Month: March 2026

Stalin, Mao, Kim, Ceaușescu, Niyazov, Saddam, Gaddafi – who comes next in this sequence? Why, Donald Trump of course.

This isn’t to suggest that he has anything to do with the other gentlemen politically. Equating Trump with hideous dictators is a popular sport nowadays, but I find it ludicrous. People who indulge in that pastime think with their gonads, rather than with the organ custom-made for that purpose.

However, as far as I’m concerned, politics is secondary to aesthetics, and I can prove it.

No one would find it especially hard to place the names of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Velazquez, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven.

Every educated person has enjoyed their works or at least heard their names, while most would know in which century they lived. But would you be able to name offhand all the aristocratic patrons of those great artists and musicians?

I bet you’ll know some but far from all. Who remembers all those margraves and electors to whom Bach wrote obsequious letters? They’ve slipped out of collective memory. Bach has outlived them all.

If you accept this, admittedly debatable, pecking order ex aestheticis, then Trump effortlessly slots into the place immediately after the chaps I mentioned. Like them, he too wants to immortalise himself in a giant statue, and like some of them he believes the statue should be at least covered in gold leaf if not made of solid gold.

However, I’m convinced Trump won’t go as far as Nebuchadnezzar, who not only erected a colossal golden statue of himself but also insisted that his subjects worship it on pain of death. Getting a law of this nature through Congress would be hard even if the Republican Party keeps hold of both Houses after the November midterms.

The 50-foot colossus in question will be the centrepiece of the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library and Museum in Miami, a project unveiled yesterday in an AI-generated video.

Connoisseurs of this genre of art will notice that the statue’s right hand pointing into eternity closely resembles the design of typologically similar figurines of Messrs Lenin, Stalin, Kim et al.

To reflect the idol’s taste, Trump’s favourite design feature will be everywhere, not just in the statue: the golden escalator, the exterior panelling gleaming in gold, the main entrance framed in gold leaf, the walls and ceiling of the giant ballroom. (What self-respecting library can ever be without one?)

The project seems to be overseen by Trump’s son Eric, who proves that it’s not only facial features but also writing style and orthography that are genetically transmitted. “This landmark on the water in Miami, Florida,” he wrote, “will stand as a lasting testament to an amazing man, an amazing developer, and the greatest President our Nation has ever known.”

Admirers of Washington or Lincoln may demur at this point, but I shan’t. My only suggestion is that Trump and his retinue defer such superlatives until after his second term. His Legacy and the Place he Should Occupy in History will Then be Clearer.

Meanwhile, Trump and his sycophants are busily renaming public places to reflect the sentiment Eric enunciated. On Monday, for example, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed the legislation to re-baptise the Palm Beach International Airport after Trump.

When De Santis ran against Trump in the Republican primaries, he upset the Donald so much that the latter wittily called him ‘DeSanctimonious’. Now perhaps he should be known as Ron the Re-Baptist.

Much as I’m loath to indulge in cracker barrel psychiatry, I’m certain Trump has gone beyond narcissism and solipsism. He is certifiably suffering from delusions of grandeur, which is a serious and progressive mental disorder.

Combined with his epically rotten taste, that disease, if left unchecked, may yet disfigure the American landscape with dozens of monuments to self-adulation. For example, I wouldn’t put it past Trump to improve Mount Rushmore by adding his gilded bas-relief to those of his presidential inferiors: Washington, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Lincoln.

I’m sure MAGA zealots will welcome this new exercise in idolatry. They are constitutionally incapable of describing whatever Trump does as anything other than beautiful, amazing or, push come to shove, tasteful.

The rest of us should worry what the next delusion Trump develops will be and where it may lead. But getting back to that library, I’ve read a couple of articles about it, but both featured a characteristic omission. Books weren’t mentioned at all, and no AI images of neatly lined shelves were anywhere in evidence.

This is one library in which books are clearly an afterthought not rating even a cursory mention. I suggest Trump and his flock abandon subterfuge, forget books altogether and give the project its proper name: The Donald J. Trump Temple.

The motto above the main entrance should say “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images unless thou art Donald Trump”. Yes, I think this works. But I must find out what one of my best friends, a psychiatrist by trade, thinks about this.

He will probably describe Trump’s obsession with gold as ‘auromania’ or ‘chrysomania’. Not being privy to recondite medical knowledge, I’d describe it, ex aestheticis, as criminally bad taste.  

No, I don’t mean the president’s ability, rare among politicians, to speak and even write in incoherent snippets full of solecisms.

Neither does my topic deal with his infantile vocabulary heavily slanted towards superlatives and general hyperbole. I’m not even going to talk about Trump’s idiosyncratic orthography featuring an inordinate number of inappropriate capitals, whole capitalised sentences and a forest of exclamation marks.

My subject is different, dealing as it does not so much with Trump as a person as with Trump as a phenomenon. (Immanuel Kant would probably insist he is also a noumenon, but we are none of us Kantians, are we?) And my contention is that the same phenomenon is unlikely to occur in England.

Britons are perfectly capable of voting for rank nonentities, which they’ve proved in every general election following the coup that ousted Margaret Thatcher. But never once have they voted in a blustering, narcissistic buffoon constantly talking about himself in terms that Englishmen hesitate to apply even to others.

Granted, every politician standing in an election is going to highlight his achievements or, in their absence, to promise achievements beyond the wildest dreams of his opponent.

But an English politician will do so quietly, diffidently, almost apologetically. No one will ever be elected who says “I’ll be the greatest PM in British history and the greatest statesman in history full stop because I’m the most brilliant high achiever you’ve ever seen.”

For Britons to respond favourably to such a candidate, they’d have to stop being British. This process is certainly under way, but it’s still not quite complete. For the time being, Britons retain enough of their natural qualities to reject loud-mouthed demagogues screaming to the world how wonderful they are, describing everything they do as ‘beautiful’, ‘perfect’ or ‘amazing’.

Americans are different, and I’m speaking from personal experience, having tried to manipulate the masses through advertising in both countries. Shortly after I arrived in London from New York, I was given a task of writing a radio commercial for a chain of high-street shops.

My bright idea was to use the owner of the chain as spokesman. I don’t remember what words I proposed to put into his mouth, but at the time I did think they were clever. However, the agency head rejected my idea out of hand.

“We aren’t Americans you know,” he said. “You can’t turn a British tradesman into a performing flea. They just can’t say ‘I’d give you the same deal I’d give my own mother’. They’d be so embarrassed that they wouldn’t be able to get the words out.”

I’m a quick learner when it comes to trivial subjects, such as advertising. And I used athletes as my teachers. As an inveterate sports watcher, I’ve heard hundreds of post-match interviews given by players still sweating and gasping for breath.

There too the difference between the two countries is instantly obvious. American players flash their impeccable pearly whites and deliver orations that stylistically wouldn’t be out of place at a sales conference. They tend to utter inanities in smooth, well-practised sentences coming right out of a PR manual.

British players utter inanities too, but their sentences are typically neither smooth nor well-practised. Most of them are uneasy in front of the camera, and they clearly struggle to string words together without their customary four-letter conjunctions.

The difference isn’t in the level of public education in the two countries – it’s abysmal in both. The difference lies in the whole ethos, in, if you will, the quintessential makeup of the national character.

Unlike Britain, the US is a country of showmen and salesmen, salesmen as showmen and showmen as salesmen. Americans are no easier to con than Britons but, unlike Britons, they don’t mind being conned provided they are also entertained.

They know perfectly well the used car salesman is fibbing when saying that “this baby has never seen the inside of a repair shop and tell you what, Jim – may I call you Jim? – it never will.” But they are satisfied that the game is being played by the rules, with the salesman delivering the mandated mantra, the eenie-meenie-miny-mo of commerce, but without the objectionable violence towards a person of Afro-American descent.

Like a theatre audience applauding a performance they know is make-believe, the prospective customer may reward the salesman by actually buying that baby that’ll run and run. The salesman kept his end of the bargain – he entertained. A Mowgli-type understanding was reached: we be of one blood, ye and I.

Americans expect similar entertainment, and a similar message, from candidates trying to sell them political goods. There too they’ve been conditioned to accept make-believe as real or rather pretend they do.

They know perfectly well that a candidate has neither the means nor indeed the intention of keeping the campaign promises he makes. Americans know politicians lie through their teeth, which is why they dislike them as a rule.

Britons aren’t excessively fond of politicians either, but at least ours are less given to making grandiloquent claims.

Partly that’s because we don’t vote for national candidates. We vote for our local MP who tends to promise to fix the potholes in the King’s Road, not to bring peace and prosperity for all. Such promises are smaller and more verifiable: if the potholes are indeed filled, we may vote for him again. If not, we’ll vote for someone else next time.

Britons find the US electoral spectacle to be rather tasteless, way too protracted and too akin to show business. Yet that’s precisely what Americans like: their own lives unfold in one plane, politics in another, and they don’t really intersect.

But Americans do expect politicians to offer entertainment value, and the less they look like politicians, the more entertaining they are. By such standards, Trump is indeed the best president ever: no other POTUS ever walked and talked less like a politician.

Trump is a star of the political show, and he upstages all other actors. He talks in the language last heard at an interstate truck stop; he says and does wild things; he takes self-aggrandising braggadocio to a level even American politics has never seen.

And he is conspicuously, boastfully rich, something Americans don’t hold against people as much as Britons do. Our politicians are hardly ever paupers, and some are prosperous beyond most people’s dreams. But any fat cat would be instantly drummed out of politics if he bragged about his wealth the way Trump does.

Envy is less widespread in the US than in Britain: when Americans see a billionaire, they don’t want to take him down a peg. They want to learn from him how to get rich.

That’s especially true if they see that a rich politico is like the guy next door in every other respect: he has never read a book, he speaks ungrammatically, he is crude, his tastes redefine vulgarity. But as long as he continues to entertain, there will always be enough people to support him, beyond his cadre of ideological followers.

Americans don’t want their leaders to be anodyne chaps mouthing sweet nothings and wearing button-down shirts with striped ties. They want them to be stars in a virtual reality show – provided they don’t encroach on the actual reality of everyday life.

Saying crazy, incoherent things is okay, even doing them is perfectly acceptable: that makes make-believe more fun. But when as a result it costs more to buy petrol and groceries, the fun stops. And when young Americans go to fight overseas and come back home in body bags, no one thinks of politics as a road show.

Real life barges in, and suddenly Americans don’t care to be entertained any longer. They will now be happy with the button-down types, provided the standard of living goes back up and no one is asked to die for God knows what.

Britons don’t necessarily like their politicians but they see them as a necessary evil, not circus clowns. When it’s time to vote, they choose whomever they think is the least objectionable candidate, pinch their nostrils and drop the paper into the ballot box.

Even Britons who are themselves vulgar would regard a populist demagogue like Trump as an unspeakable, irredeemably un-British vulgarian. I’d suggest that no other nation is inoculated so thoroughly against loud-mouthed trumpery, something aspiring populists would do well to remember.

The scenario I outlined above is currently unfolding in America: people, even many MAGA supporters, are turning away from Trump. His approval ratings are dropping like a plane hit by an AA missile, and the message is unequivocal. The show is over; it’s now time for statesmen, not circus performers. It looks like Trump has been found out.

To extend Churchill’s quip, it’s not just a common language that Britons and Americans are divided by. The whole ethos is fundamentally different, and I for one am thankful that our own nonentities aren’t proud of their mediocrity. They may be running the country into the ground, but at least they don’t tell us every second how great they are.

The Daily Telegraph recently ran a test to help readers answer this question.

The only time I took such a test before was almost 40 years ago, when my boss found one in a glossy magazine. That test was strictly about vocabulary: do you say ‘napkin’ or ‘serviette’, ‘lounge’ or ‘sitting room’, ‘vest’ or ‘waistcoat’, that sort of thing.

There were 10 questions altogether, and, according to my inquisitor, I gave no proletarian answers at all. “You must have been upper-middle class back in Russia,” he said, and he didn’t mean that as a compliment.

“We might or might not have been,” I replied. “But whatever we were, we spoke Russian, not English.”

Anyway, that test, an echo of Nancy Mitford’s U and non-U, put me squarely on the top rung of the social ladder. However, the Telegraph test left me barely clinging on to the bottom rung of the middle range. I don’t think my class identity, or rather the absence of one, has changed in the interim. So why such a difference?

The answer is, it’s not I who has changed. It’s the notion of what constitutes a class structure.

Most questions in The Telegraph had to do with money: income, investments, stock market activity, the use of financial consultants. Obviously, I fell far short of the top two categories, ‘The Elite’ and ‘The Ambitious High Earners’. Moreover, even my answers to the few questions related to culture also proved that I was at best a philistine, at worst a wretch belonging to the lowest category, ‘The Left Behind’.

As I recall, one of the culture-vulture questions was ‘How often do you go to the opera?’, to which my honest but clearly unsatisfactory reply was ‘Never’. I had to offer the same answer to the question about ballet, what with ‘Once every 20 years’ not appearing among the multiple choices.

Had they asked me about, say, Palestrina, Byrd or Bach, my social rating might have climbed up a notch, but these days such music is off the charts, as it were. Rossini-Puccini-Verdi seems to be the acme of cultural aspirations.

Reading books, however, doesn’t seem to be among such aspirations at all, at least not in the top two categories, the masters of our universe. Only about a third read them regularly, and it’s a good job the questionnaire didn’t probe deeper by asking what kind of books they favour.

Five gets you ten, most would specify the kind of potboilers that adorn the windows of even our better bookshops. By contrast, the window displays of bookshops in France show a wide selection of serious stuff: philosophy, history, even occasionally theology.

This is just an observation, not a serious comparison. I don’t know whether the French, those who belong to their elite, actually buy such books or the windows are just a merchandising trick, a way for a shop to establish its intellectual bona fides. Still, next time you visit a WHSmith shop, try asking for, say, The Critique of Pure Reason. See how far you’ll get.

Anyway, these are all moot points. The salient point is that even conservative British papers have adopted a Marxist view of class structure as a hierarchy based strictly on wealth. (The bearded monster called it ‘relationship to the means of production’, but that was at a time when things were actually produced, rather than imported from China.)

Just a few decades ago, class had less to do with money than with the names people applied to different rooms in their houses. But things have changed. Our upper classes are now young, bone-ignorant, ill-mannered high earners who read only trash, if anything.

The political elite in the two Western countries I know best is a case in point. Just compare American and British leaders today with their earlier counterparts.

John Adams, America’s second president, was an envoy to France when the battle between the Federalists, his and Hamilton’s party, and the Democrat-Republicans of Jefferson and Madison, reached a climax. Adams was asked to write a polemical essay, and in the next three weeks he knocked off a 900-page text, which is still standard fare in political science classes.

I doubt that even the most zealous of Trump fans would claim he’d be able to read a book that length in three weeks – or indeed that he has ever done so in his life. Lest you may think I’m on a Trump-bashing crusade, the situation with our leaders is just as dire.

According to the same Telegraph article, Rishi Sunak, our last Tory PM (and I do mean last, not latest) doesn’t venture any higher than Jilly Cooper, and our current Labour PM is no better. As for our likely next Labour PM, Angie Rayner, she probably moves her lips when reading The Daily Mirror.

However, Churchill not only was a highly educated man who knew all of Shakespeare practically by heart, but he actually won the Nobel Prize – for literature, not for ending eight wars before breakfast or for being the first black elected as US president.

Churchill’s younger contemporary, Enoch Powell, was a classical scholar who regrettably never got to be PM because he quoted Virgil and not The Communist Manifesto. And his even younger contemporary, Margaret Thatcher, quoted Aquinas at 10 Downing Street. Even if that piece of erudition came from her speechwriters (one of them, my late friend, was a top scholar), she clearly knew who Aquinas was. Does Angie? Rachel? For that matter, Keir?

And Thatcher definitely read thinkers like Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. I would have known this even if The Telegraph hadn’t said so: Maggie’s policies followed clearly identifiable patterns and antecedents.

It’s not just our political life that’s dominated by ignoramuses. So is our economic life, which is where most respondents in the Telegraph survey operate. Fair enough, I’m sure one doesn’t have to go beyond such masterpieces as The Art of the Deal to make a mint in property or other speculative investments.

But when it comes to running the economy of a country, especially one woven into a sprawling fabric of globalism, ignorance of economics, history, political philosophy is a sure recipe for national disaster.

Since Western countries increasingly resemble entrenched plutocrats fighting rearguard action against advancing Marxists, ignorance of serious subjects cedes the intellectual ground to villains mouthing bien pensant clichés. They are the ones who set the language and terms of the debate, which means they are guaranteed to win it.

Civilisation is about 5,000-years-old, meaning that everything that could be tried in politics or economics has been tried. History is bulging with correct answers, but do we know how to ask correct questions? How do we separate the wheat of successes from the chaff of failures? In fact, how do we define failure or success?

It takes intimate familiarity with a vast corpus of knowledge to answer those questions correctly, and answer them we must if our civilisation is to survive. Such familiarity can only come from a lifelong habit of reading serious texts – to begin with.

Also vital is training one’s mind and senses to chart a safe route through the moral and aesthetic minefields densely covering the political, economic and cultural landscape. Alas, such training and such learning can’t possibly be acquired by a dominant elite, two-thirds of which hardly ever open a book.

In that sense, the Telegraph survey is useful. It gauged the depth of the abyss into which our civilisation has sunk. And the worst thing is that what passes for today’s upper classes are so ignorant that they don’t even realise the abyss exists.

I think it was either Chesterton or C.S Lewis who lamented the sharply declining level of public atheists.

In the past, he wrote, we were blessed with David Hume, whereas today we are cursed with… I don’t actually remember which names were offered as an exemplar of intellectual degradation.

Stripping Hume’s argument down to its bare bones, he wrote that, if God knowingly allows evil to exist, he isn’t good. If he doesn’t know about it, he isn’t omniscient. And if he knows but can’t stop it, he isn’t omnipotent.

That argument can be defeated, but it can’t be dismissed out of hand. It’s an invitation to engage one’s philosophical apparatus and apply it to theodicy, ‘defence of God’, a term coined by Leibnitz in 1710.

But the very fact that one would have to delve deep into philosophy and theology to counter Hume’s argument makes him a worthy opponent. Compared to him, modern public atheists like Dawkins, Wolpert or Dennett look like blithering pygmies.

However, even they seem intellectual giants compared to Annabel Fenwick Elliot’s turgid musings in yesterday’s Mail.

She starts out well, by agreeing with what I wrote the other day (osmotically, that is – I’m sure she doesn’t read me): “I don’t believe the assertion that Prince William has a ‘quiet’ faith in God. It looks very much to me like he has no belief whatsoever…’

Since it looks very much the same to me, I read the whole piece, expecting to see pearls of wisdom strewn for the delectation of Mail readers. What I got instead was unmitigated drivel, of a kind that would make even Dawkins wince.

I don’t automatically regard atheists as ipso facto stupid. Perhaps they are at a slight disadvantage in the rarefied upper reaches of the philosophical stratosphere, but, as long as they eschew doing an Icarus, they can be intelligent. In fact, one or two atheists among my friends are among the brightest men I’ve ever known.

The gift of faith is like any other, and no one would accuse a chap for not having a gift for music or mathematics. Nor can one praise him for possessing such a gift. It’s what he does with it that may be praiseworthy.

An intelligent atheist says, “I don’t believe in God” and leaves it at that. The statement is perfectly unobjectionable. You don’t, I do, and that’s all there is to say on the subject. So which team do you fancy in the Cup Final?

It’s only when an atheist starts arguing against religious doctrine that he begins to sound stupid. And he, in this case she, sounds downright moronic when trying to co-opt science to the case of godlessness. I’ve seen no exceptions to this observation – and it applies even to people who start that downward slide from a much higher level than Fenwick Elliott.

She did all those ill-advised things, achieving exactly that effect. The phrase that followed my ellipsis in the quotation above said: “…  – and for this I commend him.” I don’t commend anyone for believing in God, but she happily commends William for his atheism.

From there, the only direction for travel is down:

“I do not for one moment believe in the stories of the Bible. I don’t think Jesus had magical powers. I reject the notion that we get judged by a supernatural entity for the things we do when we’re alive, so as to be sorted into the heaven-or-hell bin when we die.”

That’s saying in 51 words what can be succinctly said in five: I don’t believe in God. And then: “Honestly, I cannot take anyone seriously who does believe these things”.

No comment is necessary here. It would even be tedious to provide a long list of history’s greatest minds whom Miss Fenwick Elliott can’t take seriously because they believed in God. I’ve already mentioned Leibnitz and could easily add hundreds of similarly illustrious names.

Then that old chestnut: “You might say that… Christians in the modern Western world don’t routinely round up and murder anyone who doesn’t believe in their storybook. But they did, until quite recently, and they still do in some remote parts of Africa.” In those parts, Christians are even more sinned against than sinning.

But true enough: belief in Christ doesn’t turn humans into angels. Fenwick Elliott adds that she doesn’t think “we must have religion to be a good person.” Neither do I. However, I’d venture a guess that a man who thinks that everything he does in this life will be judged in eternity may behave better than he otherwise would.

Annabel then vindicates Euripides, who wrote that: “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad”. For her subsequent statements make me doubt her sanity, not just her reason.

She describes herself as a “cultural Christian”, meaning that she likes pretty churches. As a travel writer by trade, she must have seen lots of them, and many appeal to her aesthetic sense. No harm in that. But then:

“I very much resent the fact that in England, if I want to get married in a pretty church, I’d have to – as many of my friends have – pretend to believe in God for a bit in order to get permission. Why can’t we love history and appreciate the architecture of a chapel without having to convince the vicar”?

We can love history and even appreciate the architecture of a chapel, but we can’t appreciate it fully if we treat it as just a pretty building.

Thousands of people had to sacrifice their time, money, health, often life to erect the churches Annabel likes so much. They weren’t inspired exclusively by aesthetics, and no one can appreciate the architecture as deeply as it ought to be appreciated while ignoring the inspiration behind it.

As for an atheist feeling deprived by being unable to marry in church, this is cloud cuckoo land. Christian marriage, dear, isn’t just a licence to shack up and share community property. In apostolic confessions, it’s a sacrament.

An atheist can no more marry in church than he can have his children baptised or go to Communion. But I have an idea for Annabel. Before going to the Register Office to get married, she could stop at a Gothic church, ask the taxi driver to wait, go in and admire the vaulted ceiling. That way she wouldn’t have to gatecrash a performance without first getting a ticket.

Nor is it just church marriage: “I don’t want to have to tell bare-faced lies about what I believe in order for my children to get a good education [at an Anglican or Catholic school]”.

If I were her, I’d ask myself why such schools offer better education than your regular comprehensive. But again I have a suggestion: we have plenty of secular public schools for Annabel’s children to be properly educated. No need to tell bare-faced lies there. Tuition fees may be quite steep, but that’s a small price to pay for honesty.

But thank God for small favours: “I am not suggesting we ban Catholics or dissolve the Church of England… ”. It’s even okay to go to church on Sunday, but “purely because [people] value the community and like singing, rather than because they believe it possible – against reams of scientific evidence – for a man to part oceans and rise from the dead.”

Such is the level of atheist propaganda these days. Similar intellectual heights were scaled in Russia immediately after the Bolsheviks took over. They created The League of the Militant Godless, which embarked on an orgy of anti-religious persecution putting the French revolutionaries to shame.

Eventually the League grew to 3.5 million members, most of them semi-literate and hence responsive to the crudest of arguments, with many based on “reams of scientific evidence”. Since The Mail saw fit to publish the same harebrained hogwash, one could legitimately wonder about its readers – and editors.

It’s terribly unfair that Britons who don’t know Russian can’t enjoy Kremlin TV channels, especially the talk shows on Russia-1.

One such, An Evening with Vladimir Solovyov, is especially entertaining. It’s also relevant (dread word) because Britain figures prominently among his favourite topics.

Solovyov’s recent guest was Leonid Kalashnikov (no relation to the rifle), communist deputy of the State Duma. Comrade Kalashnikov commendably thinks that, though Russia is undoubtedly the greatest country in history, she can still learn from her inferiors.

Iran, for example, teaches a valuable lesson in the use of proxies, he said. Rather than attacking capitalist devils herself, in the past she delegated that responsibility to Hamas and the Houthis. The Russians too can use this trick to bomb England and her bomb factories.

“I always say let’s borrow the best ideas from Iran and act through proxies,” added Comrade Kalashnikov. “We currently have these kinds of proxies, like Iran itself. We don’t have to bang these factories ourselves; it would be too provocative. It’s war, after all. So let’s pretend, like you say, with tankers. Let our proxies carry out the strikes.”

Comrade Kalashnikov is clearly unfamiliar with the state of the British armament industry if he thinks we still have such factories to “bang”. Nor has he followed the general line of thought popularised by the official Russian media. It’s London, rather than non-existent bomb factories, that’s designated as the target to bang.

Solovyov himself seems to be unaware of Britain’s industrial deficiencies. In any case, details like potential targets don’t matter. It’s the thought that counts and Solovyov, once and future communist himself, was aghast. He raised his voice several decibels and rejected Kalashnikov’s idea out of hand.

The general desirability of “banging” Britain is beyond dispute. But under no circumstances could Solovyov countenance the specifics proposed by his guest. As he always does when brushing aside an unacceptable idea, Solovyov started at a bass-baritone rumble, but then introduced a steady rise in pitch and volume.

At the top of that crescendo, he exploded into a hysterical rant: “Listen, are you a Communist or not? Stop fearing war! Are you a Communist or not? The first step is to strike these scumbags and not hide behind anyone’s back!”

True communists don’t fear war and, by the looks of it, neither do post-communists. Therefore, in Comrade Solovyov’s eyes, Comrade Kalashnikov was letting the side down. He also seemed to have forgotten the seminal moral lesson all communists ought to know by heart.

As far as Solovyov was concerned, a reminder was in order: “When I was joining the ranks of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, I was taught to speak openly and honestly. If this is our enemy, we destroy him.”

No subterfuge. No equivocation. Britain is an enemy to be destroyed, and real communists, past, present or future, must be brave and honest enough to state this publicly.

Perestroika chickens have come home to roost, and we are all enjoying the ‘end of history’ with its ‘peace dividend’. Back in the early 90s I was writing one article after another, invoking the Law of Conservation of Energy.

The evil Soviet energy, I argued, hadn’t disappeared. It was merely transforming into its equivalent, seemingly benign but in reality just as evil – and more dangerous for hiding behind a kindly mask.

All those glasnosts and perestroikas were in effect a transfer of power from the Communist Party to the KGB, an organisation much more adept at duping the West. But both I and the small conservative journals for which I wrote were easily outshouted by perestroika fanatics. Even some conservatives expressed touching concern for my mental health.

Russia had seen the liberal democratic light, sang the mighty neocon chorus. History had ended, went the solo part. There was nothing to disagree on or to argue about. We were one happy family now, and we could all get fat on the peace dividend together.

The West’s disarmament was one of the most important objectives of the perestroika op, and it has succeeded famously. Britain, in particular, has denuded her defences to such an extent that we can’t even protect a few acres of our sovereign territory in Cyprus.

The Royal Navy has one solitary sea-worthy destroyer and one carrier (out of two) that’s not in the repair dock. So much for our counterattacking capability, but Britain’s defences are in even worse shape.

As Iran’s strike at Diego Garcia showed, the mullahs possess missiles with enough range to hit London. And we have no means of our own to stop even a single Iranian rocket pitching feebly at the end of its flight. Our sole hope lies in the kindness of strangers, such as our American and European allies who may conceivably stop an antediluvian Iranian missile before it falls on Westminster.

However, should the Russians decide to act on Solovyov’s threats, even NATO wouldn’t be able to save us. Only God could do that but, judging by His acquiescence in Britain’s 30-odd years of disarmament self-harm, He isn’t on our side.

Considering the bellicose hysteria fanned into incendiary rants by Russian media and government figures, HMG’s continuing sabotage of Britain’s defences has left the realm of folly to enter one of treason.

Any comparison with Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in the late 1930s is spurious.

Britain’s failure to confront Nazi Germany earlier was unfortunate. But at least, as Chamberlain waved that piece of paper in the air and declared peace in our time, Britain began to mass-produce Spitfires, the fighters that won the Battle of Britain and hence, one could argue, the war.  

Today’s Chamberlains don’t mass-produce anything but ‘commitments’. Thus, they are ‘committed’ to cranking up our defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP. When? Soon. When we have enough spare change. Which will be when? At some point in the future. We’ll let you know.

Meanwhile, it wouldn’t hurt to remember that a vast volume of war propaganda preceded both World Wars. Mobilisation of the people’s martial spirit and morale always starts before queues form outside recruitment offices. And Russia is more gung-ho now than she has ever been in my lifetime.

P.S. Speaking of our NATO allies, the German government has taken steps to limit the access of the pro-Putin AfD party to security briefings. Good luck with that, considering that AfD has 152 seats in the Bundestag, which makes it the main opposition party.

That’s another thing the KGB is good at: recruiting allies in enemy countries, sowing discord and undermining institutions. Putin has many friends, aka traitors, in all NATO countries, not just Germany. Those chaps don’t come cheap, but they are always good for a leak or two.

Question: What do you do during a famine? Answer: If you put ideology before both economy and humanity, ban harvesting.

Replace cereals with oil, and this is precisely what Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Net Zero, is doing on behalf of our Marxist government.

In the midst of what is beginning to look like the worst energy crisis ever, our assorted Milibandits don’t even consider revoking their ban on issuing new oil and gas drilling licenses in the North Sea.

That policy, based as it was on fraudulent science, was imbecilic even before the current crisis, as is the very brief of Miliband’s ministry. But one could see his point if he were genuinely, if mistakenly, worried about ‘our planet’ being deep-fried by aerosol sprays.

But all their protestations to the contrary, the Milibandits don’t give a hoot about ‘our planet’. Their motivation comes from ideology, not climatology.

In this case, when global warming was added to the neo-Marxist canon, ideologues who accept it as gospel truth have to commit to net zero. They have no option to refrain – Marxism, or any other ideology, doesn’t allow cherry-picking.

One can’t say I accept this dogma but not that one. An ideology can only ever come as a package: one either accepts the whole lot or is drummed-out for apostasy.

Hence a conservative has the luxury of, say, accepting high taxation when absolutely necessary even though under normal circumstances it’s considered sinful. Conservatism allows such flexibility because it isn’t an ideology.

Marxism is. That’s why the Milibandits wouldn’t review their energy policy even if they knew that it’s driving the economy towards extinction and the people towards penury.

A significant, possibly principal, part of the Marxist canon is hatred of anyone or anything that isn’t Marxist. That’s another stimulus for their suicidal commitment to net zero: conservatives, whom they loathe, find it foolhardy. The intrinsic value of a policy doesn’t even matter as long as it lets ideologues cock a snook at their opponents.

We don’t yet know the true long-term cost of this net zero madness. But it’s already clear it’ll be so high as to be practically incalculable. Oh well, as long as the Milibandits are happy playing with their little toys, such as wind mills, solar panels and electric cars, who are we to argue?

Meanwhile, Miliband et al. have already outdone other zealots of the past who didn’t mind sacrificing Britain at the altar of their ideology. One of them, John Major, isn’t generally regarded as a Marxist, but that’s only because most people have a sketchy idea of the full range of Marxist dogma.

It includes internationalism as a necessary constituent, ideally to the point of creating a single world government. The European Union is an echo of that Marxist din, this irrespective of the arguments Europhiles put forth in its favour.  

Perhaps ‘arguments’ is a wrong word. Ideologues don’t really argue, in the sense of using debate to arrive at the truth. You could destroy every statement they make logically, rationally and factually, but it wouldn’t make one jot of difference.

Ideologues have this gnostic belief in subliminal knowledge to which only they are privy. All arguments to the contrary only succeed in branding their opponents as infidels and hence targets for harangues — or worse.

Major was committed to Britain joining the EU, even though I doubt he understood the neo-Marxist nature of the whole project.

Britain belonging to the Exchange Rate Mechanism that effectively pegged all European currencies to the Deutschmark was essential as a prelude to creating a single European currency. That too was a prelude, to creating a single European state.

Margaret Thatcher was generally sceptical of the whole idea, but she allowed herself to be persuaded by her Chancellor Geoffrey Howe and his successor Nigel Lawson. Had she stayed in power, no doubt Thatcher would have read the signs early and pulled out of the ERM before too much damage was done.

But the Europhiles in her cabinet staged a coup, Thatcher was ousted and replaced with Major, the figurehead to the pro-Euro faction within the Tory Party. A true believer, Major refused to accept that Britain had entered the ERM at a ridiculously high exchange rate she couldn’t sustain.

Still, he couldn’t decide to leave the ERM until the markets took that decision out of his hands in 1992. Currency speculators led by George Soros pounced, began to short the pound, and a fiscal Armageddon beckoned. Major had no choice but to pull out, on what would become known as Black Wednesday.

The true cost of that whole ideological folly is hard to estimate. It’s variously put in the £3-£7 billion range, but there were so many knock-on effects that the real damage had to be much higher. Still, whatever it was, Ed Miliband doesn’t have to worry: Major didn’t even come close to the losses Britain is suffering, and is yet to suffer, due to net zero.

Neither did Gordon Brown, Tony Blair’s Chancellor and successor. But he did try his level best.

The Marxist dream of a world government got a step closer in 1999 when the single European currency was introduced. Unlike most other members of the Blair cabinet, Brown had reservations about joining the euro. He correctly surmised that, if even joining the ERM almost made Britain go belly up, adopting the euro would take ‘almost’ out of it.

Still, even though Culpability Brown couldn’t find a way of adopting the euro, he found a way of propping it up. All he had to do was pump money into euro futures, but there was a snag: Britain had no money to dedicate to that noble cause.

But Culpability Brown wouldn’t be deterred. To raise the necessary funds, between 1999 and 2002 he sold off over half of the country’s gold reserves, putting 40 per cent of the proceeds into the euro.

He was so desperate to help his Continental comrades that Culpability sold the gold at its lowest price in 20 years, only to see it grow at an average of eight per cent a year ever since.

To be fair to Brown, Europhilia wasn’t his sole motivation.

Socialists and statists in general loathe gold because it diminishes their power to lord it over the populace. First, when paper money is pegged to a hard standard like gold, the government can’t inflate the money supply at will and use deficit spending as a political tool.

Second, when people keep their money in gold rather than paper, they become more independent of the state. The state could reduce banknotes to wrapping paper by pushing a button on the printing press, largely turning all citizens into the state’s dependents.

Since socialists are viscerally committed to increasing their power ad infinitum, they detest gold with unmitigated venom. Also, gold is a traditional symbol of that Marxist bogeyman, wealth, and symbolism matters to ideologues.  

Brown got $3.5 billion for Britain’s trousseau. Today, that gold would be worth $56 billion. Still, converting dollars into sterling and allowing for inflation, this amount, though huge, will look like pocket change when compared to the damage net zero will cause over the next few years.

The Guardian, our Leftmost broadsheet, has long been insisting that global warming denial is a “crime against humanity”. That’s how ideologies speak – and they’ll try to make everyone listen on pain of punishment. I’ll be counting on you to send me food parcels when I’m in prison.

It’s good to see that the future Supreme Governor of our state Church and its clerical head found that magic something that’ll create a lasting bond.

Both are Aston Villa fans, and what can bring two people together as surely as shared worship? Nothing, is the answer to that, especially when they both worship a provincial football team to which neither of them has any geographical links.

I picked up this fact, nay this understanding, from an article in The Times entitled Prince William Confirms Quiet Faith and New Commitment to Church.

The article describes a visit the Prince and Princess of Wales have paid to the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Dame Sarah Mullally. Their shared love of Aston Villa was mentioned twice in the article, each time as a factor in forging closer links between our two pivotal institutions.

I’d like to extend this foray into textual analysis by pointing out that one of my least favourite words, ‘relevant’, cropped up four times, as in “institutions must continue to remain relevant” or “English spiritual tradition that remains relevant in contemporary life”.

The thing about textual analysis is that it can also reveal words that one would think should be there but aren’t. In this case, the absent word is ‘God’, which is an odd omission in a longish article about the link between throne and altar.

An explanation is sorely needed, and the article helpfully provides it: “William, 43, is not a devout Christian nor a regular churchgoer like the King and the late Queen Elizabeth. His commitment to his Christian faith has long been questioned.”

I’m not surprised, and neither would anyone be who is familiar with the art of English understatement. For the first sentence in that quote really means that William is strictly a nominal Christian who doesn’t believe in God and only ever goes to church when royal protocol demands it.

One such occasion will come up in a few days, when Prince William will perform a duty traditionally assigned to the Prince of Wales by attending Dame Sarah’s official installation.

This has presented an opportunity for the prince to state what besides Aston Villa he believes in, and he duly obliged. His “personal faith” is in establishing “a strong and meaningful bond with the Church and its leadership”.

By inference, William must think that no such bond exists at the moment, which means he must have played truant when British constitutional history was taught. Even so, William was present at his father’s coronation. Unless he was surreptitiously doing an Easy Sudoku throughout, he couldn’t possibly have failed to espy the bond in question.

The British monarch is anointed, and his coronation is a lavish church ritual unmatched anywhere in Europe. The ceremony is always officiated by the Archbishop of Canterbury, with every church dignitary in attendance. On 6 May, 2023, also present were representatives of other Christian denominations and non-Christian faiths. That last part was a novelty, but King Charles felt such ecumenism behoved the head of the British Commonwealth.

So what, other than his support of Aston Villa, will William do to strengthen the bond that, as we’ve discovered, is already rather strong? The article explains: “His intervention signals that his relationship with the Church will ‘evolve’ [another dread word] from that of previous monarchs, whose strong faith underpinned their reigns.”

If I understand correctly, William’s relationship with the Church will be underpinned by something other than his strong faith. Since I’ve already milked the Aston Villa connection for all it’s worth, I struggle to think what that might be.

The prince’s spokesman didn’t elucidate the issue all that much. William, he said, “is keen to build a strong and meaningful bond with the Church and its leadership, one that respects tradition while speaking to a modern Britain, and reflects his broader belief that institutions must continue to remain relevant and connected to the people they serve.”

Since most Britons are atheists, the Church and its leadership may definitely become “relevant and connected to the people they serve” by de-emphasising God and becoming a sort of amalgam between Oxfam and social services. Is that what a relevant connection should look like?

A relevant connection emerging between Dame Sarah and Prince William is more clearcut: she is likely to officiate his coronation when the time comes, one hopes not soon. But the ceremony, says the article, will “look and feel quite different”.

And further: “He is really thinking, ‘How do we make his coronation feel most relevant in the future?’ He is mindful of the fact that … whenever his time comes, how can the coronation be modern but also unifying to the nation and the Commonwealth?”

Well, having a female Archbishop of Canterbury is a giant stride towards desired relevance. Dame Sarah’s clerical career is as relevant as relevant can be.

She served as Chief Nursing Officer until 2004, when she decided to pursue full-time ministry. A mere 14 years later she was consecrated as the Bishop of London, and after another six years as the Archbishop of Canterbury.

This was the most vertiginous such rise in modern times, although Thomas Becket’s record is hard to beat. Henry II appointed him Archbishop the day after his ordination, while poor Sarah had to wait over 20 years for her own elevation.

But at least she can console herself by knowing she became the first female Archbishop in history. When Dame Sarah was appointed, she highlighted a fight against misogyny as her prime mission, something Jesus Christ inexplicably left out of the Sermon on the Mount.

One has to remember that most, dare I say all, female priests have to be woke Lefties practically by definition. A woman seeking ordination thereby defies two millennia of church tradition in the name of feminism, which ipso facto is a clear statement of her take on life.

It’s no wonder that many Anglicans and other Britons are concerned about the future of the Church, committed as it seems to be to seeking relevance and fighting misogyny, rather than spreading Christ’s message to the world.

Another aide tried to allay such fears, especially those springing from Prince William’s remarks: “At a time when institutions can be seen simply through a social or cultural lens, he understands that the Church’s role goes beyond this. It is not only part of the nation’s heritage, but a living expression of faith, rooted in prayer, compassion and a belief in grace and redemption.”

It’s good to know that our future king realises that the Church isn’t just an extension of social services. However, he doesn’t seem to feel the need to avail himself personally of those sacred things the Church has to offer.

Unfortunately, this is a rather widespread phenomenon, one I’ve observed even among my friends, some of whom are atheists or agnostics (a distinction without a difference). As intelligent and educated people, they understand how vital the Church is to Britain, socially, politically, institutionally and culturally.

They see it as an essential adhesive gluing a mass of individuals into a civilised nation, which it is. But those same people obviously place themselves above hoi polloi who might need the Church for solace and comfort.

They represent a relatively new type: clerical atheists. Everything about modernity is upside down, including this development. In the past, we had anti-clerical believers; now we have clerical atheists.

I’ve shouted myself hoarse trying to argue with them that the Church is only vital if people believe in the truth of its message. No successful society can be built on a lie, which atheists have to believe Christianity is.

I’d like to say that I won those arguments but, alas, I didn’t. My friends all have the courage of their atheist convictions, which is a wall against which my entreaties shatter like a flung baccarat glass. I must work harder on my rhetorical skills, I suppose.

P.S. Speaking of Christian virtues, Trump responded to the death of Robert Mueller, the former special counsel investigating Trump’s links to Russia, in a manner all his own: “I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!”

Tom Stoppard, who died last year, was arguably the best post-war English playwright, and definitely the most virtuosic.

Stoppard rivalled, without quite matching, Wilde’s talent for producing dazzling one-liners, while leaving Oscar far behind in structural creativity and intellectual playfulness.

He treated works of art, philosophy and science with the familiarity of an old friend, and without the reverence expected from autodidacts. With a slight chuckle, Stoppard rewrote Wilde in Travesties, Shakespeare in Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and the original authors would have chuckled with him.

Intellectually, I’d describe Stoppard as a polymath surface-skimmer. With the mastery of a Gobelin maker, he could weave into his narrative fabric themes borrowed from every academic discipline under the sun, treating them all with a light touch, wit and coruscating brilliance.

Like all virtuosos in every genre of art, Stoppard sometimes admired his own brilliance too much, as if listening to his own voice and winking at the audience: “There, clever isn’t it?”. It always is, but sometimes too much cleverness comes at the expense of too little artistic truth.

However, even Stoppard’s failures are often more entertaining than lesser men’s successes, and I hardly ever miss his plays whenever they are on in London. The other day I saw Arcadia at the Old Vic, and I deserve a round of applause for that effort.

Sitting for three hours in an uncomfortable chair with no leg room is hard for a man whose new hip is only a couple of weeks old. Perhaps partly for that reason I felt the play was too long and could lose an hour without too much trouble.

Unlike Shakespeare’s plays, which are always better than they can be produced, Stoppard’s work doesn’t read especially well. It’s on stage that his plays come into their own. They live or die by pace, the faster the better, and good directors realise that, never allowing the audience either to relax for too long or to think too deeply.

Arcadia characters deliver long light-hearted monologues at full speed and on a full university curriculum. Alas, sometimes those soliloquies do sound like university lectures.

Stoppard respected his audience, giving them credit for being familiar with such diverse subjects as Fermat’s Theorem, the chaos theory, Romantic art, 18^th century landscape gardening, iterated algorithms, Newton’s laws of motion and thermodynamics, entropy, classical literature, calculus – and that’s just in the first 20 minutes.

Judging by the demographics of the audience, one has to be rather old to accumulate enough knowledge to be able to follow those densely written deliveries. The other day I estimated the average age of those overachievers at 60-plus, and it might have been a rather big plus.

The most thought-provoking lines came from a character imaginatively named Septimus Hodge, and they certainly provoked my thoughts. The two lines that especially caught my attention dealt with seemingly different fields of knowledge: art, physics and philosophy.

In one, Septimus wittily describes 19^th century Romanticism as “a decline from thought to feeling”. In the other, he asks a pointed question without offering an answer: “If everything from the furthest planet to the smallest atom of our brain acts according to Newton’s laws of motion, what becomes of free will?”

This is where, with your permission, Stoppard leaves off and I pick up. For two disciplines are sorely missing from those he juggles so expertly: theology and real philosophy, a subject that Jacques Maritain aptly described as “the science of first causes”.

Romanticism indeed was exactly what Stoppard wrote it was, thought declining to feeling. However, that happened because, during the so-called Age of Reason, the thought in question was weak to begin with. Romanticism didn’t initiate the decline; it merely acknowledged it.

The very term, the Age of Reason, is fraudulent. It should have been more appropriately called ‘the Age of Reason Debauched’.

‘Reason’ to those lame Enlightenment thinkers simply meant atheism and materialism, those two great slaps in the face of real ratio. That ersatz reason was at base emotive post-rationalisation of an intuitively felt loathing for everything the ancien régime represented, especially Christianity.

The well of that post-rationalisation predictably ran dry in short order and, come the 19^th century, it had nowhere else to go but towards Romanticism, with its solipsistic emotiveness and pagan nature-worship.   

Septimus’s rhetorical question on the conflict between determinism and free will was appropriate and tersely put. But it’s impossible to answer coherently within the suffocating confines of materialism.

The smallest atom of our brain may or may not act according to Newton’s laws of motion, and in fact modern science goes far beyond Newton. But the atoms in our brain, whether acting on Newton’s laws or those of Einstein or Heisenberg, have nothing to do with free will. Neither do various synapses sending their neurons into scanners to make their displays light up or not.

All those marvellous physical things are reshuffled cards in a pack, but it’s human free will and the thought it produces that does the reshuffling.

Free will is a theological and philosophical concept. It originates in metaphysics, a discipline that justifies its etymology by going beyond physics.

Had metaphysics and theology figured among the disciplines Stoppard invoked, he wouldn’t have let Septimus’s question remain unanswered. He would have said that free will and the physical world, including Newton’s laws of motion, belong to two different realms of God’s creation.

Even within the metaphysical realm a conflict between predetermination and free will did puzzle thinkers for centuries. In religious thought, predetermination is expressed as predestination.

Since God, said St Augustine of Hippo (d. 430 AD), is omnipotent, he uses his power to predestine our lives in eternity. But since he is also omniscient, he allows us to make our free choices whenever they are called for: he knows in advance which way we’d go, but he doesn’t force us to choose one way or the other.

One part of Augustine’s teaching that I find less than convincing is that he believed that, though we do make choices of our own free will, they don’t affect our salvation or perdition. These are predestined by God, and that’s something I’ve always struggled with. If we don’t stand to gain from making good choices or lose from making bad ones, free will seems an exercise in futility.

Luther and especially Calvin built a vast corpus of theology on predestination, and I think they were wrong. Actually, the whole issue of predestination is rooted in the timelessness of God, as opposed to the temporal existence of man. This juxtaposition gave rise to the most elegant solution to our problem, that by the Spanish Counter-Reformation thinker Luis de Molina.

In effect, though he himself didn’t use this terminology, Molina linked the philosophical category of time with the grammatical category of tense. Our lives unfold within three basic tenses: Past, Present and Future. But God, being timeless, has only one tense: the Present Perfect.

What is ‘will be’ for us is ‘has been’ for God. Hence when he predestines each individual for salvation or damnation, God does so not arbitrarily but on the basis of the free choices he knows the individual will have made during his life – before he has actually made them within his earthly time frame.

Had Stoppard thought in such terms, he could have doubtless put some dazzlingly witty response to Septimus’s question into the mouth of another character, possibly Thomasina. However, he didn’t think in such terms, which is why his probing question fell flat.

Thus he unwittingly proved that, outside metaphysics, questions touching on first causes can never be answered, nor even properly asked. Having said that, one shouldn’t expect philosophical depths in a work of art – unless it’s Bach, but that’s a whole new topic.

Over 3,000 Muslims occupied (or colonised, if you’d rather) Trafalgar Square on Monday to celebrate iftar, the meal that breaks the Ramadan.

They were holding a mass prayer, with London mayor Sadiq Khan in attendance as host or perhaps imam – I’m not quite up on Islamic arcana. But I’m glad the festivities took place behind Admiral Nelson, not in front of him.

Had he been able to see the revelries, Nelson would have come alive, gasped “I’m petrified, Hardy” and ordered a grapeshot broadside. Scenes of that nature smack in the middle of London aren’t what the good admiral died for at Trafalgar.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a big, perpetually thirsty Irishman over 20 years ago at just about this time of the year. Some urgent business had taken me to the area around Trafalgar Square on St Patrick’s Day, only for me to realise that urgency wasn’t on.

The whole area was taken over by boisterous green-clad crowds, with many drinking out of Guinness cans and most belting out Oh, Danny Boy or songs I didn’t know. Even though they were in no way threatening, they were unbearably noisy. I detest crowds of any kind, but on that day I was especially annoyed because I had to shoulder my way through that mass of inebriated humanity and as a result was late for my meeting.

When I shared my feelings with my Irish co-worker the next day, he said I was a miserable sod who just hated to see people have a good time. I objected, saying I was all for people having a good time. I just didn’t think some people should have a good time at the expense of many others, in that case paralysing both vehicular and pedestrian traffic through central London.

But at least St Patrick’s Day is a Christian holiday venerating a saint recognised as such by both apostolic confessions of Christianity, Catholic and Orthodox, and also by the Lutheran Church and the Church of Ireland (part of the Anglican communion). Hence both the saint and his commemoration are in line with our formative tenets and 1,500 years of tradition.

That wasn’t the case with all those thousands doing their Muslim press-ups in Trafalgar Square. That sight had to be offensive even to those who, unlike me, don’t suffer from an acute case of enochlophobia.

They were celebrating a tradition not only alien to our civilisation, but actively hostile to it in every way you care to name: historical, religious, cultural, even sartorial. Still, they are entitled, I suppose, to exercise the freedom of religion guaranteed by the same British constitution so many of them despise.

The question arises, however, of why they chose to exercise it in Trafalgar Square. After all, most of those gathered there don’t live in that area. The Muslim population of Westminster does stand at 20 per cent, but most of it is concentrated around Westbourne, Paddington and Edgware Road, about three miles away.

Why didn’t they choose those areas for their devotions or, better still, Tower Hamlets, a borough that might as well be in Dhaka, not in London?

Shadow Justice Secretary Nick Timothy provided a credible answer to that question. The costume show in Trafalgar Square, he said, was an “act of domination and division”. In other words, it was radical Muslims showing Londoners who’s boss.

They’ve already demonstrated their electoral power by electing a socialist Muslim mayor, who is happily running London into the ground, replicating on a smaller scale the outrages being committed by other socialists, those working in Westminster and specifically Downing Street. And it was Starmer, with Sadiq Khan bringing up the rear, who led the counterattack.

Starmer described Timothy’s comments as “utterly appalling” and demanded that the Tory leader “sack him”. That Kemi Badenoch refused to do, offering a cogent explanation why.

It’s not about religious freedom, she said. “It is about how religion is expressed in a shared public space, and whether those expressions fit within the norms of a British culture.” Just so.

Moreover, she jogged Starmer’s memory by reminding him that in 2021 he himself refused to take part in an event organised by the Ramadan Tent Project, the same group that was behind the display in Trafalgar Square.

Badenoch didn’t say so, but at that time Labour was reeling from a series of anti-Semitic scandals at the top of the party. The very top, actually, starting with the previous leader, Jeremy Corbyn, whose position became untenable in 2020, partly for that reason.

Hence Starmer had to develop ad hoc philo-Semitism and boycott radical Muslim events. The situation now is different: as the recent by-election in Manchester showed, Muslims will vote as a bloc for a party that loves them the most. And, on that evidence, that party isn’t Labour but Green.

Hence Starmer’s urgent need to “suck up to Muslims”, in Badenoch’s phrase. It should go without saying that Mrs Badenoch, the rest of her party and Reform in its entirety were instantly accused of being secretly run by Tommy Robinson.

The logic behind it is typically Left-wing – after all, people capable of rational, sequential thought don’t become Left-wing. Hence anyone sharing a single view with a demonstrably revolting personage like Tommy has to be his closet admirer.

If you’ll excuse another foray into my personal experience, I once had an argument about the EU with an American neocon, to whom I have the misfortune of being related. Neocons in general are pro-EU, mainly because they don’t know enough about it, but also because American ‘paleo-conservatives’ whom they dislike are against it.

Having heard my arguments, which I won’t repeat here to save space, my opponent used the same line of thought currently practised by Labour: if you are against the EU, he said, you are for Putin, its known enemy.

Absolutely. And every dog-loving Briton is a crypto-Nazi because Hitler loved his Alsatian Blondi.

As an aspiring PM, Kemi Badenoch can’t express herself with the same freedom I can. So I’ll say this for her, without, I’m sure, deviating too far from what she thinks. It’s possible to despise that disgusting thug Robinson while at the same time being appalled by watching a great nation commit civilisational suicide.

For the accumulation of Muslims in Britain is rapidly approaching, if it hasn’t already reached, the critical mass where they’ll become king makers, if not quite kings yet. If they can force at least three of the five major political parties to do their bidding, they can gain political control of the country.

That would be a gift that keeps on giving because all those parties support easing (in the Greens’ case, eliminating) immigration controls. In effect, this means that the Muslim population of Britain could easily double within a few years – especially since those same parties also support abiding by EU laws.

One of those laws is about free movement of people, meaning that a Muslim setting foot anywhere on the European continent could proceed to Britain unimpeded. Experience shows that many will do just that, even though in theory they are supposed to settle in the first free country they reach.

God save us all if the only tangible force opposing this development is Tommy Robinson types. In their own way, they are as un-British as the possessors of those heaving backs in Trafalgar Square. Whichever side wins, the future is grim.

P.S. If you have doubts about cultural erosion, just look at one small aspect of our culture: Imperial units. Britain went metric to be in line with the EU, and by 2000 grocers could be arrested for selling food in pounds rather than kilos.

Even though Britain left the EU in 2016, that abomination has persisted. Today, most grocers, especially young ones, don’t even know what an ounce or a pound is. Since I stubbornly demand my food in Imperial units, I have to provide translation services on the spot.

This morning I asked my local butcher for three pounds of short ribs and realised I might as well be talking to a deaf Martian. “A kilo and a half,” I said because I didn’t want to go hungry.

You can extrapolate from there, can’t you? Penelope certainly can.

Yesterday, she received a circular e-mail from Smythson, whose (prohibitively expensive) leather goods she occasionally patronises. The message showed a crescent and said: “Eid Mubarak. From all of us at Smythson, we wish you and your loved ones a joyous and happy Eid.”

Can’t you just see it? The Donald donning a black beret, grabbing a Kalashnikov, addressing every man he meets as “my old son”, and shouting “Up the Republic!”?

No, perhaps not. But he did the next best thing by stating his support for a united Ireland, which is after all the declared aim of the IRA.

That statement was as carefully thought through as most things Trump utters, and it bore every hallmark of his style and professional experience.

The careful thought was evident in the reason Trump identified for aligning himself with IRA desiderata. The setting was perfect: the Friends of Ireland luncheon in honour of St Patrick’s Day.

Trump noticed that Northern Ireland’s Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly and Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin “get along so well”. From there it was natural to move on to a simple syllogism.

Thesis: Little-Pengelly and Martin are cordial to each other. Antithesis: both are Irish, but live in different countries. Synthesis: the two countries should unite.

What can be more logical than that? If this is the first question, then the second one has to deal with Trump’s thought process. Does he ever take the trouble of thinking before opening his mouth? Or is he so narcissistic as to believe that everything he says is clever because he is the one saying it?

Anyone who has ever seen Mrs Pengelly’s photograph will know that any post-pubescent male with a palpable pulse would find her easy to get along well with at a party. Drawing geopolitical conclusions on that basis is insane.

So much for substance. Trump’s style also provides an insight into the workings of his mind for he thinks and therefore speaks as the property tycoon he was and not as the politician he is. “I love mergers,” he declared, explaining why the two parts of Ireland should “merge”.

The lexicon of Trump’s current occupation includes terms like ‘unification’ or, in Ireland’s case, ‘reunification’. Although loosely synonymous with ‘merger’, they are the ones to use in a geopolitical context. Trump will next describe Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine as a hostile takeover.

Still, one has to compliment the Donald for knowing that Ulster and the Republic are indeed different countries. According to his former, admittedly disgruntled, aides, in Trump’s first term he couldn’t tell the Baltics from the Balkans.

“That’s the way it’s supposed to be,” he concluded his remarks on a potential merger. Not as far as the United Kingdom is concerned, it isn’t. Actually, that’s the whole point.

I’m sure there was an ulterior motive behind Trump’s clumsy remarks. It was cocking a snook at Britain in general and Keir Starmer in particular, who, as Trump keeps repeating, correctly, is no Churchill.

For once I agree with the Donald, and I also think it’s unfortunate that European NATO members are in no hurry to join the on-going war in the Middle East. We should be above such emotive issues as the slings and arrows Trump routinely uses to attack and humiliate his European allies.

The issue of going to war or not ought to be decided on cold-blooded considerations of national interest, not on politicians’ feelings, hurt or otherwise. And since Europe suffers more than America from the current damage to oil shipments, we have a vested interest in opening the Strait of Hormuz.

The politician whom Trump identified as no Churchill is, according to him, making “a big mistake” in not being “supportive” of America. Yes, he is. But Starmer’s lack of Churchillian qualities is only partly to blame for his reluctance to go in guns blazing.

Trump is learning the hard way, inasmuch as he is capable of learning anything, that he can’t treat America’s allies as skivvies he can summon or dismiss at will and then expect them to ask how high when he tells them to jump. Moreover, threatening to invade two fellow NATO members isn’t going to inspire them or their friends to go to war on America’s behalf.

Nor do Trump’s increasingly erratic and self-contradictory musings on the subject encourage America’s allies to act in the spirit of the alliance. Thus, he has been issuing declarations of victory practically every day, starting from the first day of the hostilities.

Just yesterday he wrote in his customary illiterate manner: “Because of the fact that we have had such MILITARY SUCCESS we no longer “need”, or desire the NATO countries’ assistance – WE NEVER DID!… In fact, speaking as President of the United States of America, by far the Most Powerful Country Anywhere in the World, WE DO NOT NEED THE HELP OF ANYONE!”

Splendid. So what’s the problem then? More to the point, what has changed since two days ago, when Trump implored the allies to join in?

Did the sight of a major LNG facility burning in Qatar convince Trump that America could go it alone? Or is it the sight of the Strait of Hormuz closed to all oil tankers except those belonging to Iran, Russia or China?

For all of Trump’s bravado, America does need and desire the NATO countries’ assistance – SHE ALWAYS DID! If Trump were a true statesman, rather than a jumped-up property developer with personality disorders, he’d know that – and he would have laid the necessary groundwork.

A statesman would have consulted America’s allies beforehand, explained to them why the war was necessary, identified the strategic objectives, shown how NATO in its entirety stood to benefit from victory and suffer from defeat or inactivity, had the countries’ general staffs jointly work out the means to the end – and define the desired end.

A statesman – or simply an averagely intelligent person – would have realised that unleashing hell in one of the world’s major oil-producing regions would affect energy supplies. He would have explained to the allies that such was an unavoidable cost of war, but that it would be outweighed by the spoils of victory.

Trump did none of those things. Instead, he blithely barged in, certain it was possible to force a regime change from 10,000 feet, something that had never been done in history.

From the beginning he has been dismissing such naysaying. There would be no need for a ground assault, Trump kept saying. And that’s another tune he seems to be changing. He would deploy ground troops “if necessary”, this is the current melody.

Hence yesterday a reporter posed a natural question at a press conference: “Are you afraid that if you put boots on the ground in Iran, it could be another Vietnam?”

“No,” Trump snapped tetchily, “I’m not afraid of anything.” 

He should be. The war is unpopular in the US as it is, and will become even more or so if body bags start arriving in a steady stream. It doesn’t take much for crowds, especially on campuses, to start marching and shouting “Hell no, we won’t go”, like their grandparents did.

I’m convinced that the war on Iran is just, legal, necessary and winnable. I also agree with Trump that Starmer is no Churchill. Alas, neither is he – and that’s the calibre of statesmanship required to lead free nations in wars against evil tyrannies.

Catastrophes happen when countries are led by bad politicians at a time of crisis. And no one this side of MAGA fanatics would extol the likes of Trump, Hegseth, Witkoff or Kushner as great wartime leaders. I wish them every success and hope for the best – while fearing the worst.