Let’s just pull the old Occam’s razor out and accept that criminals act in criminal ways: murderers kill, thieves steal, embezzlers pilfer – and Putin’s Russia acts in character.

Illegal migrants, mainly from Syria and Iran, are adding new touches to the Damascene experience.

The original story involved Saul, a full-time persecutor of Christians in Jerusalem. The High Priest was so happy with Saul’s zeal that he decided to give him new responsibilities.

Saul and his retainers were sent out to chase Christians in Syria but, as Paul later told the story, a funny thing happened to him on the way to Damascus. A bright light shone from heaven and God asked him a trick question: “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” (In those days, God still hadn’t learned to speak in street English.)

Saul couldn’t give a satisfactory answer to that question. Hence he instantly became a Christian, changed his name to Paul and made the phrase ‘on the road to Damascus’ proverbial.

Well, today’s Syrians prove that a similar experience can also occur on the road from Damascus.

They arrive in Britain by rather unconventional methods, such as clinging to the undercarriage of a lorry or packing themselves into a rubber dinghy. Upon landing, that daring act entitles them to such benefits as living allowances and free accommodation, sometimes in four-star hotels.

But it doesn’t entitle them to the right to stay. Of course, they can do so illegally, and many follow that path, but that involves looking over the shoulder to see if immigration officers are lurking in the shadows.

So they apply for asylum, some successfully, some less so. At this point, one would think, the rejected applicants only have two options: either to go back or to go illegal.

Nothing especially interesting so far, is there? But here comes the third option, one that has inspired the above story of Saul/Paul. For those pious Muslims can greatly improve their chances of getting asylum by claiming they’ve had an experience similar to Saul’s.

As a bearded chap walks to the Regent’s Park mosque, a blinding light shines, and a voice thunders from heaven: “Ahmed, Ahmed, why deniest thou me?” Or perhaps “Why d’you dis me, mate?” (God has since learned how to talk proper.) At that moment, Ahmed realises that the way to asylum lies through Jesus Christ.

Off to the nearest church he goes, gets baptised and reapplies for residency, saying that, as a devout Christian, he feels unsafe in his homeland. That’s it, Paul is your uncle, Mary is your aunt. The Visas and Immigration Office opens its arms and welcomes the brother in Christ to the fold.

When I first came across such stories, I was incredulous. After all, His Majesty’s Government is more likely to be biased against Christians than for them. Also, one would hope that our public servants can see through such a transparent ruse.

Alas, they can’t. This raises the question of what to do about it. Taking God’s name in vain is one thing, but taking it in bogus applications for asylum is quite another. So how can we identify fake Christians?

A similar problem arose in 15^th century Spain, when their Catholic Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella decided to rid the country of Muslims and, while they were at it, also Jews. Many Jews then went through fake baptism, while continuing to practise Judaism in secret.

They were called Marranos or conversos, the former being devious crypto-Christians, and the latter all new Christians, whether genuine or not. The Holy Inquisition, first instituted in the 12^th century, was given the task of sorting them out, setting a useful precedent for the UK Visas and Immigration office to follow.

However, call me a sceptic and a cynic, but I can’t quite see that venerable department employing priests trained to examine new Christians on the fine points of doctrine. For one thing, I’m not sure how many vicars and priests could themselves pass such tests. And then there’s the stylistic incongruity of a receptionist at a government office telling a visitor: “Father Ignatius will see you now, Ahmed”.

So much more highly should we praise the Rev Matthew Firth for his ingenious solution to the vetting problem. He introduced a more involved and rigorous process for baptising asylum seekers from Syria and Iran, whom I shall call reversos. The vicar insisted that they first had to involve themselves in the life of the church, especially by attending services.

And what do you know, a miracle occurred. According to the vicar, the number of Muslims who had found Christ instantly “fell off a cliff”, and those people just “melted away”. If so, that makes those reversos not only mendacious but also lazy.

Anglican services typically last about an hour, so attending a few wouldn’t be overly onerous for robust young males (the dominant demographic among asylum seekers). They could then share a pint and a bacon sarnie with the vicar, thereby providing further proof of their apostasy from Islam. A few Sundays like that, and the baptismal font awaits.

Those reversos belie the fashionable belief that religion is useless. Unlike most of the indigenous population, they’ve found a definite use for Christianity. That outdated creed can now do what cards do in three-card monte: trick the innocent. That broad category includes HMG and, by association, us all.

A piece of avuncular advice to my fictional Ahmed and other reversos: remember to keep saying “There’s a God other than Allah, and Mohammed isn’t his prophet”. Who knows, you may get not just asylum but full citizenship. British Christians need people like you.

Whenever a magazine or a newspaper runs a test asking the question in the title, I take it. Yes, I know I have an appalling eye for physical detail, and yet I can’t help resisting the challenge. So predictably I fail.

As I did this time, looking at the Mothering Sunday photo of a radiant Princess of Wales and her three children. The photo was released by the Palace to quash spreading rumours about Kate’s health. Alas, that noble effort had the opposite effect.

For some people are more observant than I and they know a Photoshopped image when they see it. Those eagle-eyed pedants counted 16 things wrong with the picture, from the autumn leaves in the background of the photograph supposedly taken this weekend to the fewer than the regulated number of fingers on Louis’s hand.

(Spoiler alert: there will be no other spoilers from me. Try to find the other 14 errors, see how you get on. Unprompted, I would have spotted none.)

As a result, AP, AFP, Reuters and Getty Images, which at first ran the picture, have now withdrawn it. One statement said: “The AP later retracted the image because at closer inspection, it appears that the source had manipulated the image in a way that did not meet AP’s photo standards.”

And the British media refused to publish the photograph, except to illustrate stories similar to this one. Considering their unbounded love for paparazzo offerings, they must be complimented for their reticence.

This is a very serious business indeed, and not just because the Palace seems unable to employ competent retouchers. Nor is there anything wrong with publishing an official picture that has been either touched up or taken when the model was younger.

Why, I am myself guilty of such legerdemain: the photo adorning my books and blogs was taken a few years and many illnesses ago, making it rather flattering to my current appearance. I use it not out of vanity, but because it’s the only professional high-res photo of myself in my album.

But that doesn’t matter: no one really cares about my looks and health, family and friends excepted. Our future queen is a different story, and her health has far-reaching ramifications.

Back in January Kate had abdominal surgery from which she is still recovering. That gave rise to fears about her long-term health, which this clumsy photo was supposed to allay. Such fears go beyond the public’s voracious appetite for royal gossip.

For Kate is indeed our future queen, which makes her health a constitutional issue. And when the Palace releases dubious health bulletins or fake photographs, the issue becomes the proverbial hot potato.

The first bulletin in January said the princess had checked into the London Clinic for an abdominal operation. Words like ‘minor’ or ‘routine’ didn’t come up, but they were implicit.

The only specific information provided was that the operation had nothing to do with any kind of cancer. And oh well, lest we forget, went the afterthought, Kate would stay in hospital for a fortnight and then convalesce for two to three months. Nothing to worry about.

Those PR chaps take us for idiots, I thought. Anyone who has a modicum of medical knowledge would know that something untoward is going on.

My own empirical knowledge of medicine has been acquired on its receiving end, as a veteran of many illnesses, some of them deadly, and nine operations, some of them abdominal. And some of those were performed at the same London Clinic (thank God for private insurance), where my wife has also had two operations.

Neither Penelope nor I have ever spent more than three post-op days in hospital, which I’d say is par for the course. Hence, loath as I am to play cracker-barrel physician, weeks in hospital and months of convalescence betoken a serious condition.

The most widespread abdominal surgeries involve removal of the appendix, gall bladder, malignant or benign tumours, liver transplants or else hernia repair. My appendix and much-abused liver are still in place and I’ve never had a hernia, but I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing the other kinds, and none involved anything even remotely like Kate’s stay in hospital and subsequent convalescence.

All this sounds solipsistic, but I’m not bragging about my illnesses – there’s nothing to brag about. All I’m saying is that my experience suggests that Kate’s condition is far from trivial. The attendant events reinforce this impression.

First, Prince William cancelled at the last minute his attendance of the memorial service for his godfather, King Constantine of Greece. That was especially odd since William’s father, King Charles III, was also unable to attend because he is recovering from cancer treatment. Kensington Palace cited “personal reasons”, which sounded ominous in context.

Then the Department of Defence announced that the princess would attend Trooping of the Colour in June, only for that announcement to be hastily withdrawn. One possible inference is that the Department jumped the gun, and Kate isn’t expected to be fit enough to attend public events even six months after her operation.

Most Britons, emphatically including me, feel a great deal of affection for the Princess of Wales. Unlike her late mother-in-law, she has gone about her royal duties with dignity, responsibility and grace. That’s why we are genuinely concerned about Kate’s health.

But – and this is something Kate seems to realise, whereas her late mother-in-law didn’t – royal personages, especially those likely to accede, are defined not so much by their personalities as by their functions. And the functions they perform are vital to the constitution of the realm.

This doesn’t mean that every detail, salacious or otherwise, of the royals’ lives should be exposed to the gawking, gasping public. But it does mean that their subjects should be informed of issues with constitutional implications.

Since Kate is the wife of the future King William V, her physical wellbeing is definitely of constitutional import. So, much as I hate the phrase “we have a right to know”, in this case we do. Meanwhile, I – and millions of people in Britain and around the world – wish Kate the speediest recovery. We need her.

P.S. Just so that we are clear. The same event has three different names, and which one you choose says something about you. Mothering Sunday is conservative/Christian. Mother’s Day is woke/secular. International Women’s Day is woke/communist. Thus, the photo under discussion is supposed to have been taken on Mothering Sunday.