Since I started putting my thoughts into the public domain some 35 years ago, I’ve been on the receiving end of many accusations, none of them just.
For example, I’ve been called a racist, which isn’t true. I genuinely believe that all men are brothers and feel no discomfort when meeting someone of a different race.
This is an intuitive feeling I had acquired long before I read Paul’s teaching about “neither Jew nor Greek”, although I’m grateful to the saint for putting into such poignant words something I’ve always sensed to be true.
However, while I believe that fundamentally all races are equal, that doesn’t mean they are the same. They all produce different cultures, and I happen to prefer the one produced by white Europeans.
That doesn’t mean I consider myself superior to, say, an Indian or an African. As I said, I’m not a racist. But I have to admit I’m a culturist, or would be if this word existed. I’m absolutely certain that European culture is better for me and – yes, I know the slings and arrows are about to come my way – better than any other in general.
It’s certainly the only one that’s indigenous to the West. Others sharing our living space should be welcome to live their lives according to the tenets of their own culture – as long as they realise that it’s a guest within ours, and guests should respect and accept the customs of their hosts.
Having cleared myself of the charge of racism, I must now state that neither do I deserve another charge sometimes levelled at me, that of misogyny. “Neither male nor female…” continued St Paul, and he wasn’t prophesising our epicene modernity.
On a personal note, I’ve always preferred the company of women to that of men, and nothing bores me more than an evening out with the lads. That’s one of the reasons I’ve never sought membership in any Pall Mall club (another reason is a near certainty that I wouldn’t be admitted).
Women, I think, are as good as men, and I’d even be willing to entertain the thought that they are better. However, it takes a uniquely unobservant, or else obtusely ideological, person to insist men and women are equally capable of performing the same tasks.
Women can take their innate house-keeping talents to the broader arena of business or public administration. The best post-war prime minister of Britain, and arguably her best monarch ever, were women, for example.
Even when women didn’t rise to the throne themselves they often had a civilising effect on their men, helping them climb to higher rungs on the cultural and spiritual ladder. It was often women who dragged many a royal husband from paganism to Christianity.
France, to name an obvious example, could have remained pagan way beyond 509 had Clothilde not put her foot down and forced her royal husband Clovis to see the light. (England went Christian a century earlier, as I don’t mind mentioning for the delectation of my French readers.)
Yet it’s hard not to notice that women, a few notable exceptions aside, such as Hildegard von Bingen, Héloïse and Elizabeth Anscombe, aren’t as good as men at more theoretical pastimes, such as philosophy, theology and mathematics.
The usual explanation that women have been historically barred from such fields doesn’t cut much ice. At the time the first two ladies I mentioned were leaving their glorious mark, at least as many women as men led a monastic life of contemplation. And Elizabeth Anscombe (d. 2001) certainly wasn’t the only contemporaneous woman with a PhD in philosophy.
It’s just that women’s and men’s brains are wired differently, which, I insist, certainly doesn’t mean that men are superior. Just, well, different.
Neither am I a homophobe, a charge once brought on me courtesy of the Press Complaints Commission that was responding to hundreds of complaints (some accompanied by death threats). I did lose my job at a national paper as a result, yet the charge was false.
I was simply suggesting that heterosexuals, even if they have the misfortune of being Christians, should enjoy equal rights to publicise their take on sexuality. At the time, homosexuals advertised their messages on London buses, whereas Mayor Boris Johnson said no to Christian groups that demanded equal time. Fair is fair, I wrote. Ideally, neither side should use such vulgar media to air its views, but if one is allowed to do so, then so should be the other.
My view of homosexuality is that it’s a sin. But then so is adultery, and he who is without sin… . Adultery is actually worse: after all, God mentioned it in His Ten Commandments, while leaving it for commentators like, again, St Paul to express opprobrium of same-sex hanky-panky.
I’m not going to parade the old cliché about some of my friends being homosexuals, although it is so. Let’s just say that the only moral teaching I recognise as valid says we should hate the sin but love the sinner, and again I accept it intuitively, not just rationally.
That, however, doesn’t mean we should love the sin and teach our children that there is nothing wrong with it, and there’s no such thing as sin anyway. Therein lies the kind of decadence that ushers in civilisational demise, and I don’t think you need me to cite historical examples of such downfalls.
Transphobia? Same again: I certainly don’t hate, and neither am I irrationally scared of, people suffering from gender dysphoria. I’m genuinely sorry for them – but I feel even sorrier for any society that promotes sex change as an inalienable human right to be upheld from the public purse. I don’t hate transsexuals, but I certainly hate teachers who indoctrinate little tots to ponder their sexuality and change it should they find it wanting.
Again, this is another charge to which I emphatically plead not guilty.
However, there is another accusation, that of ageism, that I’ve never had thrown in my face. People must assume that, as an old man myself, I can’t possibly be guilty of that awful failing.
Yet I am, M’lud, guilty as not charged. And it’s specifically because I identify with other old men, understand their strengths and weaknesses, that I don’t think – as a general rule – that men in their 70s or older should be allowed to hold a public office of any import.
Just as I mentioned Elizabeth Anscombe as an exception in another context, you may mention Winston Churchill who led his country through a world war in his 70s, or Konrad Adenauer, who presided over the German economic miracle in his 80s. But you know what they say about exceptions that prove the rule.
Old men accumulate wisdom and experience that can make them invaluable advisors to princes, presidents and prime ministers. That’s why countries have throughout history had councils of elders keeping the rulers on the straight and narrow.
But it takes more than just wisdom and experience actually to be princes, presidents or prime ministers. It takes physical strength, stamina, energy and cognitive sharpness, and such faculties always decline with age.
Thus I can trust myself to write an essay on political philosophy, but not to run a country day to day. My short-term memory isn’t what it used to be: if a few decades ago I could read a long poem once and memorise it for ever, now it would take me hours if not days to do that.
Physically, when I lived in Houston, in my 20s and 30s, I could outlast most tennis players in 100-degree heat and 95-per-cent humidity. I still play tournaments, but have to default when the temperature tips into the 90s.
If in my 40s and even 50s I could more or less go without sleep, now I can’t function without my six hours at night and, ideally, a short snooze in the afternoon. That alone should disqualify me from a serious public office, for presidents and prime ministers can find themselves in national emergencies that can’t be handled by the “old and grey and full of sleep”.
I’ve learned to compensate. For example, I now use bookmarks, which I never had to do in the past. When buying food, I have to write down a shopping list, something I never used to do.
When speaking in public, I nowadays rely on having the text in front of me – gone is the time when I could deliver half a dozen different lectures a day without ever once consulting any notes.
All things considered, I know I wouldn’t trust myself to run a country, even though – and I hope you’ll forgive such arrogance – I’m in better mental shape than Joe Biden ever was or (and I know the skies are going to open and the MAGA god will smite me with his wrath) Donald Trump now is.
Biden’s cognitive decline was plain for all to see, and it took criminal shenanigans on the part of his colleagues and family to insist that old Joe was fit for office. Trump’s age-related problems are so far less severe but just as obvious.
Geriatric decline is a gradual process, and the best way to diagnose it is to compare the way a person was to the way he is. So try to compare Trump in his first term with Trump in his second.
Five years ago, he was unpleasantly eccentric, but he was sharp as a tack. One could agree or disagree with Trump’s policies and ideas, but one couldn’t in good faith question his mental health or indeed common sense.
Alas, the 2025 vintage of Trump is different. In his off-the-cuff speeches he sometimes talks incoherent gibberish, often saying mutually exclusive things within five minutes of each other. I understand and sympathise: although a year and a bit younger, I too sometimes forget things I said five minutes ago.
Trump’s erstwhile narcissism has degenerated into what looks like delusions of grandeur. Hence he says things – and repeats them more than once in what psychiatrists call perseveration – that no sane US president would even think, such as conquering Canada and a good part of Denmark.
Trump changes not just his words but also his policies from one day to the next, and then back again. Remember that his words and policies cause an instant shockwave in the world, with markets collapsing, businesses going under, nations allied with America quaking in their boots.
In an eerie reminder of Joe Biden, Trump stumbled on the steps of Air Force One the other day, and I sympathise. I too am less firm on my feet than I was even a few years ago.
Just in case there is a groundswell of opinion that I should become the prime minister of Britain, I can only repeat the words of the American Civil War general Sherman, who dismissed suggestions he should make a run for the presidency by saying: “If drafted, I will not run; if nominated, I will not accept; if elected, I will not serve.”
I’m just too old for the job, quite apart from a whole raft of other disqualifying characteristics. Mercifully, no one will be crazy enough to moot the idea of me at 10 Downing Street.
My point is that Biden was and Trump is also too old for his job, quite apart from a whole raft of other disqualifying characteristics. Yet the former was and the latter is the US president. This is no job for old men – take it from me.