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Obviously, no official can make such decisions on his own. We are, after all, a democracy, meaning that nothing is ever decided without a show of hands. Unless, of course, the survival of ‘our planet’ is at stake, in which case only Ed Miliband can be trusted.

So first things first. And the very first thing had to be hiring an expensive market research consultancy, in this case one called Savanta.

Savanta was given a carte blanche and did what market researchers do: put together focus groups. Savanta’s included 119 respondents deemed sufficient for the task. I’m not familiar with the criteria for their selection, but, judging by the outcome, the overarching principle is clear enough.

Savanta’s report summarised the results by stating that the participants found that banknotes featuring historical figures, such as Winston Churchill, Alan Turing and Jane Austen, were “potentially divisive, elitist and disconnected from their own experiences”. Such figures were “contentious and not representative of the UK’s cultural and natural diversity.”

Moreover, “Many participants – especially younger ones – questioned the relevance of current figures, suggesting the theme feels outdated. There was a clear desire for banknote imagery to evolve and better reflect modern Britain by being more inclusive.”

The current banknotes reflect “a backward-looking vision of the UK that carries too great a risk of division and controversy.” And the Bank of England wasn’t prepared to take such lethal risks.

Now, what’s so divisive and controversial about Jane Austen? Fair enough, some people think she is a great novelist, while others see her as a precursor of Girl Lit. But such diversion of tastes poses little threat to social cohesion.

One has to conclude that the most offensive aspect of Jane Austen is that she lived more than 200 years ago. Putting her image on a tenner is thus undeniably “backward-looking”, which is a wrong way to look.

As far as today’s lot is concerned, history is reset to zero in every generation. Everything that happened in the past is at best irrelevant and at worst pernicious. In Britain’s case it’s mostly the latter. British history is nothing but an exercise in racism, colonialism, misogyny, transphobia and religious persecution.

But hold on a moment. What’s wrong with Churchill and Turing? Old Winston did lead the country during the war, while Turing’s Enigma exploits helped the country emerge victorious. Isn’t that so?

It is. That’s precisely the problem. As one respondent explained, “It does kind of still feel a little bit imperialistic… like ‘we’re the ones who won the Second World War and saved the world’ feeling’.”

Also, both Churchill and Turing were unquestionably elitist. The former was the worst kind, an aristocrat, a duke’s grandson. But Turing, even though his sexuality was commendable, was too clever by half. Churchill was no idiot either, so any way you cut it they were both elitist.

‘Elitist’, you must understand, now means belonging to an elite, not what it used to mean, someone who looks down on his perceived inferiors. Thus anyone whose achievements make his face known to the public is ipso facto elitist.

And elitism is every bit as bad as racism, colonialism, misogyny, transphobia and religious persecution. You understand the problem now? Any familiar face appearing on a banknote will be controversial to most and offensive to some. And all famous people lived in the past, which makes any depiction of them backward-looking.

Have we reached a dead end? Not at all. Savanta respondents weren’t just naysayers. They offered a non-controversial solution to the problem: banknotes should feature not people but wildlife and natural sites, such as the White Cliffs of Dover…

Hold on a moment. That image won’t do either “due to its association with the UK border”. As one respondent explained, the cliffs “could be seen by some people to be a political statement, particularly at the moment around immigration and small boats”.

Actually, the same goes for any place in Britain. Its very provenance makes it exclusive rather than inclusive. Those famous Cliffs, for example, aren’t just White but Whites Only. Anyone can see that.

And showing a foreign location may raise a question of relevance – or worse. Anything African or Indian, for example, may be construed as glorifying the British Empire and its colonial past.

No, forget about both people and places. Back to the drawing board it was, and the Bank went to the public at large with a multiple choice questionnaire. Some 44,000 responses came back, and 60 per cent voted for nature as their preferred imagery, to be on the safe side.

Since we’ve already vetoed inanimate nature, animals emerge as the clear winner. According to the Bank’s spokesman, new imagery would “demonstrate the rich variety of wildlife we have to celebrate in the UK.”

One of the creatures to be celebrated is the common frog, and that’s where we realise how divisive and controversial even animals can be. Wouldn’t that be an underhanded Francophobe dig at our cross-Channel neighbours?

A British comedian once quipped, “It’s not racist if it’s against the French”, but I disagree. No ethnic stereotyping belongs on our banknotes, and even the French are off limits.

Do you ever get the feeling we live in an asylum run by the lunatics? I do, all the time. And everything about modernity is progressive, including its madness.

Yesterday, I wrote about brown-eggians and white-eggians, today I’m writing about the xenophobic, anti-immigrant implications of the White Cliffs of Dover. What will tomorrow bring?

Well, I don’t know about tomorrow, but I can confidently predict a violent reaction in the near future. Britons still clinging on to their sanity will rebel against this woke lunacy and, as rebels usually do, run to the opposite extreme.

Enoch Powell’s classicist and therefore elitist prophecy may well come true, and the consequences are too awful to contemplate. Our woke powers that be better watch out: history, something they wish to expunge, shows what happens when the people have had enough.

This is it. There’s no going back. Britain has gone mad, and there is no cure.

Symptoms keep appearing at an alarming rate, yet every time we hope the condition is reversible. Now we know it isn’t.

Sainsbury’s, a chain of 1,500 supermarkets, is so committed to saving ‘our planet’ that it will no longer stock brown eggs. Only white-shell eggs will henceforth be on offer, and I for one detect a touch of racism there.

If you think this is a ridiculous remark, wait till you hear why Sainsbury’s has made this announcement. According to its report, white eggs leave a 12.7 per cent lower carbon footprint.

This, says the report, is “largely due to better feed conversion” and “the longer productive lifespan of the white hens”. Whatever that means.

When I read this yesterday, I had to check the calendar to make sure it wasn’t April Fool’s Day. It wasn’t. It was 4 June, still, as it ever was on that day.

Even assuming the cited datum is correct, you’ll notice it’s expressed in percentages, not absolute numbers. As someone who used to advertise drugs for a living, I know the trick only too well.

Let’s say Drug A has an incidence of side effects of one in a million, whereas Drug B produces two in a million. The advertiser of Drug A will use those findings to claim its product is twice as safe, and this is statistically significant. Quite. But it’s not clinically significant, meaning that for all practical purposes both drugs are perfectly safe.

So give us absolute numbers, chaps, not those larcenous percentages. Considering that Britain produces less than one per cent of global carbon emissions, how much better off will ‘our planet’ be if Burford Browns (producer of popular brown eggs) goes out of business? One trillionth of one per cent? Less? How many zeros are we talking there?

One piety thus served, the report effortlessly segues to another: “Additionally, white hens are less prone to feather pecking, leading to higher animal welfare.” Are birds animals? Don’t answer that, the issue is way beyond semantic quibbling.

I thought animal welfare has something to do with the way humans treat animals, or in this case birds. Turns out I was wrong, or rather not wholly correct. We are also supposed to protect animals from one another.

In that spirit, I propose HMG commission its own report, ideally an expensive one, to find out which breeds of dogs are more likely to chase cats around the block. We can then confiscate the most felinophobic dogs and put them down, ignoring their owners’ protests.

Good idea? No? You’ll have to explain to me how it’s any worse than this war on feather-peckers.

You’ll be happy to know that the war is already under way. The report says that Sainsbury’s “is making progress on transitioning our shell eggs from brown to white eggs.”

‘Transitioning’ is such a lovely word, don’t you think? I wonder if we are protecting hens’ rights to transition into cockerels, but this discussion is for another day.

The company’s spokesman then added a human touch to the arid jargon of the report: “We know Britons love their eggs and, as we work with suppliers to transition all our own brand to white shells, they can now enjoy them knowing they are better for the environment and the hens.”

Do I detect a reprieve for Burford Browns, my favourite brand? If Sainsbury’s is ‘transitioning’ only its own brand, may there be hope for others? But never mind that.

Now I know how destructive brown eggs are, I’m heaving a sigh of relief even as we speak. Here’s my chance to alleviate my persistent anxiety about henpecking (no, Penelope, this isn’t about you). Now I can tuck into my poached on toast secure in the knowledge that I thereby protect both the environment and hens’ plumage.

Jonathan Swift thought he was clever coming up with disputes between small-endians and big-endians. He didn’t realise he was writing not satire but prophesy. Replace those two warring factions with brown-eggians and white-eggians, and there’s the good Dean writ large.

There is little we can do about the on-going onset of virulent woke insanity. That is, in general. In particular, I’m hereby undertaking never to buy another egg from Sainsbury’s, and I hope you’ll follow suit, along with millions of other customers.

Tell those self-righteous, virtue-signalling, holier-than-thou woke morons to go boil an egg. The eggs we’ll be buying from now on will come from a different shop.

I’ll leave you to contemplate the racial overtones of the report on your own. Are the authors venting their unconscious bigotry by claiming that brown hens are more violent than white ones? I’m merely extrapolating, but this should make perfect sense in the loony bin we call Britain.

St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) is well-attended this year: 76 countries are taking part. However, those churlish European NATO members aren’t among them – most of them are boycotting ‘Putin’s Davos’.

However, Trump has sent a representative, partly to let European leaders know yet again that his special relationship is with Putin and not any of them. This is the first time since 2017-2018 that the US has so honoured Putin’s travesties, and Trump was president then, as he is now.

Rodney Mims Cook Jr, US delegate, is chairman of the Commission of Fine Arts, and it’s unlikely that his sphere of immediate interest will feature prominently at the SPIEF. But his presence, said Putin aide Ushakov, will promote “dialogue between cultures”, or rather between Mr Cook and Putin’s court jester, conductor Valery Gergiev.

How such chitchat will affect world economy isn’t immediately clear, but its function is purely symbolic. What it symbolises is Trump’s preference for Putin over any of those effete Europeans, and the Donald seldom misses an opportunity to send that message.

The Ukraine has also announced her presence, albeit in a rather unorthodox way. Acting as her delegates were a swarm of drones that blew up a major oil port just 12 miles down the road from the SPIEF venue.

As black smoke began to dominate Petersburg’s skyline, the Russians triumphantly announced that they had downed 50 Ukrainian drones. They didn’t say how many had got through, but the fireworks plainly visible from everywhere in the city didn’t let them deny that some drones had found their target.

Other drones hit the Russian naval base at Kronstadt, damaging four warships. That base is about 30 miles from the city centre, but I wonder if the Ukrainians may be planning on sending their airborne representatives to the actual forum venue.

That would add a whole new meaning to the forum’s theme, “Pragmatic dialogue – the path to a stable future”. A dialogue doesn’t have to be semantic to be pragmatic. It can well be semiotic, with drones acting as words in a sign language.

I wonder how Putin plans to get out of the situation he himself created. The Russian economy is breaking up, unable to sustain the endless war. But there is good news too: unemployment is going down, and Vlad must be complimented on discovering an effective way to combat that blight.

One traditional way is to galvanise the economy and create masses of new jobs, but that option is clearly unavailable for Putin. But the other way works as well: reducing the number of job seekers by having a couple of million of them killed or crippled in an aggressive war.

That’s the option Putin chose, and as a result Russia has begun to import labour. Thus, over 50,000 Indians are now doing menial jobs in places like Petersburg, and India is just one example of a country eager to lend a helping hand. China, Vietnam and North Korea are also sending workers to Russia, but so far Trump has refrained from following suit. Then again, I doubt he’d find many American takers even if he decided to plug some holes in the Russian job market.

Meanwhile, the Russians have accused the three Baltic NATO members of allowing the Ukrainians to launch those drones from their territory. Crying foul under the current circumstances strikes me as odd and quite cynical.

After all, Russia launched her massive 2022 invasion of the Ukraine mainly from Belarus. That’s what allies are for, but what’s sauce for the Putin goose must also be sauce for the Zelensky gander. Rather than denying their involvement, the Baltics ought to be proud of it.

European countries should communicate to Russia’s fascist regime that they stand united with the Ukraine in the face of Putin’s aggression. That point has been made clear already, but then repetition is the mother of all learning.

A major strategic realignment is under way in the West, with Trump’s America remaining a NATO ally only nominally. Trump’s novel approach to geopolitics and diplomacy has gone a long way towards alienating America’s traditional allies, including European NATO members, the Persian Gulf countries – and even Israel.

The other day Trump accused Netanyahu of being “f***ing crazy”. In Trump’s eyes, Israel’s prime minister proved his emotional instability by continuing to fight Hezbollah even though American drivers are now paying more at the pumps.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Israel began to reorient her foreign policy towards Europe and away from the US – if the Ukraine could do it, so can Israel. The standard MAGA reaction to such developments is “we don’t care”, but they should.

Trump’s personal preference for an alliance with despots like Putin and Xi, whom he sees as his typological brothers and role models, is at odds with US history, constitutional tradition and culture. Most Americans feel civilisationally closer to the countries that boycotted ‘Putin’s Davos’ than to those that didn’t.

That preference will probably be communicated in November’s mid-term elections, when Republicans are likely to lose their majority in at least one House and possibly both. But meanwhile Cook is conducting his cultural dialogue with Gergiev. “What do you think of Aaron Copland then, Valery?” “Well, Tchaikovsky he ain’t, Rodney.”

“Pragmatic dialogue” may indeed be “the path to a stable future”, but no pragmatic dialogue is possible with a criminal regime threatening the whole European continent. That regime can respond only to the language spoken to it so loudly and eloquently by Ukrainian drones.

Putin has already forced his house-trained ‘oligarchs’, like Mandelson’s friend Deripaska, to loosen their purse strings and feed billions into the Russian war machine. The ongoing forum is an attempt to extort more billions from Russia’s allies, mainly in Asia and Latin America.

If the attempt succeeds, Russia will get her own version of demographic displacement. Young Russians will continue to die in droves at the front, while the jobs they’d otherwise be doing in the economy will be taken by Indians, Vietnamese and North Koreans.

Meanwhile, congratulations to the Ukrainians for another brilliant raid. Theirs is a valuable contribution to the “cultural dialogue”.

If you want to know what’s wrong with Britain, look no further than the Nowak murder case. On second thoughts, do look further, all the way to Minneapolis.

That trans-Atlantic glance will help you compare the public reaction to the Nowak murder with the genuflecting hysteria following the death of George Floyd.

Floyd was a drug-addled career criminal whom the police tried to arrest while he was robbing a convenience store. In the ensuing scuffle, Floyd was accidentally killed. Since he was black and the cop involved was white, riots broke out all over the country, eventually spilling over to Britain.

“Black lives matter!” screamed the thugs as they vandalised, looted and burned their way through city centres. Since the arresting officer tried to subdue Floyd by kneeling on his throat, public genuflection became a badge of woke probity.

English footballers ‘took the knee’ before every match. So did our Marxist PM (then Labour leader) and his deputy. And yes, of course, Derek Chauvin, the possessor of the original, unfortunate knee, was tried and sentenced to 21 years in prison (remember this numeral).

Sowing discord between races is a customary stratagem of the woke Left. It’s used as both a battering ram to punch through the wall of social order and a hoist to propel subversive Marxists over the top.

Both the mob and the professional rabble-rousers egging them on screamed that the killing wasn’t accidental. It was a reflection of racism, than which no worse crime exists. That was arrant nonsense, of course, but it took unrealistic courage for a public figure to demur.

Even a timid attempt to defend Chauvin, stating the obvious fact that the killing was accidental, and the culpable party was Floyd, would have been tantamount to career suicide – political definitely, academic probably, any other most likely.

Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old student at the University of Southampton, was on his way home after having a drink with his friends. Subsequent reports said the alcohol content in his blood was under the drink-drive limit. That probably means he had no more than one pint of beer.

Some exchange of words followed, between Nowak and Vikrum Digwa, a Sikh carrying an 8-inch ceremonial knife. That he used to stab the boy five times, with one of the wounds proving fatal.

The murderer’s brother called 999, and the police arrived. As the wounded boy lay on the ground bleeding his life away, the two brothers lied to the police that the victim had abused them racially and even knocked Vikrum’s turban off.  

Once the cop heard the word ‘racism’, he sprang into action. Ignoring the victim’s pleas for help, they arrested him, putting his lifeless wrists into handcuffs. Bodycam footage shows Nowak said four times, “I’ve been stabbed”, to which one cop replied, “I don’t think you have, mate”. As if to prove him wrong, Henry Nowak then died.

His murderer wasn’t cuffed – he had said the magic exculpating word, ‘racism’. He was only arrested after his victim breathed his last.

Yesterday, the trial of the murderer came to a conclusion. He was sentenced to life in prison, with a minimum of 21 years to be served. Remember that numeral? That’s the same sentence Derek Chauvin, the cop who accidentally killed that Minneapolis criminal, received in the US.

So far I haven’t heard of any action taken against the officers at the scene, who should be treated as accomplices. If they are eventually tried, I’d recommend that their barrister take the lapidary line of defence: “It’s all society’s fault, m’lud.”

Our society has to be rotten to the bone for officers of the law to regard presumed racism as a worse crime than murder. Incessant propaganda of wokery has conditioned cops to fear any accusations of racial bias – even patently false ones.

A boy bleeding to death in front of them is in their eyes a worse criminal than his murderer, provided the boy is white and his stabber isn’t. Society tacitly agrees, as evinced by its muted reaction.

No demonstrations are held, no one shouts “White lives matter too”. Our moral receptors have been cauterised by wokery so much that it took our Marxist PM six months after the murder to issue a half-hearted statement of regret.

His obscene genuflection for the camera in his office followed the Floyd killing almost immediately. As for the cops involved, the released official statement says they “are treated as witnesses”. I’d lock them up and throw away the key, to use the old expression.

And I’d put Starmer and his whole cabinet into the same cell… no, forget I’ve said that. They are inhaling the zeitgeist, but they aren’t the ones who fanned it into a storm.

If we start pointing the finger at all the academics, journalists and politicians who foster the toxic climate of wokery, we’ll have to imprison practically the whole humanities faculties of all universities, the entire staff of the BBC and all other ‘liberal’ media outlets, the complete membership of the Labour and Green parties and half the membership of the Tories.

Since this is clearly impossible, it’ll have to remain a cherished fantasy. Too bad.

P.S. Speaking of wokery, a fourth-round women’s match at Roland Garros was put into a night spot, TV prime time. That was the first time in three years that a women’s match enjoyed that privilege, much to the consternation of the three giggly girl commentators.

One of them, the former player Anne Keothavong, just couldn’t understand why women had to suffer that indignity for so long. “We must ask the organisers for an explanation”, she said, “so that the rest of us could understand”.

No need to bother the organisers, dear – I’m happy to resolve this conundrum for you. You see, TV audiences would rather watch men’s tennis because the quality of it is infinitely better. Glad to have been of help.

Another commentator came up with an air-tight argument. “Women,” she said, “get the same prize money. So it’s unfair they shouldn’t get the same viewing time.” I couldn’t agree more with the implication: it’s grossly unjust that women are paid the same for spending half the time on court and, judging by the way they play, one-tenth the time practicing.

Some 90 per cent of our gas came from Norway last winter, when the demand was at its peak. And Norway’s gas comes from the North Sea, as did ours in the recent past.

In fact, close to 100 per cent of our gas was produced by British North Sea companies at the turn of the century. Not only was Britain self-sufficient in energy, but we exported about 12 per cent of that production.

Oh the good old days. Now we pay some £20 billion a year for Norway’s North Sea gas, plus some £7 billion for American LNG. And things will get worse before they get much worse.

Our production of oil and gas is falling by 15 per cent a year, while Norway’s is racing in the opposite direction. The country has recently opened a major new gas field, while taking three others off the mothballs.

Energy secretary Ed Miliband has banned new drilling and production licences, whereas his cabinet accomplice, Rachel Reeves, is taxing oil and gas companies at 78 per cent.

Both policies add a whole new dimension to imbecility. For one thing, oil companies are notoriously mobile. When it’s no longer profitable for them to operate in a country, they up sticks and leave for sunnier economic climes.

Rachel’s 78 per cent tax rate will then produce a big fat zero in tax revenue, but such incidentals never stop Marxist ideologues. As far as they are concerned, 78 per cent of nothing is better than, say, 30 per cent of something, provided they can punish the fat cats and drive them out of the country. And if I went against my instincts and tried to look for any logic in Miliband’s policies, I’d fail miserably.

British industry, public services and private households need to burn oil and gas to survive – this is a fact. Another fact is that much of those hydrocarbons have to come from the North Sea for simple logistical reasons. Geography shows that the existing pipeline from there to Yorkshire is shorter than would be a hypothetical one from, say, Texas to Cornwall.

Thus, since much of our energy will come from the North Sea anyway, why not produce it ourselves and save a few bob? Oh well, you see, Ed’s full job title, Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, contains the exhaustive answer to that question.

It also contains an oxymoron: the two parts of his title are mutually exclusive. Energy security means uninterrupted availability of energy sources at an affordable price. Net zero means saving ‘our planet’ from the supposedly harmful effects of the greenhouse gases produced by, well, burning oil and gas.

However, since we have to continue to burn oil and gas to stay afloat, or rather alive, pursuing that policy with Ed’s kind of zeal means uncertain availability of energy and its exorbitant cost. Hence Ed’s title is oxymoronic, not to say moronic.

It makes no difference whatsoever to ‘our planet’ who produces the North Sea hydrocarbons we burn. The net effect on net zero is exactly the same whether the drilling platforms belong to Britain or Norway. Hence banning British companies from exploration and production, while taxing them out of existence, makes no sense at all.

No practical sense, that is. But I’ve always repeated, and will continue to do so till I’m blue in the face, that our Marxist government isn’t motivated by common sense, as evinced by its approach to the economy, morality, law, defence, health, education and of course energy policy.

When they express their concern about any of those, they are lying. This is a classic example of the rule by simulacrum: nothing they say or do can be taken at face value. Everything that even remotely resembles an attempt to make things better is crude disguise.

When contemplating a new policy, this lot don’t ask themselves how its likely outcome will affect the country. The only question that concerns them is whether or not the policy agrees with their ideology and promotes their in-built imperative: gaining more control over the population by punishing its more successful and independent-minded part.

That’s why the fallacy of global warming was such a godsend for them. Some of them may believe the flimsy evidence behind it, but that doesn’t matter one way or the other. Even if they suspected or even knew for sure that the whole thing is a swindle (incidentally perpetrated by some of the same scientists who back in the 1970s were scare-mongering about an impending ice age), that wouldn’t change their behaviour one iota.

Such a glorious opportunity to impoverish the people the better to lord it over them simply couldn’t have been passed up. And, as always, the assault had to be launched from a moral high ground. They aren’t pursuing any nefarious purposes, Marx forbid. Theirs is the noble cause of saving ‘our planet’ from the depredations of rapacious profiteering.

Notice how their poster retard, Greta Thunberg, always linked global warming to capitalist excesses. You are destroying our planet and my future, she frothed at the mouth, to make more money. How dare you!

That evil child was simply enunciating in clear, hysterical tones the strategy appealing to many a grown-up Marxist heart. If plentiful, inexpensive, domestically produced energy could make people wealthier and more independent of the state, it had to be made to stop being plentiful, inexpensive and domestically produced. And if that dastardly objective could be couched in bien pensant waffle, then so much the better.

Unfortunately, even our left-leaning royals try to march in step with the villains who’d get rid of the monarchy in a second if they got the chance. Thus, back in 2009, Prince Charles, as he then was, warned world leaders we had just 100 months before global warming did irreversible damage.

Then, 120 months later, he repeated the warning of the coming fiery doom, this time shortening its ETA to 18 months. And in 2020, Prince Charles couched the same doom-mongering in colloquial terms, saying “we really do have to pull our fingers out now because the theory is we have this decade left” before we all fry. HRH, as he then was, left the idiom incomplete by omitting to mention the place we ought to pull our fingers out of.

His son William agrees wholeheartedly: our royals seem to worry that, unless they mouth vox sinistri platitudes, King Charles III will have to suffer the fate of King Charles I. We have to decide whether such sermons are sinister or merely gauche, but they undeniably issue from the Left.

Apparently, what we pay Norwegians for the energy we could easily produce ourselves amounts to £3,500 a year for every Norwegian. I expect a letter of thanks from a Nordic chap in receipt of my £3,500. What’s the Norwegian for sucker?

P.S. Regrettably, Nigel Farage is being ‘no-platformed’ by the leftist propaganda outlet, the BBC. Also regrettably, he was ‘platformed’ 17 times by the Putin propaganda outlet, RT. I’m appalled by the former and frightened by the latter. Aren’t you?

“I reject the incomprehensible trinity”, wrote Tolstoy in his letter to the Synod, protesting against his excommunication. He then proceeded to explain that what made him such a uniquely good Christian was his rejection of all other doctrines and sacraments as well, including the Eucharist.

The Count doth protest too much, methinks. If he didn’t believe in the Holy Communion, then what was his problem with being denied it?

I once wrote a whole book, God and Man According to Tolstoy, trying to come to grips with the writer’s elusive – or, not to cut too fine a point, non-existent – logic. But the question to ask today is whether the Holy Trinity is indeed incomprehensible. Can we understand it?

First we must try to understand understanding. What do we mean by it?

If we mean grasping triune God in the same way in which we understand, say, Newton’s three laws of motion, then the answer is no. No matter how high a ladder of logical steps we construct, it won’t lead to the very top: by His very definition, God will for ever remain beyond that kind of understanding.

But there also exists revealed, intuitive understanding vouchsafed to the initiated, and this is what was denied Tolstoy and other hubristic agnostics. Even those who were originally privy to such knowledge, Fathers of the Church, took quite a long time expressing it in coherent theological terms.

They created the most profound and nuanced system of thought the world has ever known. But it was so much more than just a philosophy – to them theology was like a mirror held up to reflect Christ onto the world, illuminating it until He came again.

However, the mirror is only an approximate simile, for the reflected light didn’t bounce into people’s eyes at once. The issues involved were so deep and subtle that it took centuries for their true meaning to sink in. The greatest difficulty was presented by the dual nature of Christ whence comes the great synthesis of Christianity, its unique dialectical balance.

Several Councils of the Church battled with the task, but it wasn’t until the First Council of Nicaea (325 AD) and the First Council of Constantinople (381 AD) that the church managed to define the true nature of the Trinity.

Understanding, or rather defining, the nature of Christ took even longer. The matter was settled at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD: Jesus Christ is neither just God nor just a man – and nor is he a centaur-like creature, half-man, half-God. He is fully divine and fully human.

But why did this knowledge take so long to dawn on people? Some Christians may say that the revelation wasn’t given to the people at once; it came gradually and piecemeal.

Dmitry Merezhkovsky, whose book, Jesus Unknown, is infinitely superior to anything Tolstoy wrote on the subject, went even further. He argued that the truth was always going to come down to us in three major instalments, corresponding to the three hypostases of the Trinity.

The first, the gospel of the Father, was laid down in the Old Testament; the second, the gospel of the Son, in the New; and the third, the gospel of the Holy Spirit, is yet to come in some future, and last, Testament.

We may come up with a strong argument against this theory. What, however, is undeniable is that faith in Christ inexorably leads to belief in the Holy Trinity.

The word ‘Christ’ means ‘the anointed one’. Without stepping outside the boundaries of logic, the term thus presupposes the existence of both the anointer (the Father) and the medium of anointment (the Holy Spirit).

Since the three hypostases are equal, and since the first two were revealed in two separate Testaments a thousand years apart, while the third one so far hasn’t been confined to a separate document, logic would suggest that another Testament will come sooner or later.

Some might reject this hypothesis, but even they would struggle to dispute the gradual nature of Revelation. And even if that hypothesis was mistaken, the mistake was understandable.

The human mind is conditioned to think in tripartite units. When a writer puts down a sequence of examples on paper, it’s likely to be made of three elements, not two or four. The syllogism, that bedrock of reason, is a three-part logical argument. The dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis is tripartite. Plato’s transcendentals, those of Virtue, Truth and Beauty, were three in number.

In each case, three elements make up a single indivisible entity, something that comes naturally to us. Perhaps our mind was created that way for us to be ready to receive at some point the truth of the Holy Trinity.

However, we can’t receive it by relying solely on the everyday receptors and mechanisms of our reason. Inspiration and imagination must come to the aid of ratiocination, but then that’s true of any thought seeking a higher plane on which to operate.

A mind mired in the petty puddles of quotidian morass may be highly adept at logical thought. However, the logic of an average taxpaying citizen relates to the higher mind of a religious thinker the way the diatonic scale relates to a Beethoven sonata. The former is a useful tool; the latter, a sublime achievement incorporating it.

Christ embodies the trinitarian principle in His person, which opens our minds to the Trinity, in which He is the second, creative hypostasis. Without achieving the impossible, ultimate understanding, we still find it easy to accept a unity of three, with the third element proceeding from the first two.

We push our reason as far as it can go, knowing in advance it’ll never reach the ultimate destination. Even getting anywhere near will require some inspiration to release intuitive understanding. Only an obtuse materialist like Tolstoy could insist that, if his reason by itself couldn’t comprehend the Trinity, it was incomprehensible.

Had he applied to his thought the same tools he so sublimely used in his art, he would have had a sporting chance of reaching the understanding he sought. He would also have been spared the indignity of writing some 50 volumes of pseudo-philosophical drivel, a time he could have used more profitably to produce more literary masterpieces.

Even great men sound like vulgarians when they take issue with higher truths while refusing to let their minds soar above the lower strata of thought where empirical logic will suffice. And the Holy Trinity is the highest truth of all, which is something to remember this Sunday.  

Andy Burnham, our would-be prime minister, does sound dumb. Worse, he sounds insane if you agree with Albert Einstein’s definition of that condition: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

However, I’m going to pay Andy a compliment: he is neither dumb nor insane. He is merely evil.

No one is so dumb as to write this: “Lest we forget: the principal cause of the 2008 crash was a failure of regulation. So how can a new wave of deregulation plausibly be the answer to the problems we have experienced since?”

Anyone with an IQ creeping into three digits must realise that the 2008 crash wasn’t caused by deregulation. It was caused by promiscuous borrowing, both public and private.

Runaway public borrowing is the bedrock of socialist economic policy, so is Andy proposing statutory limits on deficit spending? Or even, Marx forbid, a law demanding a balanced budget?

No, of course not. Anything like that would go against the grain of his communist viscera. What he wants to regulate isn’t the state borrowing but banks lending. You see, Marxists loathe banks and bankers with unmitigated passion.

The notion of money making money is as abhorrent to them as usury was to medieval Christians. But while those Christians were inspired by love, however misconstrued, Marxists are inspired by hate – and wilful ignorance of how economies work.

Credit is the lifeblood of a successful economy, meaning that any serious infringement of it will lead to economic exsanguination. Every sector of our economy, including the financial one, is already so regulated that the economy is dying of anaemia.

I don’t believe Andy can possibly be so stupid as to propose that regulations be ratcheted up. It’s just that powerlust ideally producing a totalitarian tyranny is coded into the Marxist DNA, and this is the blood coursing through Andy’s veins. For him and his ilk, regulations have a value independent of the outcome they produce.   

According to Burnham, Margaret Thatcher is to blame for our current economic ills: “The new forward-looking thinking is to have a clear-eyed analysis of how Britain changed in the four decades after the new economic settlement initiated by the Thatcher government, and develop a plan from there to lift people’s living standards. This must be the defining mission of now.”

Thatcher’s “economic settlement” wasn’t especially new; it was merely sane. She inherited a Britain universally known after a decade of Labour rule as “the sick man of Europe”. Correctly diagnosing the aetiology of the disease as too much socialism, she tried to cut it down.

Her guiding light was Hayek, not Marx, and she achieved spectacular results. That’s not to say that Maggie was flawless in every detail – she wasn’t. But she understood the core principle of all successful modern economies: they succeed in spite, not because, of state interference.

The reason Britain is in dire economic straits now is that all subsequent governments, both Tory and especially Labour, have gradually reverted to the same socialist practices that had produced the shambles of the 1970s. Labour did that out of conviction; the Tories, out of cowardice.

However, according to Burnham, even Labour didn’t go far enough: “The Labour government in which I was proud to serve did many great things. It did not, however, take us off the direction set by Thatcher.” Yes it did, Andy. That’s the trouble.

We haven’t had what Burnham describes as “40 years of neoliberalism”. Assuming he means commitment to market economy, we’ve had 40 years of its accelerating debauchment.

According to Burnham, “you can’t just leave it to the market… . If you want higher growth in areas that don’t have it, you need strong public control and direction over both the investment strategy and the enablers of a more productive economy, such as transport, energy, water, education and housing.”

In other words, we need to revert to wholesale nationalisation because “trickle-down economy doesn’t trickle”. Been there, done that. Rampant socialism has produced economic misery everywhere it has been tried, including Britain.

Even two demonstrably evil regimes, those in Russia and China, showed the miracles achievable by introducing even limited market mechanisms. Both countries, especially China, became prosperous by comparison to their abject poverty punctuated with intermittent famines during the decades of untethered socialism.

Britain too, for all the efforts of the post-Thatcher governments, managed to achieve a measure of prosperity and economic respectability comparable to that of any other European countries. This is rapidly disappearing – precisely because of the policies Andy desperately wants to multiply.

He and his Marxist colleagues in the Labour party are committed to the zero-sum fallacy proved as such throughout the world. I still maintain that no one can possibly be so stupid as to believe that, since the size of the economy is constant, it’s only possible for some to become rich at the expense of others becoming poor.

This is arrant nonsense, which the briefest of looks at any dynamic economy will confirm. For example, during the 1970s, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (the stock index of top 30 US companies) fluctuated between 600 and 1,000. Today, it trades at around 50,000.

Even a small slice of this pie will be bigger than a doorstop wedge of the pie in the 1970s. So doesn’t it make more sense trying to get an economy from 600 to 50,000 than to try dividing 600 more equally among the population?

I feel embarrassed having to talk at this pre-primer level. Anyone with a modicum of common sense, including our friend Andy, knows all this – he’d be insane not to, and Andy isn’t mad. It’s just that common sense means nothing to Marxist ideologues – if you want to argue with them, it’s a gun, not data, that you should have close to hand.

I’m not advocating violence, as I hope you understand. I’m simply pointing out the sheer futility of trying to defeat Marxism with rational arguments. These chaps are possessed with an evil energumen impervious to reason. And they govern our country.

P.S. I’d describe Andy Burnham as nauseous, but that word has been hijacked by the illiterati. Thus a headline in today’s Times talks about Dizzy, Weak and Nauseous Sinner.

‘Nauseous’, chaps, means having an emetic effect on others, but Sinner strikes me as quite nice. ‘Nauseated’, on the other hand, means vomiting or feeling like it. It’s not Sinner but those who don’t know the difference, especially professional writers, who are truly nauseous.  

In Cambridge, they are also our present. For a paltry cost of a few million, Adams Road there has been reconfigured to give cyclists priority over motorists.

Drivers have to give way to cyclists across the entire width of the road, and no on-street parking is allowed. That way cyclists are protected from car doors opening in their path, and I can just see you heaving a sigh of relief.

According to Brian Milnes, head of the Greater Cambridge Partnership, “This project is about putting people first, making everyday journeys safer and easier for everyone.”

Well, not quite for everyone, Brian. Some of us, intractable car drivers, still intone a modified version of the Orwellian chant: Four wheels good, two wheels bad. I doubt that many Cambridge motorists agree that this innovation will make their journeys easier.

But I do find it touching that every blatantly socialist, which is to say subversive, project is sold to the public as “putting people first”. Then again, expecting lefties to say honestly that they put ideology first would be presuming too much on human goodness.

That said, this particular project isn’t without some intrinsic, if perverse, logic. And in more ways than one.

Over the past couple of decades, we’ve seen cycle lanes first appearing in even major thoroughfares and then getting wider and wider. This has turned many streets even in London into single-lane roads, whereas in the past they boasted two or even three lanes.

Logically, this steady widening of cycle lanes, with the concomitant strangulation of car traffic, has to culminate in some, later most, still later all, streets converted to nothing but cycle lanes. Cambridge ought to be congratulated on taking the first step on that pioneering pathway.

Cyclists occupy a special place in the leftie heart because they are freeloaders: they don’t pay to use public roads. Motorists do, in London some £500 a year on average.

Then there is an additional £440 annually for the first five years if the car’s list price when new exceeded £40,000. Plus, there is an £18 congestion charge for entering London’s centre, plus £12.50 daily if the vehicle exceeds certain arbitrary emission levels, plus MOT… plus a hell of a lot. Penelope is in charge of our family finances, so I must ask her.

Bicycles, on the other hand, are neither taxed nor registered. That means socialists love them so much that they are prepared to put their innate taxing rapacity on hold.

Giving priority to tax consumers over tax payers comes naturally to them, so no surprises there. But the notion of putting people, meaning cyclists, first doesn’t quite add up.

You see, incessant propaganda of cycling as the morally superior alternative to driving has made many bike pushers smug and self-righteous. Hence they not only routinely flout good road manners, but, certain of their impunity, break the Highway Code. Every time I drive out in London, I see cyclists running red lights, ignoring zebra crossings, hogging the road by going two or three abreast even when a cycle lane is present.

Drivers, including me, turn puce with rage, which doesn’t add either to their cardiac health or to the gaiety of the nation. Neither does it add much to road safety, with drivers often having to swerve when a cyclist insouciantly floats into their lane.

This endangers not only drivers but also cyclists. It’s not for nothing that doctors at London’s A&E departments often refer to them as ‘organ donors’.

Socialists have always hated cars and drivers, an animus that predates the net zero idiocy. When cars first appeared on public roads, only well-to-do people could afford them, and loathing of such ‘capitalists’ defines socialism.

But inspired by their urgent need to save ‘our planet’, the lefties have now raised that emotion to fervour pitch. They climb onto their non-existent moral high ground to look down on common folk who like the speed, comfort and safety of their cars.

Reason has nothing to do with any of this, a point that recently has been confirmed by the councils of several villages in our part of France. People who know that corner of north Burgundy will confirm that the only time one can see any cyclists is when the Tour de France passes through.

In the 26 years that we’ve been going there, that momentous event has occurred exactly once. The rest of the time the roads (beautifully maintained, by the way, with nary a pothole anywhere in sight) are free for drivers to use.

There are so few of them in relation to the road miles available that, according to my visiting Dutch friends, the traffic is lighter than anywhere else in Europe. Hence, when we go somewhere, we know exactly how long the journey is going to take.

Adding sacrosanct if empty cycle lanes will remove that certainty and, considering the modest driving skills of local motorists, increase the number of accidents. But such rational considerations need not apply when socialists are in the throes of their punitive and bureaucratic zeal.

In defiance, all good people should launch a campaign of harassing cyclists. One good trick, especially if the chap has his earphones on, is to put the car into neutral when some 100 feet behind. Then, rolling noiselessly almost level with the cyclist and still keeping the car in neutral, you rev up the engine and hit the horn at the same time.

With good luck, you’ll drop the chap into the gutter. But, alas, with bad luck you may drop him under your wheels, in which case there will be some trouble with the police. Hence I don’t recommend you do any such irresponsible thing, However…

First, let’s agree on the terms, as the Greeks used to demand. In that Hellenic spirit, let me say that I use both terms loosely, for want of others in our impoverished political lexicon.

In today’s European context, I use ‘fascism’ to denote a broad ‘populist’, nativist, archaic trend oriented towards Putin’s Russia as its shining beacon. And communists are for my purposes extreme Left ideologues, with Starmer signposting the rightmost end of that group.

Those who insist on pedantic quibbling are welcome to indulge that quirk. But now I’ve defined my usages, I feel on safe ground. That’s more than I can say for Britain, a country facing the stark choice in the title above.

It’s our political tragedy that the erstwhile loony fringe has become the mainstream, while the erstwhile mainstream has become well-nigh non-existent. People are talking about the crisis of the Conservative Party, but things are actually much worse than that. It’s not just the party, but conservatism itself that’s in crisis, or rather at death’s door.

The situation is beginning to resemble, mutatis mutandis, that in Germany circa 1933. There too the mainstream made up of conservatives and milder socialists had collapsed, and the choice people faced was between Hitler and Stalin (acting through his German proxies).

The situation in the Makerfield by-election is a case in point. Andy Burnham, the Labour candidate, fits my definition of a communist. Since, should he win, Burnham is almost guaranteed to become prime minister, it’s not just the good people of Makerfield who’ll suffer the dire consequences.

Trailing Labour by a wafer-thin three per cent at the moment is the Reform candidate Robert Kenyon. The Restore Britain party, a splinter group of Reform, currently polls at seven per cent. Neither party is likely to be able to stop Burnham by itself; should they form a bloc, they probably could.

However, the personal clash between Nigel Farage, Reform leader, and Rupert Lowe, his Restore counterpart, makes any such alliance impossible. Neither man is capable of putting his ego aside for the sake of the country.

However, my subject today isn’t the political ineptitude of the Right. It’s the extremist notes struck by many functionaries in both parties.

Robert Kenyon, the great right hope, doesn’t inspire confidence in any conservative. Active on social media, Mr Kenyon once agreed with the statement that Russia’s annexation of the Crimea was “democracy in action” because 95 per cent of the Crimean population voted to become part of Russia.

Kenyon commented: “I agree totally, Russia are well within their rights to do what they have done as we did with the Falklands.”

Mr Kenyon must have learned not only his politics but also his grammar from Donald Trump. But reason wasn’t involved in that statement. Comparing the Crimea to the Falklands is so crass and ignorant that one suspects an ideological afflatus at full blast.

Did Mr Kenyon not know that the Crimean election was held at gunpoint, with Russian invaders toying with their AKs as people went to the polls? Or that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Tartars were driven out of the peninsula on pain of deportation or death?

Or perhaps he didn’t realise that the Falklanders chose to remain British in a free election, with no coercion whatsoever? If so, he shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near elective politics. But I suspect that at play there was a latent affection for Putin, which usually tends to co-exist dialectically with hatred of the European Union.

(Let’s add parenthetically that Putin hates the EU because he mistakenly thinks it makes Europe stronger. Conservatives, on the other hand, oppose the EU because they correctly think it makes Europe weaker.)

However, this candidate of a party that made Brexit the centrepiece of its policy didn’t – are you ready for it? – vote Leave. That’s what he wrote on social media: “So anyone who thinks I love Trump, voted Brexit, read the Daily Mail, live in the 1950s, a Tory and 103 is wrong. I’m none of the above.” And, in a related message, “I woke up the day after Brexit sh—ing myself to what was voted for.”

When these elegant messages came to light, Reform hastily announced the incontinent Mr Kenyon was a “proud Brexiteer”. This made me wonder what proud Remainers were like.

Having thus blotted his copybook, Mr Kenyon proceeded to befriend obvious neo-fascists electronically and re-post statements of Holocaust denial. There he converged with some prominent supporters of Restore, such as Steve Laws who has 140,000 followers on X.

Mr Laws describes Hitler as a “misunderstood politician”, denies that six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, and calls for mass deportations of all off-white Britons and Jews whom he calls “foreign”. He and his followers also suggest that Nigel Farage has been bought by the Jews.

Mr Farage angrily retorted that he “can’t be bought”, but Restore’s campaign director Charlie Downes posted a photo of Farage lunching with Reform’s Jewish Alliance Group. The caption said: “MPs should serve their constituents and Britain’s national interests, not foreign lobbies and minority advocacy groups.”

Thus, according to this senior Restore official, Jews serve not Britain’s national interests but those of Israel, which is a stock accusation in the repertoire of anti-Semitic invective. And speaking of being bought, much of Restore’s funding comes from Elon Musk.

The party’s leadership refused to disavow Laws’s wishes to deport Jews, saying that “we are not going to police our membership”. Why not? A bit of policing would come in handy, if only to protect the party from accusations of crypto-fascism. A public disavowal wouldn’t go amiss either, but none has so far been proffered.

Where are the Tories in all that, specifically in the Makerfield by-election? Languishing on two percent in the polls. The election is contested by the communists (Burnham, with the Greens bringing up the rear) and Reform, badly wounded by the rift with Rupert Lowe’s Restore.

I wouldn’t describe either Farage or Lowe as fascists, but it’s clear that their parties attract an inordinate number of fascisoid members, such as Steve Laws. Also, I’d guess that most members of the two parties, including Reform’s candidate in Makerfield, are more sympathetic to Putin than to the Ukraine.

Nigel Farage’s attitude to Putin’s Russia can only charitably be described as ambivalent. Lately he has been trying to distance himself from his past comments on the issue, and also from his 17 appearances on Russia Today, a channel solely devoted to Kremlin propaganda.

This is especially worrying now, when the possibility of Russian aggression has moved from fantasy land into the outer reaches of reality. Farage’s best friend, Trump, has made it abundantly clear that, should Putin pounce, Europe won’t be able to count on America’s help.

He has cancelled the planned deployment of an armoured brigade in Poland, and also pulled back from Europe large numbers of jets, destroyers and submarines. This sends a signal to Putin, who is doubtless watching the political landscape in Britain with a gleam in his beady eyes.

There is a gaping chasm in the centre of British politics, with its traditional right and left components. That vacuum is being filled with extreme parties, or at least those that appeal to vast numbers of extremists, most of them pro-Putin. (Just compare statements on that subject issued by Reform, Restore, Labour and Green members, occasionally even their leaders.)

One can’t readily imagine a wartime government of national unity coalescing around the Tory Party, like the one formed during the Second World War. Extreme parties don’t do national unity – they are too busy fighting one another and steadily lowering the tone of British politics.

Meanwhile, Makerfield voters are facing a Hobson’s choice between a communist in all but name and an illiterate plumber with fascisoid sympathies. I fear that this is the pattern the whole country will follow in the years to come. God spare us.

The excellent and, for once, perfectly curated exhibition of James Abbot McNeil Whistler at the Tate gave me more than just intense pleasure.

It made me think, which, admittedly, isn’t mainly what painting is for. Yet Whistler was so much more than just a master of his art. All his paintings were philosophical statements in their very rejection of philosophical statements in art.  

“Painting from nature,” wrote Whistler, “needs to be done at home”. This, for me, is one of the deepest statements on the nature of art.

A painter who sets his easel on a riverbank dissembles if he claims to be painting the river as it is. In the hours he spends adding new touches to the canvas, the sun will be moving east to west, taking its light and shadows with it.

The painter doesn’t have the luxury of such a movable view. He can only depict the river as it was at one moment possibly hours ago, when the sun shone at an angle that’s no longer there. This means the painter can capture not that precise moment but only his memory of it brought back by his retroactive imagination. His claim to the contrary notwithstanding, he is painting the river as it flows in his mind, not as it flows in front of him.

Whistler simply went a step further. He looked at the river, or whatever he was out to depict, let the image wash over his mind, then went to his studio and painted the memory. Whistler was no less realistic than the other painter, he was simply more honest.

Let’s follow his lead in taking a step further, actually this time away from painting altogether. Now we’ve entered the realm of lyrical poetry, a literary genre that, at its best, is free of novelistic rationality. Poetry too is an art of memory of the past appearing to be a vision of the present.

Sappho didn’t long for another woman’s body as she wrote her Ode to Aphrodite; she put down on paper (or whatever medium she used) what she had felt when in the throes of passion. Petrarch didn’t suffer the unrequited love he felt for Laura at the moment of writing his sonnets; he wrote from the memory of that love. And Pushkin made that point unequivocal when writing, in his textbook love poem, “I remember that wondrous moment…”. It wasn’t love as such, but the trace it left in the poet’s memory.

Now we are beginning to see why music is the quintessential art, one that all other arts aspire to. Whistler certainly knew that, even though I’ve read no statements he made on this subject. Music is also the most religious of all arts, which Whistler also knew but would never have allowed himself to utter such words.

Literature says, painting shows, but music suggests. Like faith, it’s not without, but within us, waiting to be released.

A performance can unshackle the inner resources of a listener’s imagination and lead him towards an intuitive, non-verbal understanding that’s his own and not necessarily the artist’s.

In fact, one can say that music lives in the same compartment of the soul as faith, while literature by-passes this area either wholly, as does prose, or at least to a large extent, as does even great poetry. If we are seeking the kingdom of God within us, then an external physical stimulus can act not only as help but also as distraction.

Such physical objects as a canvas, sculpture or book are all such distractions, in that they exist objectively, quite apart from the site where the kingdom is located within us. Music, on the other hand, not just appeals to man’s inner self but actually lives there. That’s why, whatever its explicit intent, even secular music is always implicitly metaphysical, while literature is implicitly materialistic – even when dealing with metaphysical subjects.

Music, even more than any other art, comes from the artist’s memory and talks to the memory of everyone in the audience. The very fact that music is the most abstract of all arts makes it the most universal of all arts, the magnet attracting other genres.

A pianist plays through a new piece he plans to programme, say a Chopin mazurka. The music is ineffably beautiful, moving him deeply. As he runs through it time after time, he feels inspired.

He keeps finding new things in the piece, new harmonies, perhaps a different kind of fingering, another way of bringing the left hand out, removing rubato from some passages and adding it to another, perhaps changing the overall pulse and so on.

With each finding, the pianist gets more excited in the solitude of his studio. But then comes the visible, culminating part of his job: conveying his excitement from the concert platform, as if telling his public: “Listen, this is why I find this mazurka a sublime and moving piece. Are you moved? Are you as excited as I am?”

The pianist is dissembling of course. He was, not is, excited. What he is conveying to the public isn’t his excitement but his memory of it.

If he were as excited during the performance as he was when first playing through the score, he’d lose the artistic and physical control he needs to convey all the intricate nuances of the piece. If he were excited when playing, a discerning audience wouldn’t be excited when listening.

That’s why male pianists with their coital gyrations, or their female counterparts with their gasping mouths and heaving semi-exposed mummeries, are swindlers. They are out to trick the audience by faking their crude emotions, and today’s audiences are only too happy to oblige.  “He feels the music so deeply,” they say on the way to their post-concert supper.

He doesn’t. What he does do deeply is offend music – by faking excitement that should have stayed behind when he was refining the piece at home. When Prokofiev wrote his Visions fugitives, he was recalling those fleeting glances, not casting them.

Whistler, the most musical of the great painters, knew all that and much more besides. Much of his work is an attempt to write musical compositions by using touches of his brush like tonal sonorities. Whistler clearly wanted his work to appeal the way music does, by evoking abstract, seemingly indistinct images lurking in the viewer’s own mind.

It’s not for nothing that he gave musical names to his cycles of paintings: Arrangements, Harmonies, Symphonies, Studies and Nocturnes. The exhibition devotes a whole room to the latter, each painting showing a scene dimly lit by the gradually dying sun.

The curator wisely hung the Nocturnes in chronological sequence, with the light gradually receding from painting to painting as the sun sets. In these and most of his other works, Whistler went beyond the Impressionists before the Impressionists (most of his great work predates the first exhibition of the Impressionists in 1874).

He saw fogs over the Thames more musically and therefore more poignantly than Monet saw them later, but much of Whistler’s work uses – and refracts – an idiom from two centuries earlier.

Many of his portraits feature dark, monochrome backgrounds reminding one of Zurbarán and Rembrandt. One small portrait of an old woman, La Mère Gérard, is clearly Rembrandtesque – it’s probably the way the Dutchman would have painted had he lived in the 19^th century.

Since I saw this exhibition only a few days after seeing Zurbarán’s, I’d hesitate to say this is the best exhibition I’ve seen for a long time. So let’s settle for one of the best – but the most musical and therefore thought-provoking.