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Their titles suggest that a Home Secretary looks after domestic affairs, a Foreign Secretary after international ones, and an Education Secretary after, well, education.

By the same token, Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Energy and Net Zero, must try to decarbonise Britain, by 2030 as he has promised. In fact, he pursues this subversive goal so zealously that one wishes someone would decarbonise Ed Miliband.

Even Tony Blair, who must have undergone woke conversion therapy, came out saying that Ed’s policy is “doomed to fail”. Forgive me for being so cynical, but I wonder if Tony had his Damascene experience because his company has close commercial ties with Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan, oil producers both. No, surely not.

Ed’s boss, Sir Keir Starmer, described Blair’s comments as “unhelpful”, but that’s because he is English. The Donald would convey the same opprobrium by saying that both Tony and his remarks suck out loud, emphasising yet again the endless lexical variety of the English language.

I fancy myself as a physiognomist, especially when trying to read the character of a person no longer in the first flush of youth. Age does leave biographical imprints on a face, and the greater the age, the more reliable those imprints are. On that basis, the briefest of looks at Ed Miliband, 55, will reveal his intellectual inadequacy.

And if you don’t believe me or, worse still, try to shove down my throat that old chestnut about judging a book by its cover, just compare two projects he pursues and tell me they aren’t the work of an idiot.

First, Ed sets out to cover every square inch of our green and pleasant land with solar panels, to make sure it becomes neither green nor pleasant. Most of those panels come from China, which, as a side benefit, adds muscle to the economic strength of a communist superpower.

Yet the strongest argument against this madness was delivered the other day by Spain and Portugal, which suffered the greatest blackout in European history. According to experts, the power cut was caused by the two countries’ growing reliance on net zero energy, meaning windmills and solar panels.

By the sound of it, Spain may beat Britain in the race to the net zero tape. At present, a mere six per cent of that country’s energy comes from gas. Most of the rest is generated by renewable sources that, alas, prove not to be as renewable as all that.

Unlike traditional energy systems, solar and wind lack the ability to keep running when a surge or power cut occurs. That inability makes it much harder to balance the grid.

After all, electricity grids are like markets: they require stability, meaning in their case a capacity to maintain electricity supply at a more or less constant level. Energy sources that depend on sunshine or wind can’t have that capacity by definition, and they also can’t store energy as effectively as traditional systems.

Moreover, even in the absence of catastrophic power cuts, solar and wind can’t sustain modern industry, especially steel and aluminium, and the growing appetite of cities to expand. This appetite is voracious, as any Londoner will confirm.

When driving to a neighbourhood for the first time in a few months, I usually can’t recognise its geometry: all the old landmarks are dwarfed by new construction, from office towers to upmarket flats. And each of those buildings is the flesh of concrete or brick on the skeleton of a steel frame.

How much steel does it take? Well, an average skyscraper requires up to 20 tonnes, and a tallish block of flats a third of that. If you look at the volume of construction in London alone, and other cities aren’t far behind, then add the amount of steel needed for other industries, you’ll believe the experts who insist that wind and solar can’t satisfy such a rapacious demand.

Hence blackouts will become more and more frequent, and HMG is already recommending that we stock up on cash to be able to buy food when card machines go zonk. That’s good advice, akin to a thug kindly telling you to stock up on plasters before he beats you up.

But let’s assume for the sake of argument that turning the British Isles into one giant solar panel can indeed take care of our energy needs. Then let’s assume further that the whole drive towards net zero rests on a sound scientific foundation, rather than an ideological swindle. Yes, you know a swindle is exactly what it is, but bear with me for a minute.

Making those wrong assumptions still doesn’t negate the self-evident fact that solar panels need sunshine to be effective, and the more energy we expect them to produce, the more sunshine they’ll need. Are you with me so far?

Good. Now we are into the oxymoron in the title. That word, as you know, denotes a proposition that combines two mutually exclusive terms. ‘Pious agnostic,’ ‘freedom-loving communist’, ‘young thinker’ and ‘charmer Starmer’ would be examples of that figure of speech.

Applying that understanding to the task in hand will help us appreciate the true idiocy of Ed’s other policy. Starting from the irrefutable observation that sunlight is warm, he reaches the conclusion that the sun throws a spanner in the wheels of his net zero project by causing global warming – or climate change, as it’s now coyly called.

That’s why, guided by his sure hand that seems to be unconnected to any semblance of a mind, HMG is about to embark on a £50 million programme investigating the possibility of blocking off sunlight. Field trials will include injecting aerosols into the atmosphere and brightening clouds to reflect sunshine.

The former bright idea will saturate the stratosphere with particles that reflect sunlight, preventing it from frying ‘our planet’ well-done. The latter involves ships spraying sea-salt particles into the sky to make low-lying clouds more reflective.

Such geoengineering reminds me of the Soviet Union, whose powers that be seriously considered diverting the course of the great Siberian rivers, thereby turning Siberia into a sort of Costa del Sol.

Scientists were screaming then that this would lead to catastrophic ecological consequences, and they are screaming roughly the same now. The Soviet government finally listened, but HMG, prodded by Miliband, is starting trials within weeks.

Now I’m going to ask you again to assume the impossible and agree that a) global warming isn’t a hoax and b) blocking off sunlight could save ‘our planet’.

Still, I can’t help noticing that this project is rather at odds with Ed’s other pet mania, that of densely covering the country with solar panels. See what I’m driving at? Actually, it’s a simple dialectical syllogism.

Thesis: solar panels, as we’ve established, require sunlight to do their job. Antithesis: since sunlight will be blocked off, they won’t be able to do their job. Synthesis: Ed’s two bright ideas are an oxymoron, and he is a moron. QED.

“Governments lie and get others to lie for them,” writes Peter Hitchens.

True. But at least others lie for their own governments. Hitchens, on the other hand, regurgitates lies emanating from Russia, our self-proclaimed enemy.

He brings to the task his affection for that “most conservative and Christian country in Europe”, woeful ignorance about it, and contempt for his readers, who he thinks will swallow any bilge he shoves down their throat.

This time around, he builds a rickety logical structure to insist that the West lives in a glass house and therefore shouldn’t throw stones at Putin. Didn’t NATO countries attack Serbia in 1999 and Iraq in 2003? And doesn’t Erdogan imprison dissidents without losing Turkey’s NATO membership?

It takes dialectical flexibility worthy of a circus contortionist to insist on those bases that the West and everyone in it have thus lost any right to oppose Putin. Hitchens here uses the trick of moral equivalence, favourite of Western Leftists. Hitchens must have learned it when he himself was one, well into his mature years. You know, Russia has the KGB, America has the CIA, what’s the difference?

Those two attacks were indeed ill-advised, although it takes quite a stretch to compare them to Russia’s starting the first major war in Europe since 1945. Nor is it valid to compare the two actions to each other: they pursued different objectives.

And yes, the West is more lenient to Erdogan than to Putin, but there exist sound strategic reasons for this. Kicking Turkey out of NATO, as Hitchens suggests, would weaken NATO’s southern flank and lay the Middle East open for Russian aggression… oops, sorry, I forgot. Russia, according to Messrs Hitchens and Putin, never commits aggression. She is always the victim of it.

For example, writes Hitchens, the 2008 Russo-Georgian War was started by Georgia, that mighty power hellbent on aggression. This is one of the most emetic lies concocted in the Kremlin and spread by our homegrown Putinista.

On general principle, only an ignoramus or an idiot would believe that Georgia would start a war with a country that has 40 times her population. She didn’t. But under her government, led by Mikhail Saakashvili, Georgia moved towards the West, just like the Ukraine did six years later.

Georgia began to develop civilised political and legal institutions, which Hitchens’s “conservative and Christian” idol couldn’t bear. In what was probably used as a rehearsal of the attack on the Ukraine, the Kremlin accused Georgia of committing “genocide” and an “aggression against South Ossetia”, run by Putin’s puppet government.

South Ossetian forces started shelling Georgian villages, in violation of the 1992 ceasefire agreement. When Georgians responded in kind, Russia launched a full-scale land, air and sea invasion, coyly called a “peace enforcement operation”, not a war. (The 2022 invasion of the Ukraine was similarly called a “special military operation”. Those conservative and Christian Russians don’t ever start wars.)

As a result, mighty Georgia outnumbered 40 to one was defeated, and a pro-Putin puppet government was installed. Any movement towards the West has been nipped in the bud, which is what those Georgian aggressors deserve, as far as Messrs Hitchens and Putin are concerned.

In general, Hitchens throws a fit whenever Putin’s puppets are either ousted or, as in Romania’s case, prevented from taking over. This is another item in his indictment of the West: “Calin Georgescu’s election was annulled by judges in December when he looked like winning the first round. And he has been banned from standing in the second round – all because he has the wrong kind of politics.”

Georgescu’s politics are indeed wrong: he is Putin’s agent who, if elected, would have turned Romania into Russia’s colony. Still, I am deeply touched, as I’m sure you are, by Hitchens’s devotion to democratic procedure, a commitment that abates somewhat when he writes about Russia, where every election for the past 30 years has been blatantly rigged.

Now, hypothetically, what if the polls in Germany showed that her next election would be won by a party campaigning under the slogan of Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer? And what if the Bundestag then disqualified it from standing? Would Hitchens still scream bloody murder in the name of democracy?

And then of course, NATO, including that “crime-blighted, decrepit, rubbish-strewn, rat-infested, broke Britain” provoked Putin into invading the Ukraine, and “seldom in history has a war been more provoked.”

You see, the West expanded NATO eastwards, although it had been begged by the “liberal, democratic politician Yegor Gaidar” to desist. Now, Gaidar was about as liberal and democratic as Julius Streicher was philo-Semitic.

The parallel isn’t random, for both were editors of their parties’ flagship journals, Der Stürmer for Streicher, Kommunist for Gaidar. One difference was that the former had no official status, while the latter was the official mouthpiece of the CPSU’s Central Committee.

Gaidar was a career party apparatchik whose tenure at Kommunist made him superior in rank to most Soviet ministers. He was a scion of a well-known NKVD-KGB family, with both his grandfather (who also wrote propaganda masquerading as children’s books) and father veterans of that sinister cabal. Gaidar continued the family tradition with distinction, rising to the position of prime minister in Yeltsyn’s government, one that begat Putin. Perfect liberal and democratic credentials, wouldn’t you say?

As for Putin having been provoked, my question is, How? Did he fear that such superpowers as Latvia and Estonia just might attack Russia? Or at least be used as beachheads for a NATO assault? If he thought that, he is suffering from paranoid delusions because no member of NATO would ever contemplate launching a first strike against a nuclear power.

You see, there’s provocation and provocation. A thug deliberately jostling you in the street and groping your wife may provoke a verbal or violent response. Then again, wearing three-piece pinstripes in an area inhabited by thugs may provoke a mugging. In the former case, the provocation was real. In the latter case, it was merely used as a pretext for thuggery.

The button for Russian aggression against both Georgia and the Ukraine was pushed in 2007 when Putin made what Hitchens calls his “dramatic speech in Munich”. Dramatic it was, just as Hitler’s maiden speech in the Reichstag was dramatic.

Putin described the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20^th century”, a calamity he made a transparent promise to remedy. Dramatic indeed.

Then came the ultimate provocation, and I must compliment Hitchens for the self-restraint he showed by refraining from describing it as a ‘putsch’ this once: “Ukraine’s elected president was lawlessly overthrown by a mob in 2014. Britain and the USA condoned this shameful event because they preferred the illegal rebels to the elected government. You just can’t do that and pretend to be the guardian of democracy.”

Oh yes, you can. Especially if you remember that many functional democracies were born like babies, covered in blood. American colonists lawlessly overthrew British rule, French revolutionaries set France on the road to democracy by lawlessly overthrowing the Bourbons, Romanian democracy was lawlessly announced with shots fired into Ceaușescu’s body.

“Ukraine’s elected president”, Yanukovych was a career criminal brought to power by Russian influence. He was Hitchens’s favourite type of Eastern European politician, a puppet at Putin’s beck and call.

Once he was overthrown – by popular uprising, not a “mob” – he was followed by two presidents, both winning the kind of free elections Russia has never had. But I’ve already mentioned that Hitchens’s delicate democratic sensibilities are offended whenever a Putin acolyte is ousted. He ends on a melodramatic note:  

“Demand proper debate. Demand the truth. Don’t be dragged into more stupidity, or we will end up with bomb craters as well as potholes.”

If modern history teaches anything, it’s that bomb craters are more likely to result from appeasement than from a resolute stand against evil. And as for debate, Hitchens is again being selective there.

When he wrote to me in 2018 saying that Russia had nothing to do with the attempt on the Skripals’ lives in Salisbury, I wrote back with an offer to debate him before any audience other than the Russian Embassy, where he was guaranteed a receptive audience. I haven’t heard from him since.

The British were a burr under Napoleon’s blanket in any number of ways. They continued to fight him when no one else did, but that wasn’t the worst thing.

So fine, that upstart Arthur Wellesley, as he then was, did give some of Napoleon’s generals a bloody nose in the Peninsular War. But the Duke of Wellington, as he became in consequence, had never defeated French troops led by Napoleon personally, not until Waterloo at any rate.

Anyway, come what may, Napoleon Bonaparte – l’Empereur! – could look after himself on the battlefield. He knew how to handle armed resistance with consummate mastery. What he had trouble with was mockery.

And that happened to be the weapon those dastardly British wielded with unrestrained savagery. Their papers made fun of him, coming up with all sorts of disrespectful nicknames, such as ‘Boney’ or, worse still, ‘Little Boney’ – and that was when they didn’t call him ‘Fleshy’, ‘Corsican Fiend’, ‘The Devil’s Favourite’ or ‘The Nightmare of Europe’.

But the worst of all were those two malicious caricaturists, James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson. They kept churning out pictorial putdowns of Napoleon by the dozen, each nastier than the other. How dared they!

Who did those islanders think they were? Utter philistines, petit bourgeois parvenus, a nation of… A nation of whom exactly? What would be the worst insult a Frenchman, especially one with aristocratic pretensions, could fling at the English? A nation of money-changers? No, that wasn’t strong enough. A nation of manufacturers? No, that could be misconstrued as a compliment.

Finally, the right moniker came to Napoleon. Une nation de boutiquiers! That was it. A nation of shopkeepers, that’s exactly what England was.

Napoleon might or might not have had a point. But I can reassure his spirit that the putdown no longer applies. England has stopped being a nation of shopkeepers. She has become a nation of shoplifters instead.

Over half a million offences were recorded by police in England and Wales last year, a 20 per cent increase on 2023. Yet the police forces admit that this is but the tip of an iceberg. They don’t know exactly how big the iceberg is, but they do know that retailers see no point in reporting most offences.

According to James Lowman, Chief Executive of the Association of Convenience Stores, “The volume of theft is still massively under-reported though: our own member survey revealed 6.2 million thefts recorded by convenience stores alone.”

Eighty per cent of retailers were thus robbed last year, with thefts cutting into their costs and therefore profits. Overall, store owners took a hit way in excess of two billion pounds, which may explain the number of ‘out of business’ signs on high-street shop windows.

Of the roughly half a million offences that were recorded by police, only 19 per cent resulted in a summons or prosecution, of which I am sure none led to a custodial sentence.  

This makes shoplifting de facto legal, presumably on the logic that, if something can’t be stopped, it must be accepted. But England, the perfide Albion of Napoleon’s nightmares, is less forthright about that than California is.

In that fanatically progressive state, stealing merchandise worth $950 or less is just a misdemeanour. That means police probably won’t bother to investigate, and if they do, prosecutors won’t bother to prosecute.

I don’t know whether such a cutoff point exists in Britain, but I do know that more and more retailers are locking up their merchandise, and not just high-value items. That too is a problem, and on many different levels.

First, this arrangement involves a major investment in refurbishing: those lock-up cases need to be installed, which necessitates changing the overall layout. It also takes time, money and hence a loss of revenue.

(I can testify to that from personal experience. Going across the street to our local Co-op for our customary Saturday-morning croissants, I found the shop closed, to be re-opened soon, as the sign on its window promised. As far as I know, they are installing those lock-up cases, so my croissant fiver had to go elsewhere.)

Then, a customer is no longer able just to pick up an item off the shelf. He has to look for an employee to unlock the case, which adds time to the shopping trip – quite a long time in Britain, especially if the employee doesn’t understand English, which many don’t.

That too ultimately leads to lost revenue because many customers, up to a third if statistics are to be believed, are too impatient to wait. They’d rather move on to a different retailer or forget about that purchase altogether.

Finally, locking up merchandise makes a travesty out of self-checkout, that triumph of technology and a thief’s dream. The idea behind that high-tech innovation was to cut down on store personnel, who could then smoothly move onto the welfare rolls. Now the same number of employees will have to roam the floor, keys in hand, helping irate customers get their hands on that six-pack of lager.

Little Boney would be gloating if he were still around. It took two centuries to turn a nation of shopkeepers into a nation of shoplifters, but two stock English questions crop up: Why oh why? and What are we going to do about it?

A good answer to the first question will prompt a good answer to the second. For people won’t respect the state’s laws if the state itself doesn’t.

And lack of such respect is precisely what the state signals by refusing to prosecute theft with the same certainty and severity it shows when prosecuting ‘hate crimes’, those of word and increasingly of thought.

When calling a shopkeeper a ‘Paki’ is seen as a worse crime than stealing his merchandise, the law is turned upside down (not that I condone racial insults, as I hope you understand). And when a criminal’s ‘underprivileged’ background is seen as a mitigating, often exculpating, circumstance, the signal becomes loud and clear: now you can.

Add to this a huge influx of migrants from countries where protection of property is seen as less fundamental than it used to be in Britain, and the reality behind shoplifting statistics comes into sharp focus.

Tony Blair came to power partly on the strength of his promise to be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”. But our progressive modernity can’t be tough on crime because it woefully misunderstands its causes, the principal of which is, well, our progressive modernity.

Denizens of Victorian England were impoverished and ‘underprivileged’ by our standards. And yet people in the East End of London, the land of Fagin and Bill Sykes so vividly described by Dickens, left their doors unlocked, knowing that their neighbours wouldn’t steal from them. And I doubt that shopkeepers had to keep their wares under lock and key.

Those Londoners were as certain about original sin and God’s judgement as they were about the anatomical differences between the two sexes. Courts and policemen shared that certainty. They knew good from evil, and they were prepared to punish wrongdoing because both state and society saw the same dichotomy as clearly.

This was the main source of respect for the law, and that source has run dry. Unless this situation changes, and I’m not holding my breath, shoplifters will continue to put shopkeepers out of business. And Napoleon’s spirit will have to reconsider his putdown of our nation.

We drove down to the medieval town of Rye in East Sussex yesterday.

Greeting us there were two wind-blown ensigns atop Rye’s 14^th century gateway: the red St George Cross of England and the blue-and-yellow flag of the Ukraine.

This suggests the Ukraine can count on Rye’s support, although the moral value of this backing rather exceeds any material assistance the town could offer. Still, moral support is better than none, which is the kind the Ukraine is getting from the Trump administration.

Describing the Mar-a-Lago stance on Russia’s aggression, former Defence Secretary Sir Grant Shapps didn’t pull any punches, calling it “sick”, “disgusting” and “revolting”. Moreover, he said he knows for a fact that Trump is “in cahoots” with Putin, and only the 30-year secrecy rule prevents Sir Grant from revealing the details of that relationship.

This is something I’ve been sure about for a long time, even though the 2019 Mueller investigation in the US didn’t yield an indictment. MAGA enthusiasts insist this proves Trump’s innocence, but it does nothing of the sort.

As the astronomer Carl Sagan once said in a different context, “absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence”. An indictment is only issued when a good chance exists of securing a conviction.

In an American or any other civilised court, that demands proof beyond reasonable doubt, which in turn calls for prima facie evidence. In this case, for example, that would be a document signed in Trump’s blood or perhaps a sound recording of Trump’s vow of service to the FSB. So far nothing along those lines has been uncovered, although Sir Grant hints that some such evidence may exist.

The standards of proof required for an educated guess are lower, while the room for inference is greater. Proceeding from the scriptural principle of “ye will know them by their fruits”, one has to notice that Trump’s words and deeds both point at a clear pro-Putin stance – as clear, that is, as American politics will allow.

Thus it’s indeed “sick”, “disgusting” and “revolting” that Trump consistently blames Zelensky for both starting the war and prolonging it. The other day Trump thundered that the Ukrainian president can either “have peace, or he can fight for another three years before losing the whole country”.

As Trump seems to see it, Zelensky is ghoulishly committed to “killing fields”, eschewing Trump’s idea of peace that essentially amounts to capitulation. Sir Grant is appalled, and I could sign my own name under every word he said:

“This is the leader of the free world, who is really coming out as nothing more than a swaggering bully, and choosing tyranny over democracy. This whole idea that in public, the President of the United States of America, the home of the free, defender of freedom and liberty, bullies a democratic leader into accepting an unjust peace, I find completely revolting.”

Essentially, Trump’s plan is for the Ukraine to cede 20 per cent of her territory, including the Crimea, to Russia, and to forswear any future NATO membership in exchange for, well, nothing. Trump is offering no security guarantees whatsoever, except Putin’s word, which Trump trusts implicitly.

No one, not even Trump, is as idiotic as that. Putin is a professional liar, a trade he acquired in the most sinister secret police the world has ever known. If Trump claims to take Putin at his word, he is dealing from the bottom of the pack – with all four aces going to the Kremlin.

Zelensky points out that his country’s constitution (not to mention international law) precludes ceding territory to an aggressor, which statement Trump finds inflammatory. What do constitutions have to do with anything?

He seems to regard as null and void any agreement he himself didn’t sign. One wonders where that leaves the American Constitution, not to mention the Ukrainian one.

For example, the US Constitution says that, except in an emergency situation, only Congress can impose tariffs. So what? An emergency situation is anything Trump says it is, and if he says so, the Constitution is given a wide berth. Why can’t Zelensky do the same to please Putin who, according to Trump, is a “good guy”?

And anyway, says Trump, “Zelensky is boasting that Ukraine will not legally recognise the occupation of Crimea… if he wants Crimea, why didn’t they fight for it 11 years ago when it was handed over to Russia without a shot being fired?”

Is that a serious question, Mr President? If it is, I can add ‘moronic’ to Sir Grant’s compendium of adjectives.

The Ukraine wasn’t ready to fight 11 years ago. Her army hadn’t yet received the requisite armaments and training, and she hadn’t yet achieved political stability following the ousting of the pro-Putin puppet government.

Now the Ukraine is battle-worthy, which she has proved by fighting a country with three times her population to a virtual standstill. The Ukraine is the West’s first line of defence against fascist aggression, but that’s not how Trump and his stooges see it.

They insist that it’s not only Putin but also Trump who is a “good guy” who magnanimously agrees to tackle the Ukraine’s problems out of the goodness of his heart. However, if the Ukrainians and their sartorially challenged president prove recalcitrant, America can just walk away. She has “other priorities”.

This view is both mendacious and immoral. Supporting the Ukraine is for the US not a matter of charitable good will but one of contractual obligations. Putting it in Trump’s terms, in 1994 the US, Britain and Russia signed a deal with the Ukraine, a deal otherwise known as the Budapest Memorandum.

The Ukraine undertook to relinquish her nuclear weapons, which she has done. In exchange, the other three signatories promised to guarantee the Ukraine’s territorial integrity, which they haven’t done. A deal’s a deal, isn’t that so, Mr Trump? This isn’t some shady property shenanigans we are talking about here, after all.

It’s likely that any cease-fire agreement will include the Crimea coming under Russian control de facto. But there exists a big difference between that and doing the same thing de jure, as Trump wants.

Giving a legal stamp of approval to criminal occupation would be tantamount to destroying the world order that has since 1945 more or less maintained peace in Europe. That peace, as Peter Hitchens accurately points out in yet another attempt to do Putin’s bidding, was far from perfect. It included almost half a century of Soviet enslavement of Eastern Europe, and the spirit of Yalta was rather malodorous.

But at least there was no major war in Europe for 77 years. Now there is and, given half the chance, Putin’s fascist regime will spread it over all of Europe, potentially the world.

And that Manchurian candidate in Mar-a-Lago is playing into Putin’s hand. If Trump is doing that because he is indeed bound by some secret arrangement with the Kremlin, he belongs in prison. If he is doing that because he genuinely believes he is thereby serving American interests, he belongs anywhere but in the White House.

But I have faith that the Ukrainians will prevail in the long run. With Rye in their corner, how can they lose?

“A man,” Clint Eastwood said in one of his films, “should be aware of his limitations”. Wiser words have seldom been spoken, and I for one have decided to be honest with myself.

You see, I write because I fancy myself to be a competent stylist and someone who has something to say. Yet looking at my Easter message to all my readers (http://www.alexanderboot.com/happy-easter-4/), I realised how ill-founded and hubristic that self-image really is.

In hindsight my Happy Easter! musings seem turgid, hackneyed, unoriginal, unfocused and lacking in energy. Also, by ignoring the dynamic potential of capitalisation and exclamation marks, I committed gross orthographic negligence. Moreover, rather than speaking to my readers in the language they know from daily life, I placed an inordinate emphasis on the figure of Jesus Christ.

Granted, he might have had something to do with the occasion, but, by concentrating so much on such incidentals, I missed the chance to draw people’s attention to issues that really do make a difference to their lives.

I clearly have much to learn about the art of writing in general and producing festive messages in particular. Before committing a single word to paper, I must remind myself of Isaac Newton’s humble statement: “I stand on the shoulders of giants”.

Applied to my situation, this means I must learn from the great masters, men of letters who elevated the art of writing to vertiginous heights. Such men should become my teachers, with me their grateful and self-effacing pupil.

Rummaging through the annals of Easter messages, I found one eminently worthy of emulation. Both its powerful style and unique take on the nature of the festival enchanted me, an effect I’m sure they had on the intended audience.

Since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I’ve decided to rewrite my Easter message in the same style. I shan’t give you the name of my unwitting role model, for fear of embarrassing him by being such an inept pupil. So here is the new, better version, entitled YOU BASTARDS:

“Happy Easter to all Bastards out there, including the Labour Morons who do their stupid worst to ruin the Economy with Taxes, Regulations, Borrowing and Net Zero Idiocy. Those Mentally Insane Prats want to steal us all blind and destroy our Nation. The Scumbags want to take GREAT OUT OF BRITAIN! But I won’t let them! Look, you LABOUR MORONS, there’s a new sheriff in Town – and I know where you live!

“Happy Easter too to our LUNATIC, WEAK AND INEFFECTIVE JUDGES who set free Dangerous Prisoners, Murderers, Drug Lords, Wife Beaters and Paedo Rapists, while putting Good Men to jail for showing Muzzies what’s what. And Happy Easter to Our GOVERNMENT that refuses to let the Royal Navy sink those Dinghies carrying ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS  to BRITAIN. This is a violent Attack on our NATION, and I hope those MINISTERS are on the next Bus those Criminals blow up. MAY they rot in HELL!

“Happy Easter also to ‘SIR’ Keir Starmer, the worst and most destructive LUNATIC ever elected to any PUBLIC OFFICE. Go back to your COMMIE CELL, ‘Sir’ Keir, and leave OUR NATION the hell alone. And by the way, congrats on at last figuring out that a real WOMAN has no Dick!!!

“My best EASTER wishes also to those millions of HALFWITS who purposefully voted in by far the WORST and most calamitous Government in our NATION’S History. Are you happy now? Hope you rot in HELL, you bloody idiots. Your attack on our NATION will never be Forgotten!

“Happy Easter also to Angie Rayner, that tattooed Council Estate SLUT! Compare notes with that Bank Teller RACHEL on how you plan to turn BRITAIN into a THIRD WORLD COUNTRY, you NINCOMPOOP!!! Wish I could grab you by your Whatsit and tell you what to do.

“Today, we celebrate my Commitment to put GREAT back into BRITAIN. This is my CROSS to bear and I’ll use it to bash all those MORONS on their stupid Heads. I wish all you BASTARDS out there, with great love, sincerity, and affection, a very Happy Easter!!!”

There, isn’t this much better? Doesn’t this message do a wonderful job capturing the joy of Christ’s Resurrection, that great paschal mystery? Of course it does, and I’m eternally grateful to the great stylist and theologian who put me to shame by penning the elegant and pious message I found so inspiring.

One must learn from the best, and if the result sounds epigonic, then so be it. It’s better to imitate greatness than to insist on one’s own original ineptitude.

Renaud Camus, the author of the ‘great replacement’ theory has been barred from Britain because the Home Office says his presence “was not considered to be conducive to the public good”.

This raises serious concerns about freedom of speech, specifically because the government dislikes things Camus says and writes. After all, only permitting speech we like requires no special commitment. It’s only when we wince at everything someone says that our belief in fundamental liberties comes under scrutiny.

Mr Camus and his supporters are trying to reverse the injunction, even though it’s legally unappealable. “I anticipate that we are going to be getting an immigration lawyer on the case,” said Lord Young, a Tory peer.

Lord Young made it clear that he is siding with Mr Camus’s cause not just out of disinterested devotion to freedom but also for pecuniary reasons: “We’re trying to secure a trade deal with the United States, and the United States have flagged up that one of the conditions of the deal will be that we make a better fist of defending free speech.”

If Lord Young et al. simply wish to turn this into a test case against infringement of free speech, best of luck to them. They are going to need it because such a case is unwinnable when someone like Camus is involved.

However, Lord Young may generate much publicity, perhaps with the ulterior motive of proving to Trump that the cause of civil liberties isn’t a complete write-off in the UK. If that softens Trump’s heart enough to give Britain a favourable trade deal, I’ll be the first to cheer. Yet I’m not holding my breath.

But if Lord Young seriously wants to greet Mr Camus at the St Pancras Eurostar terminal, I’d suggest he is going about it the wrong way. He should follow the example of the feminist and lesbian activists who forced the Supreme Court to ban transsexuals from women’s lavatories. (Our dear NHS is ignoring that ruling, by the way.)

Had the same campaign been launched by conservative groups, religious groups or especially religious conservative groups, it would have been soundly defeated. Subversive causes can only be beaten by other subversive causes, not by any appeal to sanity.

Now, Mr Camus did invent the Great Replacement theory that claims that a “global elite”, aka “the deep state”, has hatched a fiendish plot to replace white Europeans with off-white arrivals and their progeny.

You don’t need me to tell you that rational arguments, no matter how solidly supported by demographic data, in favour of that theory will never win the day. Too many people will feel called upon to express indignation, real or put on.

But Mr Camus has an ace up his sleeve, or in his trousers if you’d rather. In addition to inventing and propagating that theory, he is an LGBT activist. Need I say more?

Rather than banging on about freedom of speech, Lord Young should simply claim that the Home Office’s injunction proves it’s institutionally homophobic. Should he do that, Mr Camus will be on his way to Gare du Nord as fast as a taxi can carry him.

As for the theory that enraged the Home Office so much, it has two parts. The first part is an unassailable empirical observation supported by reams of statistical data and simple arithmetic. The second part is explaining the nature of such observable facts, and there disagreements are possible.  

The first part brings back the memories of my boyhood tortures at school where I had to struggle with problems of a swimming pool with two pipes, one in-flowing, the other out-flowing. If the first pipe pumps water in faster than the second one pumps it out, the pool will overflow. If it’s the other way around, the pool will run dry.

To use a grown-up example, if we simultaneously pour gin from one bottle and tonic from another and the second bottle is tipped at a greater angle, sooner or later we’ll end up with a glass of neat tonic, and what good is that for anybody?

In 2024 the net migration, mostly Muslim, to the UK was 728,000, the better part of three-quarters of a million. Add to this the higher birthrate among the immigrant population, intermarriages and growing reluctance on the part of white Britons to procreate, certainly while the Labour government is still around, and you’ll see that Mr Camus is on to something.

He has another good thing going for him: he and I were born on the same day, although he a year earlier. We are both quintessential Leos and, as a minority, must stick together. That’s why I’m so happy to acknowledge that Mr Camus has a point, in this half of his theory at any rate.

Moreover, I’ll even agree that this demographic displacement is no good thing. The issue doesn’t have much to do with race, although for purely aesthetic reasons, and also for old times’ sake, one wouldn’t like to see most Britons being the colour of Starbucks coffee, first latte and eventually espresso.

However, the real problem isn’t racial but cultural. And I believe that culture is transmitted by nurture, not nature. Only this morning I played mixed doubles with an Englishwoman of an unmistakably Indian origin. And yet in every aspect of behaviour, social response and humour she was as English as our opponents, and in language more so.

I’m sure that, chromatic differences apart, her children are indistinguishable from their playmates whose London origins go back many generations. If all immigrants were like my partner, I wouldn’t see the ‘great replacement’ as a huge problem. But they aren’t, which is why I do.

There exists much irrefutable evidence that our growing Muslim population doesn’t adapt to Western culture, nor wishes to. Many children born in places like Leicester, Bradford or Leeds don’t even realise that Britain isn’t an Islamic country – they go to Muslim schools, read Muslim papers and books, watch Muslim TV, speak their parents’ language at home, hardly ever come in contact with English children or, in their neighbourhoods, even English grown-ups.

If this is the kind of people that indigenous Britons are being replaced with, then our cultural and civilisational future is bleak. Arithmetic proves it, it’s those two damned pipes again.

The second part of Mr Camus’s theory isn’t maths but sheer conjecture, and it’s unconvincing conjecture. He sees this development as a result of a dastardly plot concocted by some evildoers dead-set on taking over the world.

There are some evildoers involved and they may indeed have such far-reaching desires. But the existence of a conspiracy presupposes an unlikely feat of organisation.

Thousands of them, many thousands really, would have had to come together, create a tightly knit group bound by a vow of silence, decide who is responsible for what, establish a chain of command and means of communication, procure financing and technical support, set up concealment procedures.

Somehow I don’t see that happening. For me, the cock-up theory of history is more believable than any conspiracy theory, and stupid people far outnumber evil ones.

One characteristic of stupid people is their susceptibility to half-baked simplistic explanations of life. Like bad chess players who can only calculate one move ahead, they are receptive to any bien pensant slogans promising future bliss provided they get rid of annoying obstacles in their way.

You know, things like traditional social order, institutions developed over centuries, religion, laws that go back to generations of just and sage men. Get rid of such iniquities and paradise on earth awaits. When hearing this, many people can’t foresee the long-term consequences of such radicalism – and neither can those who preach it to them.

They may be brighter than their audience but not by much, not enough to be able to control the destructive animus they feel in their viscera. Generally speaking, such rabble-rousers are either young or else older chronologically but not mentally and emotionally. We all have off-the-wall notions when very young, but some people never get to outgrow them – this regardless of how many academic degrees they boast.

Then again, and this is not a defensible thought but merely a lifelong observation. One doesn’t have to be a madman, a racist or generally a nasty bit of work to see some merit in the great replacement theory. But devoting a great part of one’s life to such musings does betoken some mental disorder or at least a foul disposition.

Hence, moving from an argumentum ad rem to an argumentum ad hominem, I’m sure I wouldn’t like to spend even five minutes in Mr Camus’s company. But barring him from Britain means denying the pleasure of his company to those who do find his company pleasant.

So Lord Young is right, and I wish him success, which I doubt he’ll achieve. But there’s no harm in trying.

No one can name a year that changed man and his world for ever, a century or an age.

But it’s easy to say which day did just that. Easter Sunday, some 2,000 years ago today.

Hellenic man always struggled with death, its finality, its cruelty, its nothingness. Death seemed to render life meaningless, deprive it of any sense of purpose.

Life itself had to be regarded as the purpose of life, and the Hellenes, weaned as they were on logic, couldn’t fail to see a self-refuting paradox there.

To be sure, there were all sort of Orphic fantasies about afterlife, but that’s what they were and were seen to be – fantasies.

And then, on this day, some 2,000 years ago, people weren’t just told but shown that, just as there is death in life, so there is life in death.

Now they knew there was no such thing as a happy ending to life. If it was to be happy, it was not the ending.

There had never been such rejoicing, never such an outburst of hope, liberation and energy. Imitating God in Christ became man’s moral commitment. The ability to do so became his ontological property.

Man was no longer a lodger in the world; he had become its eternal owner. He could now imitate Christ not only by being good but also by being creative. And create he did.

Thus, on this day 2,000-odd years ago a new civilisation was born, the likes of which the world had never seen, nor ever will see. More important, a new family came into existence.

Universal brotherhood became a reality: all men were brothers – not because someone said so, but because they all had the same father.

This unity was a bond far stronger than even the ordinary, what is today called ‘biological’, family. And it certainly betokened a much greater concord than any worldly alliances, blocs, contracts, deals, agreements, political unions – or for that matter nations or races.

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus,” explained Paul, making every subsequent, secular promise of equality sound puny and vulgar.

It has not always worked out that way. Just like the ancient Hebrews who were dispersed because they broke God’s covenant, the world pushed aside the lifebelt divinely offered.

It hoped to find unity within itself – only to find discord, devastation and the kind of spiritual emptiness for which no material riches can possibly make up.

But the lifebelt was not taken away. It still undulates with the waves, still within reach of anyone ready to grasp it.

This makes today the most joyous day of the year – regardless of whether or not we are Christians, or what kind of Christians.

On this day we can forget our differences and again sense we are all brothers united in the great hope of peace on earth and life everlasting. We can all, regardless of where we live, rejoice on hearing these words, ringing, thundering in whatever language they are spoken:

Christ is risen!

Le Christ est ressuscité!

Christus ist auferstanden!

Cristo ha resucitado!

Cristo è risorto!

Kristus on üles tõusnud!

Kristus er oppstanden!

Xристос воскрес!

Chrystus zmartwychwstał!

Kristus vstal z mrtvých!

Cristo ressuscitou!

Kristus ir augšāmcēlies!

Christus is verrezen!

Χριστὸς ἀνέστη!

Krisztus feltámadt!

Kristus är uppstånden!

Kristus prisikėlė!

Kristus nousi kuolleista!

Hristos a înviat!

INDEED HE IS RISEN!

In his typically thoughtful and good-natured Telegraph article, Charles Moore talks about “cultural” Christians, the type I usually call Christianists and religionists.

These are people, my late editor Roger Scruton comes to mind, who realise that a successful society can only be built on a foundation of a shared metaphysical premise and its derivative morality.

Moreover, they know that only religion, in the West specifically Christianity, can play such a unifying and edifying role. They themselves don’t believe in God but they do believe in the social utility of God’s word.

I can’t blame them for their lack of faith, just as I can’t blame anyone for any failing that’s none of his fault. Faith, after all, is a gift in the precise meaning of the word: something presented by an outside donor, in this case divine grace.

But I can blame such people for a lapse in logic or, perhaps, also knowledge. Reducing Christianity to its moral teaching, as laid down in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere in both Testaments, is simply ignorant. (I can again selfishly refer you to my book on Tolstoy, who was the chief culprit and, in the couple of decades before his death in 1910, the most influential one in the world.)

But people like Scruton know all that. That’s why theirs is a lapse of logic, not erudition.

As materialists, with or without some mystical longings, they have to believe that every word in the Bible is a lie. Well, perhaps not every word but only those that describe supernatural events, yet this is simply a pedantic qualification. Since the Bible is the word of God, everything in it is supernatural, even the dietary dicta and moral injunctions.

I’ve heard Christianists try to soft-pedal their position by saying that ‘a lie’ is too harsh a word. Perhaps ‘false’ would be kinder. Yes, I’d usually reply, it would be kinder. But it would be less accurate.

For the Scripture is full of eyewitness accounts of many miraculous events, including the one we’ll be celebrating tonight, the Resurrection of Our Lord. If someone rejects such accounts as false, he has to believe that those eyewitnesses were liars who hadn’t seen things they claimed to have seen. So yes, a lie is a harsh word, but it adequately describes Christianists’ view of Christianity.

This means they believe that a successful social fabric can be woven out of a tissue of lies, which is unsound on many levels, logical, intellectual and above all moral. And religionists are even more misguided.

They believe that a successful society can be built on any old religion, not necessarily Christianity. What, Islam? Buddhism? Animism? Zoroastrianism? The only other religion that had a profound effect on our civilisation was Judaism, but, since its spread is biologically limited, it can’t — nor wishes to — aspire to universalism.

Both Christianists (“cultural Christians” to Lord Moore) and religionists are partly right. Unlike most people, they see clearly the accelerating disintegration of the West and correctly attribute it to atheism and resultant materialism. The opposite of that is religion or rather specifically Christianity.

Yet Christianity can never succeed in its social, cultural and moral missions unless most people believe it’s true. And most people can only ever believe it’s true if it is indeed true. A false doctrine can command a wide following for a while but, as communism proves, sooner or later it’ll collapse like the walls of Jericho.

So much for what Lord Moore describes as “cultural Christians”. But another, similar type also exists, one I’d call “cultured Christians”.

These people laudably lack Tolstoy’s consistency. The good count rejected not only the Christian religion but also Christian culture, even, when in his dotage, the glorious part of it he himself had produced. By contrast, the people I’m talking about worship at the altar of Christian culture.

They crisscross the world trying to satisfy their voracious appetite for Gothic and Romanesque cathedrals, mosaics and frescoes, icons and paintings on religious subjects. When they are in the presence of those masterpieces, they look at them with veneration and love.

And yet they dismiss completely, at times contemptuously, the inspiration behind those tributes to God in Christ and Christ in God.

Such ‘cultured Christians’ are less culpable than the ‘cultural’ ones, in that they correctly see that things we all love so much can’t have a formative social effect. They are too esoteric for that because most people don’t possess the requisite education and taste to appreciate great culture.

But less culpable doesn’t mean completely off the hook. If people don’t see God in, say, Rheims Cathedral, all they see is shapes, proportions, details like flying buttresses or façade sculptures (many of them headless due to modernity’s favourite genre of art criticism).

That means the most important thing goes right by them – not intellectually, because they know all about it, but spiritually and emotionally. And without its spiritual and emotional appeal, great art loses much of it greatness.

Only the technique remains, and ‘cultured Christians’ appreciate its subtleties perfectly well. They are, however, missing out on the joy real Christians feel first, before admiring Gothic ornamentation or Romanesque succinctness.

The upshot is that both surrogates of Christianity, ‘cultural’ and ‘cultured’, miss the point. But not so badly as common-or-garden vulgarians who are indifferent to such matters altogether. Which is to say most people these days.

Religious and scientific quests both start at the same point: an act of faith.

In religion, it may be called revelation; in science, a hypothesis. A scientist senses intuitively that a certain proposition must be true, which inspires him to embark on arduous research at the end of which his hypothesis is either proved or disproved.

The research involves experiments (performed both by the scientist himself and his colleagues or predecessors) and an interpretation of their results, efforts both empirical and rational. That’s where a religious quest may differ, although it doesn’t have to.

St Augustine wrote: “Seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.” St Anselm later expressed the same thought, confirming the appropriate sequence of the quest. Mutatis mutandis, a scientist will agree that he goes through roughly the same progression from an act of faith to ultimate understanding.

Looking specifically at Christianity, which seems appropriate today, the empirical evidence comes from the experience and testimony of numerous believers and eyewitnesses, such as the evangelists, and tangentially even non-believers, such as Tacitus, Pliny or Josephus.

And the science of rational interpretation is called theology, basically applying a philosophical apparatus to the word of God. Rational interpretation is essential for scientists, but not necessarily for believers, as history proves.

After all, how many of the billions of Christians have over the past two millennia ever opened a single theological treatise? An infinitesimally tiny proportion, I’d guess. This proves that even if a believer’s reason is excommunicated, he can still remain in communion with Christ.

But it doesn’t have to be excommunicated. If God gave us reason, it couldn’t have been just to enable us to calculate compounded interest, solve word puzzles or understand how protectionism hurts the economy. Human reason seeks to make everything, including God, intelligible.

The very definition of God precludes any possibility of complete intelligibility: a higher system can understand a lower one, but not vice versa. Yet, just as in science, any approximation to the ultimate truth is a step forward, advancing human knowledge to a higher plateau if not to the very summit.

Both theological and natural sciences pose questions and seek answers. In fact, Jacques Maritain described theology as “the science of first principles”, which purview makes it the overarching science, with fields like physics or biology merely its subsets.

Be that as it may, theology does answer questions, those asked by both believers and atheists. The latter tend to pose such enquiries in the hope of starting an argument they fully expect to win, and most of such squabbles begin with variations on my title above.

What they are implying is that, no matter how sound the theological argument is, they are going to dismiss it a priori. That’s a gross logical error on several levels.

An atheist is perfectly within his rights to say “I don’t believe in God, and nothing you say will change my mind” and leave it at that. I happen to disagree with that view, but I respect it as a faith in its own right.

Yet the moment an atheist says “If God exists…” or “If Jesus is God…”, he accepts that possibility for the sake of argument. This means he gatecrashes a different system of thought, accepting the terms on which that system is impeccably cogent.

If he then tries to keep one foot out and the other in, the resulting split is guaranteed to sprain his intellectual abductor muscle. Even an extremely intelligent atheist will then sound dumb.

The brightest illustration of this observation is David Hume who applied his intellectual gifts and literary brilliance to the perennial issue of reconciling God with the existence of evil. If God is merciful and good, Hume kept asking, then why does he allow suffering? If that’s beyond his control, then how omnipotent is he? And if he doesn’t know what’s going on, is he really omniscient?

Countering such questions is called theodicy, vindication of God. Its principal argument is based on free will, God’s gift enabling us to make our own free choice between good and evil.

We are free to help a blind man across the street or to push him under a speeding car, for example, just as God is free to punish us if we choose wrong and, one hopes, reward us if we choose right. And, though Christ showed a clear path to individual salvation, we remain free to take that path or not.

If our will weren’t free, if we were but puppets on God’s string, one would struggle to see why God would have bothered to make us so different from animals, or indeed to create us at all.

Moreover, if we accept as a given that God loves us, that indeed God is love, then we must find it hard to explain how such love could have been expressed by turning us into marionettes, or else pre-programmed robots. God’s is the absolute freedom, but if we are truly created in his image, ours has to be at least a relative one. Only God can be totally free, but that doesn’t mean man has to be totally enslaved.

Such arguments are irrefutable within the intellectual world our atheist has entered, and if he tries to refute them he’ll inevitably sound stupid, regardless of how brilliant he may be outside. That’s where he should stay, outside, thereby keeping his reputation for brilliance intact.

(I wrote a whole book about one such man, Leo Tolstoy, whose personality was voluminous enough to accommodate every known misapprehension of such subjects and also some uniquely his own.)

One such question always crops up on Good Friday. If Jesus was God, how come he didn’t exercise his divine power to save himself from an agonising and humiliating death?

Our hubristic modernity can’t fathom the possibility that someone may choose not to use his power under some circumstances. If something can be done, it must be done: such is the ubiquitous conviction. Yet the very notion of free will presupposes the possibility of self-restraint, choosing not to use some of the powers God possesses.

Such self-limitation of God is called ‘kenosis’ in theology, literally ‘self-emptying’. The term was first used in this context in St Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians, and it’s vital to grasping the meaning of Christ’s Passion.

Chalcedonian doctrine established the dual nature of Christ as fully God and fully man. The latter is consistent with kenosis: Jesus refused to use his divine power to solve every problem he encountered in his earthly life.

As God, he chose to sacrifice himself to redeem the sins of mankind. And as a man, he freely accepted the burden of humanity: he needed to eat and sleep, he could be tempted by Satan, he asked God the Father to stay the executioners’ hand, he suffered agonising pain on the Cross.

Such arguments won’t lead an atheist to Christ. But if a man asks probing questions not because he wants to proclaim his atheism, but because he genuinely wants to know, then the answers may help him in his quest for the truth. As Pascal said, “If you are looking for Me, you have already found Me.” And even Jensenists may be right.

How many times do I have to tell foreign visitors that Scottish men don’t wear skirts?

It’s kilts, chaps, not skirts, and, if anything, wearing them makes those Scots more, rather than less, masculine. Alas, they are all too eager to prove that by wearing nothing underneath and raising their hems over their heads at the slightest provocation.

The laddie doth protest too much, as Shakespeare would say – but I won’t. Instead I’d like to draw your attention to the landmine ruling… no, make it the landmark ruling of the Supreme Court.

That august body boasts a fine tradition of judicial review going back all the way to, well, 2009, when Tony Blair, PM at the time, somehow found the traditional parliamentary institutions wanting. That was part of his assault on Britain’s constitution, in the course of which he created the Supreme Court, a redundant and therefore harmful body.

This time around, however, that appellate court got things almost right by ruling that: “The definition of sex in the Equality Act 2010 makes clear that the concept of sex is binary, a person is either a woman or a man.” In other words, a conversion from laddie to lady isn’t legally recognised.

Or is it? In handing down the judgement, Lord Hodge threw a smokescreen of waffle around it: “The Equality Act gives transgender people protection not only against discrimination through the protected characteristics of gender reassignment, but also against direct discrimination, indirect discrimination, and harassment, in substance in their acquired gender.”

First, the Court talks about sex being either-or binary, then it decries discrimination against “their acquired gender”. I am confused, but then I find modernity generally confusing.

On the plus side, those strapping lads who have replaced their kilts with skirts, with or without parallel alterations underneath, won’t be admitted to women’s lavatories and dressing rooms. Those .001 per cent of British women who, according to Sir Keir Starmer, have penises, are men in the eyes of the law.

The issue came to a head in Scotland, whose devolved government (another Blair contrivance) mandated that any public board should have 50 per cent female representation. That raised a question that in the recent past wouldn’t have occurred to any sane person: What constitutes a woman?

According to the Scottish government, anyone in possession of a gender recognition certificate (GRC) was a woman who must be treated as such under the 2010 Equality Act. The Scottish courts rubber-stamped the decision in 2023, which had wide-ranging implications for the whole UK.

Characteristically, mad laws can these days be challenged only by half-mad people, in this case radical feminist and lesbian groups. Normal people, those who rely on millennia of tradition, evidence before their eyes, science, and also moral and aesthetic judgement, are effectively disfranchised in such cases.

Someone who looks and sounds like Jacob Rhys-Mogg wouldn’t be able to share with the public his views on the matter, which I suspect are no different from mine. He’d be heckled, shouted down, possibly assaulted. And his political career would be over.

But wild-eyed, bra-burning zealots, riding into battle with their pronoun weapons at the ready, enjoy quite a bit of latitude. They worship at the altar of a different piety espousing equally respectable but different perversions, which earns them a share of voice.

Using that privilege, Marion Calder, co-director of the feminist group that launched the successful challenge against the Scottish government, said the ruling delighted “the vast majority of women across Great Britain”.

I’m happy for them, but I’m neither a feminist nor even a woman, although I have been trying to get in touch with my feminine side (unsuccessfully, according to Penelope). And, according to Miss Calder, men have no dog in this fight. The issue of public decency and indeed sanity doesn’t come into it. It’s all about women’s rights.

She then went out of her way to make sure her delight wouldn’t be misconstrued: “In day to day life, you can go around and it doesn’t really matter what your sex is. But in certain circumstances it is very important, such as prisons or women’s sport, changing rooms or rape crisis centres. This is where it’s actually important.”

Particularly for a certain sub-set of womankind: “Especially for the lesbians who intervened in this case, if they hadn’t actually won today it would have been illegal for lesbians, or gay men, to have a group of more than 25 people if they didn’t admit the opposite sex and we’d have the ridiculous notion of a lesbian with a penis.”

A straight woman with a penis, on the other hand, is perfectly all right, provided she doesn’t try to sneak into a women’s dressing room. Am I missing something or has the world gone mad?

My conviction that it’s the latter was reinforced by Kate Barker, chief executive of LGB Alliance, who said: “The ruling confirms that the words ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ refer to same-sex sexual orientation and makes it absolutely clear that lesbians wishing to form associations of any size are lawfully entitled to exclude men – whether or not they possess a GRC.”

Earlier I described the Supreme Court ruling as a “landmine” decision, and it wasn’t just indulging my propensity for playing on words. Call me selfish, insensitive and reactionary, but I haven’t had many sleepless nights worrying about transsexuals stealing lesbians’ thunder.

As framed and communicated urbi et orbi, this wishy-washy ruling is exactly what one would expect from a redundant legal body designed as a weapon against our ancient constitution.

The Court should have stated that the issue isn’t about transsexuals entering women’s lavatories or tennis tournaments, and it’s not about protecting the exclusive same-sex rights of lesbians.

The situation is simple, so simple in fact that it should never have reached the jurisdiction of an appellate court: a laddie can call himself a lady, have his manhood snipped off (or not, as the case may be) and swap his kilt for a skirt. But in the eyes of the law and society he remains a man, full stop.

And if he is still a man, it should go without saying, and certainly without a Supreme Court decision, that he can’t enter spaces reserved for women. Anyone who says otherwise should have not just his genitals but also his head examined.

As it is, this landmine ruling leaves plenty of room for further challenges, meaning that the mental disease afflicting our society will continue to progress and fester. So forgive me if I don’t rejoice at this half-justice.

I like my justice like I like my wee dram: full-strength. There, I’ve now exhausted my reserves of Scottish lore. “Haste ye back,” as they say north of the border.