Month: January 2025

This question in no way implies that he shouldn’t have won. On the contrary, the ideas Trump shared with the electorate, the promises he made, were much more sound than those of his rival.

No, take that comparative back, let’s talk in absolutes. His ideas were mostly sound, whereas his rival’s weren’t. Moreover, he could be confidently predicted to carry his ideas out or at least do his best to try.

Yet better programmes don’t necessarily win elections under conditions of universal suffrage, nor do bad programmes necessarily lose them. For example, everything Labour proposed during their campaign last year was guaranteed to produce a disaster. And yet they won by a whopping majority.

Is the American electorate more sophisticated? In fact, I’ve heard MAGA people go out of their way to compliment the voting public who, they claim, saw through the Democrats’ Left-wing policies and revealed their true conservative nature. This ignores the fact that exactly the same electorate, give or take, elected Biden four years ago and earlier gave two terms to Barack Obama, that living argument against affirmative action.

It was Socrates who, according to Plato, first decried indiscriminate democracy. Voting, Socrates said, was a skill and, like any other skill, it had to be developed, not awarded as an automatic birthright. Specifically, an essential qualification was a heightened ability for critical thought, knowing the difference between truth and falsehood, fact and judgement, opinion and argument, likely and unlikely.

Anyone who says today’s masses in any country, including the US, have that ability is lying, probably for ideological reasons. Voting for most people is a knee-jerk reaction to some irritants, either positive or negative. Usually it’s the latter, with most people voting not so much for one candidate as against the other.

Our 2024 general election is again a prime example: even many Britons who tend to vote Tory went for Labour because, according to them, the Tory government was useless. So it was, but they lacked the skill Socrates considered essential. They couldn’t put two and two together to see that Labour would be even worse, catastrophically so.

That’s why Trump won not just because the voters found his programme to be better upon mature deliberation. That alone wouldn’t have carried the day, and even his rival’s vapid vacuity, though doubtless helpful, wouldn’t have been decisive.

Trump realised that underneath the outer shell of wokery the electorate wore either willingly or under peer pressure sat a vast reservoir of uniquely American patriotism. And he had the demagogic skills to tap into that reservoir more successfully than any candidate since Ronald Reagan.

When Trump shouted about the Democrats keeping America from being great again, he was a preacher fulminating against heretics and for true faith. He was a priest of the secular American creed of self-worship, replete with messianic connotations.

Winthrop’s (and Christ’s) “city upon a hill” and O’Sullivan’s “manifest destiny” came together in Trump’s rhetoric, and sparks flew. Americans were served a reminder of their secular cult of national exceptionalism, shamed about their prior apostasy, and their knees jerked.

It so happened that this time around they voted for the right candidate since Harris would have done to the US what Starmer is doing to Britain. But a similar osmotic appeal could under different circumstances have brought to power someone considerably less qualified to wield it.

For over two centuries, Americans were taught that their country is more than just a country. It’s God’s message to the world, the fulfilment of His plans for mankind, a lesson every other country should heed. That’s how they were conditioned to understand national greatness, and Trump found a way to refresh that lesson in their minds.

I’m aware of only one major country other than the US where patriotism takes on a quasi-religious dimension: Russia, with her self-serving idea of the Third Rome, replaced for a while with an equally messianic communism and then revived.

The other two nations I know well, British and French, aren’t immune to regarding their countries as exceptional, but any attempt to express that feeling in quasi-religious terms would elicit a wry smile in London or Paris.

Britons may happily sing their intention to “build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land”, but deep down they know there can be only one Jerusalem and it already exists. Anything else can only be an impostor, or else a metaphysical simulacrum.

Yet there are many Americans who understand ‘a city upon a hill’ and ‘manifest destiny’ literally. This messianic feeling continues to fertilise American grassroots, for all the attempts of the liberal intelligentsia to weed it out.

Donald Trump is both a product and promulgator of the secular religion of American self-sacralisation. He sensed its dormant vitality and awakened it with consummate skill.

One has to be American to stand up in response to that clarion call, and my American passport is long since expired. However, one has to acknowledge that the US has become a great country largely on the strength of her religious self-worship.

Unlike the Russian vintage, this has been channelled into creating a secular paradise as free of suffering as it’s possible to achieve in this world. But it’s a peculiar paradise, suspect and ultimately unfathomable to people weaned on (if eventually off) the culture owing its existence to a formative act of suffering.

By all means, we should root for Trump’s America, regret her failures and applaud her successes, especially since we all stand to lose from the former and gain from the latter. But we’d try to emulate her at our peril since that would involve repudiating not just Britain’s national history but also her national character.

Anyone who thinks that’s possible or indeed desirable is deceiving himself.   

Three typological figures have traditionally stood against the spiritual background.

The religious man says he believes. The atheist says he doesn’t believe and can explain why. The agnostic says he doesn’t know one way or the other.

The difference between the last two types is marginal. Neither of them believes in God, but the atheist is prepared to support that position with arguments, invariably spurious ones. The agnostic shies away from the argument but not from the disbelief.

As the masses march through history, a typical progression one can glean is from faith to agnosticism and then to atheism, that is first to doubt and then to aggressive denial. By and large, it was the believer who dominated the first 15 centuries of Christianity, with only a trickle of agnosticism dripping into the mighty stream of religion, and but the odd drop of atheism.

Then, over the next few centuries, faith ran incrementally drier, and agnosticism itself became a mighty stream with a few atheist tributaries. In the 19^th century atheism gathered strength, and in the 20^th it broke banks to flood the social landscape.

None of these has disappeared: the atheist, agnostic and believer are still extant. But none of them dominates any longer. A new type has appeared to shove the old ones aside.

He doesn’t believe, disbelieve, nor even says he can’t make up his mind. He just doesn’t care one way or another: the subject of God isn’t one on which he expends any mental energy.

Whenever religion comes up at a party, apathy overcomes him. He yawns and moves towards another group, where discussion revolves around subjects that really matter: sports, investments, home decoration, TV shows, sex, sometimes politics. Real life in other words.

Since this type deserves his taxonomic slot, I’d call him an apathist. His whole being exists on one plane, religion on another, and the two planes never intersect even tangentially. He has more important things to worry about, and when he hears a reference to God he is neither indignant nor doubtful. He is apathetic.

I also find him excruciatingly boring. A man who never asks what Dostoyevsky called “the accursed questions” about first causes and last things really has no interest at all in matters of the spirit. Such questions force their way into the conscience of anyone who has ever read serious books, heard serious music or pondered anything of serious interest.

The apathist is several rungs below the vagrant in the O. Henry story The Cop and the Anthem. When cold weather comes, that man deliberately commits minor crimes just to spend the inclement months in the warmth of a gaol. And then he walks past a church, with the sound of an organ chorale heard out in the street. The vagrant is transfixed; he feels in touch with eternity and decides to make something worthwhile of his life (and at precisely that climactic point he has his collar felt).

Our apathist has never had such an experience. He may be more comfortable than O. Henry’s hero, he may be rich and even educated, after a fashion. But, to me, he is still a crushing bore. Someone not worth talking to or indeed about.

However, the apathist has one thing going for him. He may be vulgar and probably is, but at least he doesn’t have to be. All he has to do is continue to ignore that subject altogether. The agnostic and the atheist don’t have that option, at least not when they broach religion, as, unlike the apathist, they tend to do from time to time.

The agnostic’s vulgarity quotient is lower, and it comes into play only when he laments that the proof of God’s existence is lacking. That statement ought to be part of the dictionary definition of inanity.

A man can’t prove God’s existence by definition: a higher system can understand the lower one, but not vice versa. The greatest religious thinker of all time, Thomas Aquinas, knew that, which is why it’s a mistake to refer to his famous Five Ways as proofs of God’s existence.

St Thomas himself never called them that. He came up with five deep and impeccably logical arguments (from ‘first mover’, from universal causation, from contingency, from degree and from final cause), but he had the intelligence and humility not to call them proofs.

He ended each argument with the words “and that is what we call God” (not “that is what God is“), showing that this was the greatest height to which the human mind can aspire. After that an impassible partition comes down: thus far, but no further.

The same goes for the earlier ontological argument put forth by St Anselm of Canterbury. That was an exercise in philosophy, not forensic proof. Anselm defined God as “a being than which no greater can be conceived.” Even someone who denies the existence of God, he argued, must have such a concept in his mind.

Conversely, someone who denies or even doubts God for lack of the kind of proof one expects in a lab forms a conclusion on the basis of ignorance and absence of any cogent thought. That’s neither grown-up nor clever. It’s intellectually vulgar.

At least, the agnostic doesn’t push his vulgarity to an unbearable level. He just shrugs, says he can’t be sure one way or the other and leaves it at that.

The atheist is much, much worse. He emblazons his vulgarity on a banner and waves it around for all to see every time he tries to prove that God doesn’t exist.

These days I can’t be bothered to join such verbal jousts, other than saying that he’s right. God doesn’t exist. It’s because of God that everything else exists, which is an oblique reference to both Anselm and Aquinas.

But the atheist seldom stops there. He has a bit between his teeth, and nothing can stop his gallop towards the far reaches of vulgarity.

He’ll commit the gross logical faux pas of mentioning natural science, not realising that he is crawling along a separate – and lower – epistemological level. He’ll talk about the continuing misery in the world, showing his ignorance of elementary theodicy. And he’ll do so with the passion of a zealous vulgarian proud of his vulgarity.

God looks down on those shenanigans and smites the atheist with the lightning of inanity. A miracle happens, one I’ve witnessed many times.

An otherwise intelligent, erudite and even subtle thinker immediately starts sounding like a blithering idiot, something he never does when any other subject comes up. I’ve heard people whose logic is forged of high-grade steel commit infantile logical errors that would put a secondary school pupil to shame (or would have done before the collapse of our education).

Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat, Romans used to say, repeating the thought first uttered in Greek by Euripides and Plato. “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” They do, but gods don’t stop their punishment there. They also make such a person sound vulgar.

As one of the 24 members of the Russell Group, Cardiff University is among Britain’s finest, whatever this distinction means these days.

That’s why it’s telling that its vice-chancellor, Wendy Larner, is about to swing an axe, citing a black hole in funding. Over 400 academic jobs will be cut, mostly in modern languages, ancient history, music, religion, theology and nursing.

With the exception of nursing, which really belongs in a medical school, these subjects should be the mainstays in the curriculum of any university worthy of the name, never mind one of Britain’s finest.

“I know that these proposals impact some staff more than others and they will cause a great deal of uncertainty and anxiety for those potentially impacted,” said Prof Larner, whose own syntax suggests an urgent need for a remedial English course.

Then again, she is a sociologist whose alliterative field is ‘globalisation, governance and gender’. One can impact an impact in that discipline by speaking in impactful bureaucratese only. In fact, that must be a job requirement.

You’ll be relieved to know that the vice-chancellor hasn’t announced any cuts in either her administrative and DEI staff or in her own annual £290,000 salary. Nor do I think she will: such things must be held sacred.

Some people may wonder why the university’s non-academic staff of 3,660 outnumbers its 3,419 dons. Yet every one of those admin jobs is much more vital: there are forms to fill by the tonne, and it takes a large labour force to make sure diverse people are equitably included.

Such is the zeitgeist: any public institution functioning according to modern principles, be it an NHS hospital, a major charity or a university, is increasingly dedicated to activities extraneous to its mission. The ideal for which they strive is hospitals getting rid of doctors and nurses, charities of their ultimate recipients, and universities of academics. Such people only get in the way of the higher purpose pursued by such outfits.

At universities, it’s the humanities that bear the brunt of redundancies. We don’t need historians, linguists, musicologists or theologians. We need DEI enforcers.

This again compels me to recall my youth misspent in the Soviet Union, so here comes another sleepless night of cold sweats. There, in 1919, Lenin ordered the execution of the few grand dukes still alive after the spate of 1918 murders.

One of those nobles, Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, was an historian renowned well beyond Russia’s borders. The Enlightenment Commissar Lunacharsky, who leavened his bloodthirstiness with smatterings of cultural pretensions, cited that fact when asking Lenin to commute the sentence.

Comrade Lenin’s reply laid out the blueprint that evidently still inspires our universities. “The revolution,” he said, “doesn’t need historians”. That uppercut of a response carried the day, and Nikolai Mikhailovich followed his relations into an unmarked grave.

Lenin’s adage can work the other way too: no need for historians betokens a revolution under way. As part of it, British universities are going the way of their Soviet counterparts.

Rather than elevating students’ minds, they combine the functions of brainwashing laundries and trade schools. This academic debauchment is so far expressed in a less sanguinary fashion than it was in Russia circa 1919, but the effect is similar.

Cardiff blamed the state of its finances on “declining international student applications”, and one wonders why Chinese and Indian youngsters, the principal groups of foreign students in Britain, are shunning Cardiff University. Could it be because they are more interested in real knowledge than in gender studies and DEI?

Cardiff doesn’t hold exclusive rights to this nonsense. Other Russell Group universities are following the same path at the same speed if half a step behind.

Durham University is slashing 200 academic jobs and Newcastle University is adding 300 to the unemployment rolls. Some 72 per cent of English universities are getting into the red, and more than half of all UK universities are laying off academics or cutting courses.

You get no prizes for guessing which courses they are cutting. Gender studies? Women’s studies? Black studies? Yeah, right.

Meanwhile, the government is raising tuition fees from £9,250 to £9,535, but that’s unlikely to plug the hole made by foreign students voting with their feet. That increase will be a drop in the bucket, considering that universities are currently making a loss of about £2,500 for each domestic student.

However, when Labour charges more for anything, be it taxes, duties or education, the purpose is usually not fiscal but punitive. Britain under their stewardship is the only Western country imposing VAT on school fees, which, with thousands of pupils having to migrate to overcrowded state schools, has a negative net effect on state revenue. But at least the middle classes are taught who’s boss, so they don’t get ideas above, or even at, their station.

That’s Leninism in action, if so far without attendant violence. The social pyramid has to be truncated, with another top put in its place. Statesmen, nobles, haute bourgeoisie and scholars have fallen by the wayside, with socialist apparatchiks taking their place.

Socialism doesn’t eliminate social hierarchies; it just puts at the top those who barely qualify to be even at the bottom.

The damage this does in academe is the most devastating for being the most enduring. We can just about survive a few years of inept government staffed with jumped-up nomenklatura. But I’m not sure we can ever recover from the knock-on effect of universities run by experts in ‘globalisation, governance and gender’.

The degrees they dole out are increasingly worthless, and people are beginning to realise this. That has to be the greatest part of the financial difficulties experienced by even our top universities — and of the social disaster lurking just round the corner.

Now, if at all possible, one should never pan without proposing, so goes the imperative British wisdom. Alas, doing something about the quality of our higher education would involve sweeping long-term changes to the whole modern ethos.

I don’t know how that can be accomplished without a revolutionary upheaval, and I detest revolutionary upheavals. However, I can offer an instant solution to the funding problems of our universities.

Do a Trump on them: sack at least 80 per cent of the administrative staff and eliminate DEI departments altogether. And oh, by the way, that same approach would also do wonders for public finances in all other areas too.

As for Cardiff University specifically, I’d suggest it start by getting rid of the vice-chancellor. She isn’t up to the job.

Who has insisted that Trump had the 2020 election stolen from him? And that, had he got his just deserts, Russia wouldn’t have invaded the Ukraine?

If your answer is ‘Trump’, you are only half-right. Yes, Trump did say those things, and more than once. Yet the other day Putin repeated those statements practically verbatim.

“I’ve always had a businesslike, pragmatic and even trusting relationship with the current president,” Putin said. “And I can’t help but agree that if his victory hadn’t been stolen in 2020, the crisis in Ukraine might not have emerged in 2022.”

Call me a Trump hater and report me to the MAGA police, but this kind of consonance bothers me, as it should bother anyone concerned with the advance of Russian fascism into Europe.

Suspicions of collusion between Trump and Putin have been floating about for years. A thorough investigation into the matter revealed no evidence to vindicate such suspicions, but, as Carl Sagan once said, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Absence of evidence may only mean the perpetrators were adept at hiding it. Considering that in this case one of the parties is a career KGB officer, the requisite skills were always on tap.

Still, even when there is no evidence to indict, there may be enough evidence to suspect, especially if the two parties constantly provide grounds for sound conjecture. Last week, Trump did just that by giving his (and Putin’s) version of the war.

Essentially, he apportioned the blame equally between Putin and Zelensky, an even-handedness that absolves the aggressor of a criminal violation of international law.

Trump magnanimously allowed that Putin was slightly rash when he set out to recolonise the Ukraine and stamp out her hard-won independence. However, “Zelensky… shouldn’t have allowed this to happen either. He’s no angel,” added Trump.

Fair enough, the last time I looked at Zelensky’s photographs I didn’t see a pair of wings attached to his back. But a victim doesn’t have to possess celestial qualities to be victimised. Raping a prostitute, for example, is still a felony.

The Polish leaders in 1939 were far from being cherubim too, and yet the world had no problem identifying Nazi Germany as the aggressor. Nor could Gen. Mannerheim and other Finnish leaders be readily confused with seraphim – and yet the League of Nations kicked the Soviet Union out for committing an act of blatant aggression against Finland later the same year.

Zelensky has his flaws, and so does his country. I’ve heard Putin fans accuse the Ukraine of corruption a thousand times if I’ve heard it once, and yes, there is plenty of corruption there. Not as much as in Russia but enough. So does that justify a brutal invasion, mass murder and indiscriminate bombardment of residential areas. Does that justify rampant rapes, torture, looting, kidnapping of children?

Anyone answering yes to these questions should push that magnetised iron bar away from his moral compass. It’s going haywire.

Getting from moral to practical matters, how does Trump think Zelensky could have not “allowed this to happen”? What should he have done on 24 February, 2022, when enemy armour crossed the Ukraine’s border and advanced on Kiev?

Simple. Zelensky should have surrendered immediately because Russia is so much stronger. But let’s not paraphrase Trump’s pronouncements; they speak for themselves:

“Zelensky was fighting a much bigger entity, much bigger, much more powerful,” Trump said. “He shouldn’t have done that, because we could have made a deal.”

Is that the royal ‘we’? Yes it is.

“I could have made that deal so easily, and Zelensky decided that ‘I want to fight’,” Trump continued. This is, mildly speaking, disingenuous on more levels that one finds in your average Trump Tower.

First, on that fateful date Trump was in no position to make any deals, other than those involving the construction of yet another Trump Tower. He was not the US president then, and neither did he have any official capacity to act for the administration.

So that’s just our typical MAGAlamania, but it’s also much worse than that. No ‘deal’ (and I think Trump’s use of that word should be rationed by an act of Congress) could have been struck at that stage – not by Trump, not by Biden, not by NATO, not even by God Almighty.

Putin declared that the objective of the invasion was to “de-Nazify and demilitarise” the Ukraine, which is to wipe out her sovereignty and reincorporate her into Russia. His timetable for that operation was short: three days to a week.

Unlike Trump’s defunct 24-hour deadline for ending the war, Putin’s plan was realistic. Had the Ukrainian army not put up resistance, Russian armour could have indeed covered the 400 miles from the border to Kiev in three days.

And then no deal could have been made any longer. Zelensky and his whole government would have been murdered, Putin’s stooge Yanukovych or another quisling would have been wheeled in, and the world would have been faced with a fait accompli.

An independent Ukraine would have sunk into oblivion, millions of Ukrainians would have been purged, more millions robbed, and the country would have been forced to become a Russian satrap. Yet there was that obstreperous Zelensky who “decided that ‘I want to fight’.”

The blame for the ensuing massacre is thus apportioned equally and, if anything, Zelensky is slightly more culpable. By taking on “a much bigger entity” he scuppered the chance of a deal, meaning he is neither “pragmatic” nor “businesslike”.

It’s from the wobbly platform of such understanding that Trump will start negotiating with Putin, possibly allowing Zelensky to sit in at the talks between the two grown-ups.

An essential part of that understanding is Trump’s certainty that the US has squandered too much money supporting the Ukraine. Yet the figures he has cited in support of that belief are as factual as the US taking credit for splitting the atom.

The US, he said, spent “200 billion dollars more than Europe” in support of the Ukraine. But hey, if facts stand in the way of a deal, then so much the worse for facts.

In reality, the US Congress has allocated (as distinct from delivered) about $170 billion to the Ukraine since the full-scale Russian invasion, $65 billion of it in military hardware. The corresponding number for the EU is $145 billion, plus another $15 billion contributed by Britain. I detect almost parity there, but let’s not quibble about numbers. It’s the thought that counts.

Moral and pragmatic often go their separate ways in politics, but this is one of those situations (which are more numerous than is commonly believed) where they coincide. The moral position on the war has to be unequivocal, but then so does the strategic need.

An evil regime has a self-declared aim of reconstructing the Soviet empire, understood in the broad sense as the whole of Eastern Europe. Ten of those countries are NATO members, as now is Finland, a neighbour of Russia.

By heroically holding the invaders at bay, the Ukraine is the West’s first line of defence, with her blood filling the moat separating absolute evil from relative good (Western countries aren’t angelic either, let’s concede this point). Allowing the aggressor to overrun the Ukraine is bound to have the same consequences as the appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s – but with a new twist.

Delivering a victory to Putin is tantamount to disassembling the system of collective security that has more or less kept Europe at peace for 80 years. A subsequent attack on a NATO country, most likely one of the Baltics, will put NATO before a stark choice. Either engage Russia in a full-blown, possibly nuclear, war or repudiate Article 5 of the NATO charter, leaving Europe at the mercy of Russian hordes.

I agree with Trump that Europe should invest much more in her defence and, unlike him, I also believe that both Europe and the US should remove all stops from their support of the Ukraine. This is the moral thing to do and it also happens to be the practical one.

Trump is also right when saying that the Ukraine “has had enough”, although I’d be tempted to add that so has Russia. Yes, the war must be ended, and the only way to do so is to bring the two countries to a negotiating table, with America perhaps overseeing the proceedings.

But starting the negotiations from the presumption of equal guilt means putting the Ukraine in an invidious losing position from kick-off. That’s why I see Trump and Putin singing in unison as a portent of gloom.

My advice to Trump is to find a spot somewhere between a deal and a holy crusade against evil, and use it as the starting point of any negotiations. Closer to the latter would be my preference, but then I too can be pragmatic in my expectations at times.

This phrase usually means making things worse. However, President Trump has hinted at the possibility of reversing its meaning.

Ostensibly speaking to the World Economic Forum at Davos but in reality to Putin and OPEC, he said: “If the [oil] price came down, the Russia-Ukraine war would end immediately.”

Don’t know about immediately, but Trump has a good point. Overlaying the historical graph of oil prices over that of Russia’s military forays one can see a different inverse relationship, as I’ve found out by following expert opinion.

Thus, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, when the oil price was at a record high. Corrected for inflation it equalled $140 in today’s money.

In 2008 Russia attacked Georgia. The oil price was still high, about $130, again in today’s money.

In 2014, Russia annexed the Crimea and set the Donbass on fire. The oil price was stubbornly staying in triple digits, at about $110 a barrel.

And the price was still $110 a barrel in 2022, when Russia embarked on a full-blown aggression against the Ukraine, plunging Europe into a war the likes of which hadn’t been seen since 1945.

Since then the price has come down, to about $78. But it’s still high enough for Putin to finance the war by circumventing Western sanctions and dumping his oil at sale prices to anyone willing to do business, mainly China.

That relationship also works the other way: Russia tends to succumb to peace overtures when the oil prices dip.

In 1986 Ronald Reagan struck a deal with Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil producer. The Saudis agreed to crash the price per barrel by stepping up their production. The prices went down from $140 a barrel to $30, and the button for Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan was pushed.

In January, 2015, the oil price dipped from $110 to $50 a barrel. A month later, Russia signed the Minsk agreements, which she broke the instant oil became more expensive again.

Oil economists believe that getting the price down to the 2015 level of about $50 will force Putin to sue for peace straight away. That strikes me as way too optimistic, the kind of optimism that can only ever be based on a deficit of knowledge.

If currently Russia is spending over a third of her budget on the war, a collapse in oil prices may raise that proportion to 50 or even 75 per cent. That would turn the Russian population into cold and hungry paupers deprived of even the bare essentials of life.

But that wouldn’t deter Putin, or at any rate wouldn’t do so immediately. Concern for the well-being or even lives of the people has never figured prominently on the Russian list of priorities, certainly not since 1917 and not all that much even before then.

Their conduct of the on-going war shows that treating lives with cavalier disregard hasn’t exactly gone out of fashion there. Putin’s generals are pursuing the war effort by paying no attention to the growing list of casualties. They are throwing wave after human wave at fortified positions, with their forces advancing through the puddles of their comrades’ blood.

Conditions in the rear haven’t yet reached catastrophic proportions, but the Russians are considerably worse off now than they were three years ago. Yet one doesn’t see any mass protests, nor any fiery headlines in the papers. Such is the nature of any totalitarian state – and of the Russian people whose tolerance of deprivations has been honed throughout their history.

Having said that, the avenue to peace that Trump hinted at looks promising. The president’s transactional talents may not work on the Russians, but the Saudis are more receptive to pressure. They may grab at any carrot dangled by Trump because they stand to lose a lot if he swings a stick.

Trump’s entreaty of “Drill, baby, drill” may produce the same effect: if America boosts her fracking effort, she can flood the markets with liquefied natural gas, which too is bound to push hydrocarbon prices down.

There is no reason for the oil price not to drop as far down as $30 or even $20. That would indeed crush the Russian economy, making any foreign forays unthinkable even for Putin and his accomplices.

The Saudis may scream bloody murder, but that’s where the carrot can come in. The US could offer OPEC countries any number of concessions that would make up for the lower price of their principal export. In any case, such a dip would only have to last as long as the war. Once it has ended, the prices may be allowed to seek their natural level.

Donald Trump is on to something here. He might have identified the only way for the Ukraine and her Western allies to occupy a position of strength in any negotiations with Russia. Instead of appealing to Putin’s nonexistent good nature, Trump could simply whip his trusted calculator out and show him a few simple sums.

Here, Vlad, this is what’ll happen to your economy at $50, $40, $30 or $20. And did I forget to mention it? Here’s a copy of my agreement with OPEC who are ready to do what it takes. So this is where you sign.

This approach has got to be more successful than trying to intimidate Russia with more sanctions they know how to circumvent, or to bully Zelensky with the threat of cutting supplies off. As a concomitant benefit, a period of cheap energy would inject some resuscitating medicine into the sclerotic veins of Western economies.

A footnote has to be attached to every pronouncement made by Trump, good, bad or indifferent. His words and his deeds have been known to go their separate ways, and he doesn’t always take the trouble of thinking before talking.

But I have a feeling that this time around he has found, and is prepared to act on, the right ploy for ending the war – not in 24 hours, not immediately, but soon. Best of luck, and do let’s hope the strategy will succeed.

Any physiognomist casting an eye over our chancellor’s face will suspect she isn’t excessively bright. Then she’ll say something, anything, and the suspicion will turn into a certainty.

Yet so far no psychiatrist I know of has diagnosed Rachel Reeves with schizophrenia. That oversight ought to be corrected, and soon, before she hurts any more people.

Schizophrenia, as you know, is characterised by a delusional divorce from reality. And one doesn’t have to be a trained shrink to see that poor Rachel from Complaints has that condition, if only perhaps in a mild form.

(Rachel acquired that nickname when saying on her CV that she had been a top economist at the Bank of Scotland, and she justified that job experience by being economical with the truth. In fact, she had worked in the complaints department of a retail bank, fobbing off distraught customers who asked for a higher overdraft limit.)

But judge for yourself. This is how Rachel describes her experience of travelling through China on a recent trip: “I went on this train from Beijing to Shanghai, it’s 1,200km, it got there in four hours. Can you imagine if I’d said to the vice-premier, ‘I would like to understand what you did around environmental rules’? … We would have sounded like lunatics. We can’t get stuff done in Britain because of these ridiculous rules.”

I agree. Every sensible Briton knows that “these ridiculous rules” are hammering nails into the coffin of the economy. And every such individual is well within his rights to complain – in fact it’s his civic duty to do so. Provided, of course, that it’s not he who is responsible for suffocating the economy with a suicidal commitment to net zero.

Rachel, by contrast, is one of those directly responsible, holding as she does the second-highest position in a government whose climate fanaticism is unmatched anywhere in the world. So which of those “ridiculous rules” is she planning to rescind?

She seems to have this schizophrenic ability to become in her mind someone she isn’t in reality, in this case someone outside the government looking in. From that vantage point, one she shares with all of us, she can, indeed should, criticise our useless government to her heart’s content.

Now, I don’t know what the therapeutic protocol is for dealing with delusions, and I’d welcome any advice from medically trained readers.

Are you supposed to get the patient in touch with reality by, for example, telling Kevin that he isn’t Napoleon and should take that silly hat off, Jane that she isn’t Lady Godiva and should put her clothes on, and Rachel that she isn’t an outsider to this government and should either get rid of those ridiculous rules or shut up? Do tell me.

Everything about Rachel is progressive, including, by the looks of it, her schizophrenia. Speaking at Davos, she said:  “We’re all sick of Britain being in the slow lane, whether it’s British CEOs or British investors, and we want to see a revival of those animal spirits so that we can grow the economy and bring investment here.”

Rachel then channelled her inner Trump by holding the US president up as an example of someone whose can-do attitude is working wonders in America. “I think we do need more positivity,” she said.

The reality is that whatever economic success Trump may be able to achieve will be due not so much to what he is (a positive thinker) as to what he isn’t (a Marxist ideologue). Rachel is just that, yet she scolds British investors and businessmen for being pessimistic as if she had nothing to do with fostering such sentiments.

Her abrupt about-face on Trump is also nothing short of insane.

For the past decade or so, the Labour brass (including Reeves) have been demonising him as a racist, fascist and in general the devil incarnate. Now they desperately need a trade deal with the US, they want Britons to become as positive as Trump – to a point that they don’t notice that their catastrophically incompetent government is destroying their country in the service of an evil ideology.

I’ve already mentioned the net zero madness, all those rules Rachel finds ridiculous but does all she can to multiply. But that’s only a start. Correctly sensing that climate fanaticism alone may not destroy the economy beyond recovery, our heroine has slapped such extortionist taxes and strangulating regulations on the economy that she started a massive exodus of wealth.

One wealth-producer is leaving Britain every 45 minutes, doubtless to the resounding chorus of “good riddance” performed by our governing Marxists. Hundreds of businesses are closing down, and those that are still holding on by their fingertips are laying people off.

Supermarket chains lead the way, with Sainsbury’s announcing 3,000 redundancies and Morrison’s not far behind. And investors, both foreign and domestic, aren’t investing because they don’t like throwing good money after bad. As a result, public borrowing is becoming not only greater but also more expensive.

In the fine tradition of socialist governments everywhere, Rachel is robbing the Peter of the private sector to give to the Paul of public employees. These are the only people who are doing well under Labour, with record wage hikes blithely dispensed by Rachel from Complaints.

“I want to keep the talent here,” she says. “In recent years too much has been drifting overseas.” True, so it has. But at nowhere near the rate of the past six months, when she took charge of the Exchequer.

Yet Rachel’s medical condition is such that she lives in the virtual reality of her mind, not in the actual reality of life. Thus, she blames the Tories for whatever economic problems Britain is experiencing: “You can’t turn around 14 years of sluggish growth in six months,” she says.

No you can’t. But you certainly can eliminate growth altogether, which is what Rachel from Complaints has done.

Economic growth in any country is inversely proportionate to the amount of socialism in it. The Tories are socialist too, but less so than Rachel and her mates. That’s why last year Britain’s growth, though undeniably sluggish, was still the fastest in the G7. Now it’s the slowest, having ground to a halt.

Every economic forecast, apart from those emanating from Rachel’s department, isn’t just pessimistic but doomsday. And even the Office for Budget Responsibility is downgrading forecasts every day.

Incidentally, Trump said yesterday that Starmer’s government has done a “very good job thus far”. That statement is as far from reality as anything Rachel from Complaints is saying, but one hopes that in this case the aetiology of the problem is merely ignorance, not madness.

Then again, Trump can’t be held responsible for anything he says: he is too garrulous to exercise even elementary self-restraint, and too egotistic to hold his statements to any tests of facts or general knowledge.

Thus he made a promise to indulge his fondness for “the most beautiful word in the dictionary”, tariffs, mentioning plans to introduce levies as high as 40 per cent on all imports.

Then some economically literate advisers must have talked sense into Trump, and the bar began to come down incrementally. First, 40 per cent became 20, then 10, but even such a tariff on British exports to the US would inflict even more damage on our economy than Rachel can cause on her own.

That’s why she is full of praise for Trump, where before she was scathing about him and not always selective in her epithets. Overall, I can’t shake the clichéd feeling that we live in an asylum run by the lunatics. Please, please tell me I’m wrong.

Democracy in America is arguably the most seminal work of political science ever written, and definitely one of the most prescient.

Its first volume appeared in 1835, 190 years ago and only 59 years into America’s life as an independent country. And yet much of the book reads as today’s reportage.

This isn’t to say I find all of Tocqueville’s political philosophy of equal value, but, when reading a significant book on any subject, my tendency is to concentrate on the points that make it significant. In this case too, rather than arguing with many of Tocqueville’s contentious ideas, we could all learn from his sage observations.

It was Tocqueville who first explained to Americans that what they had created wasn’t exactly what they had set out to create. Democracy, not mixed republican government, was central to American politics. However, unlike both Jefferson and Adams who deplored that development, Tocqueville rather welcomed it.

But not without reservations, and I find these more interesting than the praise. Tocqueville believed that only democracy could find a proper balance between equality and liberty. However, he was aware of the problem that has since become as evident as it is ubiquitous:

“But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.”

Tocqueville knew that not only political liberty might suffer as a result, but also intellectual freedom: “The majority has enclosed thought within a formidable fence. A writer is free inside that area, but woe to the man who goes beyond it.”

As a result, Tocqueville could think of no other country where there was “less independence of mind, and true freedom of discussion, than in America.” It was mainly in that sense that he spoke of “the tyranny of the majority”, a phrase also used by another champion of liberty, if a less nuanced thinker, John Stuart Mill.

While writing about America, Tocqueville always had his native France in the back of his mind. He was hoping France and other European countries would transplant America’s good features while remaining immune to the bad ones. His hopes have so far remained forlorn, and, largely as an effect of unchecked democracy, the West shows every day how little attention it has paid to Tocqueville’s caveats.

Many of his observations were both eagle’s-eye accurate and crystal-ball prescient. Pointing out that most people in the US government were lawyers by trade, Tocqueville feared that American politics would become excessively legalistic as a result:

“Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that does not turn, sooner or later, into a judicial question.”

True enough, of the 56 signatories to the Declaration of Independence, 25 were lawyers, as were 31 of the 55 members in the Continental Congress. That situation hasn’t changed much: 51 out of the 100 US senators were trained as lawyers. Although the percentage is somewhat lower in the House, Tocqueville’s numerical observation still holds.

What he didn’t anticipate, and neither did anyone else, is the amount of judiciary activism in the US (and, these days, elsewhere), with judges acting as political players, not just referees. They turn political questions into judicial ones not to protect constitutional purity but, as often as not, to usurp political power.

In fact, that practice is so widespread that political motives are impugned even to purely legal decisions. Thus, the predominantly leftwing press was up in arms about the Supreme Court’s decision to reverse Roe vs. Wade. Pundits insisted the judges had ruled that way out of conservative (or religious fundamentalist, take your pick) distaste for abortion.

In fact, Their Honours merely scrutinised the federal Constitution and decided that nothing in it could be interpreted as an argument for or against abortion. Hence it was up to the states and not the central government to legislate the issue.

During his first post-inauguration hours, Trump fired a volley of executive orders at everything progressive mankind holds dear and sane mankind abhors. The President is clearly intent on pushing executive power to (some will say beyond) its constitutional limit. Considering that he has a majority in both Houses, political opposition is too weak to stop the Trump juggernaut.

That’s why massive legal regiments have been thrown into battle, trying to do exactly what worried Tocqueville: turn political questions into judiciary ones. That continues the tendency that took shape during Trump’s campaign, when the opposition often relied not on political arguments but on questionable legal tactics to get ahead.

That Trump’s order to deny birthright citizenship to children of illegal immigrants would be challenged in court was clear even to me, a rank amateur in such matters. Birthright citizenship regardless of the parents’ residence status is guaranteed by the 14^th Amendment, and it would take another amendment to overturn it. That’s a lengthy process at best, and Trump has neither the time nor probably the votes to succeed.

Just as the aforementioned rank amateur predicted, 22 states have filed legal challenges and lawsuits, probably meaning that sound idea will bite the dust. I can’t say I’m upset: as the Romans used to say, dura lex, sed lex – the law is harsh, but it is the law. And it’s the law that should rule a civilised country, not a ruler full of sound ideas.

Also finding itself at the end of a lawsuit is Elon Musk’s DOGE, the outfit charged with the worthy mission of cleaning up the Augean Stables of the federal payrolls. The lawsuit filed by National Security Counsellors takes exception to DOGE’s lack of transparency.

Apparently, a federal advisory committee, which is what DOGE is, is supposed to keep regular minutes of meetings and allow public access, whereas Musk would rather do his work in camera.

That’s supposed to violate the Federal Advisory Committee Act, and I’m sure lawyers on both sides will have a well-paid field day arguing the toss. But I suppose DOGE could sidestep this one suit by making some concessions and continue to do its important work. I wish a less hideous character than Musk were in charge, but it is what it is.

The lawsuit filed by the National Treasury Employees Union may be harder to dismiss. Trump’s worthy intention is to sack tens of thousands of federal employees he sees – correctly, I think – as useless, actually harmful, leeches on the body of the public finances.

But it was predictable that getting rid of so many people would run into legal challenges, both individual and class suits. To speed matters up, Trump reinstated Schedule F, reclassifying all those employees as political hires and therefore sackable when the politics changed. If the government succeeds in reclassifying them in that manner, the employees will lose the right to appeal, which the union says is unprecedented and diabolical.

And so it goes, the legal merry-go-round spinning and gathering momentum as it goes. Some objections to Trump’s policies raise legitimate constitutional concerns, but most are simply legal sticks thrust into the spokes of political wheels.

They may not stop the juggernaut, but they can certainly slow it down, and Trump only has four years to implement his policies. So prepare yourselves for a whole bunch of further suits, some legitimate, most frivolous.

I hope Trump can chart a safe course through the legal reefs, but that’s not my subject today. I’m simply marvelling at Tocqueville’s sagacity. He noticed almost two centuries ago the seeds that have since sprouted into mighty trees.

If he suddenly came back, he’d look at today’s America and utter the aphorism coined by his contemporary, Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”.

No one I know ever took seriously Trump’s promise to end the war in the Ukraine within his first 24 hours in office. But we’ve all been waiting with bated breath to find out what the President had in mind.

Now we know. Or rather don’t know because Trump’s message to Putin doesn’t clarify matters one bit. The only conclusion one can draw is that Trump doesn’t really understand the situation, nor, more puzzling, has any advisers who do.

He starts out by declaring love for the Russian people, which is neither here nor there. But the way he explained the origin of that affection has everyone in the Kremlin up in arms. Even I cringed, and I’m no friend of Putin.

In both style and substance, Trump seems to have been inspired by the speech that Marlon Brando’s Godfather made to the other Mafia dons. Seemingly pacifying, it augmented that carrot with the stick of threats. But, unlike Trump, old Vito was in command of his facts.

“We must never forget,” writes Trump, “that Russia helped us win the Second World War, losing almost 60,000,000 lives in the process.”

First, a minor quibble: the 60,000,000 number was bandied about and discredited long ago. Having done the sums as accurately as the available data allow, serious historians and demographers have arrived at a total of about 27 million, of whom over 15 million were military casualties.

Trump doesn’t seem to have a Russian expert in his entourage, which his playing fast and loose with numbers shows. More important, such an expert could have prevented him from needlessly alienating the Russians by cavalierly offending the core of what passes for their ideology.

That is based on the cult of victory in the Great Patriotic War, their misnomer for the Second World War. The cult is worshiped with so much fervour that most Russians are unaware that their country had some help from the US and other allies.

(I recall doing interpreting for a group of Russian athletes visiting Houston back in the 1970s. On a city tour, I pointed out a memorial to Americans killed in the Second World War, much to my charges’ consternation. They didn’t realise the US had taken part in the hostilities. That was a long time ago but, if anything, the situation now has to be even worse.)

Official sources begrudgingly acknowledge that assistance but downplay its vital importance. Such is ideology, with its characteristic dismissal of facts that don’t fit.

But Trump’s statement is just as ideological and just as ignorant. He seems to be saying that the US won the war almost singlehandedly, with a little help from the Soviet Union, which is historically inaccurate and – more to the point – diplomatically inept. If the President envisages playing a part in subsequent negotiations, enraging one party by way of a warm-up is silly.

Since he chooses to adopt the tone of a chap who’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse, he should realise that such a mentality is encoded into Putin’s DNA. Like a Mafia don, he too demands respect – and neither can he be seen by his lieutenants as someone yielding to pressure. Show weakness and you are dead – this is one of Putin’s favourite phrases.

“I’m going to do Russia, whose Economy is failing, and President Putin, a very big FAVOR,” continues Trump. “Settle now and STOP this ridiculous War!”

Trump’s team seems to have a vacancy not only for a Russian expert but also for a grammarian. No one can ever accuse the President of being undercapitalised: his devotion to capital letters is as boundless as it is illiterate.

The Russian addressees of his message may not realise that part, but they’ll certainly be up in Arms at the Claim that their Economy is FAILING. It’s hard to know anything for sure about that country, but the reports I get from Russia don’t suggest an impending catastrophe.

The economy is definitely hurting, with rampant inflation impoverishing more and more people. At least a third of the budget (in reality, probably quite a bit more) is going up in smoke in the battlefields of the Eastern Ukraine, and Western sanctions do pinch.

But the Russian people have a long history of adding new holes to their belts, while the Russian government is similarly adept at getting around sanctions and international laws. These days too they are punching numerous holes in the sanctions wall, with a little help from their friends in China, Hungary, the Middle East – and corrupt Western traders whose name is legion.

Then comes a threat that sounds empty to me and definitely infuriating to Putin. “If we don’t make a ‘deal’, and soon, I have no choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States and various other participating countries.

“Let’s get this war, which never would have started if I were President, over with! We can do this the easy way or the hard way…,” added Trump in a further foray into Vito Corleone’s idiom.

Karl Popper would describe the first part of that statement as an unfalsifiable, and hence unsound, claim. Not being a Popper fan, I’d simply describe it as irrelevant and self-serving. But what does Trump see as the hard way? What is his leverage on Putin?

Slapping further sanctions on Russian exports to the West isn’t going to work because the volume of that trade is already negligible. Yes, saving the Russians further hardships may be (but really isn’t) important to Putin, but not nearly as important as saving his own face. If he loses that, the rest of his body will follow in short order – he knows that as well as your average godfather.

In his other messages Trump outlined other levers of influence, which may prove to be more effective. He is hinting that, should Putin refuse to do a ‘deal’, the US would ratchet up its arms supplies to the Ukraine. And if it’s Zelensky who proves obdurate, Trump will stop all such supplies.

If both parties take such threats on faith, Trump may succeed in dragging them to the negotiating table. Both countries are suffering egregiously, and both would be happy to end the war. But on what terms?

Zelensky has stated he is ready to talk, but he won’t accept the 20 per cent of Ukrainian territory currently occupied by the Russians as part of the conversation. Putin has also hinted at a possibility of talks but, with the Russians on the offensive, he too signalled his aversion to any serious concessions.

So what kind of deal does Trump have in mind? I hope an equitable one that isn’t tantamount to the Ukraine’s surrender. Yet I fear that, as far as Trump is concerned, any deal is better than no deal, and neither party to the conflict sees it that way.

One way or another he needs some expert advice on how to talk to a man who describes his youth as that of “a common Petersburg thug”. By all means, speak from a position of strength, but don’t make overt threats that will be counterproductive.

Thugs respond to deeds, not threats. Thus promising to arm the Ukraine to the teeth is not going to work, but actually doing so may. Announcing that US troops will be part of any peacekeeping contingent after the war may also have an effect.

Above all, Trump should realise that the desired end of any deal is lasting peace and the Ukraine’s security. Any other deal would set the stage for another world war, and this time around the US won’t have Russia’s help.

A chap should be allowed to indulge a few fantasies, no matter how preposterous. Mine is that someone sort out the gross pay inequality at major tennis tournaments.

And, say what you will about Donald Trump, but he wouldn’t stand for such injustice. So I’m hereby putting forth his candidature as the world’s tennis supremo. Yes, I know he already has a job, but I did tell you my idea was a fantasy.

The first of the yearly four Grand Slams, the Australian Open, is currently under way, and it would be a perfect time for Donald to put his foot down. If he could shut down all the federal DEI programmes in one fell swoop, he’d find it a doddle to make sure players get equal pay for equal work.

Someone has calculated that during the first week, before the quarterfinal stage, the women’s world number two, Iga Swiatek, was paid $148,000 per hour. It wasn’t specified whether the dollars were Australian or US, but that’s an arithmetic distinction without a substantive difference.

This is more than twice the hourly wage earned by her male counterpart, second seed Sasha Zverev. The two outside letters in DEI are working hard, but the middle one, which stands for Equity, has dropped out of the acronym.

However, the WTA and organisers of the majors insist that men and women should get the same prize money at every stage. At work here is an ideology that, like all other ideologies, is impervious to facts, logic or any moral considerations. This characteristic should appear in any dictionary definition of ideology, but, unless I do a Dr Johnson and compile my own, probably won’t.

This is my perennial theme, figuring in my pieces once every few years. But this year it’s different, for Swiatek’s obscene earnings have caused a public outcry. Well, perhaps not exactly an outcry, but certainly some commotion.

Ideologues of this outrage insist that Iga is so much better than anyone else that she hardly has to take more than an hour to dispatch her opponents, especially in the early rounds. That’s beside the point.

In their heyday, players like Sampras, Federer and Nadal also dominated their opponents, and Djokovic is still doing that. But even their one-sided matches hardly ever lasted less than two hours and usually closer to three.

One reason for that is that men play best out of five sets, and women best out of three. But another, just as important, reason is that the overall level of men’s tennis is infinitely better. A world number sixty or seventy can give a match to a top player and, on a good day, even knock him out. For a top woman, a match against such a lowly opponent is a warm-up session.

One fan who is aghast pointed this out: “Check all of the women’s scores from the year and you will be shocked at how many bagel and breadstick sets have been played.” (For those unfamiliar with tennis slang, in a bagel set the loser doesn’t win a single game, and in a breadstick set he only wins one.)

But most protesters insist that, if women want to deserve equal pay, they should play five-set matches too. That, I think, misses the point, or at least most of it.

An argument could be made that women are physiologically less strong than men, and they expend as much energy in three sets as men do in five. But people glued to their TV sets are only watching the results of hard work, not the work itself.

The real work is done behind the scenes, on the practice courts, running tracks and in the gyms. That’s how professional athletes hone the tools of their trade: not just strength, speed and endurance but also technique.

And, while the women can’t be expected to match the men’s physical properties, there is no reason for them not to develop the same technique. This means the ability to hit the whole repertoire of shots (and there exist dozens) with the right pace, touch and consistency.

Anyone wishing to argue that women have that ability should have watched the quarterfinal match between two burly, heavily tattooed ladies, first seed Aryna Sabalenka and twenty-seventh seed Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova.

A typical point featured the two players, one of whom is the world number one, hitting hard, flat shots at each other, with no attempt at ever varying direction, length or spin. After a couple of such boring shots, one of the women would either dump the ball in the net or hit six feet out.

The match was technically inept, creatively nonexistent and invariably boring to watch. Sabalenka, who eventually won in three sets, tacitly acknowledged as much in her victory speech.

“Djokovic and Alcaraz are coming next,” she said with a self-effacing smile. “So you’ll be able to watch better tennis.”

She was right about that, except the next match wasn’t just better tennis – it was tennis from a different planet, nay universe, a totally different sport. Serena Williams, possibly the best women’s player ever, would know that as well as Sabalenka did.

When she was at the peak of her powers, Serena was asked if she’d like to play Andy Murray. “I’m not going to play Andy,” she laughed. “He’d beat me in ten minutes. It’s a different game.” Quite. The game is different. It’s the money that’s the same.

Unless you are prepared to argue that women are innately less talented than men (and if you are so prepared, I’ll report you to the Equality Commission), it’s clear that the men and the women display a different commitment to their profession.

Add to this the observable fact that many women in the Aussie Open draw are grossly unfit, and you’ll realise that it’s not just hours on court that separate the two sexes. It’s the total amount of work, and the women’s hourly wage is many times that of the men’s.

Anyone who has ever struck a tennis ball in anger knows this, and the tennis powers that be certainly do. Nevertheless, Sabalenka has no qualms about receiving as much for her QF win as Djokovic got for his – and twice as much as Alcaraz got for losing. She doubtless likes the money and is grateful to her feminist predecessors who pushed through this travesty of equality and fairness.

In this area, tennis is a microcosm of life in general. Loudmouth ideologues, whichever subset of the overall woke ideology they single out, aren’t after equality. They do battle not for equality but for the preferential treatment of the group they depict as an oppressed minority.

This is strictly political chicanery that has nothing to do with the intrinsic merits of the issue. As Thomas Sowell showed convincingly decades ago, there was no wage discrimination of either women or blacks even then, at least not in the private sector.

(Prof. Sowell can get away with publishing such research because he is black. Or perhaps he isn’t: as Joe Biden explained, negritude is a political, not racial concept. “If you vote for Trump, you ain’t black,” he once said to a black audience.)

Discrimination is merely the battle cry screamed by radical activists out to fulfil their political objectives, in this case the preferential, which is to say unfair, treatment of their flagship group. That is only an intermediate step along the way to their ultimate goal: wreaking destruction on tradition, common sense, justice and morality.

Trump knows this if he knows anything. And, to his credit, he is doing what he can within his own bailiwick, the federal government, to put an end to this political subversion, and inversion, of justice. Alas, most areas are outside his reach, and tennis is only one of them.

Still, watching woke lefties squirm is one of life’s greatest pleasures – even greater than watching tennis matches played by top men.

Donald Trump must be having cramps in his right wrist. Signing so many executive orders one after another within just a few hours has to be hard for someone his age.

Here’s a man who rolls up his sleeves and gets down to business with gusto, even though he’s only working from home, you know, the one in Pennsylvania Avenue. Moreover, he gets most things right.

If I succumbed to delusions of grandeur and imagined myself in Trump’s shoes, I’d happily sign my name to most of his edicts. Whether or not he’ll manage to get all of them through Congress and the courts remains to be seen, but the intent is clear and it’s mostly laudable.

One thing that isn’t is changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, as a way of “reasserting America’s greatness”. This is simply playing to the populist galleries by singing a tune that makes them get up and salute. In fact, rather than reasserting greatness, this sort of thing screams insecurity.

Taking such liberties with geography is just venting churlish pique at Mexico, which does little to stem the flow of huddled masses across the border. In that case, why stop there? Why not rebaptise the Rio Grande as the Big River or, better still, the Wetback Stream?

While at it, perhaps all those Spanish-sounding locations ought to be renamed too. San Francisco, for example, could become St Donald, Los Angeles Ivanka City and San Antonio Barronburg. This is just silly, isn’t it?

Some of Trump’s ideas are contradictory to the point of being self-refuting. Even though he hasn’t yet signed any edicts featuring what he calls his “favourite word in the dictionary”, tariffs, the idea hasn’t gone away.

Yet if he goes through with it, Trump will find it hard to keep his promise of lowering the cost of living. Quite the opposite, things will cost more, as a result of both the higher cost of imports and an increase in inflation. At the same time, his pet idea of kicking illegals out and not letting even legals in is bound to create short-term labour shortages, pushing prices up even higher.

I also have doubts about Trump’s foreign policy, described by his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, as “America First”. As a barely post-pubescent person (she is 27), Miss Levitt may not be aware of the historic associations, but they aren’t necessarily positive.

The term was first used by the America First Committee (AFC), a group of cross-party isolationists that existed from September, 1940, until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour just over a year later. Their principal idea was that America had no business taking sides in the on-going war, what with the ocean making her immune to invasion.

If America’s neutrality meant Britain’s defeat and Nazi domination of Europe, America Firsters had no problems with that. A few of those chaps didn’t have a problem with fascism either, while having a big one with Jews.

Trump himself made a reference to the ocean in a similar current context, which probably means he is familiar and sympathetic with AFC mentality, if not its nastier edge. In that case, he should also know that, had the AFC had its way, America wouldn’t have emerged as the dominant world power after the war, and neither would we have had several decades of relative peace.

So far Trump has announced he is pausing foreign aid until a thorough review of it, which is a sound idea in general. In particular, however, I wonder whether supplies to the Ukraine fall under the rubric of foreign aid or else that of stopping evil in its tracks. I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.  

With these reservations out of the way, I have to applaud Trump’s other executive orders, each taking a wrecking ball to this or that pillar of New Age wokery: climate, DEI, gender madness, globalism.

I’m not convinced he can defeat all those enemies of sanity, but at least he gets top marks for trying. For example, Trump has stated that the US will only recognise “two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality”. That’s Genesis truth against genital lies, and godspeed to the President.

Trump has also put paid to all DEI programmes within the federal government, calling them “radical and wasteful”. That description is unnecessarily moderate, which is out of character. Such programmes are actively and deliberately subversive, driven by hatred of our civilisation, its history and tradition.

Trump knows this, but there are things even he can’t say in public. I just hope a legal mechanism may be found for extending such measures to the private sector, though I’m not sure presidential power packs that much punch.

In any case, I hope our own lot are taking notes, although I suspect they aren’t. Wokery has seeped into their viscera and they have no minds capable of combatting its toxic effects.

The same hope goes for Trump’s climate policies that one wishes our own government adopted. Trump has again pulled the US out of the Paris Accords, leaving bogus concerns for ‘our planet’ to the EU and, alas, HMG.

Realising that it’s not ‘our planet’ that’s in trouble, but its inhabitants reeling under the blows of woke ideologies, Trump has also put an end to Biden’s pet project, the Green New Deal. If ‘tariffs’ takes pride of place in Trump’s lexicon, ‘net zero’ doesn’t figure in it at all and, for once, I have no quibble with such a limited vocabulary.

No more leasing of wind farms, Trump has ruled, and say good-bye to the “electric vehicle mandate”. Are you listening, Sir Keir? No, you are too busy beggaring Britain for the sake of a stupid ideology, which is to say an ideology.

Immigration is another one of Trump’s bugbears, and he is right to be concerned about what he calls, somewhat excessively, “America’s sovereignty under attack”. If he can stop the swarms of illegal immigrants crossing the southern border, more power to his elbow. I just hope Trump doesn’t go too far, as he is prone to do, and stops legal immigration too, while he is at it.

As I’ve mentioned before, this may create severe labour shortages, especially in agriculture and construction. As a former Texas resident, I can testify to the vital importance of Mexican migration to the economy of the border states. But Trump is right: the perennial problem of illegal immigration must be solved at last. Best of luck to him.

Another good idea of his may run headlong into legal challenges. This concerns birthright citizenship, with any child born on US territory automatically becoming a citizen regardless of the parents’ immigration status. Trump has ordered the denial of citizenship to children born to migrants who are in the US illegally or temporarily.

I like this, although I can foresee a slippery-slope argument against it. Trump’s idea bears a direct relevance to our own situation, what with some native-born British Muslims prevented from re-entering the country after a stint in Middle Eastern terrorism.

Some of Trump’s closest confidants, namely Elon Musk, demanded in a rather peremptory tone that HMG abandon that practice. Perhaps Donald should put a quiet word into Elon’s shell-like, to the effect that some people may not be morally entitled to a citizenship even if born in the country.

The legal problem may arise from constitutional pedants invoking the 14^th Amendment to the US Constitution, which says that: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Not being an expert in constitutional law, I don’t know if that Amendment has a loophole wide enough to repeal birthright citizenship. But on general principle, I find Trump’s idea defensible morally and intellectually, if perhaps not legally.

All in all, Trump’s first day in office is interesting, even invigorating. I hate being bored, and usual humdrum politics are boring in the extreme. That’s not a charge that can be levelled against the President, and I hope some Hollywood diva will croon her appreciation.

P.S. In his inaugural speech, Trump listed the splitting of the atom among America’s great achievements. In fact, this was done by Sir Ernest Rutherford at Victoria University in Manchester. I know this may come as a surprise to the President, but America can’t take credit for everything good in the world.