Month: March 2024

Penelope and I have been fortunate with priests, friends and priest friends.

Our latter category is impeccably ecumenical: breaking bread with us have been two Anglican priests, two Catholic ones and even a Copt (whom I had the gall to lecture on the evils of Monophysitism).

Last Sunday came the tragic news that one of those friends won’t be with us for much longer. It was announced after Mass that Fr Michael Daley, who has been ill for a while, is dying. As he was receiving treatment for Parkinson’s, he developed an aggressive brain tumour and is now in end-of life care.

Just a month ago Fr Michael rang to tell us he was too unwell to come to lunch. Now we’ll never see him again: he can’t handle any visitors, asking instead for our prayers.

That we’ll miss him as a close friend goes without saying: Fr Michael’s genuine faith, generosity, sardonic wit, and rare combination of all such qualities have been a source of our great joy for years. And he is the only friend I have who shares my taste for dry martinis.

What, however, needs saying is that we’ll miss him as a priest as well, hugely. Last Sunday we found out exactly how much.

Fr Michael is a conservative man, although opponents of Vatican II may not recognise him as a conservative priest. Apart from references to the Pope, his liturgy is indistinguishable from the High Anglican equivalent, and I’ve never heard him utter a Latin word.

Nevertheless, his moving homilies and intercession prayers never lost touch with his mission. He has neither spoken about, nor asked the congregation to pray for, any fashionable causes: climate, negotiations in places where there is nothing to negotiate, rights that are actually wrongs, social justice. Fr Michael serves God, not woke fads, and he has never conflated the two in his life.

On occasion, Mass at our church has been celebrated by visiting priests, one young, the other less so. The young one is very good and the older one is the Vicar General. It was he who broke the tragic news last Sunday – but not before serving an unintended reminder of how much we’ll miss Fr Michael at the altar.

The good VG inclines to the left so much that he sometimes loses sight of God. Unlike Fr Michael, he has been known to ask us to pray for ‘our planet’ and some such, with Penelope and me steadfastly refusing to say “Hear our prayer”.

And during last Sunday’s reading, he made sure God himself spoke with all the right pronouns.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with such uncool things, during readings from the Bible the parishioners have the prayer sheet in front of them, so they can follow the text if the acoustics aren’t up to scratch (or if English isn’t their first language, which is common in Catholic churches).

Hence we had the privilege to hear the VG replace every ‘he’ and ‘his’ with ‘they’ and ‘their’, making one wonder if Jesus Christ was actually a diversity consultant for the NHS, vox DEI and all that. I winced in disgust, which is hardly the grimace and the feeling one expects a priest to elicit from the pulpit. That’s what we have politicians for.

On the way out, I chatted with the VG’s younger colleague, Fr Antony, whose own homilies are invariably inspiring. My side of the conversation was rather limited, what with my throat feeling constricted and words being extruded from my mouth, rather than flowing from it of their own accord.

Fr Antony assured me that Fr Michael, his friend and mine, was lucid, at peace and not in pain, with even his Parkinson’s now gone. But he didn’t know who, if anyone, would replace Fr Michael. Apparently, six local churches are already without priests, which is astounding in an affluent area with a large French and Italian population.

The situation in rural France, certainly our part of it, is even worse. There one priest has to cover up to 40 churches, which among other things means that many pious Catholics are denied the funeral Mass at their death. One wouldn’t expect central London to have similar problems, but that’s globalisation for you.

Should the priest’s personality really matter to his congregation? It shouldn’t. But it does, at least as far as I’m concerned.

When he is at the altar, a priest is an intermediary in the dialogue between man and God, a conduit through which this two-way communication can flow. His own vices and devices should have no effect at all: when he is at the altar, he is the stand-in for God, not a first person singular.

Such is the theory. But in practice it matters when the priest exudes and elicits the warmth and joy of someone celebrating the best news of all. He doesn’t have to be a beloved friend, like Fr Michael is to us, but he should be likeable, someone who never utters jarring, ungodly things.

The sound of such things punches a hole in the aura one feels at Mass, turning one’s thoughts away from God’s love and towards political rancour. That shouldn’t happen, but it does. And when it does, the joy goes, the contemplation disintegrates, and one’s Sunday is damaged, if not ruined.

Mass is all about love, God’s for us and ours for God – that is indisputable. But when a priest says something one hates, a drop of tar drips into a bowl of honey, making it all unpalatable. Yes, one loves God. But it helps if one at least likes the priest.

We love Fr Michael, weeping for him as his friends, praying for him as his parishioners. May his last days be filled with love – God’s and people’s.

Congratulations to Vlad Putin on his knife-edge election victory – and my deep gratitude to him for pointing out the fatal flaws in Western democracy.

Fair enough, not a single Western country can these days boast either a turnout of 77 per cent or a victor with 87 per cent of the vote. Speaking of the latter, I commend Vlad for his modesty and stoic self-restraint. He agreed to settle for a knife-edge 87 per cent even though he could easily have demanded – and received! – 100 per cent or more.

Stalin, for example, often polled 105 per cent in some constituencies. In fact, Putin’s modesty was only ever outdone by Hitler. After winning the 1933 election, Adolf manfully resisted the temptation to hold another one, no doubt wishing to avoid the embarrassment of popular enthusiasm to the tune of 100 per cent of the vote.

But what attracts me most about Putin’s victory is the implicit lesson it has taught our own Tory Party. The Tories should heed the message, what with their own electoral chances currently bringing to mind words like ‘snowball’ and ‘hell’.

However, there is still time to turn things around, and Vlad shows how. After all, a party that has already been in power for 14 years must have been able to grease many proven mechanisms of power. That experience should inspire the campaign slogan to be inscribed on blue Tory banners: “We know where you live.”

Admittedly, there seems to be little the Tories can do to improve their performance in government. The economy, defence, NHS, education, taxation and so forth are all drops in the puddle of spilled milk, and Rishi must be realistic enough to recognise this.

Yet any political consultant worth his salt would tell him to stop shedding tears over that puddle. Instead he should concentrate on the positives, Vlad-style. And Vlad teaches the ultimate lesson of political campaigning: the best opposition is no opposition.

Since, as Vlad explained, we have no democracy anyway, Rishi shouldn’t feel constrained by traditional British niceties. He is still PM, isn’t he? Of course, he is. That puts him in control of the armed forces (including SAS), police, intelligence (MI6) and counterintelligence (MI5). All these institutions are his natural allies and instruments of truly democratic politics. They can pave Rishi’s return to 10 Downing Street with the bodies of his opponents.

This is of course a mere figure of speech (or is it?). There’s so much Rishi could do before having to resort to violence.

For example, yesterday Sir Edward Davy, LibDem leader, said that Britain should return to the single market as a minimum, or ideally to the EU. This effectively means compromising Britain’s sovereignty, and if that doesn’t constitute high treason, I don’t know what does.

We aren’t talking about casuistic details here, as I hope you understand, but about the sacred principles of British politics, what Vlad calls ‘traditional values’. According to those values, Sir Ed must be immediately arrested, charged and banged in Wormwood Scrubs.

The important thing is not to squander public funds on such incidentals as a trial. A quick phone call to a friendly judge, along the lines of ‘we know where you live’, should do the trick. When Sir Ed is safely incarcerated, the warders could promise some of his rougher cellmates conjugal privileges to make sure that once in means never out.

Since a leader speaks for his whole party, the LibDems must be identified as a party of traitors and summarily disbanded. If any of them protest too loudly, they should be asked rhetorically whether they wish to keep the now late Ed company. (We know where you live.) You’d be amazed how quickly they’ll repudiate their past sins and undertake never to campaign against Rishi again.

Another marginal force, the Reform Party, will be even easier to bring to heel. Its driving force, if not nominally leader, Nigel Farage, is known for his close association with Donald Trump.

Hence Rishi must force Nigel to declare himself – and his whole party by association – a foreign agent. As such, the Reform Party could be legitimately disbanded, with all its leaders made to leave the country. After all, emigration is the better part of valour, as the old saying goes. We know where you live!

That leaves Labour, the current runaway leader in the polls, which may present more of a problem but not an unsolvable one. To start with, Sir Keir Starmer should be invited to tea at the Millennium Hotel in Grosvenor Square. That would reduce his life expectancy to about a fortnight, leaving his party both headless and heedless.

Then it could be ascertained that just about every prominent Labour politician used to belong to the CND or other Soviet fronts. Since British jurisprudence provides for no statute of limitations, they could all be arrested, charged with treason and put into Wormwood Scrubs, where by that time the warders will have learned exactly what to do.

Admittedly, that wouldn’t eliminate all potential Labour candidates, but that’s where Vlad’s lesson on polling procedure will come in handy.

Two blue-rosetted armed soldiers (preferably SAS) could be posted as guards at the entrance to every polling station. They should be ordered to flick the fire selector switch on their L85 rifles and ask every incoming voter what he thinks of the Tory Party.

That’s guaranteed to produce an outburst of loving loyalty, to which the soldiers should respond by saying: “On yer way then, mate. We know where you live.” This should guarantee that right people never cast wrong votes. Just in case, the polling volunteers, MI5 officers all, should have close to hand a stack of pre-prepared voting papers, each with a fat cross next to the name of the Tory candidate.

Such are the lessons of Vlad’s victory. I’m not suggesting they ought to be followed in every detail, but on the other hand it’s arrogant and wrong to ignore successful foreign experience. So I hope you’ll all join me in pledging undying support to the ruling Tory Party.

We know where you live!

If Europe ever does become united, it’ll be courtesy of Vlad Putin, not Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman or Konrad Adenauer. For Putin has kindly reminded Europe that she must either perish or stand united in defence.

Defence isn’t just planes, tanks, and missiles. Nor is it just warships, artillery and swarms of soldiers.

Defence starts with resolve and courage, and Europe has been short of these commodities throughout the post-war years. Like a little girl feeling lost without her mother, Europe has been clinging to America’s apron strings – America will provide, has been the infantile battle cry.

Now America herself is suffering from diminishing amounts of those commodities, as is evident from her position on the Ukraine and Israel. Hence the US allows, or rather pretends to allow, her eternal conflicts between hawks and doves to be resolved by bean counters.

If defending Europe through NATO’s good offices used to be understood as the sacred duty of the Leader of the Free World, and also the strategic necessity of counterbalancing Russia’s power, suddenly it has become a matter of balance sheets. Instead of talking about tanks and missiles, US leaders now talk about dollars and cents.

Yet they are still Western politicians, and as such what they say isn’t necessarily what they mean. Biden’s and Trump’s rhetoric on these subjects is different, but one can detect a similar erosion of testicular strength underneath.

Hence all this talk about negotiations, ‘red lines’, reluctance to ‘humiliate Putin’, fear of ‘Russia’s disintegration’. Hence also the increasingly niggardly assistance to the Ukraine, and continuing refusal to supply ATACMS systems, F-16s, heavy tanks, long-range artillery and so forth.

One has to acknowledge that Putin’s ‘hybrid’ war has been much more successful than the usual kind. The non-stop bombardment of American airwaves with threats of nuclear annihilation, fake stories of Ukrainian Nazis, Putin’s commitment to ‘traditional values’ and other disinformation shrapnel is bearing fruit.

Job done – one can just see those ghouls smirking in Lubyanka and the Kremlin. They have been dismissing Europe in their calculations. Europe to them is a degenerate, defunct entity obsessed with homosexual/trans racial minorities on welfare. If European countries are too stingy to commit even a paltry two percent of GDP to defence, they aren’t even part of the conversation.

Neutralise America’s resolve, and Boris is your uncle. Stripped of the American umbrella, Western Europeans will be cowering in their underheated houses as Russia, led as she is by the muscle-bound Putin, gobbles up the eastern part, restoring Stalin’s empire to all its past glory.

The Russians can be forgiven for thinking that, for Europe has done nothing over the past 70 years even to hint at any testosterone content in its bloodstream.

The European Union may be the precursor of a single European state, but let’s be serious now: Europe isn’t really united, is it? Any fly on the wall during a talk between, say, Stoltz, Macron and Orbán would bust its wings laughing at any suggestion of pan-European unity.

So fine, things on the frontline haven’t quite gone according to Putin’s plan. The Russians failed to take Kiev in three days, and it’s reasonably clear they won’t be able to do so in three years either. But the hybrid war seems to have succeeded beyond their wildest imaginings.

The US talks tough (or not even, if you listen to the likely once and future president), but has practically cut off all military aid to the Ukraine. And Europe, who cares about that impo…

But hold on a second. The looming threat of barbaric invasion has suddenly made Europe flex its muscles and realise they haven’t completely atrophied. Europe stood up from its previous genuflecting stance and put some steel in its voice, if not quite yet in its spine.

One European leader after another has spoken of resisting Russian expansion with everything Europe has. Which is significant: Europe’s population is four times the size of Russia’s, and the combined GDP of European countries is 12 times greater.

European military technology is two generations ahead of Russia’s, and most European armies are better trained and more professional than the Russian gang of murderers, looters and rapists. European leaders have begun to mention such facts ex officio, and one, Manny Macron, even spoke about the possibility of putting European boots on the Ukrainian ground.

Nor is it just talk. European countries have started to increase their supplies of ordnance for the Ukraine, and the danger of Ukrainian guns falling silent is diminishing. Meanwhile, the European countries within immediate range of Russian tanks, such as Poland, Scandinavia and the Baltics, have stepped up their armament programmes and troop training. Finland, Sweden and Denmark are even discussing the possibility of conscription.

Suddenly, that rotten Hungarian apple apart, Europe is indeed beginning to look united. Where the EU has failed, Putin might have succeeded.

Should this tendency continue, as I hope it does, the US may face a stark choice between either recovering her masculinity or losing her status as Leader of the Free World, with all the associated benefits. Meanwhile, though still short of resolve, the US has vast reserves of effrontery, as demonstrated by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

In common with many Jewish American politicians, especially those inclining leftwards, Schumer treats Israel as a pet that can sit, fetch and lie down on his orders.

In that spirit, Schumer has demanded that Israel hold a snap election and get rid of Netanyahu, who “has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel”.

Netanyahu, thundered Schumer, “has been too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza, which is pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows. Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah.”

In response, Israel’s ruling Likud party has explained to Schumer that Israel isn’t “a banana republic” and will not be spoken to in that tone.

“Contrary to Schumer’s words,” said the government statement, “the Israeli public supports a total victory over Hamas, rejects any international dictates to establish a Palestinian terrorist state, and opposes the return of the Palestinian Authority to Gaza.”

America should really wipe her glasses and see more clearly who are her friends and especially who are her enemies. Such improved clarity of vision would enable her to do the right thing both in the Ukraine and Israel.

Perhaps she should ask Putin to threaten an imminent invasion, across the Bering Strait if not the Atlantic. Similar threats seem to have put some lead into Europe’s pencil, and I do hope it’s not just an appearance.

Yesterday was the 141^st anniversary of Marx’s death, an event worthy of joyous festivities. God only knows how much more harm he would have caused had he lived beyond age 64.

Since for 70-odd years the most formidable propaganda machine in history was dedicated to spreading Marxism, many feel they know what Marx is all about without having to resort to the primary source. That’s a pity, for if more people had actually read the Communist Manifesto, one hopes there would be fewer innocents insisting that Marx’s ideals were wonderful but regrettably unachievable; or else that Marx’s theory was perverted by Soviet practice.

In fact, Marx’s ideals are unachievable precisely because they are so monstrous that even the Bolsheviks never quite managed to realise them fully, and not for any lack of trying.

For example, the Manifesto prescribes the nationalisation of all private property without exception. Even Stalin’s Russia in the thirties fell short of that ideal. In fact, some 15 per cent of the Soviet economy was then in private hands.

Marx also insisted that family should be abolished, with women becoming communal property. Again, for all their efforts, Lenin and Stalin never quite managed to achieve this ideal either, much to the regret of those who could see an amorous pay-off in such an arrangement.

Then, according to the Manifesto, children were to be taken away from their parents, pooled together and raised by the state as its wards. That too remained a dream for the Bolsheviks who tried to make it a reality, but ultimately failed.

Modern slave labour, such an endearing feature of Soviet Russia, also derives from Marx – and again Lenin and Stalin displayed a great deal of weak-kneed liberalism in bringing his ideas to fruition.

Marx, after all, wrote about total militarisation of labour achieved by organising it into “labour armies”. Yet no more than 10 per cent of Soviet citizens were ever in enforced labour at the same time.

The only aspect of Bolshevism that came close to fulfilling the Marxist dream was what Engels described as “specially guarded places” to contain aristocrats, intelligentsia, clergy, etc. Such places have since acquired a different name, but in essence they are exactly what Marx envisaged.

Here Lenin and Stalin did come close to fulfilling the Marxist prescription, but they were again found wanting in spreading concentration camps to a mere half of the world. So where the Bolsheviks perverted Marxism, they generally did so in the direction of softening it.

All such monstrous practical prescriptions of Marxism lie on the surface, for anyone with eyes to see. None of it, however, explains the influence of Marxist philosophy even in countries described as liberal democracies. One thing for certain: for a philosophy to gain such a lasting influence, it has to inhale the zeitgeist and then exhale it with a tsunami force.

That’s what Marxism did, thereby answering the need keenly felt by post-Enlightenment mankind. The Enlightenment, that great misnomer, was essentially a mass rebellion against Christianity, which was seen as superfluous to the needs of nascent modernity.

That, however, left a philosophical vacuum that had to be filled. Man, after all, is a reasoning creature, and he needs to make the world intelligible. Christianity achieved that end by providing a coherent explanation of life, man and nature that vindicated its founding faith. Now the founding faith was lost, a materialist surrogate was urgently needed.

However, when a religion goes, it’s never replaced by naked materialism. It’s invariably replaced by a determinist cult absolving people of individual responsibility for their salvation and treating history as a sequence of predetermined tectonic shifts, with people at their mercy.

The elements of such a cult were already in place by the time Marx came about. He himself cited as his three major sources Hegel’s dialectics, Smith’s economics, and the utopian socialism of Campanella, Fourier and Saint-Simon.

Hegel equipped Marx with the dialectical method, but Adam Smith did so much more than that. His philosophy posed as sheer rationalism, but was in fact pure metaphysics with a sorcery dimension.

According to Smith’s moral philosophy, each individual must pursue nothing but his own interests, mainly economic. One could get the impression that this would create a society of atomised, amoral individuals, but that impression was wrong, explained Smith. All those private interests would be tossed into a giant pot, where they would be stirred by an invisible hand in such a way that the resulting stew would emerge homogeneous and moral.

That was the beginning of what I call totalitarian economism, allowing economics to claim the universality formerly reserved for religion, theology and priesthood. Thus Smith indeed exerted a formative influence on Marx, but not only on him.

Not just Marx but also Hayek, Mises, Friedmann and other ‘conservative’ economists applied Smith’s ideas to modern needs. As a result, modern man divided into two streams, which I call nihilists and philistines. Both carry Marx’s genes in their DNA, but siblings can be similar without being identical.

Marx interpreted Smith’s invisible hand as class struggle, with people forced to act in a certain way by their demographics, something Marx called “relationship to the means of production”. Since the have-nots are more numerous than the haves, they are slated to emerge victorious in the long run. The long run could be made shorter by physically eliminating the classes putting the brakes on predestined progress.

Hayek et al. ignored the cannibalistic strain of Marxism, but they too tried to fill the void left by Christianity with economic superstitions. If Marx believed that mankind was divided into hostile classes to begin with, only then to arrive in due course at a uniform bliss he called “dictatorship of the proletariat”, Hayek’s society started out as a conglomerate of selfish individuals who were then guided by the invisible hand to collective morality.

Totalitarian economism with a superstitious dimension is evident in both strains, which makes them dislike each other: none so hostile as divergent exponents of the same creed. Yet anti-Marxism is but Marxism with the opposite sign, which is why, much as the two groups proclaim mutual hatred, they continue to survive side by side in our liberal democracies.

Both testify to the barren philosophical insides of modernity. Both try to replace Christian teleology with materialistic determinism, with equally abysmal results. And the struggle between the two siblings of the Enlightenment is still raging, with the outcome far from clear.

Marxism has been so influential over the past century and a half not because its home was in the Soviet Union, but because it is in the heart of modernity. Marxism in economic, social and political thought is the same as Darwinism in biology. It tries to plug a hole left by Christianity, only to find it unpluggable.

But it will persevere for as long as modernity does. In the absence of real, aromatic coffee of philosophy, a surrogate concocted of Enlightenment acorns has to do. And Marx, along with Smith, Darwin and Hayek, is one of the acorns of which that unsavoury beverage was brewed.

“Marx’s teaching is omnipotent because it’s true,” wrote Lenin. It’s neither, actually. But Marxism is a systemic, untreatable malaise of materialist modernity. It will continue to fester until it kills the host organism.  

Everyone knows that too much stress can be lethal. Hence it’s logical to infer that the greatest number of job-related deaths would be caused by the most stressful jobs.

These, according to my painstaking research, are (in this order): military personnel, police officer, firefighter, social worker, broadcaster, newspaper reporters, emergency dispatcher, mental health counsellor, anaesthesiologist, A&E nurse.

Well, let me tell you: comparatively speaking, all of these are sinecures involving no health risks whatsoever. Relegating them to that lowly status is the most dangerous job in the world: top executive in the Russian oil industry.

In the two years that have passed since Putin decided he had had enough of Ukrainian sovereignty, 18 holders of such jobs have died under mysterious circumstances. The latest such demise was announced yesterday by Lukoil, one of Russia’s biggest oil companies.

Its vice president, Vitaly Robertus, died at 53, for reasons not divulged. Robertus is the fourth Lukoil executive to die since the beginning of Putin’s war. One of his colleagues, Chairman of the Board Vladimir Nekrasov, died of a heart attack last October. But the other two deaths were rather, shall we say, baroque.

Nekrasov’s predecessor, Ravil Maganov, was treated for a cardiac complaint in hospital. His condition was so serious that he fell to his death out of a sixth-floor window, a known side effect of heart trouble. And in May, 1922, another top manager, Alexander Subbotin, died during an ESP séance run by a shaman.

Lest you may think that Lukoil is the only Russian oil company suffering such personnel attrition, Gazprom is giving it a good run for its money.

A few days before the invasion, Leonid Shulman, manager of Gazprom Investa, was found dead in his bathtub. He had died of multiple knife wounds, all of them, according to the suicide note, self-inflicted. One would think that an obviously intelligent chap should have thought of a less demanding method of suicide than using himself for knife practice, but there you have it.

Then the day after the invasion, Alexander Tulyakov, Deputy Treasurer, was found hanged in his Petersburg flat. The contents of the suicide note haven’t been revealed, possibly because no note existed.

Doing business with Gazprom can be as dangerous as serving on its board. Thus Yuri Voronov, Director General of a major Gazprom contractor, was found floating in his swimming pool. He had been shot in the head point-blank, which had to be ruled suicide even in the absence of a note.

On 18 April, 2022, former vice president of Gazprombank, Vladislav Avdeyev, his wife and 13-year-old daughter died by what was described as murder-suicide.

Avdeyev was believed to be so jealous of his wife that, before topping himself, he shot not only her but also their daughter. Shakespeare could have got to the bottom of that family drama, but I can’t. All I can do is speculate about the daughter’s role in that triangle, but shan’t for fear of offending your sensibilities.

Another murder-suicide at about the same time involved a company in a different line of work. Vasily Melnikov, head of the medical technology concern MedStom is supposed to have done the deed with a knife. He first killed his wife, then his two little sons, then himself. According to the family and neighbours, theirs was a loving close-knit family, but hey, what do they know?

But back to the hydrocarbon industry and its jinx. That Russian gremlin seems to ignore international sanctions and travels globally with ease.

Former head of the gas company NOVATEK, Fyodor Protosenya, and his family settled in the Catalan resort town Lloret de Mar. On 18 April, 2022, the police of that town reported that Mr Protosenya had first killed his mother and sister, then hanged himself in the garden. His son categorically stated that his father was no murderer.

Closer to home, almost exactly a year ago another oil magnate, Michael Watford (né Mikhail Tolstosheya) was found hanged in the garage of his Surrey house. He emigrated to Britain in the early 2000s, changing his name and citizenship, but there is no statute of limitations in Russia. Shortly before his death, Watford had told his friends he was scared of Putin’s kill-list, to which he had been “added two years ago”.

In January, 2023, Dmitry Pavochka, former Lukoil manager, provided material proof of the government warning ‘smoking kills’. He fell asleep with a lit cigarette in his hand and burned himself to death.

A month later, Vyacheslav Rovneiko, co-founder of Ural Energy, was found unconscious in his house. For all the doctors’ efforts, he died in hospital of indeterminate causes.

The most recent oil death, on 5 February this year, struck Ivan Sechin, 35, whose father Igor owns Rosneft, where Ivan himself was an executive. Igor Sechin isn’t just any oil billionaire, but also one of Putin’s closest cronies whom many regard as the dictator’s unofficial deputy. Ivan’s death was ascribed to the same diagnosis as Alexei Navalny’s: blood clot.

Please remind me not to apply for any top position in the Russian oil industry. Such jobs seem to be too demanding by half.

Then again, similar death rates have been recorded among Russian journalists, dissidents and any opponents of Putin who didn’t manage to flee Russia in the nick of time (and even some who found what they thought was a safe haven in the West).

I think the annals of medical science should be expanded to include a new phenomenon, ‘sudden Russian death syndrome’. My innate modesty won’t let me claim all credit for this vital contribution to medicine. One, I must add, that’s denied by such a respectable expert as Mark Galeotti.

Prof. Galeotti points out any number of possible explanations for that spate of mysterious deaths, from the general Russian propensity to suicide to professional hits commissioned by business competitors.

The first possibility is refuted by Russian immigrants in the West who rise to high positions in the oil industry (when I lived in Houston, I knew quite a few). All of them courageously resist the temptation to kill themselves and their whole families. The second possibility may well be a factor, but again, during my 10 years in Houston, I never once heard a story of, say, an Exxon president ordering a hit on a Tenneco chairman.

In any case, Prof. Galeotti ought to know that the Russian energy industry doesn’t function according to the laws of competition and free enterprise. It’s wholly controlled out of the Kremlin, where Putin and his closest cronies decide who prospers, who goes bust and, more to the point, who lives and who dies.

Russia is a fascist gangster state, a megalomaniac crime family with global ambitions. So we shouldn’t look for far-fetched explanations. Let’s just pull the old Occam’s razor out and accept that criminals act in criminal ways: murderers kill, thieves steal, embezzlers pilfer – and Putin’s Russia acts in character.

Illegal migrants, mainly from Syria and Iran, are adding new touches to the Damascene experience.

The original story involved Saul, a full-time persecutor of Christians in Jerusalem. The High Priest was so happy with Saul’s zeal that he decided to give him new responsibilities.

Saul and his retainers were sent out to chase Christians in Syria but, as Paul later told the story, a funny thing happened to him on the way to Damascus. A bright light shone from heaven and God asked him a trick question: “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” (In those days, God still hadn’t learned to speak in street English.)

Saul couldn’t give a satisfactory answer to that question. Hence he instantly became a Christian, changed his name to Paul and made the phrase ‘on the road to Damascus’ proverbial.

Well, today’s Syrians prove that a similar experience can also occur on the road from Damascus.

They arrive in Britain by rather unconventional methods, such as clinging to the undercarriage of a lorry or packing themselves into a rubber dinghy. Upon landing, that daring act entitles them to such benefits as living allowances and free accommodation, sometimes in four-star hotels.

But it doesn’t entitle them to the right to stay. Of course, they can do so illegally, and many follow that path, but that involves looking over the shoulder to see if immigration officers are lurking in the shadows.

So they apply for asylum, some successfully, some less so. At this point, one would think, the rejected applicants only have two options: either to go back or to go illegal.

Nothing especially interesting so far, is there? But here comes the third option, one that has inspired the above story of Saul/Paul. For those pious Muslims can greatly improve their chances of getting asylum by claiming they’ve had an experience similar to Saul’s.

As a bearded chap walks to the Regent’s Park mosque, a blinding light shines, and a voice thunders from heaven: “Ahmed, Ahmed, why deniest thou me?” Or perhaps “Why d’you dis me, mate?” (God has since learned how to talk proper.) At that moment, Ahmed realises that the way to asylum lies through Jesus Christ.

Off to the nearest church he goes, gets baptised and reapplies for residency, saying that, as a devout Christian, he feels unsafe in his homeland. That’s it, Paul is your uncle, Mary is your aunt. The Visas and Immigration Office opens its arms and welcomes the brother in Christ to the fold.

When I first came across such stories, I was incredulous. After all, His Majesty’s Government is more likely to be biased against Christians than for them. Also, one would hope that our public servants can see through such a transparent ruse.

Alas, they can’t. This raises the question of what to do about it. Taking God’s name in vain is one thing, but taking it in bogus applications for asylum is quite another. So how can we identify fake Christians?

A similar problem arose in 15^th century Spain, when their Catholic Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella decided to rid the country of Muslims and, while they were at it, also Jews. Many Jews then went through fake baptism, while continuing to practise Judaism in secret.

They were called Marranos or conversos, the former being devious crypto-Christians, and the latter all new Christians, whether genuine or not. The Holy Inquisition, first instituted in the 12^th century, was given the task of sorting them out, setting a useful precedent for the UK Visas and Immigration office to follow.

However, call me a sceptic and a cynic, but I can’t quite see that venerable department employing priests trained to examine new Christians on the fine points of doctrine. For one thing, I’m not sure how many vicars and priests could themselves pass such tests. And then there’s the stylistic incongruity of a receptionist at a government office telling a visitor: “Father Ignatius will see you now, Ahmed”.

So much more highly should we praise the Rev Matthew Firth for his ingenious solution to the vetting problem. He introduced a more involved and rigorous process for baptising asylum seekers from Syria and Iran, whom I shall call reversos. The vicar insisted that they first had to involve themselves in the life of the church, especially by attending services.

And what do you know, a miracle occurred. According to the vicar, the number of Muslims who had found Christ instantly “fell off a cliff”, and those people just “melted away”. If so, that makes those reversos not only mendacious but also lazy.

Anglican services typically last about an hour, so attending a few wouldn’t be overly onerous for robust young males (the dominant demographic among asylum seekers). They could then share a pint and a bacon sarnie with the vicar, thereby providing further proof of their apostasy from Islam. A few Sundays like that, and the baptismal font awaits.

Those reversos belie the fashionable belief that religion is useless. Unlike most of the indigenous population, they’ve found a definite use for Christianity. That outdated creed can now do what cards do in three-card monte: trick the innocent. That broad category includes HMG and, by association, us all.

A piece of avuncular advice to my fictional Ahmed and other reversos: remember to keep saying “There’s a God other than Allah, and Mohammed isn’t his prophet”. Who knows, you may get not just asylum but full citizenship. British Christians need people like you.

Whenever a magazine or a newspaper runs a test asking the question in the title, I take it. Yes, I know I have an appalling eye for physical detail, and yet I can’t help resisting the challenge. So predictably I fail.

As I did this time, looking at the Mothering Sunday photo of a radiant Princess of Wales and her three children. The photo was released by the Palace to quash spreading rumours about Kate’s health. Alas, that noble effort had the opposite effect.

For some people are more observant than I and they know a Photoshopped image when they see it. Those eagle-eyed pedants counted 16 things wrong with the picture, from the autumn leaves in the background of the photograph supposedly taken this weekend to the fewer than the regulated number of fingers on Louis’s hand.

(Spoiler alert: there will be no other spoilers from me. Try to find the other 14 errors, see how you get on. Unprompted, I would have spotted none.)

As a result, AP, AFP, Reuters and Getty Images, which at first ran the picture, have now withdrawn it. One statement said: “The AP later retracted the image because at closer inspection, it appears that the source had manipulated the image in a way that did not meet AP’s photo standards.”

And the British media refused to publish the photograph, except to illustrate stories similar to this one. Considering their unbounded love for paparazzo offerings, they must be complimented for their reticence.

This is a very serious business indeed, and not just because the Palace seems unable to employ competent retouchers. Nor is there anything wrong with publishing an official picture that has been either touched up or taken when the model was younger.

Why, I am myself guilty of such legerdemain: the photo adorning my books and blogs was taken a few years and many illnesses ago, making it rather flattering to my current appearance. I use it not out of vanity, but because it’s the only professional high-res photo of myself in my album.

But that doesn’t matter: no one really cares about my looks and health, family and friends excepted. Our future queen is a different story, and her health has far-reaching ramifications.

Back in January Kate had abdominal surgery from which she is still recovering. That gave rise to fears about her long-term health, which this clumsy photo was supposed to allay. Such fears go beyond the public’s voracious appetite for royal gossip.

For Kate is indeed our future queen, which makes her health a constitutional issue. And when the Palace releases dubious health bulletins or fake photographs, the issue becomes the proverbial hot potato.

The first bulletin in January said the princess had checked into the London Clinic for an abdominal operation. Words like ‘minor’ or ‘routine’ didn’t come up, but they were implicit.

The only specific information provided was that the operation had nothing to do with any kind of cancer. And oh well, lest we forget, went the afterthought, Kate would stay in hospital for a fortnight and then convalesce for two to three months. Nothing to worry about.

Those PR chaps take us for idiots, I thought. Anyone who has a modicum of medical knowledge would know that something untoward is going on.

My own empirical knowledge of medicine has been acquired on its receiving end, as a veteran of many illnesses, some of them deadly, and nine operations, some of them abdominal. And some of those were performed at the same London Clinic (thank God for private insurance), where my wife has also had two operations.

Neither Penelope nor I have ever spent more than three post-op days in hospital, which I’d say is par for the course. Hence, loath as I am to play cracker-barrel physician, weeks in hospital and months of convalescence betoken a serious condition.

The most widespread abdominal surgeries involve removal of the appendix, gall bladder, malignant or benign tumours, liver transplants or else hernia repair. My appendix and much-abused liver are still in place and I’ve never had a hernia, but I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing the other kinds, and none involved anything even remotely like Kate’s stay in hospital and subsequent convalescence.

All this sounds solipsistic, but I’m not bragging about my illnesses – there’s nothing to brag about. All I’m saying is that my experience suggests that Kate’s condition is far from trivial. The attendant events reinforce this impression.

First, Prince William cancelled at the last minute his attendance of the memorial service for his godfather, King Constantine of Greece. That was especially odd since William’s father, King Charles III, was also unable to attend because he is recovering from cancer treatment. Kensington Palace cited “personal reasons”, which sounded ominous in context.

Then the Department of Defence announced that the princess would attend Trooping of the Colour in June, only for that announcement to be hastily withdrawn. One possible inference is that the Department jumped the gun, and Kate isn’t expected to be fit enough to attend public events even six months after her operation.

Most Britons, emphatically including me, feel a great deal of affection for the Princess of Wales. Unlike her late mother-in-law, she has gone about her royal duties with dignity, responsibility and grace. That’s why we are genuinely concerned about Kate’s health.

But – and this is something Kate seems to realise, whereas her late mother-in-law didn’t – royal personages, especially those likely to accede, are defined not so much by their personalities as by their functions. And the functions they perform are vital to the constitution of the realm.

This doesn’t mean that every detail, salacious or otherwise, of the royals’ lives should be exposed to the gawking, gasping public. But it does mean that their subjects should be informed of issues with constitutional implications.

Since Kate is the wife of the future King William V, her physical wellbeing is definitely of constitutional import. So, much as I hate the phrase “we have a right to know”, in this case we do. Meanwhile, I – and millions of people in Britain and around the world – wish Kate the speediest recovery. We need her.

P.S. Just so that we are clear. The same event has three different names, and which one you choose says something about you. Mothering Sunday is conservative/Christian. Mother’s Day is woke/secular. International Women’s Day is woke/communist. Thus, the photo under discussion is supposed to have been taken on Mothering Sunday.

Pope Urban II had a clarity of vision that’s beyond today’s prelates. He kept things simple, without encumbering straightforward issues with wishy-washy casuistry.

The Holy Land was in the hands of Muslims who abused Christians and threatened the survival of the eastern churches. The only solution was to defeat Muslims and reclaim the Holy Land, to which end Urban began to preach the First Crusade.

Everyone taking part, he declared, would be doing God’s work. Hence all his past sins would be forgiven – going on that death-defying mission was redemptive.

Urban thought in the binary categories of good and evil, as behoved his job. The man currently occupying his throne, Pope Francis, eschews such primitive simplifications. Instead his mind draws inspiration from the nuanced thinking of the secular intelligentsia.

Thus stimulated, His Holiness shared his geopolitical ideas in an interview he gave to the Swiss broadcaster RSI. The interview was recorded last month, and it’s scheduled to be aired on 20 March.

The Pope correctly identified the on-going wars in the Ukraine and the Middle East as today’s key events of international politics. In both cases, he kept the issue of good and evil open-ended, without once offering any moral judgement of the warring sides.

Thus abandoning the language of his day job, His Holiness gave his audience the benefit of vox DEI, as in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion. Implicitly, he seems to believe, there is nothing to choose between the two sides in either conflict. Therefore the sole concern should be saving lives.

And if the only way to achieve that purpose is unfurling the white flag and capitulating, then so be it. Abject surrender is a sign of courage and strength, explained His Holiness in language that would have made George Orwell envious.

That was a daring foray into the field of semantics, consonant with the modern tendency to use words in a meaning contrary to the dictionary definition. Lest you may accuse me of twisting the pontiff’s words, here’s what Francis said about the war in the Ukraine:

“I think that he is stronger who sees the situation, who cares about the people, who has the courage of the white flag to conduct negotiations. [My emphasis: I just love this turn of phrase]… ‘Negotiations’ is a brave word. When you see you are losing and things aren’t going well, you must have the courage to negotiate. Aren’t you mortified of how many deaths will ensue otherwise?… Don’t be ashamed to start negotiations before the situation gets even worse.”

Having analysed the situation on the frontline, His Holiness reached the conclusion that the Ukraine is definitely losing – something claimed by few military commentators this side of the Kremlin.

Yet it’s not just his strategic perspicacity that impresses me no end. His Holiness effectively tells the Ukrainian government that, because the war is lost, they must display “the courage of the white flag” to negotiate the best terms of surrender.

First, the few setbacks suffered by the Ukrainian army are as far from defeat as their anterior advances were from victory. Second, surely His Holiness must be familiar with the notion of martyrdom. Some great saints in his religion have chosen death over surrender in defence of what they saw as a noble cause.

If Francis is unfamiliar with Catholic hagiography, a brief visit to the Vatican library could plug the more gaping holes in his education. And perhaps talking to someone who understands such matters will help him to realise that the Ukrainians are dying so that Europe may live. They are defending us all against the onslaught of barbaric hordes – the Ukrainians are today’s equivalent of the Europeans who died to stop the Muslim invasion from the south or the Mongol offensive from the east.

Pontificating, as it were, on the subject so dear to Urban’s heart, Pope Francis had similar ideas on Israel trying to forestall her annihilation at the hands of Hamas savages and the Muslim states behind them. Israel too must negotiate with those who wish to wipe it off the face of the world.

“Negotiations,” explained Francis, “aren’t capitulation. It takes courage not to drive one’s country to suicide.”

Now, neither Zelensky nor Netanyahu has rejected the idea of negotiations in principle. Both, however, refuse to accept the status quo as the starting point. Both leaders will only negotiate on the terms that would make their countries safe in the foreseeable future.

And both the Ukraine and Israel, for all their real or mythical faults, are allies of the West. For Muslim aggression and terrorism are capable of igniting the whole world, as are Putin’s unequivocally stated plans to recreate the Soviet empire.

The Pope should draw his inspiration from Urban II, not Neville Chamberlain. It would be in keeping with his mission if he spoke ex cathedra about the West uniting behind its two vanguards, Israel and the Ukraine.

It would be consistent with his remit to call on Western governments to provide the assistance the Ukraine and Israel need to prevail over their enemies and ours. Instead the Pontiff is making general pacifist noises that play into the hands of both Russia and Hamas.

Perhaps someone ought to remind His Holiness of the bellicosity he showed early in his papacy, when he said that if anyone “speaks badly of my mother, he can expect to get punched.” I’m not sure popping someone in the snout for such a minor transgression is consistent with the letter of doctrine, but it does evoke the memory of warrior popes.

The current interview is more reminiscent of Kremlin propaganda on the Ukraine and Muslim propaganda on Israel. Now, that definitely has little to do with doctrine, either its letter or its spirit.

The other day, members of the pro-Hamas organisation Palestine Action slashed and spraypainted the portrait of Lord Balfour at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Such zealots, sometimes going by the nickname of ‘anti-Semites’, have it in for Balfour, of the Declaration fame. The 1917 document bearing his name undertook to create a “national home for Jewish people” in Palestine. The Balfour Declaration was cited as a legal justification for the founding of Israel in 1948.

Yet much Jordan water flowed under the bridge between those two dates, with HMG doing all it could to redeem Britain in the eyes of Muslim fanatics. After the war, the British tried their hardest to prevent what Balfour promised, a national home for Jewish people.

The Royal Navy harassed ships carrying Jewish survivors of the Holocaust to Palestine, and the incident involving one such ship, the Exodus 1947, created a wave of protests and hunger strikes on both sides of the Atlantic.

British destroyers first surrounded and then engaged the Exodus, killing a crew member and two passengers. They then forced the ship to sail to France, but the passengers, including many orphaned children, refused to disembark, going on a hunger strike instead. (Leon Uris described their three-week plight in his 1958 novel Exodus.)

The British in general fought against the partition of Palestine tooth and nail, eventually voting against the founding of Israel at the UN. That, incidentally, made the USSR vote in favour, on the mistaken assumption that Britain was still a major power capable of thwarting Stalin’s ambitions.

I don’t know if members of Palestine Action are familiar with this history, though I suspect they probably aren’t. But Lord Balfour and his pictorial representations remain their enemy to this day, as are Israelis and Jews in general.

Following the 7 November monstrosity committed by Hamas in Israel, and the latter’s predictable response, pro-Hamas protests (aka riots) have become commonplace in London, as have anti-Semitic attacks on Jews. The situation has got so bad that counter-extremism commissioner Robin Simcox has described London as a “no-go zone for Jews.”

HMG is doing next to nothing to put an end to Islamic fascism in the streets of London, a tendency lovingly kept up by Sadiq Khan, the capital’s mayor and police commissioner. For example, no arrests were made in the wake of the slash-and-spray attack on Balfour’s portrait.

The photograph of that act of vandalism is blurred, so it’s hard to establish the attacker’s race. Such identification, however, would be relevant because pro-Hamas activities involve not only Muslims but also infidel Lefties.

Many of that group are themselves Jewish, which sets up one of those conflicts of pieties that give me a feeling I can only describe as schadenfreude. My own loyalties are invariably undivided, which makes it easy for me to take sides in any conflict.

Yet many of those on both the Left and the Right don’t have that luxury, what with some of their views being not just contradictory but mutually exclusive. And I’m man enough to admit that, rather than sympathising with their conundrums, I tend to gloat in a most un-Christian way.

It was in that shameful spirit that I read today’s letter to The Telegraph whose nine signatories are all prominent British Jews, or rather “Jewish people living in the UK”, as they identify themselves.

A more sensitive person than I would commiserate with the authors: they have to reconcile their self-acknowledged Jewishness with their clearly evident wokery, which is no easy task in the present situation. Jews everywhere tend to support Israel and abhor Islamic terrorism, along with general anti-Semitism. However, for most Lefties it’s the other way around.

Hence Jewish Lefties have to be especially fleetfooted to dance around the problem. Yet even if they are, sooner or later they’ll stumble over it. At that point, they’ll have to select one of their two mutually exclusive pieties. That’s what the authors of this letter have done.

First, they acknowledge that “Anti-Semitism is a very real problem, faced by us for centuries and increasingly in recent months.” Having provided that historical perspective, the authors then explain that some problems are much worse:

“Pro-Palestinian marches [are not] the major problem we face. Many of us join those marches and feel safe on them; indeed we are much more worried by the Government’s branding of them as ‘hate mobs’, and the constant stream of Islamophobia coming from the media and Westminster. We urge care when it comes to reporting anti-Semitism – because doing so in the way you have… risks dividing our communities.”

Righty-ho. Mobs blocking major thoroughfares and screaming “From the river to the sea!” don’t divide communities. The real culprits are government officials who describe London as dangerous for Jews and The Daily Telegraph that whips up Islamophobia by reporting on, say, pro-Hamas fanatics vandalising works of art.

Those nine signatories looked deep into their woke hearts and decided that their politics occupied a larger space in that organ than their Jewishness. One has to conclude that they are either ignorant of geography or else don’t realise that “from the river to the sea” presupposes the extermination of everyone currently filling that space, the six million Jewish Israelis (the number has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?).

Yet conflict of pieties is like Covid. It can afflict everyone, and people on the right of the political spectrum aren’t immune either. Most Americans I know who fit this description tend to be enthusiastic fans of Trump and also equally enthusiastic supporters of the Ukraine’s heroic fight for her survival.

Suppose for the sake of argument that Trump is elected president. His hero-worship of Putin is well-known and amply documented, both by eyewitnesses and his own numerous statements of admiration. Equally well-known is Trump’s understated affection for NATO often expressed through hints that he’d consider taking America out of it.

Not wishing to upset my American friends, I’ll describe their ensuing conflict of pieties as hypothetical rather than assured. So how would they reconcile their affection for Trump with his betrayal of the Ukraine? I’m not saying they are guaranteed to be gored by the horns of that dilemma, only that this is a realistic possibility.

That would present a problem not only for them but also for me. Since mocking Lefties comes more naturally to me than doing the same to my fellow conservatives, it would be harder for me to maintain the role of a sniggering outside observer. Oh well, we’ll drive off that bridge when we get to it, as Teddy Kennedy could have said.

Do you remember Alan Hansen? Whenever a goal was scored, that football commentator would utter the lapidary phrase in the title with real exasperation in his nice Scottish voice.

Looking at Britain’s budget unveiled yesterday by the Chancellor with the oft-mispronounced name, I asked – myself, since no one else was around – the same rhetorical question. My uncouth interlocutor replied with an obscenity I don’t dare repeat here.

Announcing a £2.5 billion reduction in defence spending, Mr Hunt boasted that it’s “already more than 2 per cent of GDP . [Moreover, it] will rise to 2.5 per cent as soon as economic conditions allow”.

Permit me to translate the open-ended promise in the second sentence: economic conditions will never allow it, and defence spending will never rise until it’s too late. In general, Mr Hunt ought to be reminded that defence of the realm from enemies foreign and domestic should be the only non-negotiable part of the budget.

Any responsible government should first decide how much it needs to spend on keeping the nation safe and only then ponder how to distribute whatever is left. And the question of how much is enough should be answered on the basis of the geopolitical situation, not “economic conditions”.

The benchmark of 2 per cent of GDP is what NATO countries have undertaken to spend under normal circumstances. I’ve highlighted the last three words to emphasise that today’s circumstances are far from being normal.

A war is raging in Europe, with neo-fascist invaders openly proclaiming their far-reaching designs on at least the eastern half of Europe, where most countries are NATO members. Putin and his propagandists make no bones about identifying NATO as its real adversary.

Elementary responsibility, common sense and historical experience demand that aggressive dictators be taken at their word – unlike our own politicians they tend to say what they mean and mean what they say.

Under such abnormal circumstances, the figure of 2 per cent of GDP is the barest of minimums that should only serve as a point of departure. And yes, by spending 2.07 per cent of GDP on defence, the UK is regrettably one of only 10 NATO countries meeting that puny requirement.

It’s instructive to see who the other nine such members are. The US apart, they are Poland (her proportion of 3.9 per cent is NATO’s highest), Greece, Finland, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia.

Notice anything they all have in common? Correct. They all suffered, or were barely able to repel, Soviet domination.

In 1944-1949 Greece was torn apart by a civil war started by the communists with the Soviet Union’s blessing. The government, helped by Britain and America, prevailed in the end, but only just.

And Finland suffered Bolshevik cannibalism twice, first in her own 1918 civil war, then following the Soviet aggression in 1939-1940. In 1918 the Finnish ‘Whites’ routed the Red menace, and in 1940 Finland managed to defend their sovereignty at a cost of almost 10 per cent of her territory.

All the other countries on the list of NATO ‘big spenders’ were either parts or satellites of the Soviet Union. Since that was only a generation ago, the fond memories are fresh in their minds, and they are hastily arming themselves against the blight they are too familiar with, if in a different guise.

By contrast, Western European countries, Britain included, clearly don’t feel the same sense of urgency. Their leaders make all sorts of bellicose statements, but keep their collective hand firmly in their pocket. When it comes to defence, that is.

Chancellor Hunt and the government he fronts have other priorities, and there their generosity knows no bounds. While reducing defence spending by £2.5 billion, they are increasing NHS spending by exactly the same amount.

One of Mr Hunt’s predecessors at 11 Downing Street, Nigel Lawson, said in 1992 that “the NHS is the closest thing the English have to a religion”. The God of that religion is athirst, demanding ever greater sacrifices. Billions after billions are tossed into its voracious innards, where they disappear without a trace or any noticeable effect. But religious piety can’t be measured in any monetary units.

Now, Mr Hunt and just about everyone in government know this perfectly well. To repeat Jean-Claude Juncker’s aphorism for which I absolved him of all his sins, they all know what to do. They just don’t know how to get re-elected once they’ve done it. And that’s all that matters.

Mr Hunt knows as well as everyone in Parliament that failure to increase NHS spending and especially any attempt to reduce it will be immediately punished at the ballot box. However, leaving the realm defenceless in the face of the direst threat in 78 years is something else indeed.

Electoral chastisement will come only if Russia acts on her threat to attack NATO, which may or may not happen, and almost certainly won’t happen before the next election. So Sunak and Hunt are prepared to risk our national survival for the outside, not to say non-existent, chance of staying in power.

Other than that, the new budget points to another choice the government made. The Tories have two ways of approaching the electoral campaign. One, they can effectively say to the voters: “Our policies are drastically different from Labour’s. Vote for us if you agree they aren’t just different but better.” Two, they can say: “Our policies are the same as Labour’s. Vote for us because you won’t get anything different anyway.”

The government is clearly opting for the second strategy. Other than reducing the national insurance tax from 10 per cent to eight, the new budget contains nothing that a Labour chancellor wouldn’t happily sign his name to.

By freezing income tax thresholds, the government is effectively increasing the overall tax burden, a ruinous decision camouflaged with the odd nip and tuck here and there. “Lower taxes mean higher growth,” said Mr Hunt, again showing his familiarity with the sentiment behind Juncker’s quip.

However, he spent the previous weeks dropping hints that he didn’t wish to spook the markets by precipitous tax cuts, the way the hapless Truss and Kwarteng had done. That’s dishonest.

Truss and Kwarteng committed an economic faux pas not by cutting taxes, but by doing so without also cutting public spending. Hunt, on the other hand, is presiding over an economy bending under the burden of promiscuous spending and extortionate taxation.

The attempt to out-Labour Labour will get its comeuppance at the next election, with the Tories almost guaranteed to be reduced to the status of a fringe party, sort of like the Greens. Britain will suffer too, with Labour Full Strength adding its own touches to the Tories’ Labour Lite policies.

One way or another, Britain’s armed forces will continue their descent to the size of London’s Metropolitan Police, with only a slightly bigger arsenal of heavy weapons. Let’s just hope Putin isn’t good at doing sums.