Author: Alexander Boot

“I’ve got the most working-class Cabinet in the history of this country sitting round my Cabinet table,” said our beleaguered prime minister, “and I’m really proud of that”.

That statement is rich in connotation, which, I’m afraid, may escape my American readers. Even Britons may struggle to define ‘working class’ precisely, but Americans must be totally at a loss.

I understand their predicament. Having myself lived in the US for 15 years, I never once heard anyone describe himself as working class. I’m not saying such people don’t exist, only that I never met them.

When I moved to London, the demographics of my friends and colleagues didn’t change appreciably. And yet from day one I began to meet people, some of them on incomes ranging from six to eight digits, saying they were working class.

Now, I grew up in a country where Marxism was recognised as the only true teaching in history. Hence I had to take half a dozen different university courses in various aspects of Marxism, all the time suppressing either the giggles or nausea.

I’m not sure I retained much of that useless knowledge, but I do remember how Marx defined working class, otherwise known as the proletariat. His definition was mostly economic, based on one’s relationship to ‘the means of production’. Essentially, he meant manual workers in manufactories, factories, mines and some such.

It seems to me that our governing Marxists have kept their guiding light’s nomenclature, while depriving it of any tangible substance. They define working class as a certain badge of honour, the prole version of hereditary peerage.

A man whose ancestor was ennobled, say, in the 17^th century will consider himself upper class or, if he is in the direct line of male descent, a peer. The same logic is applied to working class: someone who grew up in a working class family, even at several removes, is working class for life, and so will be his progeny.

While feasting on upward economic mobility, our Marxists illogically deny the possibility of upward social mobility. Hence, what Starmer meant was that many members of his cabinet grew up in families that were, or had been in previous generations, working class.

However, if we insist on using the term in Marx’s own rigorous sense, Starmer’s statement is a lie. Hard as I looked into his cabinet colleagues’ backgrounds, I couldn’t find a single one who ever did a full-time working class job.

Starmer himself never did. Neither did Rachel Reeves. Neither did David Lammy. Neither did Angela Rayner – although she qualifies tangentially and, if you will, culturally. Angie grew up on a council estate and left school at 16 after producing an illegitimate child conceived behind a bike shed or in some other insalubrious surroundings.

After that she became a social worker and a greasy-pole climber in union and then Labour politics. Does that make her working class? I don’t think so, but Rayner’s background is similar to her cabinet colleagues’, minus bike-shed babies.

By being an open homosexual, Wes Streeting boasts an important political qualification, but not the one in question. His grandpa and grandma did some time at Her Majesty’s pleasure for armed robbery, which is undoubtedly a lower-class pastime. But as far as I know, Wes himself never knocked off a corner shop – and neither did he ever do a blue-collar job.

Compare this cabinet to the first Labour one in history, Ramsey MacDonald’s in 1924.

MacDonald himself was a farm labourer at 15. Arthur Henderson was a foundry worker. John Robert Clynes, a mill worker. Margaret Bondfield, shop assistant. Thomas Shaw and Fred Jowett, textile workers. William Adamson and Stephen Walsh, miners. And so forth.

Care to withdraw your statement, Sir Keir? No, of course not. It’s too pedantic for words to insist on precise definitions. Any Labour politician or voter is ipso facto working class, especially if he identifies as such. What’s there not to understand?

But I’m glad to see that Starmer found something to be proud of in his cabinet. For he and his jolly men are rapidly running the country into the ground – so rapidly and thoroughly, in fact, that one is tempted to think that perhaps a different family background is more conducive to successful governance.

Sir Keir’s boastful and false statement was more than just a reaffirmation of his Marxist credentials. It was surrender to the loony Left wing of his party, the Trotskies to his Bukharin.

“I will never walk away from the mandate I was given to change the country,” vowed the PM to the loonies baying for his blood. He seems to misunderstand not only the term ‘working class’, but also ‘mandate’.

Britain has 48,208,507 registered voters. One would think that a vote of at least over 50 per cent would constitute a mandate, but that would only go to show how deeply one misunderstands politics. In fact, 9,708,816 people voted Labour in 2024.  

The peculiarity of our election system delivered Labour a landslide 174-seat majority. But it takes a profoundly dishonest man (aka a Labour politician) to claim a mandate on the basis of only 20 per cent of registered voters casting their ballot for his party.

“I will never walk away from the people that I’m charged with fighting for,” continued Starmer, and he didn’t mean all British subjects, which is how his job used to be understood. He meant those especially dear to his Marxist heart: working people, defined as the non-working underclass.

The necessity to restate his commitment to ruining the country arose in the wake of the Mandelson scandal, which the loonies saw as a pretext to get rid of Starmer and replace him with a loony Marxist like Rayner.

Yet Starmer got a stay of execution (figuratively speaking, for the time being) by effectively saying, “Chaps, we don’t need the chaos of a leadership challenge right now. Keep me in, and I’ll do everything you want – and more.” We can take his word for it.

“It is utter nonsense to suggest that everybody gets a fair chance in life, utter nonsense,” complained Starmer.

But it isn’t. Everyone gets a fair chance. What he meant was that not everyone gets an equal chance. For example, girls who get pregnant behind a bike shed at 15 are at a disadvantage, although not such a big one that they can’t become MPs 20 years later.

The complete equality of Marxist fancy is achievable only in prison, and this is the ultimate ideal for which Marxist loins ache. Making everyone equally poor and equally enslaved was the philosophy of the country in which I grew up, but I hoped — in vain, as it turns out — I’d be spared that evil nonsense in the country in which I grew old.

Then Starmer added a lachrymose personal touch: “Even within my own family, my brother, who died last year, he had difficulties learning when he was growing up. He spent his adult life wandering from job to job in virtual poverty.”

Learning difficulties is the woke for what used to be called mental retardation. This is a tragedy, as is dying of lung cancer at 60. But I struggle to detect any relevance here, unless Starmer believes that government action can turn mentally retarded people into systems analysts and brain surgeons, while banning cancer by fiat.

Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband, and only in a mad country can that post exist, explained the terms of surrender he and his fellow loonies imposed on Starmer: “I tell you what angers Keir the most – it’s class. It’s the class divides… He exists to change that… I absolutely dispute the idea he’s not somebody driven by burning passion about the injustices our country faces and how we need to change them.”

Right. So Starmer got to keep his job by promising to eliminate class divides. Good luck with that: no government in history has ever succeeded in that task, including those that could bring to bear on it mass executions, concentration camps and murderous artificial famines.

But hey, nothing ventured and all that. I just shudder to think what this lot may try before irreversibly reducing Britain to a Third World status politically, economically and socially.

We can’t get rid of this Marxist cabal for another three years, not legally at any rate. As a conservative, I’m opposed to any illegal ways of changing government, although I sometimes think at a weak moment that I’d be willing to make an exception in this case.

P.S. Would Angie Rayner know that the title above is based on a literary source? If not, she’s perfectly qualified to be the next PM.

None of what I’m about to say comes out of the burning bush. I claim no universal truth, nor even wide applicability. It’s just my very personal (and hence probably flawed) way of looking at things.

My first reaction to any news, any development, any image isn’t moral, religious, philosophical, intellectual or political. It’s aesthetic.

Hence my first, usually unspoken or even unconscious, question isn’t “Is it ethical, legal or clever?”, nor even “Is it right-wing or left-wing?”. It’s “Is it in good taste?”

This doesn’t mean that my first reactions and questions will remain my last, far from it. If the subject is interesting enough, I’ll then ask more questions on the basis of those other criteria I’ve mentioned. But depending on the answer to that first lapidary question, my judgement will be skewed.

In this, I humbly follow the lead of many great thinkers of the past: pre-Socratic philosophers like Parmenides; Plato and Aristotle; medieval scholastics like Albertus Magnus and Aquinas; then subsequent Catholic theology; and of course classical German philosophers, most notably Kant.

Both Plato and Aristotle devoted much attention to what they called ‘transcendentals’, objective ontological properties of being they defined as Truth, Beauty and Goodness. The key word there was ‘objective’: the transcendentals weren’t contingent on personal tastes, ideologies or cultural diversity.

Moreover, they existed as one – meaning that a deficit in one transcendental also diminished the other two. In other words, what’s true and moral is also beautiful, what’s beautiful is also moral and true – and hence what’s ugly can be neither true nor moral.

Which of the transcendentals one wishes to apply first is a matter of personal, often intuitive, preference and also the situation analysed. My tendency is to look out for Beauty, or lack thereof, first. I simply feel that nothing ugly and tasteless can be either true or good.

Just look at the Epstein scandal and those involved in it. I’m sure some of what was going on there was illegal – but that to me is secondary. Actually, most things happening on that notorious island broke no laws – but that doesn’t matter to me either.

What matters to me more than anything else is that the whole affair is staggeringly tawdry, vulgar, tasteless – and so are all the individuals involved in it. That’s what is really criminal to me, as it would have been to that professional aesthete, if a somewhat lesser intellectual light than the men I mentioned earlier, Oscar Wilde.

“All crimes are vulgar,” he wrote, “all vulgarity is a crime”. That makes everyone who has ever set foot on that wretched island a felon, whatever the letter of the law has to say about it.

Popping over to Epstein’s properties to indulge pornographic fantasies was much worse than patronising a brothel. A visitor to such establishments is engaged in a cash-and-carry transaction, exchanging real money for ersatz sex.

Old men doing so may look for professional stimulation of their flagging libido. Younger men, especially those who see carnality as a competitive sport, may simply want to run up their score or else obtain a quick release without wasting time and money on courtship with an uncertain pay-off. The whole institution is as democratic as any shop: anyone willing to exchange cash for goods is welcome, provided he isn’t seen as a factor of danger.

The morality of such activities is questionable, but their redeeming quality is their patina of age. A conservative thus finds himself in a quandary: on the one hand, prostitution is immoral; on the other, it has existed roughly for as long as mankind has. And conservatives are innately conditioned to give ancient institutions the benefit of the doubt.

Aesthetically, I find brothels to be in bad taste – but not nearly as bad as Epstein’s enterprise. His guests didn’t pay for sex, at least not directly, in banknotes. They partook in the whole spectacle of entitlement: it wasn’t a few hundred they traded for sex but their station in life, which was thereby affirmed.

Politicians, noblemen, tycoons, stars of screen, stage and catwalk all basked in their self-importance. For Epstein’s island was more than just a brothel writ large. It was a monument to vulgar narcissism and powerlust – it was a vindication of Freud’s swindles, which ipso facto made it vulgar in the extreme.

Therefore, every visitor to that island is a criminal in Oscar Wilde’s book, and mine. That’s why, when news emerges that some of them committed criminal acts defined as such not aesthetically but legally, I don’t gasp in incredulity. Par for the course, I dare say.

If we plausibly define civilisation as a sustained collective effort to uphold Truth, Beauty and Goodness, then Epstein, Maxwell and all their guests have delivered another kick to the body of our already prostrate civilisation.

To me, that crime trumps (no pun intended) all the other crimes they either committed or suborned, such as running a KGB honeytrap operation, blackmail, passing insider information to interested parties, money laundering, corrupting the morals of minors, living off the proceeds of prostitution, human trafficking and all the rest.

I must emphasise again that I don’t think all or even most visitors to Epstein’s island violated the letter of the law. What they did violate was the spirit of our civilisation, and for that crime there ought to be no pardon or parole.

Fate has forced me to ponder more deeply the human factor of the on-going war in the Ukraine. Said fate came in the shape of our boiler that decided to pack up yesterday.

In full compliance with sod’s law, the boiler had to choose a winter Sunday to do its dirty work. Our regular plumber was kind enough to answer our desperate call for help but explained there was nothing he could do until Tuesday – he is fully booked all day Monday.

Hence, as I write this, I’m wearing three layers of clothing and considering the possibility of typing in gloves. Penelope is courageously practising her Bach Partitas, which is a hell of a task when one’s fingers are cold and stiff.

Allow me to put our plight in a meteorological context: outside temperature is 11C. That’s plus, not minus.

In Kiev, it’s -9C at the moment, and recently it has been as low as -20. And yet on-going Russian raids on the Ukrainian capital’s energy infrastructure have left the city pretty much without electricity, and hence without light and, more to the point, heat.

How do the Kievans manage to stay alive? One could put on one’s whole wardrobe and still die of hypothermia, especially if one is no longer in the first flush of youth. Old people must be dying in droves as the world watches on with perfunctory empathy or, increasingly, without thereof.

Whenever someone in the US or Britain accuses the Russians of beastly savagery, they have their stock replies ready and well-rehearsed. You bombed Dresden! You dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki! And now you have the nerve to accuse us of monstrosity?!?

Yes, somehow our progressive age has taught us that civilians are legitimate targets in any war. That’s what progress is all about: our progressive science enables us to produce doomsday weapons; or progressive morality allows us to use them to murder millions.

When Mongol hordes under Genghis Khan and Batu swept across Eurasia, they usually spared the populations of the town they conquered. The Mongols tended to massacre civilians only after the parley they’d send out to the town had been killed. But that was before progress arrived. We are much more open-minded now.

It’s only numerically that the ordeal of Kiev still hasn’t reached the scale of Dresden or Hiroshima – fewer Kievans have lost their lives so far, and more of their buildings are still standing. That said, I’d suggest that what’s going on in Kiev is worse than the terrible tragedies of Dresden and Hiroshima. It’s worse both objectively, seen in the light of the military situation, and subjectively, from the standpoint of the soldiers involved.

First, a minor point: neither Britain nor the US was the aggressor in that war. That fact doesn’t absolve them of any responsibility for subsequent atrocities, but it must be taken into consideration.

Second, those bombings pursued hard-nosed strategic objectives. Dresden and Leipzig were important railway junctions, through which the Nazis were moving reinforcements north to Berlin, as the Red Army was approaching. That’s why the Soviets asked the Allied High Command to bomb the two cities.

Smart ordnance didn’t exist at the time, and high-altitude carpet bombing was the only way to degrade those railway junctions. Of the two cities, Leipzig received a much higher load of explosive, but the city was fortunate in that there were no swirling winds to cause a fire storm. Dresden wasn’t so lucky.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki had little military significance, which is why choosing them for nuclear annihilation was more problematic morally. However, US strategists wanted to avoid desperate fighting island by island, which would have had to happen had Japan not been knocked out of the war quickly. The estimates of potential American casualties ran well into six digits, which must have focused President Truman’s mind.

None of this is earth-shattering news. The arguments pro and con the aerial bombardment of German and Japanese cities (incidentally, Tokyo was bombed with conventional weapons and still suffered higher casualties than Hiroshima) have raged ever since. Only a brave debater would insist that the morality of those actions is unequivocal one way or the other, and I’m not so brave.

However, there is one aspect that hardly ever comes up, and yet I think it’s morally significant. Those airmen dropping bombs on German cities didn’t just kill. They also risked being killed, and 81,000 of them actually died – 55,573 RAF (Penelope’s uncle among them) and over 26,000 USAF.

Had the Germans had neither Luftwaffe fighters nor flak guns, the airmen dropping almost three megatons of bombs on German cities (yes, RAF and USAF already spoke the language of the nuclear age) wouldn’t have been soldiers. They would have been terrorists.

This brings me back to the on-going conflict. Referring to it as ‘PlayStation war’ is an exaggeration, but it’s true that at the moment the heaviest casualties on either side are caused by similar devices and the drones they control.

Those drone ‘pilots’ are essentially youngsters who grew up playing computer games. Now they are using skills accrued thereby to play the same games, except that their targets are made of flesh and blood, not pixels. These barely post-pubescent lads kill with no risk of being killed, which makes them terrorists in my book.

I’m not suggesting moral equivalence between the two sides, far from it. First, the Ukraine is an innocent victim of fascist aggression (I’m using the modifier advisedly), and she is fighting not just for her national political sovereignty but also for her national existential survival.

The Russians have already shown in Bucha, Mariupol and elsewhere that they are willing and able to conduct a systematic genocide of Ukrainians. Hence I’d say that anything the Ukrainians do to defend themselves is morally justified, and nothing the Russians do is.

Second, Ukrainian drone ‘pilots’ are hitting military targets almost exclusively. Though last year they destroyed some 20 per cent of Russia’s oil refining capacity, they haven’t targeted power stations around Russian cities to make sure the inhabitants freeze to death.

I wish the Ukrainians had the weapons to launch retaliatory strikes against Moscow and Petersburg because only such actions could make the Russians desist from their genocidal practices. But the spineless pusillanimity of the Ukraine’s Western allies has made such weapons unavailable.

This means Ukrainian soldiers will continue to die at the front, and Ukrainian civilians in their unheated homes. Meanwhile, I promise not to moan about our own unheated flat. Considering what the Ukrainians are going through, such whingeing would be in bad taste.

When in the 1880s Nietzsche appointed himself coroner to divinity and pronounced God was dead, he was writing reportage, not prophecy.

The idea that God was dead or at least redundant had been bandied about by the likes of Condorcet a hundred years before Nietzsche, and, closer to his time, by Hegel, Marx, Compte and others, whose name is legion.

However, all those undoubtedly clever men were committing a category error. For God can’t die by definition – if he dies, he isn’t God but something else. What exactly?

All those Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers agree: it’s not God who created man, but the other way around. And if man created the myth of God, man is free to kill that myth – it’s his to do what he will with. This, however, raises a question: if God is merely a creature of man’s imagination, then whose creature is man?

When this question is posed, all those undoubtedly clever men prove my observation that even undoubtedly clever men lose their logical faculties when trying to prove God’s non-existence. Even though they all use different words, the underlying paradox is the same: man created himself.

How can they prove that parthenogenesis? Simple. If man didn’t create himself, then those gentlemen’s philosophy is meaningless. But, as true Gnostics, they know for a fact their philosophy is the ultimate truth. Ergo, man created himself.

How many logical fallacies do you detect there? One is obvious: petitio principii (begging the question), assuming the argument’s desired conclusion as its premise.

Thus Marx: “A man who lives by the grace of another considers himself a dependent being. But I live by the grace of another completely if I owe him not only the maintenance of my life but also its creation: if he is the source of my life; and my life necessarily has such a cause outside itself if it is not my own creation.” And that just won’t do.

Also, in the same vein: “Philosophy makes no secret of it. The confession of Prometheus, ‘In a word, I hate all the gods’, is its own confession, its own verdict against all gods heavenly and earthly who do not acknowledge human self-consciousness as the supreme deity.”

Here Marx plays fast and loose with Aeschylus: the Greek considered hatred of all the gods to be a sign of madness. Prometheus is thus co-opted to the cause also championed by Adam, Eve, Cain and the serpent: man’s liberation from the power of tyrannical God.

Nietzsche, being a better writer than Marx, expressed himself more lucidly: “Alas, my brothers, that God whom I created was human work and human madness, like all gods.”

And, “Let will to truth mean this to you: that everything be changed into the humanly conceivable, the humanly visible, the humanly sensible… What you called ‘the world’ shall be created only by you: it shall be your reason, your image, your will, your love.”

Then comes my absolute favourite: “If there were gods, how could I endure not being a god? Therefore, there are no gods.” Man as God is both the premise and the conclusion. A bit circuitous, don’t you think?

Hegel spoke of a dead God long before Nietzsche. To Hegel, the death of God meant the death of a man-made abstraction: “This death is the unhappy consciousness’s painful feeling that God himself has died… science alone is the spirit’s true knowledge of itself.”

The progression is unmistakable. The Reformation declared every man to be his own priest. Then the Enlightenment went a step further by declaring every man to be his own God, consigning the outdated deity to the knacker’s yard. That other God of old, explained Condorcet, was nothing but a despot invented by tyrannical priests and their masters to control the populace and nip human progress in the bud.

Condorcet was quite forthright about that, presaging Hegel’s belief in science as the sole dialectical unfolding of the spirit. All human ills, explained Condorcet, come from insufficient knowledge, a gap that only science can fill. Scientific progress assured, moral, social and cultural progress would follow ineluctably. Well, it hasn’t quite worked out that way, has it?

If Condorcet believed that heaven on earth would arrive if everyone became an intellectual, Hegel thought that advent would occur if everyone became a Gnostic:

“The true form in which truth exists can only be the scientific system of it. To contribute to bringing philosophy closer to the form of science – the goal of being able to cast off the name love of knowledge and become actual knowledge.”

Here Hegel plays with words by translating into German – and distorting – the terms that in the original Greek were philosophia and gnosis. According to Plato, the Oracle of Delphi called Socrates ‘the one who knows’. But Socrates rejected the honour. Only God, he explained, possesses gnosis, what Hegel called ‘actual knowledge’. A mortal man can only aspire to be the philosophus, the lover of knowledge and wisdom. He thereby also becomes the theophilus, the lover of God.

As Hegel stated at the beginning of his Phenomenology, in effect if not in so many words, his task was to replace philosophical inquiry with Gnosticism. We can thus grasp the full depth of Erik Voegelin’s insights (see my article of 5 February). He went Ortega y Gasset one better by showing the Gnostic nature of what Ortega in his eponymous book called The Revolt of the Masses.

Ortega brilliantly showed what kind of cultural, social and intellectual nightmare would be, already had been, produced by that revolt. But he missed its Gnostic, anti-Christian nature, although correctly identifying the ‘masses’ not as the proletariat but as bourgeois intellectuals.

Real masses, that great wad of humanity, are but putty in the hands of the Gnostic intellectual who murders God in order to take his place and rule as the anti-Christian, nihilist Superman: Scientific Superman of Condorcet and his French contemporaries, Positivist Superman of Compte, Proletarian Superman of Marx, Dionysian Superman of Nietzsche, Communist Superman of Lenin, Racial Superman of Hitler, Economic Superman of Ayn Rand.

However, history shows that, having murdered God, man doesn’t become one himself. He doesn’t even become the Superman – he becomes a mass murderer. Gnostics preaching deicide inspire revolutionaries practising homicide.

The much-vaunted Age of Reason was in fact the age of reason debauched. Men inspired by the Gnostic belief in heaven on earth only succeeded in creating hell on earth – it’s not for nothing that the atheist-Gnostic 20^th century claimed more victims than probably all the previous centuries of human history combined.

It would be simplistic to explain modernity as strictly a victorious Gnostic rebellion against Christendom. But this interpretation isn’t far from the truth, even though Voegelin himself refrained from making such sweeping statements. He just led his readers to the edge of that argument, leaving them to make the final leap themselves.

P.S. Writing in the early 1950s, Voegelin predicted that one day Russian communism would be replaced with Russian nationalist messianism, which would present an even greater danger to the West. Not many thinkers saw the future with such prophetic clarity.  

One increasingly faces this rejection throughout the West. I’ve certainly heard it so many times in London that I’ve stopped carrying cash, except on Sundays, when I need a banknote for the collection plate.

This aversion to paper money would be easy to understand if a shifty-looking chap tried to pay for a Mercedes with a suitcase full of cash. But I last heard that lapidary phrase the other day, when buying a cup of coffee at a theatre café.

Extrapolating from that experience, one finds out (in my case, from an excellent article by Oliver Bullough) that in 2024 just “nine per cent of payments were made with cash, down from more than half of transactions a decade earlier. Almost half the British population now uses cash just once a month, or not at all.”

And most of those transactions are small: some cafés in Britain must still be prepared to take your fiver. This situation isn’t unique to the UK though: some 40 per cent of Americans never use cash, and similar proportions hold true in France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland and so forth.

So how should central banks respond to a world going cashless? The answer is as simple as it is logical: they should drastically reduce their output of banknotes, and those they do print should be of smaller denominations.

Thus speaks common sense. Yet that faculty shuts up in the face of brutal facts. For what’s happening is exactly the opposite of that logical inference.

“In November last year,” writes Mr Bullough, “the value of all the dollar bills in circulation hit a new all-time high of $2.422 trillion (it hits new highs every month, so may well have done so again before you read this), which is almost exactly double the total a decade earlier, and that was in turn almost exactly double the total a decade before that. In fact the total value of notes in circulation, as reported by the Fed, has been doubling every decade for as long as I’ve been alive.

“For euros, the picture is similar. The most recent figure for the total circulating value of the European Union’s single currency is €1.619 trillion, which is also an all-time high, and also significantly higher than the €1.083 trillion of December 2015 and the €565 billion of a decade before that.”

But surely most of those banknotes were small, to reflect the way most people use cash? So demands that restless common sense, reluctant to admit defeat.

Sorry, wrong again: “Two decades ago the $100 bill was only the third most common banknote in circulation, but it overtook the $20 at some point in 2008 and then the dollar bill eight years later. Today there are more than 18 billion of them in circulation, 55 for every American. In raw value terms, about 80 per cent of all the paper dollars out there are made up of $100 bills… .”

This isn’t unique to the US. “Some 690 billion – almost half – of the euros in circulation are in the form of €100, €200 or €500 notes. The biggest denominations are also popular in Britain, Australia and Canada, while more than 90 per cent of all Swiss francs in circulation by value are in the form of the 1,000 franc note.”

Let’s sum up. Corporate transactions are never carried out in readies, this is obvious. Apparently, people don’t buy things for cash any longer either, and are often prevented from doing so even when they try. So what happens to all those truckloads of large-denomination notes?

Do people hoard cash under the proverbial mattress? If they do, they didn’t pay attention in history classes. Otherwise they’d know that the combined inflation over the second half of the 20^th century was 2,000 per cent, compared to just 10 per cent for the second half of the 19^th century. Hence that comfy mattress is an incinerator of cash, and the longer it houses money, the more it burns.

This leaves only one possibility: high-value banknotes are used by people operating in the shadow economy, which is to say common-or-garden criminals, terrorists and tax evaders. And Western governments, acting through their quasi-independent central banks are the criminals’ accomplices.

“Untraceable, untaxable income in the hands of criminals is the new lingua franca of organised crime,” says Davis Veness, former commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Hence the popularity of high-denomination banknotes.

Back in Soviet times, a $100 note could be exchanged for 20 per cent more in the black market than smaller denominations. Apparently, exactly the same premium is placed on that banknote these days, and one can understand why: the higher the denomination, the smaller the bulk of the wad, which is an advantage for criminals circulating cash between cities or countries.

Some central banks understand this perfectly well, which is why the production of €500 notes ceased in 2019. But by and large, Western printing presses and the governments that operate them are complicit in criminal activities, and Mr Bullough takes the shortest route to this uncompromising conclusion.

He uses the example of the Albanian gangs that have cornered the UK cocaine market in the past 10 years. “During this period, the annual repatriation of cash pounds from Albania to the UK has increased from about £65 million a year to £400 million, much of which had been smuggled to Albania, then paid into a friendly bank branch far from the UK authorities before being sent back by the official route.”

All doubtless true. But while highlighting the illicit activities of organised and individual criminals, Mr Bullough left out an important and ever-expanding category of cash lovers: criminal states.

Unlike puny gangs measuring cash in traditional denominations, criminal states measure it in units of weight, and Russia leads the way. When President Trump introduced the first tranche of crippling sanctions on Iran in 2018, Putin was on hand to give his friends a leg up.

In the first four months of that year, Russia’s state-owned bank sent over to Iran some five tonnes of banknotes totalling about $2.5 billion. There is every indication that even larger amounts are being shipped now, some as assistance to a fraternal regime, some as payment for the swarms of kamikaze drones and short-range ballistic missiles Iran is supplying to Russia.

The original infusion of cash came in several shipments across the Caspian Sea. The analysis of the weight and value of each shipment suggests that the cash came in €500 notes. This may be why the European Central Bank stopped printing that denomination the next year, but that was merely a palliative measure.

While Western governments impose punitive sanctions on criminal regimes, Western central banks happily make sanction-busting easier. They’d do well to remember to what use the Russians put those drones and missiles purchased with Western cash.

The words aiding and abetting spring to mind, but as long as the letter of the law is obeyed, everyone is happy, except Ukrainian civilians buried under the rubble of their homes. But money talks louder than their dying screams.

If someone asked me who I think was the best political scientist of the 20^th century, I’d probably reply that the question is frivolous.

Intellectual and artistic activities aren’t sporting contests. In such higher pursuits there are no rankings and ratings, nor any objective criteria on which such things could be based. However, if that hypothetical inquirer then cocked a gun, held it to my temple and demanded an unequivocal answer, I’d have to say Erik Voegelin.

The English prose of Voegelin’s best book, The New Science of Politics, is heavily influenced by his native German. And if there exist two other languages belonging to the same group that are as incompatible as English and German, I’d like to know what they are.

Moreover, he had the annoying habit of quoting profusely in untranslated foreign languages, both dead and alive. I can do reasonably well with Latin and French, but Greek and German take me out of my depth.

All in all, reading Voegelin is heavy going, but it’s an effort richly rewarded by the width of his erudition, the depth of his insights and the originality of his thought. There haven’t been too many political thinkers like Voegelin since Plato invented political science.

The phrase in the title above is a tongue-in-cheek encapsulation of one of Voegelin’s fundamental ideas, the leitmotiv of The New Science. Translated into the language we speak, rather than admire from afar, this means “Don’t try to make the Kingdom of God arrive here and now” or “Don’t try to create Heaven on Earth”.

Such urges are typical of Gnosticism, a heresy that proceeds from the assumption that the physical world (including human nature) was created not by God, but by an evil demiurge. Only an elite to which direct, mystical knowledge was vouchsafed can create a new, virtuous world, naturally having first destroyed the old, flawed one.

All three Abrahamic religions spawned their own versions of Gnosticism, and in fact echoes of the early church’s battle with such heresies are already discernible in John’s Gospel. But Voegelin expanded the notion of Gnosticism into the political sphere. In fact, using the example of the English Puritan revolutionaries of the 17^th century, he showed that Gnostics pursue mainly destructive political ends even when they drape them in a fabric of piety.

Voegelin cites a remarkable 1641 pamphlet, entitled A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory, which adumbrated practically the entire subsequent history of political (pseudo-religious or otherwise) Gnosticism, including the variants we see today or saw yesterday.

The pamphlet proudly flaunted every possible intellectual, moral and political vice, all under the guise of devoutness: refusal to recognise reality as it is, rampant nihilism, rejection of debate, personal attacks on infidels, seeing oneself as the ultimate depository of wisdom.

Since then, Gnostic politicians and their friends have refined the best lines of attack on those who stubbornly cling to reality as it has organically developed over the centuries – as it actually is.

All great political thinkers, from Machiavelli onwards, who insisted on such obduracy have been consistently pilloried as immoralists in the past, fascists at present. And a good Gnostic never argued with such scoundrels. He tried to silence (cancel, in today’s parlance) them one way or another, either for a long time or, better still, permanently.

As one reads the excerpts from that Puritan pamphlet, as quoted by Voegelin, one feels the warmth of recognition: the language was archaic, but the substance has since been perhaps the most productive trend of modern politics.

One can see all modern revolutions in that prose, those perpetrated by either violence or subterfuge – screaming from those pages are 17^th century England, 18^th century France and America, 19^th century philosophical trends such as Hegelianism, Marxism and positivism, 20^th century Bolshevism and Nazism, 21^st century… well, about that later.

The pamphlet starts by outlining the virtual reality of Gnostic fancy: “Babylon’s falling is Sion’s rising. Babylon’s destruction is Jerusalem’s salvation.” Though God is the cause of this coming change, men can still do their bit to hasten its advent: “Blessed is he that dasheth the brats of Babylon against the stones. Blessed is he that hath any hand in pulling down Babylon”.

And who specifically will be so blessed for such laudable action? Why, “the common people” of course. The noble, the wise, the rich and especially the clergy are possessed by “the spirit of the Antichrist” and will have to be eliminated by “the vulgar multitudes”.

By way of illustration, the pamphlet’s author quotes from Isaiah: “Kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and queens thy nursing mothers; they shall bow down to thee and lick up the dust of thy feet.” The Saints (Gnostics), on the other hand, “shall be all clothed in white linen, which is the righteousness of the saints.”

Naturally, the proposed reforms went beyond the sartorial splendour of the Saints and the dust-licking detail for the rulers. Essentially, all traditional institutions, especially legal ones, would bite the dust that hadn’t made its way onto the common folk’s feet:

Legal compulsion would be the first to go: “It is questionable whether there shall be need of ordinances, at least in that way that now there is….” As for the economy, abundance and prosperity would ensue:

“All is yours, says the Apostle, the whole world… You see that the Saints have little now in this world; now they are the poorest and meanest of all; but then… the world shall be theirs… Not only heaven shall be your kingdom, but this world bodily.” This sounds remarkably like the lyrics of the song belted out at Labour conferences.

There we have it, the eschaton immanentised, the course for all subsequent politics charted. Voegelin bravely widens the notion of Gnosticism, showing its dominant influence to this day (the book came out in 1952).

He predicts that all those changes will arrive “through [what is now called] the dialectics of history but in political procedure the saintly comrades will take a hand, and the hand will be well armed. If the personnel of the old order should not disappear with a smile, the enemies of godliness will be suppressed or, in contemporary language, purged.” Or, if I may add with the benefit of hindsight, cancelled, in even more contemporary language.

“The immanentisation of the Christian eschaton,” writes Voegelin, “made it possible to endow society in its natural existence with a meaning that Christianity denied to it. And the totalitarianism of our time must be understood as journey’s end of the gnostic search for a civil theology.”

When The New Science of Politics was published, the world was still trying to catch its breath after a great clash between two versions of gnostic totalitarianism, and naturally Voegelin concentrated on that sanguinary end of political Gnosticism.

But he knew that the powers that had sided with one version against the other weren’t free of that little weakness either: “[T]he gnostic politicians have put the Soviet army on the Elbe, surrendered China to the Communists, at the same time demilitarised Germany and Japan, and in addition demobilised our own [US] army. The facts are trite, and yet it is perhaps not sufficiently realised that never before in the history of mankind has a world power used a victory deliberately for the purpose of creating a power vacuum to its own disadvantage.”

In my book How the West Was Lost, I argued that all modern politics is essentially totalitarian in that the modern state, whichever mantle it dons, seeks total control over the populace. Voegelin shows that ‘totalitarian’ is fully synonymous with ‘gnostic’, even if gnostic power is applied without bloodshed.

Had Voegelin lived to this day, he’d no doubt discern aspects of Gnosticism gathering strength in modern politics. For example, both MAGA and its woke opposition are clearcut gnostic cults, seeking to reshape society, and the world at large, with no regard for traditional institutions, legality, reason, culture and political custom.

Scientism, the belief that natural sciences can solve every little problem of life, is another gnostic cult ruling the roost, as is the ecototalitarianism assiduously keeping contradicting evidence under wraps and launching frenzied attacks on those who seek to remove the wraps.

All such movements claim esoteric knowledge immune to criticism, all of them are merciless to the opposition, all of them claim to be working towards creating a true Golden Age – or immanentising the eschaton, in Voegelin’s phrase. What a sage man he was.

So what else is new, I hear you say. Of course, it’s in trouble.

Farms that have always operated on wafer-thin margins have had that wafer taken away. Strangulated by Labour’s taxes, inheritance and other, many farms have breathed their last.

As a result, domestic food production has gone down. If in 1984 we were 78 per cent self-sufficient, in 2024 that proportion dropped to 65 per cent, and analysts confidently predict a further reduction by a third in the next two decades.

So if this isn’t trouble, I don’t know… at this point, down came a thundering disembodied voice rudely interrupting me in mid-flow.

What are you on about? it asked. The same materialist nonsense that always turns you on? Who cares about producing, or for that matter having, less food? So we’ll ratchet up agricultural imports. Or, better still, start eating less – just look at our obese population.

What you’re talking about isn’t real trouble. Never mind Blake with his “England’s green and pleasant land.” Well, let me tell you: pleasant it isn’t. Green it may be, but the real problem is that it is also too white. And, even worse, too white means too middle-class.

Turned out the booming voice belonged to the authors of a government report who rang alarm bells all over the nation. The countryside, they accused said nation, is “very much a white environment”, which risks becoming “irrelevant” in our multicultural society.

To name just one outrage, ethnic minorities stop visiting, and certainly settling in, the beautiful Cotswolds and Chilterns because said minorities feel “anxiety over unleashed dogs”

Now, keeping a Labrador on a leash in the Chiltern Hills is the kind of cruelty to animals that’s bound to excite the RSPCA. However, one has to thank the authors for identifying, albeit indirectly, the offended ethnic minority.

You see, Muslims avoid dogs because their religion (Muslims’, not dogs’) teaches that a dog’s saliva and fur are impure. That’s why a devout Muslim has to ablute any part of his body that a dog has touched. (I’m using the masculine pronoun because a devout Muslim woman leaves no parts of her body exposed to dogs or leering passersby.) Since water taps may not be readily available up in the hills, you can understand the conundrum.

The Malvern Hills National Landscape caught the drift: “While most white English users value the solitude and contemplative activities which the countryside affords, the tendency for ethnic minority people is to prefer social company (family, friends, schools).”

Hence, the plan is to “develop strategies to reach people or communities with protected characteristics such as people without English as a first language”. Or any English at all, may I add.

This cri de coeur reaches the very depth of my soul. It’s true that England’s countryside can’t be readily confused with a casbah or, for that matter, a bustling Muslim ghetto somewhere in Bradford… Sorry, wrong example. In Bradford, Leeds, Leicester, Birmingham and many other places, it’s the indigenous population that’s being pushed into a sort of ghetto. But you know what I mean.

It’s also true that speaking nothing but Arabic or Urdu may complicate one’s progress through the Cotswolds, English being the language of preference in those parts.

It’s not just canine and linguistic barriers that are keeping those oppressed minorities away. The report is nothing if not comprehensive: “Protected landscapes were closely associated with ‘traditional’ pubs, which have limited food options and cater to people who have a drinking culture.”

And you know what? This is a valid, or at least factual, point. Country pubs are the hubs of social life in the countryside. While it’s true that Englishmen “value the solitude and contemplative activities” of the countryside, they also like to meet friends and neighbours. And traditionally (that dread word), they break their reveries to go down the pub, provided they can find one.

So fair enough: over the past 40 years, I must have visited dozens of country pubs and – are you ready for this? – never once have I seen one that offered such pub grub as biryani, falafel, hummus, samosas or tagines. And not a single one has had the good manners to offer a halal menu.

Moreover, every pub I’ve ever seen – brace yourself – served alcohol. Chaps behind the counters were pulling pints as if they didn’t know that booze is haram (forbidden) in Islam. In fact, a verse in the Koran calls alcohol, and yes, that includes a pint of bitter, “the work of Satan”. I bet those publicans know about this injunction but choose to ignore it. Shame on those white supremacists.

What brings some relief to this deplorable situation is the on-going Labour war on the hospitality industry, including pubs. Extortionist taxes push many of them out of business, over 500 so far, and the number is growing by some 30 pubs a week.

At this rate, before long there won’t be any country pubs left to worry about. But here’s the silver lining: the empty buildings can be converted into mini mosques or perhaps Islamic community centres, to add a touch of sorely missing diversity to England’s green, but regrettably white, land.

Apparently, Wales beat the report to the punch. Its devolved administration has vowed to end racism by 2030 and transform “all areas” of public life in line with its Anti-Racist Wales Action Plan. As part of that forward-looking plan, a 2024 report called for dogs to be banned from the Welsh countryside, thereby making the country “anti-racist”.

If all this sounds deranged, allow me to quote from that irredeemably white, if mercifully dead, author: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.” The method becomes clear once we’ve reminded ourselves that a) our government is Marxist, and b) Marxists feel a scriptural and dogmatic loathing of country life.

The scriptural source in question is The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848. This hallowed text pulls no punches: “The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.”

The idiocy of rural life indeed. These words, along with other monstrosities from the Marxist canon, are burned into what passes for our leaders’ minds. And Marxism isn’t just a theory but a call to action.

I’m sure that our cabinet members would deny they are Marxists. They’d probably describe themselves oxymoronically as democratic socialists. But Marxist dogma resonates through their skulls, and everything they do proves they heed this inner voice.

The current wholehearted attempt to destroy the English countryside goes back to that Manifesto. That’s the imperative, and how they go about putting it into practice depends on the situation.

At the moment, they are eviscerating England’s rural tradition in the name of diversity. Should that miraculously go out of fashion, they’d find another pretext, such as global warming, some mythical epidemics or concerns about the well-being of farm animals. The point is to destroy – how doesn’t really matter.

But don’t blame the government, chaps. Blame yourselves: you voted this lot in. The UKSSR, anyone?

Some 15 years ago I wrote a piece in The Mail about Princess Michael of Kent. She had a public, not to say demonstrative, affair with a young Russian mafioso, which was amply documented by panting paparazzi.

Her lover was subsequently riddled with bullets somewhere near Moscow, which gave rise to all sorts of ugly if unsubstantiated rumours about Princess Michael and her husband. I wrote that, if our royals wished to get rid of the monarchy, that was exactly the way to behave.

The Palace issued a protest, and the paper couldn’t get rid of me fast enough. I was quite angry at the time, but later I saw justice in that reaction. In addition to the constitution, history and constitutional history, our royals derive their legitimacy from an aura of love, theirs for their people, their people’s for them.

Attacks on the royals, even marginal ones like the Kents (Prince Michael was 53^rd in the line of succession), risk punching holes in that aura, especially if the attacks are valid and factual. That’s why the press used to wear kid gloves when getting its hands on any royal scandals.

That didn’t mean the royals were off limits. They weren’t, as anyone who has ever seen those brilliant 18^th century cartoons by Gillray, Hogarth and Rowlandson will testify. But it did mean that the press treated the subject responsibly, realising that some lines just couldn’t be crossed.

The implicit understanding was in line with Burke’s maxim: “For us to love our country, our country must be lovely.” This adage rings even truer if ‘country’ is replaced with ‘monarchy’.

Not all British kings could be readily confused with choirboys. Bertie, the future King Edward VII, kept some Parisian brothels in business almost single-handedly. And his grandson, Edward VIII, had to abdicate over the unlovable woman he loved.

The nation giggled about Bertie’s indiscretions and gasped about his grandson’s. Still, the throne remained sturdy even if it had tottered a bit. The quiet heroism of King George VI, who refused to be evacuated during the Blitz and did perhaps as much to boost the nation’s morale as Churchill did, reminded the people why they loved their royal family.

The press continued to treat the royals with tact. Even though gossip circulated about the amorous exploits of Prince Phillip, no scandal ever made the papers, not even during the Christine Keeler affair. Both the Queen and her husband were loved, in a quiet, understated English way.

But then their two elder sons married quite awful women, and scandals began to pile up. The venerable institution tying up the past, present and future into an irreplaceable national continuum desperately tried to shield itself from the shovelfuls of muck thrown at it by tabloids. That didn’t always work – some dirt stuck.

Each particle of it took some mystique away from the royals, and a monarchy demystified is a monarchy in trouble. Monarchy and church have that in common: even a whiff of vulgarity may turn into a hurricane sweeping the edifice away.

Both institutions depend on their flock’s love of something higher than themselves, and in Britain especially the link between monarchy and church is emphasised by the quasi-sacrament of anointment. God’s kingdom is in heaven, a monarch’s kingdom is in earth, but the two realms are inextricably linked.

When photographs of royals in flagrante delicto with American visitors are splashed all over the tabloids, when the heir to the throne writes letters to his mistress expressing his urge to become her female hygiene product, while his wife cuts a wide swathe through the male population of the British Isles and beyond – each such incident by itself and especially all of them collectively drag the monarchy from its exalted perch down into the gutter.

I haven’t seen any statistics, but I’m willing to bet that, even if many Englishmen retain their respect for the monarchy as an institution, few actually love any of the royals personally, certainly not the way the late Queen was loved.

When she died, one could see genuine grief in many people’s eyes (including, I’m sure, mine). They mourned the passage of a monarch whose impeccable life of honour and dignity made her lovely, in the Burkean sense of the word.

King Charles III has turned out better than I feared. His bizarre attachment to certain woke fads apart, he and his new Queen have done much to preserve the aura of dignified mystique around the monarchy. His Majesty’s courage in continuing to serve his realm in spite of suffering from cancer has much to do with that, as I understand only too well.

But the outrageous scandal involving Andrew and his hideous ex-wife may prove the undoing of the monarchy yet.

Andrew, Fergie, the late Diana and her second son are more in tune with the zeitgeist than Charles is, certainly more than his late parents were. They were driven by the old-fashioned duty of service, while the riffraff end of the royal family worship at the altar of self-service.

When Diana screamed “I want to be me!”, she was issuing the manifesto of all-conquering modernity. That was the modern counterpart of the prayer with which the late Queen ended every day, a statement not of love but of amour-propre.

Andrew is covered with Epstein’s muck from head to toe, but even though he has lost all his titles, he is still eighth in the line of succession to the throne. For all of Charles’s efforts to protect that piece of furniture, some of that filth is bound to stain it.

Each blotch doubles as a hole punched through the aura from which the monarchy derives its real legitimacy. This is how most people probably feel about it – the fine constitutional points, while perfectly valid intellectually, fall flat emotionally. And love isn’t mainly, and never merely, rational. It’s an intuitive feeling, not a rational construct.

Polls show that about a third of Britons support replacing the monarchy with an elected head of state, which proportion almost doubles for the 16- to 34-year-olds.

When those youngsters grow up, they may or may not realise that such a development would spell a constitutional disaster tantamount to the dissolution of Britain’s sovereignty. We might as well become America’s 51^st state.

Yet even if their minds develop sufficiently for them to understand such matters, it’s clear that they feel little emotional attachment to the royal family. And it increasingly looks as if this is the family’s fault.

The newly released batch of Epstein’s files turn conjecture into a certainty: his whole operation was set up and run by the KGB.

The files include 1,056 documents naming Putin and 9,629 referring to Moscow. Epstein even met Putin after already serving a prison term for procuring a child for prostitution. (Some 5,300 files also mention Donald Trump, and I for one am anxious to find out what they say.)

This intimate link explains the billions Epstein’s lifestyle must have cost. His known financial activities could have explained, at a stretch, a million or two. Not the billions pouring out of some invisible horn of plenty.

The files also identify the greatest Russian export other than oil: prostitutes. The KGB was, and the FSB is, a great believer in catching flies with honey rather than vinegar. Acting in the capacity of a honeycomb is a beehive of comely young ladies trained to use their charms for both pecuniary gain and information gathering.

Before perestroika, those creatures were mainly used domestically, to entice foreign diplomats, journalists and tourists into blackmailable indiscretions. However, when the borders were open, a swarm of long-legged Russian girls descended on the West.

Some were independent operators; some (most?) were run by the FSB. Apparently, Epstein had a steady supply of Russian labour for the delectation of his guests. According to vigorously denied rumours, some VIPs’ pleasure came packaged with a dose of clap, but hey – soldier’s chances and all that.

The nature and amount of leverage the KGB/FSB obtained from the Epstein bordello must be staggering. I suspect that information about it will be drip-fed into the media for years, with some illustrious names besmirched for ever.

Since every newspaper in His Creation is running extensive reports of an expository nature, I shan’t repeat things you can read elsewhere if you are interested. What I find fascinating is how a small-time wheeler-dealer ended up running – or rather fronting – a major KGB op.

Actually, the link is obvious: Ghislaine Maxwell. Her father, Robert ‘Cap’n Bob’ Maxwell was a KGB asset, and Ghislaine was not only Maxwell’s daughter but also his business associate and closest confidante. It’s inconceivable that she neither knew about her father’s illegal activities nor participated in them.

The current newspaper accounts state that Maxwell became a KGB agent in the 1970s, but (as The Mitrokhin Archives and other documents show) Cap’n Bob’s tenure is of much longer standing

Maxwell was what the Soviets called ‘an agent of influence’, perhaps the most important one next to the American industrialist Armand Hammer. Said influence was exerted through both individuals and ‘friendly firms’. One such firm was Maxwell’s Pergamon Press.

Maxwell, a retired captain in the British army, bought 75 percent of the company in 1951 and instantly made it an unlikely success. Actually, it’s also unlikely that a poor Czech immigrant could have found the required £50,000, which was then serious money, at least £1,000,000 in today’s debauched cash.

If the original investment miraculously didn’t come courtesy of the KGB, the overnight success did. Maxwell signed a brother-in-law deal with the Soviet copyright agency VAAP (a KGB department) and began publishing English translations of Soviet academic journals.

Making any kind of income, never mind millions, out of that would have been next to impossible. Publishing even English-language academic periodicals is a laborious and low-margin business requiring much specialised expertise. That’s why it’s usually done by big and long-established firms, which Maxwell’s wasn’t. Add to this the cost of translation and one really begins to wonder about the provenance of all that cash.

Subsequent close ties between Maxwell and the Soviets dispel any doubts. He became a frequent visitor to Moscow and a welcome guest in the Kremlin. Cap’n Bob met every Soviet leader from Khrushchev to Gorbachev, and they didn’t just chat about the weather.

As an MP, Maxwell made speeches defending the Soviet 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, bizarrely portraying it as some kind of recompense for the country’s betrayal at Munich.

In the ‘70s Pergamon Press prospered churning out such sure-fire bestsellers as books by Soviet leaders. On 4 March 1975, Maxwell signed, on his own terms, another contract with VAAP and published seven books by Soviet chieftains: five by Brezhnev, one by Chernenko and one by Andropov, then head of the KGB.

Under a later 1978 contract he also published Brezhnev’s immortal masterpiece Peace Is the People’s Priceless Treasure, along with books by Grishin and Ponomarev, the former a Politburo member, the latter head of the Central Committee Ideology Department.

All those books were published in huge runs and, considering the nonexistent demand for this genre, would have lost millions for any other publisher. But Maxwell wasn’t just any old publisher and these weren’t any old publishing ventures. The translation, publishing and printing were paid for by the Soviets.

In the ‘80s Maxwell met Gorbachev three times, the last meeting also involving Vladimir Kryuchkov, the KGB boss. As a result Pergamon Press began publishing the English-language version of the Soviet Cultural Foundation magazine Nashe naslediye (Our Heritage), along with the writings of both Gorbachev and his wife Raisa (Charles Dickens and Jane Austen they weren’t).

One objective pursued by the Soviets was propaganda, but this could have been achieved with less capital outlay and greater effect. The real purpose was the old Soviet pastime: money laundering and looting Russia in preparation for ‘the collapse of the Soviet Union’, which in effect was a transfer of power from the Party to the KGB. And the core business of Pergamon Press played only a small role in this enterprise.

Between 1989 and 1991 the KGB transferred to the West eight metric tonnes of platinum, 60 metric tonnes of gold, truckloads of diamonds and up to $50 billion in cash. The cash part was in roubles, officially not a convertible currency. But the Soviets made it convertible by setting up a vast network of bogus holding companies and fake brass plates throughout the West.

The key figures in the cash transfer were the KGB financial wizard Col. Leonid Veselovsky, seconded to the Administration Department of the Central Committee, and Nikolai Kruchina, head of that department. Putin, who ‘left’ the KGB at that time, took a modest part in the looting of Russia in his capacity as Deputy Mayor of Petersburg.

The focal point of that transfer activity in the West was Maxwell, the midwife overseeing the birth pains of the so-called Soviet oligarchy. We know very little about the exact mechanisms of this scam, perhaps the biggest one in history. The actual operators knew too much, which could only mean they had to fall out with the designers.

Specifically, in August 1991 Kruchina fell out of his office window. Two months later Maxwell fell overboard from his yacht. Veselovsky, who handled most of the legwork, managed to leg it to Switzerland, where he became a highly paid consultant. Obviously he knew quite a bit not only about his former employers but also about his new clients, which enhanced his earning potential.

Evidence shows that Epstein, in cahoots with Maxwell, set up one of the laundromats for the Russian cash. His operation was thus multi-purpose, combining business with pleasure – and turning his customers’ pleasure into KGB business.

We don’t yet know how much kompromat Epstein’s bordello delivered to history’s most diabolical secret police, nor how damaging it will turn out to be. It has already pushed our monarchy to the brink, courtesy of Prince Andrew, as he then was, but this is only a warm-up.

New blows are bound to land on political and corporate offices all over the world, and not all of them will be able to pick themselves up off the floor. I won’t be surprised if the ensuing scandals make Watergate look like an innocent peccadillo by comparison.

Meanwhile, I look at the unfolding events with the squeamish wince of a man who accidentally touches a slug. How could the US authorities let that transparent KGB operation run unmolested for decades? Don’t bother replying: the question is rhetorical.

P.S. Some of the facts I cite in this article I first used 13 years ago. The proverb “Everything new is the well-forgotten old” is thereby vindicated.

P.P.S. My programme of learning English as a second language is proceeding apace. As ever, I use sports commentators as instructors.

Thus Jamie Carragher, one of our most perceptive football analysts, wrote that “Raheem Stirling doesn’t get the adoration he deserves”. There I was, thinking that, while God is adored, athletes are at best admired. Learn something new every day.

Then a tennis commentator at the Australian Open suggested that Sabalenka “pick up her intention”. Thus I learned that ‘intention’ and ‘intensity’ are full synonyms, and I’m grateful for this contribution to my vocabulary.

… It knows no peacetime.” So gasped the French writer the Marquis de Custine after spending three months of 1839 in Russia. At the time Russia was in the middle of the Caucasian War (1817-1864) and also trying to conquer Central Asian khanates.

Custine’s subsequent book is a miracle of insight, especially considering that he embarked on his journey without much knowledge of the country. Most educated Russians I know have read La Russie en 1839, and I have yet to meet one who thought that Custine’s observations and inferences were anything other than astonishingly accurate.

Russian studies haven’t been blessed by many equally astute commentators since then. In fact, academics, historians, economic analysts and even intelligence officers have been evincing steadily deteriorating standards of understanding.

The on-going war is a case in point. Ever since it became clear that Putin’s 2022 blitzkrieg had failed, and the war had entered an attrition phase, hardly a day has gone by without some expert sounding the death knell for Russia.

Russia is losing too many soldiers. The country’s economy is on the verge of collapse. Russia has no more soldiers. Her economy has collapsed already. Western sanctions are a noose throttling Russia. Putin will sue for peace at any moment now. Putin is suffering from a fatal illness and, when he dies, his successors will beat a retreat. The Russian people will rise in revolt. The war will end in a month [three months, a year, two years at the outside, take your pick].

This reminds me that only a short word separates a Mr Know-All from a Mr Know-Sod-All. Actually, when it comes to predicting when and how the war will end, I myself fall into the second category. Hard as I’m rubbing my crystal ball, it still remains too murky for me to predict the future.

However, I do know that most Western observers, even those few in command of the relevant facts, base their prophesies on false criteria. They may know much, but they understand little.

It’s a natural human trait, and a generally sound cognitive practice, to use what we know to understand what we don’t know. Alas, most of what Western observers know doesn’t apply to Russia, and neither do sound cognitive practices.

What we know about war economy is that a country has to be solvent to afford that luxury. And by our standards, Russia’s economy lies in ruins.

Because of Western sanctions, Russia has to sell her oil at or even below cost just to keep afloat. Gazprom, the jewel in Russia’s economic crown, has been reduced to a skeleton of its former self – in any Western economy it would have ceased trading long ago. Inflation is rampant, interest rates are sky-high, budget deficits are astronomical, the rouble is dying a quick death, the cost of living is outpacing inflation on its race to the moon, any other than military production has ground to a halt, imports of even staples have ceased, growth is negligible – and so forth.

All true. But do let’s consider the situation in the same country in the run-up to another war, which for Russia lasted exactly as long as the present one: the Second World (what the Russians call ‘Great Patriotic’) War.

Throughout the 1930s, the economy was being switched into a war mode. That wasn’t so much a case of guns before butter as guns and no butter – guns before everything people needed to survive. War factories were running round the clock in three daily shifts – Nazi Germany ambled along at one shift a day at the time (the Nazi economy didn’t go into a full war mode until 1942, three years after the war started).

The Soviet Union suffered a series of murderous famines. Only the ones in the Ukraine and Kazakhstan that killed millions and were deliberately organised as a crowd-control tactic have received wide publicity in the West, but there were many others as well.

The Russians lived in conditions that any Western cattle farmer would have considered unacceptable for his livestock. Compared to those Russians, their descendants today, even after four years of war, live in the lap of luxury.

Stalin’s tyranny was such that Putin’s regime looks like the acme of weak-kneed liberalism by comparison. Just a few thousand political prisoners, a mere couple of dozen dissidents bumped off? Stalin would have regarded such numbers as amateur hour.

In his Russia millions were shot with or without trial, tens of millions of others revived the notion of slavery by being thrown into death camps, where they died while mining minerals and felling trees on a bowl of liquid soup a day and in Arctic frosts.

Most Western visitors ignored the tyranny, or even welcomed it as a bold experiment, but even they couldn’t fail to notice the empty shelves in grocery shops and mile-long queues for bread. What they also failed to notice was that Stalin was creating the world’s most formidable war machine, a juggernaut ready to roll over Europe.

So it would have done had Hitler not beaten Stalin to the punch by starting the war on his terms. The tyrannised, impoverished Red soldiers, most of whom had had family members killed or imprisoned by the NKVD, didn’t want to fight for Stalin. They surrendered en masse, with the Germans taking over four million POWs in the first few months (my father among them). That was a popular uprising in all but name.

The war started on 22 June, 1941, and by late November German officers could see the Kremlin through their field glasses. Every sensible Western observer knew the war was about to end – in Moscow. Instead it lasted another four years and ended in Berlin.

Now let me ask you this. Suppose the US and Britain went to war with, say, China and won, but having lost 40 million and 14 million respectively. How do you think the subsequent generations, including historians, would view that war?

Would they treat it as a resounding triumph vindicating the greatness of the people and their leaders or as the worst tragedy and the greatest national shame ever? Yet the numbers cited represent exactly the proportion of the population the Soviet Union lost in 1941-1945. And the war is still hailed as the highlight of Russian history, the cornerstone of national ideology and identity.

The standards of civilised society don’t apply to the Russians because they aren’t civilised. They are prepared to accept the kind of deprivation and death that would be unacceptable to any Western nation. Here’s an example from history, cited by Dwight Eisenhower, who at the time was the supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe.

He was talking to Marshal Zhukov at the Yalta Conference, some three months before the end of the war. It was decided the Russians would have the honour of taking Berlin, but Eisenhower commiserated with the difficulty of getting armour through the minefields surrounding the German capital.

Zhukov couldn’t understand what Ike was on about. The way we handle this problem, he explained, is just marching some infantry units over the minefields, thereby clearing the way for tanks. Eisenhower shuddered, perhaps imagining the firing squad any Western commander would face if he used the same trick.

(On a different subject, it was at Yalta that Zhukov asked Eisenhower on Stalin’s behalf to bomb Dresden and Leipzig. Both cities had vital railway junctions through which the Germans were sending reinforcements to Berlin, making the Soviet task so much harder. So the bombing wasn’t just a useless act of Anglo-American barbarism, as some (most?) historians would have us believe.)

The upshot of it is that the on-going war will end sooner or later – wars always do. It may end in a week, next month or in three years, and I wouldn’t venture a guess when or how. But it won’t end because the Russians lose too many people and don’t eat regularly enough.

They’ve so far lost only about one per cent of the population – they still have 99 per cent left. And the people aren’t really starving yet, not by the standards of the 1930s or indeed those of my childhood. Let’s wait and see, shall we?