Category: Blog

Religious and scientific quests both start at the same point: an act of faith.

In religion, it may be called revelation; in science, a hypothesis. A scientist senses intuitively that a certain proposition must be true, which inspires him to embark on arduous research at the end of which his hypothesis is either proved or disproved.

The research involves experiments (performed both by the scientist himself and his colleagues or predecessors) and an interpretation of their results, efforts both empirical and rational. That’s where a religious quest may differ, although it doesn’t have to.

St Augustine wrote: “Seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.” St Anselm later expressed the same thought, confirming the appropriate sequence of the quest. Mutatis mutandis, a scientist will agree that he goes through roughly the same progression from an act of faith to ultimate understanding.

Looking specifically at Christianity, which seems appropriate today, the empirical evidence comes from the experience and testimony of numerous believers and eyewitnesses, such as the evangelists, and tangentially even non-believers, such as Tacitus, Pliny or Josephus.

And the science of rational interpretation is called theology, basically applying a philosophical apparatus to the word of God. Rational interpretation is essential for scientists, but not necessarily for believers, as history proves.

After all, how many of the billions of Christians have over the past two millennia ever opened a single theological treatise? An infinitesimally tiny proportion, I’d guess. This proves that even if a believer’s reason is excommunicated, he can still remain in communion with Christ.

But it doesn’t have to be excommunicated. If God gave us reason, it couldn’t have been just to enable us to calculate compounded interest, solve word puzzles or understand how protectionism hurts the economy. Human reason seeks to make everything, including God, intelligible.

The very definition of God precludes any possibility of complete intelligibility: a higher system can understand a lower one, but not vice versa. Yet, just as in science, any approximation to the ultimate truth is a step forward, advancing human knowledge to a higher plateau if not to the very summit.

Both theological and natural sciences pose questions and seek answers. In fact, Jacques Maritain described theology as “the science of first principles”, which purview makes it the overarching science, with fields like physics or biology merely its subsets.

Be that as it may, theology does answer questions, those asked by both believers and atheists. The latter tend to pose such enquiries in the hope of starting an argument they fully expect to win, and most of such squabbles begin with variations on my title above.

What they are implying is that, no matter how sound the theological argument is, they are going to dismiss it a priori. That’s a gross logical error on several levels.

An atheist is perfectly within his rights to say “I don’t believe in God, and nothing you say will change my mind” and leave it at that. I happen to disagree with that view, but I respect it as a faith in its own right.

Yet the moment an atheist says “If God exists…” or “If Jesus is God…”, he accepts that possibility for the sake of argument. This means he gatecrashes a different system of thought, accepting the terms on which that system is impeccably cogent.

If he then tries to keep one foot out and the other in, the resulting split is guaranteed to sprain his intellectual abductor muscle. Even an extremely intelligent atheist will then sound dumb.

The brightest illustration of this observation is David Hume who applied his intellectual gifts and literary brilliance to the perennial issue of reconciling God with the existence of evil. If God is merciful and good, Hume kept asking, then why does he allow suffering? If that’s beyond his control, then how omnipotent is he? And if he doesn’t know what’s going on, is he really omniscient?

Countering such questions is called theodicy, vindication of God. Its principal argument is based on free will, God’s gift enabling us to make our own free choice between good and evil.

We are free to help a blind man across the street or to push him under a speeding car, for example, just as God is free to punish us if we choose wrong and, one hopes, reward us if we choose right. And, though Christ showed a clear path to individual salvation, we remain free to take that path or not.

If our will weren’t free, if we were but puppets on God’s string, one would struggle to see why God would have bothered to make us so different from animals, or indeed to create us at all.

Moreover, if we accept as a given that God loves us, that indeed God is love, then we must find it hard to explain how such love could have been expressed by turning us into marionettes, or else pre-programmed robots. God’s is the absolute freedom, but if we are truly created in his image, ours has to be at least a relative one. Only God can be totally free, but that doesn’t mean man has to be totally enslaved.

Such arguments are irrefutable within the intellectual world our atheist has entered, and if he tries to refute them he’ll inevitably sound stupid, regardless of how brilliant he may be outside. That’s where he should stay, outside, thereby keeping his reputation for brilliance intact.

(I wrote a whole book about one such man, Leo Tolstoy, whose personality was voluminous enough to accommodate every known misapprehension of such subjects and also some uniquely his own.)

One such question always crops up on Good Friday. If Jesus was God, how come he didn’t exercise his divine power to save himself from an agonising and humiliating death?

Our hubristic modernity can’t fathom the possibility that someone may choose not to use his power under some circumstances. If something can be done, it must be done: such is the ubiquitous conviction. Yet the very notion of free will presupposes the possibility of self-restraint, choosing not to use some of the powers God possesses.

Such self-limitation of God is called ‘kenosis’ in theology, literally ‘self-emptying’. The term was first used in this context in St Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians, and it’s vital to grasping the meaning of Christ’s Passion.

Chalcedonian doctrine established the dual nature of Christ as fully God and fully man. The latter is consistent with kenosis: Jesus refused to use his divine power to solve every problem he encountered in his earthly life.

As God, he chose to sacrifice himself to redeem the sins of mankind. And as a man, he freely accepted the burden of humanity: he needed to eat and sleep, he could be tempted by Satan, he asked God the Father to stay the executioners’ hand, he suffered agonising pain on the Cross.

Such arguments won’t lead an atheist to Christ. But if a man asks probing questions not because he wants to proclaim his atheism, but because he genuinely wants to know, then the answers may help him in his quest for the truth. As Pascal said, “If you are looking for Me, you have already found Me.” And even Jensenists may be right.

How many times do I have to tell foreign visitors that Scottish men don’t wear skirts?

It’s kilts, chaps, not skirts, and, if anything, wearing them makes those Scots more, rather than less, masculine. Alas, they are all too eager to prove that by wearing nothing underneath and raising their hems over their heads at the slightest provocation.

The laddie doth protest too much, as Shakespeare would say – but I won’t. Instead I’d like to draw your attention to the landmine ruling… no, make it the landmark ruling of the Supreme Court.

That august body boasts a fine tradition of judicial review going back all the way to, well, 2009, when Tony Blair, PM at the time, somehow found the traditional parliamentary institutions wanting. That was part of his assault on Britain’s constitution, in the course of which he created the Supreme Court, a redundant and therefore harmful body.

This time around, however, that appellate court got things almost right by ruling that: “The definition of sex in the Equality Act 2010 makes clear that the concept of sex is binary, a person is either a woman or a man.” In other words, a conversion from laddie to lady isn’t legally recognised.

Or is it? In handing down the judgement, Lord Hodge threw a smokescreen of waffle around it: “The Equality Act gives transgender people protection not only against discrimination through the protected characteristics of gender reassignment, but also against direct discrimination, indirect discrimination, and harassment, in substance in their acquired gender.”

First, the Court talks about sex being either-or binary, then it decries discrimination against “their acquired gender”. I am confused, but then I find modernity generally confusing.

On the plus side, those strapping lads who have replaced their kilts with skirts, with or without parallel alterations underneath, won’t be admitted to women’s lavatories and dressing rooms. Those .001 per cent of British women who, according to Sir Keir Starmer, have penises, are men in the eyes of the law.

The issue came to a head in Scotland, whose devolved government (another Blair contrivance) mandated that any public board should have 50 per cent female representation. That raised a question that in the recent past wouldn’t have occurred to any sane person: What constitutes a woman?

According to the Scottish government, anyone in possession of a gender recognition certificate (GRC) was a woman who must be treated as such under the 2010 Equality Act. The Scottish courts rubber-stamped the decision in 2023, which had wide-ranging implications for the whole UK.

Characteristically, mad laws can these days be challenged only by half-mad people, in this case radical feminist and lesbian groups. Normal people, those who rely on millennia of tradition, evidence before their eyes, science, and also moral and aesthetic judgement, are effectively disfranchised in such cases.

Someone who looks and sounds like Jacob Rhys-Mogg wouldn’t be able to share with the public his views on the matter, which I suspect are no different from mine. He’d be heckled, shouted down, possibly assaulted. And his political career would be over.

But wild-eyed, bra-burning zealots, riding into battle with their pronoun weapons at the ready, enjoy quite a bit of latitude. They worship at the altar of a different piety espousing equally respectable but different perversions, which earns them a share of voice.

Using that privilege, Marion Calder, co-director of the feminist group that launched the successful challenge against the Scottish government, said the ruling delighted “the vast majority of women across Great Britain”.

I’m happy for them, but I’m neither a feminist nor even a woman, although I have been trying to get in touch with my feminine side (unsuccessfully, according to Penelope). And, according to Miss Calder, men have no dog in this fight. The issue of public decency and indeed sanity doesn’t come into it. It’s all about women’s rights.

She then went out of her way to make sure her delight wouldn’t be misconstrued: “In day to day life, you can go around and it doesn’t really matter what your sex is. But in certain circumstances it is very important, such as prisons or women’s sport, changing rooms or rape crisis centres. This is where it’s actually important.”

Particularly for a certain sub-set of womankind: “Especially for the lesbians who intervened in this case, if they hadn’t actually won today it would have been illegal for lesbians, or gay men, to have a group of more than 25 people if they didn’t admit the opposite sex and we’d have the ridiculous notion of a lesbian with a penis.”

A straight woman with a penis, on the other hand, is perfectly all right, provided she doesn’t try to sneak into a women’s dressing room. Am I missing something or has the world gone mad?

My conviction that it’s the latter was reinforced by Kate Barker, chief executive of LGB Alliance, who said: “The ruling confirms that the words ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ refer to same-sex sexual orientation and makes it absolutely clear that lesbians wishing to form associations of any size are lawfully entitled to exclude men – whether or not they possess a GRC.”

Earlier I described the Supreme Court ruling as a “landmine” decision, and it wasn’t just indulging my propensity for playing on words. Call me selfish, insensitive and reactionary, but I haven’t had many sleepless nights worrying about transsexuals stealing lesbians’ thunder.

As framed and communicated urbi et orbi, this wishy-washy ruling is exactly what one would expect from a redundant legal body designed as a weapon against our ancient constitution.

The Court should have stated that the issue isn’t about transsexuals entering women’s lavatories or tennis tournaments, and it’s not about protecting the exclusive same-sex rights of lesbians.

The situation is simple, so simple in fact that it should never have reached the jurisdiction of an appellate court: a laddie can call himself a lady, have his manhood snipped off (or not, as the case may be) and swap his kilt for a skirt. But in the eyes of the law and society he remains a man, full stop.

And if he is still a man, it should go without saying, and certainly without a Supreme Court decision, that he can’t enter spaces reserved for women. Anyone who says otherwise should have not just his genitals but also his head examined.

As it is, this landmine ruling leaves plenty of room for further challenges, meaning that the mental disease afflicting our society will continue to progress and fester. So forgive me if I don’t rejoice at this half-justice.

I like my justice like I like my wee dram: full-strength. There, I’ve now exhausted my reserves of Scottish lore. “Haste ye back,” as they say north of the border.

“Wars aren’t won by generals,” Bismark once said. “They are won by school teachers and parish priests.”

Adjusting for our heathen time, we must replace parish priests with universities. But otherwise the Iron Chancellor was right.

Modern wars are either won or lost not by armies, but by nations. And nations become strong when their minds are properly educated and their hearts are properly primed.

If that condition isn’t met, the strongest army on paper will become the weakest army in battle. And vice versa – as the Ukraine is showing, a smaller nation blessed with a strong mind and morale can keep a major power at bay.

Both mind and morale don’t just happen by themselves. They must be developed and nurtured, which indeed makes schools and universities the smithies of nationhood.

If such institutions are in default of their mission, a responsible government must do all it can to get them back on track by any legal means necessary. If that means war, then so be it.

Such is the approach of the Trump administration, which seems to be in a combative mood. There are two other wars in which the US is currently involved either directly or indirectly: the trade war America is waging on the world and the aggression Russia is perpetrating on the Ukraine.

Trump’s approach to both covers a broad range from idiotic to criminal, but he is on the right side in the war he is waging on American universities, specifically Harvard. Acting in the capacity of loaded guns is the federal funding, which the government may withhold at its discretion.

That’s precisely what the Trump administration did when it froze more than $2 billion in such funding for Harvard. The immediate reason was the White House’s commitment to “ending unchecked anti-Semitism and ensuring federal taxpayer dollars do not fund Harvard’s support of dangerous racial discrimination or racially motivated violence”.

That was a reference to a wave of pro-Palestinian, at base anti-Semitic, rallies regularly held at Harvard and other universities under frankly incendiary slogans. But the issue is even worse than that.

American – and European – universities are increasingly replacing their core business of education with indoctrination, trying to turn their students into ignorant woke zealots committed to DEI subversion. Rather than educating the students’ minds, the universities are inflaming their passions, and pernicious passions at that.

Trump’s message to Harvard is that if that’s what you want to do to your students, by all means continue. But the federal government isn’t going to pay for it.

Harvard President Alan Graber predictably screamed bloody murder, or rather threat to academic independence. The Department of Education, he wrote, wants “to control the Harvard community”, jeopardising its “values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge”.

I don’t get this, and neither by the sound of him does Trump. If Harvard is such a stickler for its independence, it shouldn’t need federal billions to stay afloat. And if it wants the money, it should accept the strings attached to the purse – and in this case the strings are much needed.

I don’t know whether Trump can win the war against DEI madness, but it’s certainly one worth waging. Otherwise an agricultural analogy comes into play.

One way to combat a blight caused by locusts is to catch as many male ones as possible and turn them into drones by castrating them with radiation. When then released into the wild, the insects try to mate with their females but fail to produce any progeny. This disrupts the reproduction cycle and eventually wipes out the whole crop-destroying population.

That’s what taking one or two generations out of normal intellectual life does to the mental and moral health of a country. And this is exactly what Western universities do by churning out alumni well-versed in such disciplines as Black Lesbian Paraplegic Studies and proudly displaying degrees in cultural and intellectual subversion.

Just as I was sensing a nice warm feeling about Trump appearing somewhere in my breast, he had to go and spoil it all by uttering what my good friend called “the most revolting statement I’ve ever heard from a politician in my whole life.”

That was really saying something considering that my friend is roughly my age and must have heard quite a few revolting statements. He was referring to Trump’s comments on yet another war crime committed by Putin’s fascists, a murderous rocket attack on Sumy city centre.

That was Putin’s way of celebrating Palm Sunday (for botanical reasons, it’s called Willow Sunday in Russia), although I don’t think he got his theology right. On that day, Jesus entered Jerusalem to begin his Passion that led him to the Calvary on Friday.

Someone as committed to ‘traditional values’ as Putin claims to be ought to know that the idea was self-sacrifice for the sake of others, not sacrificing others for the sake of evil. Vlad made a mistake, and that was how Trump interpreted the war crime that killed 34 civilians and injured over 100, as a lapsus manus.

Putin, he said, “made a mistake”, sort of like capitalising words that shouldn’t be capitalised. Asked to elucidate, Trump added that “they made a mistake… you’re gonna ask them”.

But the real mistake, he explained, was made by Biden and especially Zelensky who is “always looking to purchase missiles”. Then came the statement that upset my friend so much.

“You don’t start a war against someone 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles,” Trump told reporters. “When you start a war, you got to know you can win.”

Yes, that’s why Zelensky didn’t start that war. Putin did, by committing an act of aggression aimed at rebuilding the Soviet empire and dictating terms to the West, certainly its European part.

Trump’s idea of avoiding that war against a stronger enemy is for the Ukraine to have surrendered the moment Russian hordes crossed the border. Things like honour, liberty, sovereignty don’t come into that.

Nor should Zelensky “hope” for missiles and other US assistance. That was explicitly guaranteed the Ukraine under the terms of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. In exchange for the Ukraine relinquishing her nuclear arsenal, the signatories, the US, Britain and Russia, undertook to protect the country’s territorial integrity.

No one took Russia’s promises seriously, but the US and Britain were supposed to be civilised countries bound by their word. Thus, Zelensky shouldn’t have had to “purchase missiles” or beg for them. Military hardware ought to have been provided to the Ukraine without quibbles or charges the moment Russia violated the terms of the Budapest Memorandum.

But then Trump has a peculiar idea about America’s contractual obligations. If he wasn’t president at the time they were signed, as far as he is concerned they are null and void.

He didn’t mind spelling out that notion in his own inimitable fashion: “The War between Russia and Ukraine is Biden’s war, not mine. I just got here, and for four years during my term, had no problem in preventing it from happening.

“President Putin, and everyone else, respected your President! I HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS WAR, BUT AM WORKING DILIGENTLY TO GET THE DEATH AND DESTRUCTION TO STOP. 

“If the 2020 Presidential Election was not RIGGED, and it was, in so many ways, that horrible War would never have happened. President Zelenskyy and Crooked Joe Biden did an absolutely horrible job in allowing this travesty to begin.”

I fully expect Trump to develop this thought on Good Friday by saying that, had he been president at the time, Jesus would never have been crucified. Nor would either World War have happened, the Bolsheviks wouldn’t have taken over Russia, and the Great Depression would have been avoided.

I don’t know whether the latest round of Trump’s pronouncements on the Ukraine are among the most revolting political statements I’ve ever heard. Let’s just say there are quite a few close seconds, and the Donald can claim proud ownership of many of them.

There’s a scandal with strong dental implications unfolding in America, and sides must be taken. Hence I have to repeat what Leo Tolstoy said on a different subject: I cannot remain silent.

The other day, the American comedy show, Saturday Night Live, used an actress with prosthetic teeth to mock the White Lotus star Aimee Lou Wood for her characteristic English incisors.

Miss Wood took exception to that, calling the parody “mean and unfunny”. Since I haven’t seen the sketch, I don’t have a view on its quality. But I do have a view on English teeth, which I regard as a badge of national honour.

Foreigners tend to make fun of them, but only because they are secretly envious of the English, aware that they themselves drew a losing ticket in what Cecil Rhodes called “the lottery of life”.

Recognising this, Spike Milligan, though himself half-Irish, wrote a song celebrating his better, English, half: “English Teeth, English Teeth!/ Shining in the sun/ A part of British heritage/ Aye, each and every one/ English Teeth, Happy Teeth! Always having fun/ Clamping down on bits of fish/ And sausages half done/ English Teeth! HEROES’ Teeth!”

Penelope, my better half in the more usual sense of this phrase, is also a proud possessor of that hallmark of Englishness, which, as you can see in the photograph, does her looks no harm. I often say, only half in jest, that her teeth are the foundation on which our 40-year marriage rests.

If you like the English and their language, you must also like their teeth, it’s as simple as that. For it’s the language that gave the English dental structure that most endearing overbite.

Many English vowels are enunciated with the lower jaw retracting slightly, and I’ll leave you to decide the nature of the causality there. Did God who, as we know, was Himself an Englishman, make the English that way to make it easier for them to speak the best language in His creation? Or did the language have a formative effect on the English dental structure?

One way or another, the link exists. American sounds, by contrast, are formed deeper in the mouth and involve the lower jaw much more. Over time, this phonetic peculiarity has produced the heavy, jutting jaw typical of that nation. Such sound production also creates more resonant waves, making many Americans talk more loudly than they intend.

That’s partly why one can always hear two Americans talking across the restaurant floor. The other, non-phonetical, reason is the inherent American belief that, since all men are created equally interesting, even strangers must find whatever they say to each other fascinating.

Interestingly, both that tendency and indeed the jutting jaw begin to disappear the higher up the American class ladder you climb. Paul Fussell, whose seminal (and humorous) book on American social divisions, Class, I can’t recommend too highly, compared upper-class and lower-class American profiles and reached the same conclusion.

The higher the social class of an American speaker, the closer his accent moves to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, making his speech no louder than British, and his jaw no heavier. Though less pronounced in Britain, this tendency also exists here, which is why “chinless wonder” is a widespread prole putdown of the upper classes.

It pains me, as a patriot of England, to admit that, while the English lead the world in dental configuration, they don’t enjoy quite the same excellence in the quality of their dentistry. On the other hand, I find the American obsession with perfect teeth quite ludicrous.

Without wishing to go too far out on a limb, I’d suggest that this reflects the overall American tendency to uniformity. By contrast, English teeth may be imperfect but they are a marker (sometimes the marker) of individual character.

Thus, I much prefer Miss Wood’s teeth to the gleaming gnashers of her co-star, Walton Goggins. They make one think of Wedgwood porcelain more than of any part of human physique. One’s teeth, Mr Goggins, aren’t supposed to gleam in the dark, nor especially to light up a room when the electricity is out.

Speaking of the link between the English overbite and phonetics, when I was studying English at my Moscow university, by some quirk of nature a few of my fellow students had that same overbite. And what do you know, they found it much easier to produce authentic English sounds.

I don’t know whether the formative effect of phonetics on oral structure has been covered in medical literature. Perhaps it has been, unbeknown to me. But my lifelong observation suggests the link exists, and not just in English.

The French, for example, produce most vowels labially, which often gives them slightly protruding lips, predisposing them for… Well, I’d better quit while I’m behind. I don’t want to get into more trouble than I’m already in.

At first glance, this title may strike you as odd. After all, Trump’s hopes for winning that coveted accolade were mainly linked to him ending Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine – within 24 hours or thereabouts.

Yet it turned out that the deal our peace-maker had in mind was the unconditional capitulation of the Ukraine. To begin with, Trump sided with North Korea, Russia and Belarus to vote against condemning Russia for that aggression, or even recognising it as such.

Then he agreed with Putin that the Zelensky government was illegitimate because it refused to hold elections while 20 per cent of the country’s territory was occupied by the Russians. Consequently, Trump had accepted every Russian demand before the negotiations even began.

Proceeding from that wobbly platform, his representatives have now proposed that the Ukraine be treated the way the victorious Allies treated Nazi Germany, splitting it into sectors. To be fair, the Ukraine will be magnanimously allowed to control one of them.

The nuanced differences between Nazi Germany and the Ukraine seem to have escaped Trump. First, the former was the aggressor and the latter the victim of aggression. Second, Nazi Germany was thrashed, while the Ukraine is still holding her own. And third, Nazi Germany was an anti-Western totalitarian dictatorship, while the Ukraine is a pro-Western democracy, albeit not as perfect as Trump’s version of that form of government.

Predictably, the Ukrainians refused to bend over and offer Trump his favourite gluteal tribute. There go his chances for the Nobel, right? Wrong.

For at the other end of the earth the Donald has managed to achieve an improbable peace-making feat that has been defeating diplomats’ best efforts for centuries. Surely, that accomplishment merits the ultimate recognition.

You see, Asian, what used to be called Oriental, countries have a long history of animosity towards one another. The Chinese hate the Japanese, so do the Vietnamese, the Chinese hate the Vietnamese and also the Koreans, who too detest the Japanese. The Japanese both hate and despise them all. China wants to occupy Taiwan, and the Taiwanese have stated their intention to fight to the last man.

And the less said about China and India, the better. It’s only by a tremendous exercise in self-restraint that the two countries have so far refrained from lobbing nuclear bombs at each other.

This maelstrom of ill-will also draws in Malaysia, Cambodia and Indonesia. All those countries are at daggers drawn with their neighbours in the region, especially Japan but also China and India.

Such sentiments go back a long way, centuries definitely, millennia in some cases probably. Wars involving the countries mentioned are too numerous to count (including some during my lifetime) and if, as is prudent, you believe their rhetoric, they are nowhere near finished.

But then rode in Trump, wearing the white vestments of a peace-maker. And, in one fell swoop, he made those warring nations realise they have more things in common than those setting them apart. Unity has emerged out of disunity, friendship out of enmity.

Trump set out to cut off America’s economic nose to spite China’s face by introducing 125 per cent tariffs on all Chinese imports. The Chinese responded in kind, which has effectively put paid to all trade between the world’s two biggest economies.

The other day I tried to argue that, while that American policy made no economic sense at all (unless the underlying aim is to impoverish US consumers), it could be justified in terms of strategic necessity. Communist China is getting too strong and too dangerous, making it vital for America to repatriate some manufacturing while also enfeebling China.

That argument owed more to my reluctance to come across as an anti-Trump zealot than to any serious analysis. Repatriating strategic industries does make sense, and not just for the US. But that would take much more than just stopping trade with China.

Also, although the tariffs will damage China, they certainly won’t destroy her. Trade with the US accounts for only two per cent of China’s GDP. Losing that would hurt, but the Chinese are used to pain. And even if they weren’t, there would be precious little they could do about it without asking their communist rulers for another Tiananmen Square.

Then again, ready remedies are on offer. China may simply start dumping her exports on Europe and all other continents except the southern half of North America. And her strategic position has been strengthened no end because all those other countries have also been hit with punitive tariffs, although neither they nor anyone else can figure out what it is they are being punished for.

With the world’s biggest economy declaring war on them, the problems those countries had with one another began to look trivial. Now they are ready to close ranks against the common enemy, which is America expertly guided to the precipice by Trump’s hand.

Japan and North Korea have already signed an agreement with China, and you aren’t getting any prizes for figuring who will be the senior partner in that alliance. The other countries I’ve mentioned are in the advanced stages of similar negotiations, and even the EU is making overtures to Peking.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez visited China yesterday, and Xi told him that China and the EU should “jointly resist the unilateral bullying practices” of the Trump administration. Sanchez agreed with alacrity: Spain and, by implication, the EU aren’t going to follow America’s suit.

Also, the EU and China are discussing the possibility of removing European tariffs on Chinese cars, to be replaced with a minimum price instead. Next Xi will visit Malaysia, Vietnam and Cambodia, while his ministers are holding high-level discussions in South Africa, Saudi Arabia and India. The subject is the same: greater economic cooperation.

If that doesn’t get Trump his Nobel Peace prize, I don’t know what will. One thing for sure: he isn’t going to win one for economics.

When the stock market crashed last week, Trump just shrugged. Who cares?

Well, he should, considering his braggadocio during his first term, when he took the credit for the markets going up. Make up your mind, Donald: either your policies affect the stock market or they don’t. If they do, then the same person responsible for the ups is also responsible for the downs, as dialectics would suggest.

Then came a little legerdemain, with Trump declaring out of the blue a 90-day suspension of the worst tariffs. He had obligingly told his loyal lieutenants about that a few hours in advance, giving them time to buy at rock bottom. When the stock shot up, his friends cleaned up, with, for example, Musk rumoured to have made over $30 billion.

The market euphoria didn’t last, and the bond market crashed next. When that happened to the shares, Americans, 65 per cent of whom are involved in the market one way or another, cringed. But what happened to the bonds was even worse.

US Treasury bonds finance the country’s sovereign debt, to the tune of some $36 billion. Their yields determine the cost of public (also, indirectly, private) borrowing. And the yields depend on the traders’ confidence – or in this case lack thereof.

Markets are unsentimental, and they aren’t going to kiss any portion of Trump’s anatomy. With the US economy suddenly unpredictable, and its government playing Russian roulette with each chamber in the cylinder loaded, some invisible button got pushed and institutional investors began to get out of the T-bills.

As an immediate result, the cost of borrowing went up, just at the time when America needs to refinance $9 trillion of her debt. Inflation rise is sure to follow, and more borrowing will be necessary to fund even more borrowing.

Add to this the rising prices of all goods wholly or partly imported, which is to say just about all goods, and US consumers are going to bear the brunt of Trump’s illiterate brinkmanship. Hence, if he is to make that trip to Stockholm at all, it won’t be because of his seminal contribution to economics.

Yet, as far as I’m concerned, he is still in the running for the Peace Prize. That’s the least the Nobel Committee can do for someone who made China, India and Japan see eye to eye.

Donald Trump sees the world in terms of deals, deals in terms of personal relationships, and personal relationships in terms of who’s on top.

America is top dog in the world, Trump is top dog in America, and as long as foreign leaders recognise this and pay appropriate obeisance, he sees them as friends – in the same sense in which Vito Corleone saw his underlings as friends.

(I know I’ve drawn analogies between Trump and The Godfather before, but that’s the kind of shoe that fits.)

If, however, they choose to play silly Barzinis, then no punishment seems severe enough. Trump will remind them who is boss even if that means destroying the economy of the whole world, including the US.

That’s what he did, explaining that foreign countries had “ripped us off left and right, but now it’s our turn to do the ripping … I know what the hell I’m doing.” What he was doing in the full knowledge was wiping untold trillions off the world’s wealth in one fell swoop.

Trump proved his ability to turn people into millionaires, provided they were billionaires to begin with. He was also taking a sledgehammer to millions of nest eggs, and everyone ran scared, fearing that perhaps Trump didn’t really know what the hell he was doing.

With his characteristic flair for English, Trump branded them as “weak and stupid people” and coined his own neologism, “panicans”, because only weak and stupid people used the old word ‘panickers’.

When a loose cannon careers about, crushing everything in its way, then the best thing to do is get out of its way. But there was nowhere for those uppity foreigners to go, what with Musk’s project of mass emigration to Mars still being in design stage.

Hence foreign leaders had to reenact the opening sequence in The Godfather and offer Trump their respect in exchange for his protection.

Trump commented on that submission with his customary elegance: “These countries are calling me up, kissing my ass … they are dying to make a deal.” With the Pope, supplicants only have to kiss his ring, but then it’s Trump and not His Holiness who is truly infallible.

“Please, please, sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything,” is how Trump described their supplications. I don’t know whether he told them that one day he’d expect them to provide a service, but The Godfather ethos seems to demand that sort of thing.

His personal objective thus achieved, Trump must have cast a panoramic look at the world’s economy and found it lying in ruins. Having extracted from the economic primer every prerequisite for a global recession, possibly depression, he knew he really was top dog.

Now he had shown the world his true power, people were offering him proper rispetto. Actually, this was the sort of respect offered to a chap who pulls the safety pin out of a hand grenade on a crowded bus, but that didn’t matter to Trump.

Something else did though. His capi de regime were getting restless. You see, some of them, such as Musk, Bessent and a whole raft of major donors got caught in the crossfire.

Musk, for example, lost $8.7 billion as a direct result of Trump’s affection for tariffs, and he had been a loyal lieutenant. Bessent too suffered huge attrition, although, as a former hedge fund manager, he wouldn’t own up to the number of billions wiped off his books.

When Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade advisor, tried to tell those dissenters to shut up and follow the leader, all hell broke loose. Musk called Navarro “a moron” who is “dumber than a sack of bricks”. Leader, schmeader, that was serious business they were talking about, billions, for crying out loud.

That gave Trump a dilemma. Dropping his trousers to let foreigners pay their respects was one thing, but upsetting his nearest and dearest wasn’t on. What if they did a Tessio and switched sides?

An announcement followed that all tariffs above the ironclad 10 per cent were being suspended for 90 days. The markets and, more important, the wealth of his loyal servants, shot up, and Trumps capi di regime began to smile again. This, though Trump had declared just two days earlier that “my policies will never change”.

After that, Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, and indeed his Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, explained that had been the plan all along. Trump had staged that little demonstration of power to gain “leverage”. They didn’t explain what the leverage was for and whom it was against, leaving that to their listeners’ imagination.

Let me see if I understand. So the plan was to crash the world’s markets and, just as the world was bending down to pay its respects, to withdraw – well, suspend – most tariffs, putting the economic roller-coaster on a steep upswing. Do I get this right?

If I do, then let me draw your attention to a little fact. At 9.37 AM yesterday, when the markets had hit rock bottom, Trump posted that “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” Why was it such a great time?

Buying low makes sense only if you confidently expect the market to climb up soon or at least eventually. Yet no one expected that, quite the opposite. Every economist, analyst and commentator was sure that, since Trump had declared that his policies would “never change”, the market was going to continue its accelerating downward slide.

Buying under such circumstances would have meant throwing good money after bad. Only one thing could have made yesterday a great time to buy: foreknowledge that the tariffs would be dropped the next day and the markets would surge in consequence.

And only one man, Trump himself, possessed such foreknowledge, which he could then vouchsafe to some of his loyal servants, such as Musk and Bessent. Did they follow that advice? And if so, how much did they make from such knowledge?

I wonder if Bessent and Leavitt realise what they said. They actually hinted at the possibility of market manipulation, an offence for which uncountable traders have been sent down for rather long stretches.

Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that’s what Trump did – only that it looks as if he might have done. The trick is as old as the hills: you find a way to depress the market, buy as long a position as your finances allow, then watch the market shoot up, sell and laugh all the way to the bank.

Have Tessio whacked, reward your loyal capi di regime, make everyone else pay their osculating respects… well, I don’t want to keep banging on about The Godfather. It’s just that the analogy refuses to go away.

A question, if I may. What happens after 90 days? Another roller-coaster ride? More people losing their pensions and more of Trump’s friends making a killing?

Let’s just say I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some of Trump’s lieutenants eventually got done for insider trading. But, I hasten to add, the Donald himself will have to remain above suspicion, like Caesar’s wife.

Or else they use the word ‘religion’ loosely, to denote a sense of something mystical, spiritual and extra-material in nature.

True enough, few Russians, indeed few people in general, ever deny the presence of something that can’t be described in strictly physical terms. Those who do so are sorely unobservant and also illogical. After all, they argue in favour of their obtuse materialism using a manifestly non-material faculty, their reason.

Yet sensing that there is more to the world than just an aggregate of molecules has little to do with religion. By itself, that perception is more likely to lead to superstition, including all kinds of its brutal forms, or else to abstract natural mysticism.

Yet natural mysticism isn’t a religion, though it can be the first step along the way. Mysticism is amorphous; it is a hazy instinct that hasn’t yet reached, nor may ever reach, God. It is content in search of form, not yet sure of itself and therefore uncertain which form will suit it best.

Only religion can steer a man to God, by crystallising a vague longing into faith and offering a moulded shape into which the longing can flow.

The shape is well defined: whereas amorphous mysticism has to remain abstract, religion is always concrete. There exists no religion in general. There are only specific religions, each with its own revelation, dogma and rituals – its own way of looking at God and his world.

Mysticism, on the other hand, can only exist in general, and in that sense it is not only different from religion but indeed opposite to it. That’s why many who flirt with mysticism, including some of Russia’s greatest writers, such as Tolstoy, only ever use it as a stick with which to beat religion on the head.

As religion is both higher and grander than mysticism, it tends to subsume it, channelling it into religion’s own reservoir. Mysticism, on the other hand, sometimes refuses to be diverted into that conduit.

One can say that mysticism relates to faith the way anarchy relates to liberty. When it is particularly recalcitrant, it may rebel against religion to protect what may appear to be its freedom, but is in fact its amorphousness. When such a rebellion occurs, it can be expressed in ways that are not only non-religious but also actively anti-religious. Thus, while ‘an atheist Christian’ doesn’t sound plausible, ‘an atheist mystic’ does.

It is amorphous mysticism, rather than true religiosity, that is a characteristic Russian trait. This could have led to genuine faith first and real religion second, but, alas, disdain for any formal restrictions to their self-expression has prevented the Russians from following such a progression, en masse at any rate.

This anti-formalism doesn’t just affect religion. It also explains why the Russians have never developed a knack for improving the state or any other public institutions. If they can’t destroy such institutions, they are more inclined to run away, preventing the state from destroying them.

In fact, the Russians tend to be averse to any disciplined form that might contain their fluid substance, which is why all those democracies and free markets can never succeed there even when, or rather if, they are ever tried for real.

This tendency extends even to aesthetics. For example, though all Russians hail Pushkin as the greatest poet of all time (“our all”, as the critic Apollon Grigoriev described him), his classicist form and cut-glass Mozartian cadences had no followers.

According to the philosopher Nikolai Lossky, this disdain for form even penetrated the Russians’ gene pool, having produced so many ill-defined, amorphous facial features clearly different, say, from the chiselled Northern European profile. Indeed many Russians, even those from old families, show a certain lack of straight lines in their faces.

It is as if, having drawn a sketch of their features, God then went over it, smudging every line with his thumb. Lossky’s observation may be too sweeping, but it is certainly evident that the Russians’ amorphousness extends to the way they treat every public institution, from justice to religion.

Traditional Russian lawlessness is well publicised, but mostly in the context of the state being bound by no legal constraints. It is less often mentioned that not only do Russian rulers seldom obey their own laws, but they don’t even insist that the ruled do – for as long as the latter don’t mind being ruled.

In that sense, it is Russia herself, and not just her governments, that has always been lawless. Nor do the people define liberty in any legal terms. The old Russian word for freedom, volia, is etymologically related to ‘will’, which stands to reason. Freedom to a Russian means being able to do as he wills, not obeying just laws that protect his liberties.

Many ascribe this tendency to the Asian part of the Russian character. However, lawlessness in Russia is markedly different from that in the traditional Eastern tyrannies.

There the populace was expected to follow every letter of the law, even if the despots themselves ignored its very spirit. But in Russia lawlessness functioned at all levels even under the tsars. At the top the arbitrary will of the tsar was the only law, and he could punish anyone with utmost cruelty for the slightest infraction. At the same time, he could let anyone get away with murder if such was his wish.

For example, Paul I once ordered the promotion of an officer who had had a trader hanged for having refused to sell hay for his company’s horses. On another day the same officer could have been severely chastised.

Those who derive their knowledge of Russia from Kremlin propaganda, refracted through our press, like to repeat the canard about Russians flocking to churches in their droves. In fact, church attendance in Russia is no higher than in Britain, and no one has ever accused the British of excessive piety.

Only between 0.5 and 2 per cent of Russians in big cities attend Easter services, and overall the number of actively practising Orthodox Christians is only marginally greater. In light of what I’ve said about the Russian character, it could hardly be otherwise.

Orthodox Christianity is an apostolic religion and, as such, imposes a strict discipline of dogma, ritual and doctrine. That sort of thing is alien to much-vaunted Russian spirituality, and many Russians, if they ever go to church at all, prefer various Protestant sects, which they find more conducive to free expression.

I don’t know why I felt compelled to write about this. Perhaps the proximity of Easter has made it hard to think about mundane matters. But this is a passing aberration, and tomorrow we’ll be back talking about Trump.

At some time “in the course of human events”, Western statesmen were replaced with politicians, politicians with nonentities, and nonentities with spivs.

Explaining why would take a book-length essay, but suffice it to say in a short article that some regression along those lines is easy to observe. The cited phrase in the first sentence comes from The Declaration of Independence, which hints at the leading role played by the US.

This isn’t an exercise in Americanophobia, but simply a recognition of the country’s role as the leader of the free world. It stands to reason that, if the US leads the West, she does so on a path not only to successes but also to failures.

Hence one doesn’t find among American politicians of today the same human calibre that was taken for granted, say, the 25 years on either side of 1800 – or even of 1900. The same goes for Europe, which makes it hard to escape the feeling that the US leads the free world on its way down, politically at any rate.

Myopia describes the unsavoury political types I mentioned earlier, whereas statesmen’s vision is hyperopic, able to see far into the future. This type of sight isn’t to be found among today’s politicians in the US or elsewhere in the West.

That’s why, ever since the world was cursed with truly satanic regimes, in countries like Russia, Italy, Germany and China, along with their allies and satellites, the West has consistently demonstrated strategic short-sightedeness, exacerbated by declining moral and intellectual standards.

Unable to see much farther than their noses, Western countries, but especially the US, busily built up those regimes to a point where they became a genuine threat to our civilisation. Then, when the threat became impossible to ignore, American and other Western governments would desperately try to snuff it out, exposing their countries to immense losses of money and, as often as not, human lives.

The late Stanford scholar, Dr Anthony C. Sutton, described that folly in a series of copiously documented studies, including the seminal trilogy Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development and also Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler. Without going into detail, let’s just say that the piles of documents he cites prove that without US economic and technological help, neither Bolshevism nor Nazism would have grown to its diabolical maturity.

China is another case in point. Her rise to her present status of an economic and military superpower began on 2 October, 1959, when the Sino-Soviet split kicked off with Khrushchev’s outburst and Mao’s reaction. Cold war was in full swing at the time, with America trying to contain Soviet expansion and growing influence.

The Sino-Soviet split turned China into a natural ally of America – our enemies’ enemies, and all that. Myopically, a succession of US presidents didn’t see China as a threat. The country was backward, impoverished, ravaged by communist terror, the people were starving – China was seen as a useful ally able to add her penny’s worth to the anti-Soviet cause, but not as any potential threat in her own right.

American courtship of China began, and it was eventually consummated in February 1972, when a beaming Richard Nixon shook hands with Zhou Enlai at Peking airport. From then onwards the trickle of US assistance to China has been steadily growing into a mighty stream.

Egregious folly, partly springing from an inability to plan for the future and partly from a misguided faith in the redemptive potential of commerce, made the US pump funds and technology into the sclerotic veins of China’s economy.

The picture Nixon and all subsequent presidents saw in their myopic mind’s eye was of China becoming richer and eventually democratic. How could she not? Once the Chinese people got enough rice to eat and wash down with Coca Cola, surely they’d see the democratic light shone by America?

That sort of thinking shows a profound misunderstanding of political evil, in fact an inability to think in such terms. People in general and Americans in particular like to think that deep down everyone is, or desperately wishes to be, just like them.

They know that they themselves are good people thinking of nothing but “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. So the Chinese have the same aspirations, even if they are latent at the moment. All those poor souls need is a little help, and what better way of providing it than through commerce?

This hopelessly naïve and short-sighted view of the world ignored the evil nature of China’s communist regime holding total, not to say totalitarian, sway over its people. Chinese people didn’t matter: they were either brainwashed or browbeaten by the regime. And the regime realised that what was being offered to it on a platter was a chance to dominate the world, that perennial daydream of all communists.

Some US presidents, such as Clinton, meekly tried to link further assistance to some progress in the issue of human rights, but they quickly abandoned such half-hearted attempts. China was steadily built up into the workshop of the West, with more and more products manufactured there.

Westerners would then slap their labels on those products, turning them into respectable brands. But their affection for cheap labour gradually turned into an addiction: if the Chinese could make the same things for less, one would be stupid not to take advantage of that opportunity. Especially since the Chinese could only provide the muscle, not the American capacity for technological innovation.

In 2001 George W. Bush generously welcomed China into the WTO, plugging her fully into the West’s supply chain and, as a corollary, acting as Dr Frankenstein to China’s monster. The evil communist regime was well on the road to global power.

Then, what do you know, the Chinese, who are a talented and industrious people, showed that they can do so much better than just toiling in factories for coolie wages. Their perfidious communist masters wisely loosened the reins a bit, and Chinese scientists and engineers were able to go to work.

Today, 40 per cent of all patents issued in the world go to China, and suddenly she no longer needs American labels on her products. She can put her own on, while continuing to build up her manufacturing base to a point where China can match up to America economically and militarily anywhere in the world.

The communist reins might have been loosened, but the harness is still there, and China’s regime remains as evil as ever. But it’s infinitely stronger than it has ever been.

Much of the debacle visited by Trump on the world has been caused by the belated realisation setting in: as always, America first builds up her evil adversaries and, when they grow strong enough to challenge her, has a Damascene experience.

The worst words in the political lexicon, We must do something!, then thunder from all media and certainly the White House. Rather than preventing monsters from growing to maturity, the West, especially America, weans them first and then tries to slay them when they already breathe fire and threaten to incinerate the world.

Trump is economically illiterate, but some of his advisers aren’t. They must have explained to the president that wholesale sanctions make no economic sense. And if you don’t believe us, Donald, just look at what’s happening in the markets. You used to blow your own trumpet when the stock market went up during your first term, so are you going to eat crow now?

All that is fine and well, but no economic sense doesn’t necessarily mean no sense at all. Even Trump is beginning to understand that there is more to life than just a commercial transaction at the end of which he gets richer.

Progressive, century-long myopia has led to the nurturing of a succession of evil regimes, of which China just may be the most dangerous. So yes, of course it’s cheaper to outsource most manufacturing to countries like China, those that can do manufacturing for less.

But being dependent on our enemies for the supply of strategic goods, from food to steel to electronics to everything else in between, means courting disaster. So America finally perched bifocal glasses on the tip of her nose and saw that she is on the verge of losing her superpower status to a bunch of communists who have stubbornly refused to be guided by the light of democracy.

The world is pregnant with conflict and it may give birth to war at any moment. That’s why Trump is trying to repatriate the manufacturing his predecessors foolishly allowed to go elsewhere. He is doing that in a typically bullyish and heavy-handed fashion, causing more harm than good at the moment.

But at least that dread phrase, We must do something!, is clearly sounding in the back of his mind. Instead of being the John Wayne of the world, kicking doors in and shoving the nasties aside, America is now in a clearly defensive mode.

Aware that the US can no longer afford to be the leader of the free world, Trump is trying to cut his losses by withdrawing, or as near as damn, from all traditional alliances and obligations. He says he isn’t going to lift a finger in defence of a corrupt Ukraine, pathetic and freeloading Europe, and thieving Taiwan.

Let Putin have the first, along with as much of the second as he can swallow, and let China have Taiwan. America needs to buy time to become a manufacturing autarky again, but she now needs too much time.

Even assuming that this goal is achievable, it’ll take years, more likely decades, to achieve it. Rebuilding, say, the steel and aluminium production will take longer than the same 24 hours it didn’t take to end Putin’s aggression against the Ukraine. America might have waited too long, reaping the short-term harvest and leaving the really vital fields fallow.

We should all hope America gets the time she needs, and we must all follow her on the same path, one leading to strategic survival. A quick course of political ophthalmology treatment is sorely needed though.

Trade war can only make us less prosperous. Class war can make us less civilised, and prosperity is much easier to recover.

For all the pseudo-conservative noises Starmer makes, his is a Marxist government that only ever contains its carnivorous instincts for fear of electoral reprisal. And Marxists don’t rationally weigh the pros and cons of class war any more than a dog considers the advisability of chasing a cat.

Both breeds follow the imperatives coded into their DNA, and in doing so they act without a choice. Dogs dislike cats, Marxists hate everything to do with Western tradition.

It’s only in this context that one can properly evaluate the Labour bill to do away with the 88 remaining hereditary peers in the House of Lords. “Hereditary peers are indefensible,” said the Labour manifesto in the latest election, presumably because they’ve been neither elected nor appointed by Labour governments.

Such illiterate idiocy strikes a chord in untutored hearts, which alas constitute an overwhelming cardiac majority in today’s Britain. We are a democratic country, aren’t we? We are. Then those who govern us must be elected or, at a pinch, appointed by those who have been. End of story.

Many of those who mouth such bilge don’t seem to have any problem with having an unelected and hereditary head of state, but that problem will arise sooner or later. The God of Democracy is athirst, demanding more and more sacrifices.

Yet the very existence of a king should have tipped off those people that, a democracy though Britain may be, it’s also a monarchy, albeit a constitutional one. That fact alone points to the essence of Britain’s polity, the oldest and most consistent realisation of the most sound political idea, that of mixed government.

Having analysed the three principal methods of government known at the time, aristocracy, oligarchy and democracy, both Plato and Aristotle found each of them wanting. No political arrangement can exist in its pure form without degenerating into something unsavoury. That’s why the synthetic constitution of Lycurgus in Sparta lasted longer than the purely democratic constitution of Solon in Athens.

Following the Greeks, Machiavelli argued in his Discourses that, when their purity is intransigently maintained, a principality turns into a tyranny, an aristocracy into an oligarchy and a democracy into anarchy. For a political arrangement to last, and for liberty to thrive, a state must combine the elements of all three known forms of government. A division of power, in which none of the estates feels the need to usurp the total power, is thus a proven guarantor of social longevity.

That idea lies at the foundation of most Western democracies, but especially of England and all the countries directly influenced by her. The constitution of England combines the monarchy of the king, the democracy of the Commons, and the unelected fulcrum between the two, the House of Lords, ensuring that neither end of the seesaw shoots up too vigorously.

This system goes back centuries. It was from barons’ councils that our modern parliaments have evolved, and the post-Hellenic system of representation has ancient roots as well.

For example, in England before the Norman conquest it was the Witenagemot, the assembly of the kingdom’s leading nobles, that would convene after a king’s death to select a successor. That was, to name one instance, how Harold Godwinson took the throne, which he then lost to a Norman arrow in 1066.

So yes, Britain is a democracy, but she can’t be a democracy run riot. If she becomes that, she won’t be Britain in any other than the geographical sense. For Britain is defined by her ancient constitution more than any other European country (the US is equally dependent on her own constitution, but it’s just a modification of the English antecedent).

Since the 1789 Revolution, France has had 14 different constitutions, the current one established in 1958. Replace it with a fifteenth, and France will remain France, to paraphrase Maurice Chevalier’s song (Paris sera toujours Paris). Take Britain’s constitution away, and we might as well become an American state – I’m sure Trump would welcome such a development.

I don’t know if Starmer and his merry men understand such ABC things. They may or may not, but that doesn’t matter one way or the other. Visceral hatred of the upper classes has been encoded into their DNA by Marx, and that overrides any rational considerations.

Class war, as far as they are concerned, can have only one end, that articulated by the proto-Marxist Denis Diderot: “We’ll hang the last priest on the entrails of the last aristocrat”. I’m not sure the Starmer gang see that end in similarly sanguinary terms, but that’s a difference of form, not content.

They are fighting their class war on all fronts, by driving wealth producers out of the country, suffocating the middle classes with extortionate taxes, and doing their level best to destroy public schools that alone can be expected to provide a semblance of education.

None of this makes any sense on any level, except one: the Marxist craving for the politics of envy and hatred. But I’ve got news for this lot: class war and trade war have one thing in common. Neither ever produces any winners. Only losers.

Call me an inveterate snob, but I feel an acute sense of schadenfreude when reading about Americans living in England or just visiting.

Lately, The Mail has been publishing articles on the culture shocks experienced by such innocent visitors to our shores, and none of them is a PLU (if you don’t know what this acronym stands for, you aren’t a PLU yourself).

Birds of a feather and all that, it’s natural that the English people those Americans know also come from the lowly strata of society. Visiting Americans may not be aware of our social nuances, and there is no reason they should be, but one would expect Mail journalists to enlighten them.

I’m sure they could if they wanted to, but most of their paper’s readers belong to the same demographic group. They can let The Mail get away with utter, even subversive bilge (Peter Hitchens springs to mind), but they’ll never forgive even a hint of class snobbery.

That’s why the paper allows those culturally shocked Americans to persist in the folly that their comments apply to Britons at large, rather than strictly to those of the proletarian persuasion.

The other day, for example, one perplexed visitor wrote about his confusion over tea. Not only are Britons obsessed with that beverage, he complained, but they use the word to describe the main meal of the day. Go figure.

I don’t propose to write a treatise on the class structure of British society, with its main groups, each featuring any number of hyphenated sub-groups. However, simplifying the structure to just three tiers, low, middle and high, no member of the two top groups would ever refer to a major meal as ‘tea’.

However, when I myself moved from the US to London, I too was taken aback when my advertising colleagues asked what I was cooking for tea that evening. Tea for me was strictly a hot (in America, sometimes iced) drink accompanied by a biscuit (cookie to Americans) or drunk on its own.

Moving up the social scale in the after hours, I referred to the evening meal as ‘dinner’ or more usually ‘supper’. But, being sensitive to the perverse vagaries of English usage, I knew that ‘dinner’ to my co-workers and their class comrades often described lunch.

Thus, when a London taxi driver declines a fare at noon, saying, “I’m going ‘ome to ‘ave me dinner”, he doesn’t mean he is driving to Liverpool to be just in time for his wife’s Lancashire hotpot.

The same chap, by the way, could confuse Americans even more by describing them as either ‘Shermans’ or ‘Septics’, but Cockney rhyming slang deserves a separate essay. (Just this once I’ll help out the outlanders among you by explaining that a Sherman or septic describes a tank, which rhymes with ‘Yank’. Such are the little word games played within earshot of Bow Bells.)

Britons who use such locutions seldom mean them as a compliment. For example, my erstwhile co-worker Barry detested septic tourists.

Truth to tell, Barry didn’t have much time for any foreigners, but he felt he could be more open about his animosity to Shermans. They were a free hit, and one could indulge one’s feelings without being accused of racism or Euroscepticism.

Barry lived for the moments when an American tourist asked him for directions to, say, Hampton Court. Barry’s stock reply was: “Take the Piccadilly Line, go to Cockfosters, then get out and ask again.” Those familiar with London’s geography will know that such a wild-goose chase would take the hapless sightseer at least two hours out of his way.

Another quaint idiosyncrasy spotted by the same confused visitors to The Mail‘s pages is that Britons apologise all the time in situations that don’t call for excuses in America. ‘Sorry’ with various adverbal modifiers, such as ‘awfully’ or ‘terribly’, seems to be the most popular locution.

So it may be, but only in the middle classes, especially the lower reaches therein. As one climbs the social ladder, self-confidence increases, and apologies are heard less and less.

Some Americans are amazed at the absence of power sockets in our bathrooms. This is indeed an abomination, but one motivated not by class but by what’s fondly described as ‘elf and safety.

Our powers that be are concerned that, should sockets be available in bathrooms, an irate husband might plug a hairdryer in and drop it in the tub just as his wife (‘missus’, ‘old lady’ or ‘trouble’ to Mail readers) is taking a bath.

And speaking of that facility, some Shermans have trouble with the word ‘toilet’, as do I, but for different reasons. Their response is TMI (Too Much Information), an offence avoided by their own awful euphemisms, such as restroom, powder room, little boys’ room and some such, all prole, which euphemisms so often tend to be.

Alas, this is the only room in the house for which no non-euphemistic name exists.

The flushing facility we take for granted (but one about 14 per cent of all Russians still don’t have) was invented by the Victorian plumber Thomas Crapper, an aptronymic surname if I’ve ever seen one. For a while, he lent his name to the room, but that didn’t last because of the term’s association with an older and cruder Anglo-Saxon word.

Britons can’t escape excretional euphemisms, but they can arrange them in the ascending order of social acceptability. Thus, ‘toilet’ is strictly prole in the UK (though not so much in the US). Penelope, for example, is physically unable to articulate it.

At the opposite end of the social scale sit words like ‘lavatory’, ‘lav’ or ‘loo’. The first one is a smidgen more PLU than the other two. ‘Lav’ is obviously a shortened ‘lavatory’, whereas ‘loo’ comes from ‘Waterloo’, supposedly because at the time Mr Crapper died British outhouses bore that brand name.

My own theory is that the connection with Waterloo is rather different. That room used to be called ‘water closet’, and the perverse English mind formed an association with Waterloo, later abbreviated to ‘loo’. Just a guess.

Americans also cause the natives’ mirth by struggling with the pronunciation of words like Leicester and Gloucester, both featuring in the name of tube stations. Not only do they laboriously and amusingly articulate every syllable, but they even can’t understand those words when properly pronounced as ‘Lester’ and ‘Gloster’.

Those chaps are lucky they don’t revolve in the circles inhabited by Messrs Featherstonehaugh and Cholmondeley, pronounced ‘Fanshaw’ and ‘Chumly’. If they did, they’d have even more to complain about, but I doubt The Mail would print such gripes.