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The war on Iran is just and strategically sound. One only wishes it weren’t Trump waging it.

Then again, to use Trump’s chosen mode of expression, ONLY FOOLS would expect him to put his more objectionable traits on hold at a time of crisis. It’s not just a leopard’s belligerence that the president may match, but also the animal’s inability to change its spots.

One of Trump’s metaphorical spots is a tendency to shoot from the lip in volleys of insane braggadocio. By way of illustration, just compare these newspaper reports, two days apart.

7 March – Trump yet again paraded his command of grammar by writing in his favourite medium: “Iran, which is being beat to HELL [it’s ‘beaten’, Mr President, this side of the truck stops on I-495], has apologized and surrendered to its Middle East neighbors, and promised that it will not shoot at them anymore. This promise was only made because of the relentless U.S. and Israeli attack.”

9 February – headline in The Mail: Iran Unleashes Huge Overnight Attacks on Gulf States.

It definitely behoves a wartime leader to rally his troops and the whole population with fiery rhetoric. And ONLY FOOLS would hold the odd rhetorical flourish against such a leader. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that inspiring oratory is the essential part of the job at a time like this.

The actual conduct of the war is best left to professionals, with the civilian government offering little beyond setting strategic objectives before the war and providing oversight during it. But it’s not generals but politicians who unite the people, calling on them to bear the inevitable hardships for the sake of the common cause.

Churchill was one of the best practitioners of that art. His three 1940 speeches, “We shall fight on the beaches”, “Blood, toil, tears and sweat” and “This was their finest hour”, arguably contributed more to victory than Monty’s battlefield acumen did.

Granted, Britain’s circumstances were different – the country was fighting for its survival. Hence Churchill’s oratory can only offer a general pattern for future generations, not a verbatim blueprint. But the general pattern includes an injunction against uttering obvious bilge, easily perceived as such by the public.

Trump possesses none of Churchill’s language skills. After all, while Trump has failed to win the Nobel Prize for peace, Churchill earned one for literature. And as a political orator, Churchill bears comparison with Demosthenes and Cicero, not any modern politician.

But even modern politicians should have enough nous not to make themselves laughingstocks, especially at wartime. For when guns are firing, a president or prime minister personifies his country. If he comes across as a buffoon, so will the country.

So which is it, Mr President? Did Iran surrender and promise to desist or, to quote today’s report, “Iran has unleashed a huge attack overnight on countries in the Gulf, with Bahrain experiencing the highest number of casualties since the beginning of the war. 32 people were injured in an Iranian attack on Bahrain’s island of Sitra, the interior ministry said, after Bahrain’s Bapco refinery was hit by drones overnight”?

As a result of that ‘surrender’, oil and gas prices have soared, with petrol prices at the pump heading in the same northward direction. Since Americans tend to be rather sensitive to such developments, a soothing word was necessary.

Trump was happy to oblige, and I can’t find fault with his message. Such an increase, he wrote on Truth Social (too often coming across as Untruth Asocial in his able hands) is “a very small price to pay for USA, and World, Safety and Peace. ONLY FOOLS WOULD THINK DIFFERENTLY.”

True in substance, but the form doesn’t evoke Churchill. It falls even short of Dubya’s customary standards. For millions of Americans doubtless regard the price they have to pay for this war as exorbitant, and they ain’t seen nuthin’ yet, in Trump’s idiom. It would take a rousing, kind, intelligent message to inspire them, to assuage their fears. Instead they got a harangue.

Like most promises of a blitzkrieg, Trump’s earlier bravado seems to be ill-founded. The conflict is beginning to show signs of turning into a protracted war of attrition, with all the hardships this may entail.

About 20 per cent of the world’s oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz, which at its narrowest point has the width of the Channel from Dover to Calais. Choking it off is a relatively easy task even for Iran’s military.

Should that happen – and for all intents and purposes it has happened already – Americans and the rest of us would have to suffer economic problems potentially bordering on deprivation. The cost of shipping will head for the stratosphere, and it may take a proverbial mortgage to fill up an average car tank.

I agree with Trump: this price is worth paying if the war ends in victory. But what does victory actually mean?

For Iran isn’t Venezuela. It won’t be enough to decapitate its regime but leave it in place if it promises to behave itself. It won’t even be enough to destroy Iran’s armament and nuclear industry, army, air force and navy.

Given resolve, all of these can be rebuilt with some help from Iran’s friends, namely Russia and China. One of them may even give Iran a nuclear device or two ready-made. And the resolve of that evil regime isn’t in doubt, as its choice of the new supreme leader proves.  

Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is no longer with us, is widely regarded as an extremist even by the standards of the Revolutionary Guard. It remains to be seen whether he’ll accept the post, but the very fact that it was offered suggests that the regime is ready for a long-haul battle at any cost.

Are Americans? Is Trump? Since I believe this war is just, I hope so. But I wish someone were to give Trump a crash course in wartime leadership. When a nation is hurting, bragging rights can easily turn into wrongs.

Yesterday several analysts did what analysts do: analyse. The object of their scrutiny was the on-going war in Iran, specifically why it broke out and what are its strategic objectives.

One such expert, Haviv Rettig Gur, correctly dismissed the ridiculous notion that it was Israel that was trigger-happy, with America simply tagging along out of solidarity. Though he didn’t quite put it in those words, that version of the events must have come from the same school of thought that teaches that Jews run the world.

Israel may well be a beneficiary of this war, bit she isn’t its initiator. The experts agree that the war has to be viewed in the context of global confrontation between the US and China. The minor matter that’s to be settled is whether the world order will continue to be based around America, or will China usurp that role.

Not to cut too fine a point, Iran is China’s proxy in East Asia, even more so than Venezuela was her outpost in South America. A strike against Iran was thus one against China, and the aim was to limit China’s influence in that part of the world.

It was China (among others, but we’ll come to that later) that built up Iran’s military capability to threaten the Middle East and especially Israel, America’s ally that Iran is constitutionally committed to annihilating. It is also China that helps Iran to bust international sanctions and continue to export her oil, if at knockdown prices.

China buys some 1.4 million barrels of Iranian crude a day, about 80 per cent of the total output. Partly thanks to that, the communists have built up reserves of a staggering one billion barrels. That would enable China to carry on for 100 days in case the US Navy imposes a blockade following China’s attack on Taiwan.

Without that oil revenue, which amounts to about a quarter of Iran’s budget, the regime wouldn’t be able to pay its army and security forces, nor provide essential staples for the people. In other words, it would collapse.

China is supplying Iran with state-of-the-art military technology, including supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles specifically designed to be impervious to the defences deployed by American carriers. Judging by the failure of Iranian air defences to knock down a single American or Israeli warplane nor to sink a single ship, we are talking about China’s, not America’s, state of the art, but still.

Iran’s aggressive posture in the region, aided by her transparent intention to produce nuclear weapons, seems to be an essential prong in China’s hybrid war for global dominance. It also diverts America’s attention from the Far East and, now the war has got out of the hybrid stage, it forces the US to commit much of her military capability, and deplete much of her ordnance stocks.

This simplifies China’s task should the communists act on their perennial threat to do to Taiwan what they’ve done to Tibet and are doing to Hong Kong. The omens are quite sinister at the moment, as the analysts are agreeing in chorus.

But, as Princess Diana would say, there are three in this marriage. I was surprised to see one word missing in the articles I read yesterday: Russia. Yet Russia is also China’s proxy, in Europe, just as Iran is in West Asia. The relationships aren’t identical, but neither are they drastically different.

Russia too has to sell her oil to China at dumping prices, which fills the reservoirs of the latter and keeps the former afloat. In the process Russia begins to resemble China’s vassalage more and more. By some estimates, over two million Chinese are colonising the Russian Far East, getting cheap mining concessions, building townships and in general acting towards the locals the way the conquering Mongols treated the Russians in the 13^th century.

I don’t know whether Russia’s assault on the Ukraine was prompted by China, but she certainly has a vested interest in it. This grows the longer the conflict goes on, for the same reason as with the Iran war. The West is diverting its attention and depleting its arsenal, indirectly putting its halfhearted support of the Ukraine at the service of Chinese imperialism, not just Russian.

Iran is to Russia what Russia is to China: a de facto dependency and a strategic ally. In fact, that relationship was formalised in the 2025 Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership.

The partnership also includes China, and the three evil regimes have held several joint naval exercises in the Strait of Hormuz. And Russia is another major supplier of arms and military technologies to Iran. Again, it’s testimony to the superiority of American capabilities that the US and Israeli air forces achieved air dominance in the on-going war so easily.

But there is one rubric of military hardware that Iran, Russia and the Ukraine more or less pioneered jointly: long-range attack drones. And this is one area of technology in which Iran and Russia may be ahead of the West.

Both countries are reshaping the landscape of modern warfare, with Russia doing so on a vastly larger scale, but with Iran’s assistance. Iran and Russia are both able to fire salvos of suicide Shahed-type drones in swarms, which makes defence problematic.

It’s widely known that Tehran is supplying Russia with thousands of Shaheds. But what is less publicised is that Iran actually helped Russia to build a Shahed factory. The Russians have added a few targeting and navigational bells and whistles, but by and large they are using Iranian technology.

Russia will be soon churning out 1,000 drones a day, each to be used as a weapon of mass terrorism against Ukrainians. That way the Russians can keep their expensive missiles for striking against sturdier targets.

The Russians have paid Iran somewhere between one and two billion dollars for that murderous assistance, but I’m sure they regard it as money well-spent. And of course Iran is ratcheting up her own production of drones the better to terrorise her neighbours.

I’ve forgotten to credit Russia’s and Iran’s partners in this criminal activity. For many drone components, those ‘bells and whistles’ I mentioned so flippantly, come from China and, one hopes unwittingly, the West. These mostly off-the shelf components include the engine, fuel pump, GPS, semiconductors and antenna parts.

Both Iran and especially Russia are displaying enviable ingenuity in bypassing international sanctions. The Russians bring to the task their long experience in money laundering, one of the KGB/FSB’s specialities.

Just as the West was gasping with delight at glasnost and perestroika, and issuing inane books about the ultimate victory of liberalism ending history, the KGB, as it then was, was busily creating a network of shadowy brass plates, dummy corporations and untraceable offshore shelters.

Now Russia, in cahoots with Iran, is putting that naughty experience to good use by busting sanctions on the export of military technology. New trading companies are being set up all the time and, as one lot are found out, another batch come in, making a mockery of any sanctions.

The phrase ‘expensive missiles’ I used above must be giving sleepless nights to Pentagon planners. For Americans are downing Iranian drones with Patriot missiles, a wasting asset. A side that uses missiles costing $4 million each to down drones costing $20,000 a pop is on a losing wicket, and I’m sure Pentagon officials have their calculators in working order.  

This is where the Ukraine can help America, partly paying back for the begrudging and diminishing support the US has been providing for the Ukraine’s defence. The country is ahead of the US in drone technology, but even more so in the tactics of using – and resisting – drones in battlefield conditions.

The Ukrainians have developed anti-drone drones that cost even less than their targets, and they’ve learned how to use defensive nets that can greatly reduce damage. The jackboot is on the other foot: while Western specialists used to train the Ukrainian army for years, the Ukrainians can now train the West in the use of drones for both attack and defence.

Godspeed to the Ukraine in her heroic fight against one form of evil, and godspeed to the US and Israel in their valiant effort to stop another. But it’s actually the same evil: China, Iran and Russia are thick as thieves. Or rather murderers.

Britain has sacrificed her defence for the sake of having the worst health service in Europe. But, to be fair, not just for that.

The sacrifice has also been made to bribe an increasingly decadent and work-shy population into voting in the worst governments ever, Tory or Labour. Another costly item is having 11 per cent of the population on disability benefits.

That’s more invalids than Britain had in the wake of either World War, but then Britons have become so much more fragile. Just think: after D-Day anniversary celebrations in Normandy a few years ago, several British journalists had to be treated for PTSD – with bemused nonagenarian veterans looking on.

In addition to spending 11 per cent of GDP on healthcare, we spend another 10 per cent on welfare payments (excluding pensions), and that proportion is climbing steeply like a jump jet, of the kind we no longer produce.

No country living within her means could afford such generosity. Since the welfare state is beyond any cuts and above any criticism, we borrow hand over fist to pay for it. This year it’ll cost us up to £126 billion to service the national debt. If Britain paid her way, we could triple the defence budget (currently about £61 billion a year).

Actually, it’s not just squandering money and borrowing rapaciously to make up the deficit. France actually spends some 15 per cent less on defence, but her navy is larger than ours. The same Royal Navy that deployed 127 ships in the Falklands conflict now boasts a meagre 13 warships, one of which is about to be scrapped.

Yes, we have two aircraft carriers to France’s one. But her solitary carrier strike group is now in the Middle Eastern theatre, whereas our two are sitting in port – partly for maintenance, partly for the lack of sailors. And the single destroyer Starmer has magnanimously agreed to dispatch to the Middle East won’t get there for at least a fortnight – because of the same shortage in personnel she hasn’t even sailed yet.

The Royal Navy under Drake protected England from the might of the Spanish Empire. The Royal Navy under Nelson protected England from the French Empire. The Royal Navy under Cunningham protected England from the Third Reich. Yet today’s rump Royal Navy can’t even protect a few acres of British sovereign territory on Cyprus.

(Our humiliation deepens every day: now even Spain, Italy and Holland have sent their warships to the Mediterranean. Actually, during the Second World War, Italy had one of the biggest and most modern navies in the world. Yet her navy stayed bottled up in port for the duration, scared to come out and engage the few Royal Navy warships patrolling the Mediterranean. Good old days, eh?)

One has to reach the painful conclusion that the French are more efficient than we are, which is borne out by personal observation. Just compare the public roads in France and Britain and you’ll see that, although both nations pay exorbitant taxes, at least the French get their money’s worth. (I’m talking strictly about public administration here, because France’s overall economy is no better than ours.)

We take pleasure in saying that French public administrators are corrupt, and indeed it’s easier there to smooth one’s way through their system with a timely backhander. But our public administrators are more malignantly corrupt at the more vital levels: by being grossly, some would say treasonously, incompetent, they corrupt the very essence of statehood.

This creates a vicious circle of corruption: the state corrupts the population, the population corrupts the state, and round and round she goes, with an ever-growing radius. Narrowing the circle never works. Only breaking it would provide a way out, but neither the governors nor the governed have the will to do so.  

Blaming Labour for all our ills is a time-honoured sport, but socialists merely take advantage of the openings society provides. The difference between the two main parties, as they so far have been, is that of degree, not of kind.

Neither the Tories nor Reform is committed to breaking the vicious circle. And though occasionally politicians of the so-called parties of the Right make vague noises about the need to strengthen our defence, the echoes of those noises disappear into the ether and nothing ever gets done.

No party is committed to dismantling the corrupting welfare state, to the “basic features” of which the true-blue Tory Peregrine Worsthorne, former editor of The Sunday Telegraph, wanted all Britons to pledge “loyalty” as far back as in 1958.

Not even the Tories realised then, and haven’t since, that loyalty to the welfare state is at odds with loyalty to the country. For what is disloyalty if not stripping the country of her defences, now deemed unaffordable?

The problem isn’t unique to Britain, although it’s more virulent here than in some other Western countries. All the major ones, including the US, are spending more on servicing the national debt than on defence, although the gap in America is less gaping than here.

I don’t think that, because things happen, they were bound to happen. I don’t believe in determinism of any kind.

However, I do believe that ideas and the actions they inspire have consequences. The more undesirable ones could be mitigated or even nipped in the bud while they are still in the early stages. But, if allowed to fester for too long, they may well become irreversible.

Hence I am convinced that unbalanced democracy of universal suffrage was bound to produce over time a situation similar to the one we face now.

Tocqueville, to whom I refer more and more often these days, was a great champion of that political system. But if you read his 800-page book on the subject, you’ll find dispersed at regular intervals warnings about the concomitant dangers. One of them he flagged more often than others: in the absence of an enlightened electorate, universal suffrage will sooner or later turn into universal suffering.

The America he wrote about had 12 million inhabitants, whereas today she has 350 million. While today the only qualifications required for voting are age and citizenship (this one seems to be ignored in Britain), in those days all sorts of other restrictions existed that more than halved even the relative size of the electorate.

Obviously, when tens of millions of people vote, which is the case in most major Western countries (over 48 million Britons are registered voters), Tocqueville’s condition of an enlightened electorate becomes hard to satisfy.

And it becomes impossible to satisfy when public education has to be squeezed into the Procrustean bed of egalitarianism, which one may regard as either an inevitable consequence of universal suffrage or its cause. And human nature being what it is, unenlightened people will always vote for anyone who promises them more freebies and jam today.

They haven’t been trained to realise that, say, a free medical system is an impossibility: nothing in life is free. Free NHS means that it’s funded by the state out of taxes and burgeoning money supply. This is far from being the only or the best system of financing healthcare, but unenlightened voters either don’t know this or don’t care. “We are proud of our NHS” was one of the first things I heard when moving to England.

Quite. And we are also proud of the welfare state in general. But are we equally proud of collapsing public services that don’t really serve? Of defence that doesn’t really defend? Of education that doesn’t really educate? Of politicians manifestly unqualified to govern?

We aren’t. And yet we’ll throw our arms up in horror should anyone suggest that democracy of universal suffrage is bound to produce decades of incremental deterioration, eventually leading to the calamities I’ve mentioned.

When a system is fundamentally flawed, no amount of tweaking will fix it. Hence we are for ever stuck with successive governments that see defence as an unaffordable luxury and the welfare state as an ironclad necessity. Let’s just hope we’ll never have to pay for this with millions of lives.

To paraphrase Alexander Pushkin ever so slightly, “Of course, I despise my government head to toe – but I am offended when a foreigner shares this feeling.”

Correction: my contempt for our governing Marxist cabal is so boundless that this time I can’t even take offence at Trump’s criticism of it. He is right, a thousand times over.

Trump said last night: “I’m not happy with the UK. This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with.”

Forget Churchill, Mr President. Starting from Robert Walpole, Britain had 57 prime ministers before Starmer, and not one of them was as craven, incompetent, mired in legalistic casuistry and plain stupid as he is. I miss John Major’s intellect, Theresa May’s decisiveness and Liz Truss’s fiscal acumen. Hell, and I thought these words would never cross my lips, I even miss Tony Blair.

Starmer’s first reaction to the US-Israeli assault on Iran was to state that Britain wanted no part of it because the action violated “international law”. Now, every law has its letter and its spirit, with the two sometimes going their separate ways.

The letter of the law is its precise wording, while the spirit reflects its morality. Alas, the two sometimes diverge but, in civilised countries, they shouldn’t diverge too far. In this case, the US-Israeli action is so amply justified morally and strategically that only an idiot would see it as illegal.

Just compare the two on-going wars, Russia’s on the Ukraine and the US-Israel’s on Iran. Both can be held to violate the letter of international law, but Russia had no moral or strategic justification for her brutal and unprovoked assault on a country she intends to erase off the map. That makes Putin and his gang war criminals who murder hundreds of thousands for nefarious reasons. No sane observer would accept Putin’s claim that he acted in self-defence.

The same hypothetical sane observer would instantly see that the US and Israel acted for precisely that reason. Not only is Iran’s regime evil, but it’s aggressively evil. Its stated objective is to dominate the Middle East and to annihilate the only civilised Western country in it.

For 20 years now that regime has been developing nuclear weapons, by-passing international sanctions and acting in cahoots with other evil regimes, those of Russia, China and North Korea. In parallel, it spawned several terrorist organisations, notably Hamas and Hezbollah.

While its main target is Israel, Iran is considered the “foremost state sponsor of terrorism, providing a range of support, including financial, training, and equipment, to [terrorist] groups around the world… .” This statement by the US State Department can’t be contested.

As Iran’s response to the attack shows, her regime regards not only the US and Israel as its enemies, but also all Middle Eastern countries allied to the West, if only in a marriage of convenience. This makes Iran a direct threat to Western, specifically American but also British, interests in the region.

Thus, if Russia’s attack on the Ukraine is an act of evil, unprovoked brutality, the US-Israeli attack on Iran is a preemptive act of self-defence. As such, it’s in accord with the spirit of international law, and it takes a fanatic of casuistry to argue it violates the law’s letter.

Starmer’s appeal to international law is just a cop-out, an attempt to hide behind legalistic jargon his cowardice and fear of upsetting his Muslim electorate. But Trump wasn’t finished:

“The UK has been very, very uncooperative with that stupid island. That they gave away and took a 100-year lease… what’s that all about?” I shan’t repeat all the epithets I’ve so far applied to Starmer and his coterie, but that’s what it’s all about.

Trump’s remark referred to Starmer’s idea of a good deal. He wants to hand the Chagos Islands, a British territory in the Indian Ocean and home of the Diego Garcia UK-US base, to China’s proxy Mauritius, only then to lease the base back for £35 billion.

It’s unfathomable, but when Starmer found out about the impending assault on Iran, he refused to let the US Air Force operate from British bases, including Diego Garcia. It’s only after Iran’s drones targeted the British Akrotiri base on Cyprus that Starmer graciously agreed to grant the US some limited use of British bases for strictly “defensive purposes”.

But the ultimate humiliation came later. An attack on a British base had to draw the country into the conflict, if only kicking and screaming. After all, protecting British interests around the world is a great part of what the British state is for.

And still Starmer dawdled – until Macron, who also believes that the US and Israel “acted outside international law”, nevertheless sent an aircraft carrier group to the Mediterranean to help out a beleaguered British base. Greece also offered help – France! And Greece! Two countries that must possess the naval power Britain lacks.

All Britons have to be writhing with shame and disgust. A great naval power of Drake and Nelson, one that ruled the waves for 500 years and in fact relied on naval superiority to defend her freedom, had to depend on the largesse of France and Greece to protect her vital outpost.

“Rule, Britannia! Britannia rule the waves/ Britons never, never, never will be slaves,” ring the words as proud as they are geopolitically sound: without Britannia ruling the waves (or at least holding her own), Britons may well become slaves.

Starmer doesn’t see the link. But even he had to do something as the French carrier was moving in. Begrudgingly, Starmer agreed to dispatch HMS Dragon, a Type 45 destroyer with counter-drone capabilities.

Better than nothing, I suppose, but why not carrier groups? If the French can do it, what are we, foie haché? Ah well, there’s the rub.

Our wave-ruling Royal Navy possesses two aircraft carriers (the US has 11). Both of them are currently marooned in port, “for maintenance”.

Now the two carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, were commissioned in 2017 and 2019 respectively. By the standards of such giant 65-tonne vessels, both ships are brand-new. And yet neither of them is sea-worthy at the moment, which brings into question the quality of British ship-building.

What if it were not an Iranian drone hitting Akrotiri, but a Russian missile hitting London? Never mind that.

Rear Admiral Chris Parry called Labour’s response to the crisis “strategically illiterate.” “The Government has been shamed into this token, paltry effort by the actions of other countries such as France and Greece,” he said. There is one Briton who feels the shame. I’m sure there are millions more.

Joining the conflict at full pelt would be a just, legal, moral and generally proper thing for Britain to do. The situation is drastically different from Blair docilely following George W Bush into Iraq in 2003. That war was indeed illegal because it was unjustified by any strategic considerations.

Moreover, American neocons inspired that war effort with their ideological appeals to nation-building and creating a fully-fledged democracy in every tribal backwater of the world. This time around, there’s no such talk, no American neocons (some of whom I happen to be related to) fighting tears at the sight of Muslim peasants queuing up at voting booths.

Trump and Defence Secretary Hegseth specifically said no such idiocy is on the agenda. This is an effort to defang one of the main sources of evil in the world, and godspeed to the US and Israel.

Having said that, perhaps Trump will now consider toning down his anti-NATO rhetoric and especially his anti-NATO actions. He can’t expect to have it both ways: denigrating NATO as a useless, archaic setup and treating Article 5 as strictly optional if not yet defunct, while at the same time demanding assistance when needed.

“They need us more than we need them,” Trump likes to say, and he is right. But that doesn’t mean the US has no need for her NATO allies, so I hope he changes his tune. And I also hope Trump, the US arsenal and the world economy have enough wherewithal to stay the course.

The West simply can’t countenance defeat. If it comes, it’s not just Britain that’ll have to hang her head in shame.

Just a few years ago this question would have been silly. Everyone knew the Greens were fanatics of the environment, with everything such zeal entailed.

Scientifically, green is the colour of chlorophyll, the pigment in leaves and grass. But poetically, green symbolises pristine, unspoilt nature, the way it used to be before humans befouled it. Hence the expression ‘God’s green earth’, freely bandied about even by those Greens who don’t believe in God, which is to say most of them.

The Greens translated that nature worship into a whole raft of policies that, if put into practice, would be guaranteed to drop the first world below the standards of the third. Even net zero was too, well, capitalist for them. They’d settle for nothing less than absolute zero: no hydrocarbons, full stop.

Essentially that meant reversing the Industrial Revolution, powered as it was by coal and later oil. As far as the Greens were concerned, we should produce energy the way our forebears produced it: by wind, sun, water and supposedly two pieces of flint rubbed together.

Advocacy of extreme Left policies followed naturally. Since greedy capitalists insist on raping nature for profit, both capitalism and profits had to be condemned. In the absence of bourgeois avarice, what remained was equality for all, as extreme a form of socialism as was possible to achieve before the cold, starving human race died out.

All things considered, that made the task of political taxonomists easy. Everyone knew what the Greens stood for. Most people saw them as oddballs, an extremist, half-mad minority permanently resident in the lunatic fringe.

But then the Greens came up on the political rail by winning the Gorton and Denton by-election, leaving Labour languishing in third place, also behind Reform. The victorious campaign struck most observers as incongruous: environment was hardly mentioned.

It was as if the Greens forgot they were supposed to be green. Instead their strategy was to appeal directly to the Muslims who make up 18 per cent of that constituency. A minority, you might think, but one that can swing elections if voting as a bloc.

The Greens were astute enough to realise this, which is why much of their campaign literature was in Urdu, the language spoken in Pakistan and by the predominantly Pakistani Muslim minority in Britain.

(As an aside, I’d be in favour of a law making English the only allowed language of political and official communications. NHS patient literature, for example, is currently translated into 200 to 450 languages, at a cost that could probably make nurses well-paid.

And my political point is that those who can’t understand the language of a country shouldn’t take part in deciding its politics. As the Texas governor Miriam ‘Ma’ Ferguson put it in the 1920s, “If English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me.” Unfortunately, she didn’t mean it as a joke.)

The well-trodden path to the Muslim heart lies through visceral hatred of Israel (of Jews in general, if truth be told); championship of all anti-Israel, which is to say pro-terrorist regimes and causes; and removal of all restraints on immigration, specifically Muslim. The Greens shaped their campaign accordingly and won.

Nor was it just a peculiar part of Manchester that could be swayed that way. National polls put the Greens way above Labour and only a whisker below Reform. If the general election were held today the Greens would gain around 100 seats, not enough to be kings but enough to be king makers.

Following the US-Israeli offensive on Iran, pro-Iran demonstrations have broken out all over the country, with the Greens leading from the front. Incidentally, calling these demonstrations pro-Iran is a misnomer. The mob supports not Iranian people but specifically the Revolutionary Guard terrorism fronted by the mullahs.

What exactly is the attraction? After all, Islam frowns on some Green policies, such as legalising all drugs including crack and heroin, decriminalising prostitution, removing all restraints on pornography.

Above all, the Greens are fanatically feminist, whereas Islam is, well, not quite. Specifically in Iran, women must cover their heads and bodies in public on pain of corporal punishment. They can’t get a passport without written permission from their husbands or guardians. They aren’t protected by any laws from domestic violence. Laws governing marriage, divorce and child custody heavily favour men.

One can just see British feminists, Green or other, marching in support of women’s rights in Iran and chanting “Down with misogyny!”. Instead, the polls show that the Greens draw much of their support from women, mostly feminist ones.

This is what I call a conflict of pieties. The cause of Islam is closer to the Green heart than the cause of feminism, and the Greens are prepared to forgo the latter for the sake of the former.

Thus, the party must re-orient itself, but – and I’m happy to make this helpful suggestion – no re-branding is necessary. For green isn’t only the colour of nature; it’s also the colour of Islam.

It was Mohammed’s favourite colour. He felt green symbolised paradise and the garments worn by the righteous admitted there. That’s why many national flags of Muslim countries, including Iran, feature green among their colours.

Incidentally, virgins get a free pass to paradise even if they commit capital offences. To prevent such incongruity, the Iranian regime demands that prison guards rape condemned women before execution, to make sure a virgin doesn’t slip through. One would think Green women would find it hard to reconcile such practices with their rooting for Iran’s regime, but any clash between two pieties is an elimination contest. And it’s Islam that has made it to the finals.

All this is good knock-about fun that one likes to have at the expense of assorted lefties. But that’s all it is, for the essence of the matter is different. The Greens aren’t inspired by their love of anything, be it nature, Islam, Iran or Palestinians.

The more extreme a Left-wing movement, the more evident it becomes that its true inspiration isn’t love but hatred. And the Greens are as extreme as they come. That’s why they aren’t bothered by espousing what seems to be mutually exclusive causes. Such causes are only mutually exclusive in what they advocate – not in what they hate.

The list of the Greens’ bogeymen is long: capitalism and Jews as its embodiment (according to Marx); Israel as a first-world country stubbornly resisting extermination at the hands of her third-world neighbours; the West as the hatchery of capitalism; NATO as the West’s cutting edge; US as an ally of Israel and hence complicit in the latter’s criminal efforts to protect herself; the West in general, as the oppressor of lesser, especially racially diverse nations.

The leader of the Greens, Zack Polanski, is living proof of only the illusory nature of any inner conflicts in his party’s ideology. He himself is both Jewish and homosexual, which doesn’t prevent him from touting a regime that happily murders both groups.

As long as a regime hates what Zack hates, which is Britain with her history and ethos, along with everything the West stands for, he’ll do his best to champion it. Hatred trumps any personal considerations, which is known to be the case with fanatics.

Opinion polls are fickle, and one hopes that the Greens’ current showing is merely a statistical blip. Such things have happened before: a marginal party jumps out of the water, only then to sink without a trace (Nigel Farage should also beware).

Even so, the situation is frightening. It’s just possible that the rise of the Greens adumbrates the downfall of Britain qua Britain, a malignancy eating away at the country’s body politic. If so, run for the hills (but not, on present evidence, for Dubai).

The title of Kierkegaard’s first and perhaps most famous book was Either/Or.

He was talking specifically about choosing between a life of aesthetic hedonism or one of ethical commitment, but the title contains a lesson that applies to life in general and the war on Iran in particular.

Alas, the lesson is too often ignored. We consider one possibility in isolation, forgetting that it’s usually an alternative to something else. It’s only by weighing one against the other that we can judge the wisdom of an action.

This truism is roundly disregarded by those who take issue with the assault on Iran undertaken by the US and Israel. Actually, ‘take issue’ is an understatement – no one does that any longer. ‘Hysterically attack’ is more accurate.

Don’t Trump and Netanyahu realise that their action may plunge the whole Middle East into a blood-soaked chaos, compared to which the Iraq War will look like a warm-up exercise? Do they want a Middle Eastern war of all against all, with millions dead and more millions inundating Europe and the US?

The answers are, yes, they realise and no, they don’t want. But they must have gone through Kierkegaard’s binary choice and considered what would happen if Iran was allowed to go about her business unmolested.

Quite apart from murdering Iranians, Iran’s business, in case anyone has forgotten, is promoting terrorism and fomenting hatred all over the world, but specifically against Israel and her allies, especially the US. To that end, Iran’s regime, with a little help from its Russian friends, has been developing nuclear weapons and means of their delivery.

Other countries possess such WMDs, but so far they’ve been wise enough not to use them. Iran’s chieftains can’t be relied on to display similar wisdom. The moment they acquire nuclear bombs, they’ll attach them to missiles and hit Israel – to begin with. Other targets, countries the mullahs and their Revolutionary Guard wire-pullers regard as satanic, may also be in their sights.

Those target countries that have a nuclear capability, specifically Israel, will surely respond in kind. The whole region will be plunged into a nuclear war, with consequences as horrific as they are unpredictable.

I’m the first to accuse political leaders of self-serving cynicism, and it’s indeed possible that Trump and Netanyahu resorted to this time-dishonoured trick of diverting public attention from domestic problems. Trump especially may want to counteract his recent Supreme Court debacle and possibly some forthcoming news from the Epstein files.

However, it’s also possible that Trump and Netanyahu know something we don’t about Iran’s nuclear programme. It’s that either/or again.

It’s true that George W. Bush and Tony Blair lied about Iraq’s WMDs to get the US and Britain into an ill-advised war. But unlike them, neither Trump nor Netanyahu defines the war objective as turning Iran into a US-style democracy complete with a bicameral parliament, independent judiciary and a bill of rights.

That was a toxic neocon fantasy, one kind that Trump isn’t given to. His stated casus belli is that Iran’s regime is evil (true); Iran presents a palpable danger to the region, especially America’s staunchest ally, Israel (true); Iran also presents a danger to the US herself (possibly true, but unlikely); Iran is close to developing nuclear weapons (true, depending on how one defines ‘close’).

So far so good. But, once we’ve got the casus belli out of the way to everyone’s begrudging satisfaction, then the fun starts. The kick-off question is: What’s the finis belli, chaps? How do you expect the war to end?

Regime change is on everyone’s lips, which is always nice when the regime in question is as venomous as Iran’s. However, no evil regime in modern history has ever been unseated by aerial power alone. The Allies dropped almost three megatons of explosives on Germany, but that only softened the ground for those proverbial boots, not obviated the need for them.

Neither the US nor Israel seems to be planning a ground assault: the US because it lacks the will; Israel, because it lacks the means. Iran, after all, has a population of 93 million and a territory almost seven times the size of Britain’s.

Trump is counting on a popular uprising breaking out in Iran, and in fact he has called for it. This is a daring call, considering that just a couple of weeks ago Iranian troops slaughtered tens of thousands of people who had gone out into the streets in answer to a similar appeal from Trump.

Having said that, Iranians are more civilised than Iraqis, and hence more of them loathe theocratic tyranny – especially since real power there is in the hands of fascistic Revolutionary Guards. There must be a lot of steam pressure building up under the surface, and there is every chance it may burst through. Then again, it may not. It’s either/or.

Another possibility is that the US and Israel don’t expect a regime change in Iran. All they may want is degrading Iran’s capability to do mischief internationally. To serve that more limited aim, they may merely look to destroy Iran’s air force, missile launchers, nuclear capability and the industries that could replenish such losses.

The long-term objective may also be turning Muslims against one another, along the lines of divide et impera. The Middle East seems ready for that.   

Westerners tend to lump all Muslims together, but in fact the religious makeup of the Middle East is similar to its weather: mostly Sunni, but sometimes Shiite. None so hostile as divergent exponents of the same creed, and Iran has proved that point yet again by expending her limited missile arsenal on hitting five-star hotels in Dubai and airports in Abu Dhabi.

Their vindictive aim is to make the region undesirable for foreign investors, including those in the Trump family. The Emirates in particular depend on such investors and expats, at least 240,000 of whom are wealthy Britons seeking tax shelters. They may change their mind when they have to start thinking of bomb shelters instead.

This has to bring Arab states into some sort of coalition with the US and the rest of NATO, which will be one positive outcome of the war. But not if the decapitated regime in Iran does a Hydra and grows new heads to replace those severed by American missiles.

History shows that, when the US enters regional conflicts, she seldom stays the course for the long haul. Not a single war America has fought since 1945 has ended in an unequivocal victory; most have ended in defeats, with or without face saved.

Bertie Russell would insist that this doesn’t necessarily mean each subsequent war would follow the same pattern, and for once he’d have a point. But a general tendency is observable. All in all, this war may or may not prove as futile as, say, the Vietnam War or the one in Iraq. It’s either/or.

It pains me to be unable to be more definitive, but my crystal ball has gone cloudy. No one, I suspect not even Trump, really knows where the war is going and how it will end. However, the war must have something to recommend it, considering who has condemned it.

Leading the way is Putin, the fascist dictator; Xi and Kim, the communist dictators; and, for a bit of local colour, Jeremy Corbyn, the aspiring Marxist dictator.

Putin had the gall to send this note to the Iranian president: “Please accept my deep condolences in connection with the murder of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Seyed Ali Khamenei, and members of his family, committed in cynical violation of all norms of human morality and international law.”

Putin appealing to human morality and international law is a bit like Hitler calling for racial equality, but KGB thugs don’t get irony. Neither do Chinese communists who have decried “a serious violation of Iran’s sovereignty and security, a trampling on the aims and principles of the UN Charter and the basic norms of international relations”.

Trump and Netanyahu must be doing something right. We’ll just have to see whether or not their effort will produce a worthy result. It’s either/or.

“Simple, love. They come when Mummy and Daddy stay at home all the time.”

If a report by Kings College London is to be believed, this reply will be resonating through the country in a few years, with low birth rates a distant memory.

The report says that, to quote the newspaper headline, Companies Should Let Employees Work from Home to Fix Britain’s Declining Birth Rates. Now, there’s a hell of a great idea, I thought.

This adds a whole new meaning to the concept of lying down on the job. Instead of involving themselves in the drudgery of daily toil, couples could stay at home and go at it hammer and tongs. That way they’ll produce many more babies who’ll then grow up and work from home too – nudge, nudge.

Sorted, as they say in these parts. Except that a question arises of how Mummy and Daddy will be able to pay the bills or, to extrapolate, to keep the economy going. But hey, one problem at a time, all right?

That’s the drawback of long headlines: they put the whole story in a nutshell, discouraging further reading. This is a case in point – I let my scabrous imagination run away with me. However, having then read the article to the end, I found out that replacing work with hanky-panky isn’t quite what the report meant.

Or is it? The paper says that, when both ‘partners’ (dread word) work from home at least once a week, lifetime fertility rises by an average of 0.32 children per woman. Yes, but why?

The report cites no physiological reasons. Instead it mentions the greater ease of family planning and a reduced need for childcare as contributing factors, leaving unmentioned the obvious explanation that first popped into my dirty mind.

For, as often as not, working from home (WFH) is a way of not working from home (NWFH). Anyone who has ever been involved in any commercial activity will know that people who work together with their colleagues are more productive than loners who claim to be working from home.

Claiming exemption from coming to work is almost the same as pulling a sickie, a sort of malingering. Granted, there are exceptions, but I don’t believe they can be numerous enough to make a statistical difference to birth rates. After all, we are talking huge numbers here.

To cite one example close to my heart, an advertising creative team working on a new campaign may indeed be more productive staying at home in peace and quiet, away from phone calls, irate clients and – especially in Britain – useless meetings. Even there, having made that WFH phone call myself many times, my partner (as the term is properly used) and I usually idled away half a day chatting about this and that.

Communications being what they are today, WFH is technically easier than it was in my day. But things remain the same psychologically: the dynamics of a buzzing office get more out of employees than lazing at home ever will.

“For societies faced with undesirably low birth rates,” says the paper, “WFH can thus yield societal benefits that go beyond any direct benefits to employees and employers.” Yes, such direct benefits as getting the work done and keeping the country afloat.

That said, birth rates in Britain aren’t just low but catastrophic. At 1.4 children per woman (compared to 2.93 in 1964), they are way below “the ‘replacement-level’ rate needed to maintain a stable population of 2.1”.

Of course, as any Green or Labour politician will tell you, with a Tory one pretending to demur, there are other ways of keeping the population stable or even growing. But uncontrolled Muslim immigration is a subject for another day.

A UN report identifies the same problem and offers a full raft of reasons for it. Some of them are objective: rising living costs, less job security and a lack of affordable housing. But then there are also subjective reasons, a matter of personal choice: women focusing on careers too much to be sidetracked by children, men reluctant to be burdened with family responsibilities.

Such fracturing off various factors seems unnecessarily pedantic to me. For all of them are but subsets of an overarching problem: the chickens hatched by our deracinated modernity have come home to roost. All over the developed world we are paying the price for conducting social experiments on humans.

Englishmen (and definitely Americans) my age remember the time when a man making a normal middle-class salary could provide for his family well enough for his wife and three or four children to live in comfort. The wife typically didn’t have a full-time job – because she neither wanted nor, more to the point, needed one.

Those women who couldn’t keep their natural talents bottled up did pursue careers, but they were in the minority. Most stayed at home to run their households and raise their children.

Their role was as vital as that of their men, but it was different because, well, men and women are different. The issue of which ‘gender’ was entitled to which primary sex characteristics never came up, and neither did many malcontents question the natural biological and social differences between men and women.

Then the 1960s barged in, sweeping all before them and leaving a social and cultural wasteland in their wake. The biological differences between the sexes were still acknowledged, just, but no other.

Militant feminism became the order of the day, and the woman’s traditional role of wife and mother was declared obsolete, onerous and oppressive. Women now had to fulfil themselves not by raising families but by competing with men in the workplace – this, while still juggling their jobs with domestic obligations.

I’ll illustrate the situation on the example of the only industry of which I have inside knowledge: advertising. When women were told to cast aside the yoke of womanhood, they began to flood into agencies, bloating their staff by at least 40 per cent.

There was precious little those companies could do about keeping the deluge at bay. For governments proved their progressive nature by introducing various laws mandating equal opportunity and prohibiting discrimination based on sex (or ability, as one is tempted to add).

Yet advertising agencies are commercial concerns accountable to their shareholders. They had to make profits, a task made difficult by newly bulging payrolls. Hence the managers did the only thing they could do under the circumstances: they lopped 40 per cent off the men’s salaries and used the money to pay the women.

That’s what happened in every industry and in every country. The ideologically inspired urge of a woman to have a full-time job was boosted by the economic necessity to do so. A normal middle-class salary was no longer sufficient for a man to provide for his family.

This is in no way trying to denigrate women’s competence. They are often as good as men are at many occupations and better at some. For example, the biological imperative to run large households often makes women excellent administrators at all levels, from running advertising accounts to, as Margaret Thatcher proved, running countries.

If women desperately want to work and have the necessary abilities, then by all means, no barriers should be erected in their way. But, call me a misogynist and report me to the Equalities Commission, most women seek full-time employment not because they need to express their talents but because they have to financially – and feel they have to ideologically.

It doesn’t take an academic sociologist, nor an extensive study, to realise what sort of effect that situation will have on birth rates. We can see what’s happening before our very eyes.

This whole drive to WFH, especially for women, is a tacit admission of a terrible mistake made over the previous three generations. Alas, we are going to be furnished with yet another proof that any large-scale experiments on human beings always produce disastrous effects, those that can’t be corrected by palliatives.

That is to say they can’t be corrected at all. Enforced, ideologically inspired social meddling is usually irreversible if allowed to fester long enough. That’s why sage men throughout the ages highlighted prudence as the greatest political virtue. But those men are no longer with us, and neither is their prudence and sagacity.

Hence the massive drive to tear the social fabric to tatters, followed by half-hearted attempts to patch up the more gaping holes. Good luck with that.

So many people have thus described Simon Richards so often that I once told him he should adopt the designation as his legal name.

Simon died on 21 February, at a ridiculously young age of 67, and seldom have I seen the death of a public figure causing such an outpouring of grief. Much of it is my own, for Simon was a dear friend, a man I loved and admired.

Human faces can be deceptive, but not faces like Simon’s. One glance at him, and you knew you were in the presence of a good man, a just man, a kind man, a man you wanted to become your friend for life.

Niceness so often disguises vapidity, but in Simon’s case it was a direct product of his faith, first-rate mind, deep convictions and unbridled energy in defence of what he regarded as man’s most prized possession: freedom.

Never have I seen such steeliness of conviction coexisting with such gentility of manner. Simon was a lesson to us all, emphatically including me. Where others looked for a battlefield, he sought common ground; where others saw enemies, he saw misguided friends; where others ranted, he chuckled and drew his adversaries in.

How badly we’ll miss him, especially at a time when the unity Simon cherished is giving way to rancorous factiousness, when people who disagree push so far to the opposite extremes that they resemble warring clans, not fellow men trying to arrive at a shared goal if from different ends.

Simon joined the Freedom Association as still a schoolboy and retired as its Chief Executive Officer in 2020. In 2006 he co-founded Better Off Out, a conservative group campaigning for Britain to leave the European Union.

In both capacities, Simon perhaps did more for that cause than any of the better-known figures basking in the limelight. He worked quietly behind the scenes, raising funds, building alliances, organising public events, firmly putting Brexit in the context of free nations, free speech, free markets.

Simon could discuss the economics of Brexit with the best of them, but he’d refuse to reduce British sovereignty to bean counting. He loved his country, and he felt its pain as chunks of sovereignty were slashed out of its body politic and tossed beyond the reach of Britain’s Parliament.

Even if it could have been shown that Britain would prosper beyond imagination as an EU province, Simon would have campaigned against remaining with just as much vigour. As it was, he saw clearly the economic possibilities of Brexit, those that all post-referendum governments have squandered so wantonly.

But the referendum was won against all odds, and Simon’s friends at the Margaret Thatcher Centre have written that, without him, Brexit wouldn’t have happened. I wasn’t deep enough on the inside of the movement to know whether that was the case.

But I can easily believe it, for Simon brought to the task not only his mind, organisational ability, energy and convictions, but also his talent for building bridges rather than blowing them up. For example, few conservatives would have been as eager as Simon was to divert funds and strategic support to Labour groups campaigning for Brexit, such as Labour Leave.

But Simon respected his political adversaries as fellow Britons and loved them the way Christians were taught to love. That must have come naturally to Simon for he exuded love and goodwill like few people I know.

Unlike so many activists in the ranks of Brexiteers, Simon wasn’t a single-issue zealot. He was keenly interested in a whole raft of conservative politics and thought, with his unerring instincts and sharp intellect putting him on the right side of every debate.

We were friends for the best part of a quarter-century, but unfortunately never saw each other as often as I would have liked. He lived in Cheltenham, I in London, and I wish the 110 miles between us hadn’t become such an obstacle.

Mostly we spent time together during various social and political functions Simon organised. When he ran the Freedom Association, he’d often invite me to speak at various seminars and also the annual Freedom Festivals at Bournemouth. Once I had to deliver four separate talks there in two days, matching Peter Mullen in that respect (one of the few occasions I’ve ever been able to match Peter on anything).

Just a month ago, Simon and I had an exchange of e-mails that started with my being copied in on a lively conversation among several people, some of whom spoke favourably of Orbán. Simon replied that he saw their point but couldn’t abide with Orbán’s support for Putin.

I wrote, “Hear, hear!” and Simon replied:

“Thank you, Alex. You have consistently, and authoritatively, warned about Putin, from the start. You were the first person to open my eyes to him, for which massive respect.

 “My very best wishes to you,

“Simon”

I wrote back, saying:

“And massive respect to you too, Simon, for being the only political thinker I’ve never disagreed with. By reading these e-mails, I take it you are unwell. I hope you get better soon – and do keep in touch.

 “All best wishes,

 “Alex”

Then came Simon’s last message to me:

“That’s most kind of you, Alex.

“Having never been properly ill, I had a heart attack last November. I was well looked after and now feel fine, though on a cocktail of drugs.

“I do hope that you are well.

“It is so sad to see how many people who should know better have fallen hook, line and sinker for Putin’s lies. Shame on them!

“Yours ever,

“Simon”

This may look as if I’m writing as much about myself as about Simon, and this is indeed the case. Because this is where Simon will be from now on, in the hearts of his grieving friends and all those who knew him. We have become Simon’s resting place in earth, as he claims his eternal rest in heaven.

Rest in peace, my dear friend.

On 20 February, 2014, Russian troops pretending to be something else invaded the Crimea. Almost exactly eight years later, on 24 February, 2022, a full-scale Russian invasion of the Ukraine began.

The war has raged at varying intensities for 12 years now, and no end is in sight. Instead of a lightning-quick victory within days, Putin’s fascist regime got mired in a war of attrition. Hundreds of thousands have died, three times as many have been crippled.

Of all the major modern wars in Europe, this is the only one where the line separating good from evil, victim from aggressor, right from wrong is clearly demarcated.

During the Napoleonic wars, guilt was spread around more or less evenly. Russians who put all the blame on Napoleon forget that between 1804 and 1812 Russia under Alexander I entered four different offensive coalitions against France, each resulting in wars.

Two earlier coalitions, starring Britain and Austria, had also directly led to armed conflicts. Napoleon himself was no shrinking violet, but many serious historians argue he was responding to aggression, rather than initiating one. Be that as it may, Napoleon certainly wasn’t the sole culprit.

The First World War is routinely blamed on Germany, and perhaps she did act as a catalyst. But it wasn’t Germany but Russia that mobilised first, and the Entente was spoiling for a fight as much as the Central Powers were. Had Germany and Austria emerged victorious, today’s history books would be casting Russia, Britain and France in the role of aggressors, with reasonable justification.

The Second World War had two culprits: Hitler and Stalin. The war started a week after the two predators signed their so-called Non-Aggression Pact. Germany attacked Poland on 1 September, 1941, the Soviet Union did so on 17 September.

The two diabolical regimes divided Europe between them, with Germany claiming the continent’s west, Russia invading and annexing its east. Thereafter, the two regimes began to build up for a clash between themselves, and it was a matter of who struck first.

Stalin had amassed the greatest military force in history and deployed it on the USSR’s western border, where it was poised to attack. Hitler had no choice but to launch a preemptive strike against an enemy greatly superior to Germany in every rubric of warfare: numerical strength, tanks, warplanes, artillery.

Every rubric but one, that is: the art of war. That’s why during the first four months of that conflict the Soviets suffered a military catastrophe unprecedented in the history of warfare.

Historians agree that Stalin was planning a first strike, with some claiming that Hitler beat him to the punch by a fortnight, others opting for a few days, and Mark Solonin, perhaps the most outstanding historian of the initial stage of the war, putting forth a convincing argument in favour of just a couple of hours.

One way or another, the two principal adversaries in that war, Germany and the Soviet Union, were equally satanic regimes that share the responsibility for the greatest carnage in European history – yet. Britain and the US sided with one villain against the other, won the war, and the victors dictated their own narrative to obliging historians.

Yet it takes an intrepid (or ill-informed) commentator to insist that the Western allies were on the side of the angels, rather than supporting one demon against another. Such commentators aren’t thick on the ground in Eastern Europe, which was subsequently enslaved by the Soviets for the next 46 years.

Such diversity of interpretation is out of place in the on-going war. Russia is unequivocally the aggressor; the Ukraine, the victim.

However, the US, in the person of her one-off president, is trying to impose on the Ukraine a capitulation that Putin’s hordes have failed to force on the battlefield. Not just Trump but also some like-minded commentators, presidents and prime ministers try to apportion the blame between both sides equally. If anything, they seem to think that the Ukraine and NATO bear the greater guilt.

The Ukraine, they insist, isn’t democratic, which is palpable nonsense. Yes, that beleaguered country hasn’t had a presidential election for almost seven years. But by that criterion Britain was even less democratic when she held no general election for 10 years during the Second World War era.

The Ukraine can’t possibly hold national elections at a time when 20 per cent of her nation is occupied by the Russians. And yes, the regime of the Russian puppet Yanukovych was overthrown in 2014 by a popular uprising rather than by due process.

But the legal and moral justification for that public outburst was stronger than in the three greatest revolutions of modern times, American, French and Russian. Ukrainians rose in revolt against their historical oppressors, those who have tried for centuries not only to subjugate the country politically but also to rob it of its national identity, killing millions in the process.

Just list the roll call of grievances the American Declaration of Independence cites against George III and compare them with Ukrainian ones against Soviet tyranny, complete with mass shootings, concentration camps and the artificial famine of 1932-1933 that murdered at least five million Ukrainians.

Ukrainians clearly saw what myopic Western observers missed: Stalin’s communist empire had come back as Putin’s fascist Russia. The scale is still different, but the monstrous intent is exactly the same. It takes a Putin stooge like Peter Hitchens to describe the 2014 Maidan as a ‘putsch’ against legally instituted authority.

The Ukraine, say Putin admirers, is corrupt. Of course she is. What do you expect after decades of communist cannibalism? All former communist countries are corrupt, and the nearer their orbit was to the Soviet centre, the more corrupt they are.

Russia herself is infinitely more corrupt than the Ukraine, and much less democratic (unless one sees sham elections featuring openly stuffed ballot boxes as a paragon of democracy).

The two countries must be seen in their dynamic development, which in the Ukraine is clearly vectored towards the West, and in Russia towards even more fascism and a steady escalation of war. That’s exactly what one expects from a regime formed by a fusion of organised crime with the most sinister secret police in history.

Above all, there is no argument whatsoever about identifying the aggressor in this war. The Ukraine has fallen victim to a monstrous invader whose sights are set on the rest of Eastern Europe, at least. Russia has violated every known international law and committed a plethora of unspeakable war crimes.

The Russians are fighting for imperial expansion; the Ukrainians, for national survival – and not only their own. Nevertheless, Trump, Orbán, Fico et al. are trying to force the Ukraine into capitulation, disguised as a ‘peace plan’.

They assume the right to dictate to the Ukraine when she must have presidential elections, although every sovereign country should decide that issue by herself. By their insistence, those leaders implicitly agree with Putin who refuses to see the Ukraine as a sovereign country.

It’s the Ukraine, not Russia, that is supposed to limit the size of her armed forces – another sop to Putin, another tacit agreement to ignore the Ukraine’s sovereignty.

And perhaps the most egregious of all is the demand that the Ukraine cede more territory, including the fortified region in the Donbass that would take the Russians millions of casualties to capture, if they can do so at all.

In exchange for what? Putin declaring victory, then rebuilding his military muscle and coming again within a couple of years, with the tuned-up fascist juggernaut rolling over a rump Ukraine and all the former vassal states of the Soviet empire?

Even Mark Solonin fails to match the perspicacity he shows when analysing the war that started on 22 June, 1941. The war that started in 2014, he insists, ought to end on Putin’s terms because the Ukraine has no hope of scoring a decisive victory.

He may have a point: with allies like Trump who transparently supports Putin, and Western European leaders who talk a big game but play a small one, the Ukraine may not be able to oust the invaders from her soil. But that doesn’t mean her situation is hopeless.

She continues to hold the Russians back, making them pay dearly for every square inch of Ukrainian territory. Short of weapons and personnel, the Ukrainian army is working miracles of heroism and ingenuity – as recent NATO exercises showed, it has become the most battle-worthy army in Europe.

The Ukraine bleeds, but she isn’t exsanguinating. Above all, she has no choice: contrary to the feigned innocence of some Western leaders, any peace treaty with Putin would stink as much as the sort of stuff one scrapes off one’s shoe sole. Putin’s signature on any ‘peace’ document means less than nothing – it means a guarantee that Russia’s fascist regime will soon come back in greater force.

On this tragic anniversary, one can only wish the heroic Ukrainian people even more courage, even more endurance, even more strength. I’m not a great admirer of slogans, but I’ll make an exception today by repeating the proud motto of Ukrainian independence: ‘Glory to the Ukraine!’. ‘Glory to the heroes!’, is the answer to that one.

Trying to explain Trump’s obvious sympathy with Putin’s Russia, some naysayers have claimed that Donald Trump is a Russian agent, codename ‘Krasnov’.

Those less susceptible to conspiracy theories have suggested that Putin may be blackmailing Trump with kompromat, obtained courtesy of Epstein or otherwise.

Still others have opined that Trump genuinely likes his friend Vlad and envies, hoping to emulate, the kind of power the latter enjoys.

Those more cynical have insisted that Trump is driven exclusively by pecuniary interests and hence sees Russia as a more lucrative long-term trade partner than the Ukraine can ever be.

I myself have sided with some of those versions, stopping just short of giving credence to the ‘Agent Krasnov’ theory. However, over the past couple of days, something else has dawned on me: Trump identifies not just with Putin but with Russia – as she is, historically has been, and I dare say always will be.

His reaction to the setback he suffered at the hands of the US Supreme Court leaves little room for doubt: Trump’s Weltanschauung isn’t that of an American president, nor even of an American, full stop. It’s that of a Russian, specifically of a Russian leader, be it tsar, Secretary General or president.

Russians in general, and their leaders in particular, have always held a particular view of the country’s interchange with the world. The view was nothing short of paranoia: the whole world hates Russia and conspires against her.

The country is surrounded by enemies united in their fiendish plots to enslave Russia, rob her of her riches, erect a barrier in the way of Russia’s holy mission to save the world from itself. That mission may be expressed in the terms of Third Rome, Third International or Second Coming – nomenclature doesn’t matter because Russians have that sacred mission in their blood, and no one else can possibly understand it.

Since Russia is encircled by foes, essentially defined as all countries that aren’t Russia, the country has to fight a permanent war against the world, and also against all domestic enemies, those vipers who are traditionally branded as ‘enemies of the people’, ‘spies’, ‘traitors’, ‘foreign agents’ and some such.

Looking at the deranged rant Trump delivered in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, I suddenly realised: he sees America’s place in the world exactly like Putin (Stalin, Lenin, Nicholas II, Alexander I, Ivan IV et al.) sees Russia’s.

Granted, being a Westerner, Trump has more strings to his bow than your average Russian chieftain. His mentality isn’t only that of a Russian leader but also that of a Mafia godfather.

In the latter capacity, he spewed hatred at the justices who broke the unwritten law of the underworld: they accepted the godfather’s favour without pledging undying loyalty in return.

The favour was spectacular: Trump put three of those vermin on the Supreme Court, thereby empowering them for a lifetime. Those who remember the opening scene of The Godfather know what the usual quid pro quo is supposed to be.

Vito Corleone agrees to grant Amerigo Bonasera’s request, but stipulates that one day he may call upon Bonasera to do a service for him in return. Bonasera accepts: he knows how things work.

For Vito, read Donald – he did a huge favour to those justices, and he expected a service from them whenever he needed one. Yet those ingrates proved no match for Bonasera: just when Vito-Donald expected a favour in return, they refused to grant it.

Should that have happened to Vito, he wouldn’t have slipped into a madcap harangue. He would have talked to his lieutenants in that half-whisper of his, and within hours a tragic accident would have befallen Amerigo.

Alas, Trump can’t order a hit on the six justices who voted against him. He can’t even sack them because the constitution doesn’t allow it. All he can do is rave and rant, and these modes of self-expression come naturally to our hero.

Those justices were “disloyal”! He was “ashamed of them”! So should their nearest and dearest be: they are an “embarrassment to their families”! They are “fools”! They are “lap dogs”!

That last invective bridges the gap separating a Mafia godfather from a Russian chieftain. “Lap dogs” to whom exactly? Whom are they “disloyal” to? To the Donald, naturally. But, and there the Russian chords are struck, they are also disloyal to their country. They are “unpatriotic”!

They have been “swayed by foreign interests”! Now we are talking, or rather now the Russians are talking. Those nine Supreme Court justices, well, okay, six of them, are traitors, foreign agents, enemies of the people.

I get it. But traitors don’t just betray their country in a vacuum. They betray it to other countries, those fiendish foreigners plotting against America. All those double-dealing scum who “have been ripping America off” since time immemorial.

Granted, those enemies of America have only conspired to swindle the country out of its wealth, not to enslave or annihilate it. But then that Latin phrase mutatis mutandis comes to mind – changing minor details without affecting the main point.

Russian history has conditioned the populace to think of foreigners as potential invaders, and fair enough, Russia has indeed been invaded a few times in the past 500 years. Americans, on the other hand, have never been invaded by foreign enemies – but they have been “ripped off”.

Those perfidious, sweaty foreigners aren’t out to rob America of her territory or sovereignty – they are after America’s money, which to Trump amounts to the same thing or even worse.

That’s why he lashed out in a manner close typologically to the usual reactions of Russian leaders. The whole world is against America, especially those so-called allies feigning friendship while reaching for America’s wallet.

Trump had tried to grab them by their wrists, declaring (trade) war on the world, but those Supreme ingrates didn’t let him. What does that make them? Correct: traitors, enemies of the people, foreign agents, you name it.

This shows how out of touch I am with the country I used to call my own. When I lived in the US (I left in 1988), I didn’t witness anything resembling this obscene show. This though just about every president during my American sojourn, from Nixon to Reagan, had quarrels with the Supreme Court.

Neither do I recall any Americans, never mind US presidents, who exhibited siege mentality, claiming the whole world was out to get them. If anything, the Americans I remember were more likely to believe all Europeans liked them more than they actually did.

The country must have changed tremendously during these measly 38 years for a US president publicly to accuse Supreme Court justices of treason – and get away with it. Or will Trump get away with it? We’ll see.