Author: Alexander Boot

Having spent 15 years in Russia as ambassador of the Sardinian king, Joseph de Maistre (d. 1821) summed up his experience by saying that every nation gets the government it deserves.

Two centuries later, Vladimir Kara-Murza disagrees. He is one of the 16 Russian prisoners involved in the swap the other day. That operation flies in the face of the old proverb about fair exchange being no robbery.

Russia sends out FSB hitmen and spies, electronic or traditional, to do in the West what such people are trained to do: spy, hack and murder.

These are high-risk jobs, but those agents receive a solemn promise that, should they get nabbed, a grateful Russia will trade them back. The FSB then arrests foreign journalists and businessmen or else Russian dissidents known worldwide, sentences them to the kind of prison terms that haven’t been seen since Stalin, and uses them as a sort of exchange currency.

This is done with the cynicism characteristic of Russian secret services and the government behind them. Correction: these days the secret services are the government, led and staffed as it is by career KGB officers.

Kara-Murza and Ilya Yashin are perhaps the best-known among the released dissidents, and they are remarkable men. Having been sentenced to 25 and 8.5 years respectively, they accepted their martyrdom with courage and dignity.

Both refused to cooperate with their jailers which earned them long stints in punitive solitary confinement. They also didn’t give Putin the satisfaction of pleading for mercy, even though they knew they’d be unlikely to survive their ordeal, the way their friend Navalny didn’t survive it.

Now they are in the West, and whatever is left of the free world should rejoice. But Messrs Kara-Murza and Yashin aren’t rejoicing. On the contrary, they insist that they didn’t want to be exchanged, and they certainly wanted to stay in Russia – even in Russian prison.

The swap, they insist, is banishment and exile, not liberation. They’ll go back at the first opportunity because Putin should be opposed from inside the country, not from Germany, Britain or America.

Alas, their first press conference in the West proves that, while Russia continues to produce heroic people ready to give their lives for the cause, the country still lacks effective opposition. For any successful resistance must start with an accurate, dispassionate assessment of the situation – not with consuming and purveying a diet of red herrings.

Kara-Murza, incidentally, is an historian educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is a fluent speaker of English and holds dual British-Russian nationality. Yet, as I mentioned earlier, he disagrees with de Maistre.

“I care about my country,” said Kara-Murza, “and I think Russia deserves better than a corrupt KGB dictator. I want to make sure that Russia becomes… a normal, modern, democratic country.” He also wants “to remind people in democratic countries that Russia and Putin are not the same thing”.

If I didn’t admire Kara-Murza’s heroism as much as I do, I’d think that he and his fellow dissidents weren’t just released by Putin but sent out as his secret emissaries.

That’s the time-honoured strategy of the Russian and Soviet governments. While raping their own population and pouncing on their neighbours, they inundate the West with conciliatory messages sent through private channels.

Pay no attention to what our government is saying and doing, the messages go. These are just a few ghastly hawks who in no way represent the people. The good and freedom-loving people of Russia are staunchly opposed to whatever their leaders are perpetrating. So if the West could kindly ratchet down the tension, the opposition will triumph and Russia will become a worthy member of the Western family.

This sort of thing, a sustained campaign of disinformation designed to dupe the West into acquiescence, has been going on for over 100 years. A case that springs to mind is that of Nikolay Berdyayev, one of the Russian thinkers exiled from Russia onboard the notorious Philosophers’ Steamers in 1923.

His first stopover was Prague, at that time the nerve centre of the Russian emigration. The night after his arrival, Berdyayev found himself at a gathering in the flat belonging to Anton Kartashev, the last Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod. He and other prominent émigrés were discussing ways of fighting the Bolsheviks.

To everybody’s surprise, Berdyayev preached a different message. The Bolsheviks, he said, are the true practitioners of the Russian idea. Hence all Russians living abroad should renounce opposition and wait for the glorious Russian people to sort themselves out.

Once the initial shock subsided, Kartashev uttered his severe verdict: “We thought you were exiled, but it turns out you were infiltrated.” (It’s more poignant in the original: Мы думали вас выслали, а вас оказывается заслали.)

I wonder what Kartashev would say about the message delivered by Kara-Murza and his friends. Please, they said, stop sanctions against Russia because they hurt the good Russian people who are opposed to Putin and his dirty war. Instead, target specific officials with personal sanctions.

The Russians know they don’t deserve Putin and they certainly want to have no part in the war. Give them time, and they’ll create a democratic heaven on earth.

I don’t know what kind of history they teach at Trinity, but analysis of historical continuity and dynamic tendencies doesn’t seem to have been part of Vladimir’s curriculum. What does it mean that “Russia and Putin aren’t the same thing”?

This seems to suggest that Russia has had a long history of just government reflecting the people’s sterling quality and only occasionally put on hold by evil exceptions. But this suggestion is false.

Which just rulers would that be? Ivan the Terrible, the first Russian tsar, who only ever laughed when watching people being flayed or fried alive? Peter the Great, a sadist who personally tortured and beheaded dozens of people? His daughter Yelizaveta, who had society ladies knouted and mutilated for daring to wear the same dresses as Her Majesty’s? Catherine the Great who spread serfdom to the Ukraine? The tsars of the 19^th century under whom Russia became known as ‘the prison of nations’ and ‘the gendarme of Europe’? Lenin? Stalin? Khrushchev? Andropov? Yeltsyn? Who?

The newly released heroes woefully misunderstand Russian history, politics and indeed people. The problem with the country isn’t that it lacks democracy but that it lacks civilisation (not to be confused with culture).

In fact, Russian liberals have learned their misapprehension from their Western counterparts, who believe that democracy is a panacea able to cure the ills of the world. Yet civilisational problems have no political solution. Giving barbarians democracy is like giving a Stradivarius violin to savages. They’ll just use it for firewood.

Every attempt to disprove this observation is doomed to failure, as the Americans found out in Iraq. Egged on by neoconservative (in fact, nonconservative) liberals, the US invaded, set up a chain of voting booths and embarked on a programme of nation building. In short order, that created a blood-soaked chaos rapidly spreading over the whole region.

There are indeed a few thousand Russians who oppose the war, which isn’t many for a country of 140 million. And most of those protesters object not to the war as such but to its cost in lives and money. More Russians, perhaps as many as 30 million, are directly involved in the war effort, some in the military, others in the armament industry and related businesses.

Spontaneous support for the war – and Putin – is huge, which isn’t surprising given the state’s monopoly on propaganda. Democracy, on the other hand, has a bad name among the masses weaned on the notion of imperial chauvinism.

They still remember the 1990s, the only decade of supposed liberty in Russian history. Few people still recall the previously forbidden books that became easily available. Yet everyone remembers looking at shops full of goods – and having no money to buy them, what with rampant inflation and devaluations having wiped out people’s savings, and pensions and salaries sometimes not paid for months.

Kara-Murza and his friends doubtless love liberty, even though they are prepared to sacrifice their own at the altar of woeful misconception. Their heroism will be in vain: democracy may sometimes contribute to a civilisation, but it can’t create it.

The Saturn of the Russian state will avidly devour all the sacrifices offered to it, but it won’t change its essence – even if it may pretend to change its ways. This state is exactly what the Russians deserve. De Maistre was right, and Kara-Murza and his friends are wrong – much as I’m happy that these heroic if misguided people are now free.

As far as pick-up lines go, this one doesn’t go very far. In those half-forgotten days of my youth, I never relied on it as the starting point on the road to a girl’s heart.

Moreover, I despised those men who did and those women who fell for such overtures, but then young people are good despisers. They recognise other people’s foibles more easily and surely than their own, and contempt comes naturally to them as a form of self-assertion.

And what could be more despicable to a budding rationalist than astrology or anything occult? Materialists poopoo everything magical, while Christians look down on anything that breaks God’s monopoly on magic.

As a youngster, I was neither of those two extremes, but I certainly hadn’t yet realised the limits of reason, especially my own. It took something paranormal to put a dent in that self-perception, something that I was sure didn’t exist.

I was in my early 20s, doing a stint in a Soviet hospital, my customary habitat during my last 15 years in Russia. Altogether, almost two of those years were spent in hospitals.

One didn’t just stay at Soviet hospitals. One lived there, in my case months at a time, because things medical developed at an excruciatingly slow pace, typical of natural forces. Even a simple blood test took two or three days to deliver results, and seldom had less than a fortnight passed before treatment could even begin.

As an experienced patient, I always looked for temporary friends, those who could play chess or cards, talk on interesting subjects or at least tell jokes. That time my friend was named Stas, an old man of about 30 obsessed with paranormal phenomena, such as telepathy.

I knew nothing about it, other than being certain that all such things were nonsense. Instead of trying to convince me otherwise, Stas offered a demonstration. He blindfolded himself and asked me to put a chess piece on the board.

He then told me to concentrate as hard as I could on the occupied square, my mind acting as a transmitter of mental waves. He himself was to be the receiver, and receive he did. A minute or two later, he announced: “D5!” – and so it was.

I insisted on repeating the experiment several times, and each time Stas either got the exact square or one adjacent to it. We then swapped roles, with him sending and me receiving. My results were somewhat less impressive, but not by much.

That was my first brush with the paranormal, but it didn’t make much of an impression. I was too focused on trying to dodge the KGB to worry about such incidentals.

Fast-forward a few years, and I was living in Houston, having got out of Russia and made a seminal, if yet unrecognised, contribution to medical science.

My polyarteritis nodosa, to which I owed the pleasure of meeting Stas, mysteriously cleared the moment I left the Soviet Union. That enabled me to come up with a ground-breaking hypothesis on the aetiology of collagen diseases: they are caused by communism.

Anyway, I found myself at a party where I knew everyone, except one man who was someone else’s friend passing through Texas. We struck up a conversation, and he said he was a professional astrologist.

Again, I expressed scepticism bordering on contempt. I refuse to accept, I said, that stars determine our fate.

My new short-term friend was patient with me. We don’t claim, he said, that stars determine anything. All one has to accept is that life is by its nature cyclical. If so, stars are the clock by which one could time various phases of the cycle.

That’s a hell of an assumption, I objected. I wasn’t yet a Christian but I was already thinking like one. Hence I insisted life was linear, not cyclical, expressing in crude terms my understanding of teleology. And he couldn’t really believe that one’s star sign affected one’s personality, could he?

Yes, he could. Well, in that case, I said triumphantly, he ought to be able to guess a man’s birthday just by talking to him. Yes, he said, I suppose that’s true. So what’s mine then, I asked, again demanding empirical proof.

He didn’t hesitate. “August 9^th or 10^th,” he said. My high horse bucked and threw me off. “How did you know that?” I asked. “Simple,” he replied. “You are a quintessential Leo, which means you were born right in the middle of that sign”.

I suspected legerdemain of some sort, perhaps our hostess having told him in advance what my birthday was. To put such suspicions to rest, he then proceeded to guess the birthday of everyone present, never being a day or two off. Once again, he was passing through and didn’t know anybody there except the man who had brought him in.

Push the fast-forward button again, and now we are in the late 90s. Penelope and I had been married for some 10 years, and she insisted that we travel to Moscow for her to see where I had spent the first 25 years of my life.

It was winter, the best season in Moscow, when snow acts as makeup concealing the blemishes on the city’s skin. We arrived at night, dumped our bags at my friend’s place about a mile northeast of Red Square and went for a walk.

We took Miasnitskaya Street that in my day was named after Kirov, but had since recovered its ancient name. Let me reemphasise that Penelope had never been to Moscow before, and had little idea of the city’s geography.

As we approached the top of Miasnitskaya. Penelope suddenly stopped and pointed at the back of the massive building on our right. “There are awful vibes emanating from it,” she said. “Some horrible things must have happened there”. So they had. That was the KGB headquarters in Lubianka Square.

Penelope had no way of knowing that. Even if she might have seen photographs of that sinister building, the pictures would have featured its façade, not its back. Yet, as an extremely sensitive artist, she possesses an emotional conduit to knowledge residing in the ultra range above reason and hence superior to it.

On another occasion, a few years later, we were staying with friends in Amsterdam. Our bedroom was in the loft of a typical 17^th century Dutch house, tall and narrow.

On our first night there, Penelope couldn’t fall asleep. She seemed anxious, tossed and turned, keeping me awake too. When I asked what was bothering her, she again mentioned awful vibes. Something terrible had happened there, she was sure about that.

In the morning, I laughingly mentioned that little quirk to our hosts, but they didn’t laugh. They happened to have a written history of the house, and sure enough, a family of Jews had been hiding there during the war. They were then betrayed, arrested and taken away to a concentration camp, where they perished.

If you expect a conclusion to such recollections, I haven’t got one. The best I can do is quote Shakespeare: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

This morning, Sky News reporters said a hundred times if they said it once that the murderer’s identity can’t be revealed because he is under 18 and hence a child in the eyes of the law. And children must be protected from damaging publicity even if they can’t be protected from mass murderers.

Sky even refused to vouchsafe to its audience the snippets of information mentioned in the print media. These informed us that the murderer’s family comes from Rwanda, thus having travelled in the opposite direction to that advocated by the previous government. The family has “no known links to Islam”, and in fact the murderer’s father is “active in the local church”.

There, you Islamophobes you (on this evidence I’m part of that group), the moment you hear of a terrorist act you jump to the conclusion that the offender is Muslim. The fact that you (and I?) are usually right is no excuse, and I for one am suitably contrite. It’s Christianity that’s to blame for Southport, and trust you not to have figured that out for yourself.

Of course, even if it’s true that the father is a church-goer – and none of those snippets looked especially credible – that doesn’t necessarily mean the son can’t be a Muslim. Such things happen. For example, and I hope you’ll forgive a bit of solipsism, my religion is different from my father’s and my son’s (atheists, both of them).

Anyway, Sky circumspectly refused to jump the gun and only told us that the stabber is 17 and male. However, one reporter inadvertently let another important fact slip out, and I may be the only viewer who caught it.

So here’s that cat jumping out of the bag: the 17-year-old suffers from multiple personality disorder, or dissociative identity disorder, as it’s known nowadays. I just hope the correspondent who accidentally spilled the beans won’t be reprimanded or sacked.

She probably didn’t even realise her careless mistake, but it was egregious by media standards. Having identified the murderer as a 17-year-old boy, the reporter then said that “they will be transported” to such and such facility later today.

Do you get it? I did. Obviously, the ‘boy’ has at least two personalities to go by, a sort of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The plural personal pronoun might have also meant that the murderer had an accomplice, but that’s unlikely.

If my first guess is correct, then there’s the defence strategy mapped out. The defence counsel can claim that it was his client’s Mr Hyde personality that wielded that knife. The Dr Jekyll part, which is the real essence of his client, was unaware of the monstrous act perpetrated by his alter ego and hence can’t be held responsible for it.

Then, of course, there’s another possibility, and it fills me with dread. That reporter is a woke illiterate who refuses to use the masculine personal pronoun even in relation to someone whose male sex has already been established.

Now, you may think I’m making a cultural mountain out of a verbal molehill, but this sort of thing is a harbinger of a civilisational catastrophe. When language goes, everything goes. A glossocratic attack has our whole culture as its target.

I use – and might have even coined – the term ‘glossocratic’ because an attempt to control and dictate language for political ends is a naked power grab. As Orwell showed in his 1984, he who has the power to impose usage has the power to impose anything.

Our ruling elite is after self-perpetuation, and it’s prepared to sacrifice everything at the altar of that goal: taste, grammar, semantics, literacy and so on. Those who impose glossocracy don’t really care what words we use – they only care about their power to impose usage. It’s as if they are saying to us: “Yes, we know and you know that saying ‘they’ about one man is ugly and stupid – and we know that you know. But we can force you to do such things, and all you can do is shut up”.

That’s not to say that good old common-or-garden ignorance is alien to Sky News, and it doesn’t always have to be glossocratically motivated. Thus, later this morning, a presenter reading from the teleprompter spoke about the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.

Though obligingly describing him as a “moderate” and “pragmatist” (everything is relative, I suppose), the newsreader then said that Haniyeh was “one of Israel’s most important counterparts”.

Thinking that either he or I had gone crazy, I went into the dictionary to check the meaning of ‘counterpart’. And sure enough, it was defined as “a person or thing that corresponds to or has the same function as another person or thing in a different place or situation.” It doesn’t mean ‘enemy’, ‘foe’, ‘opponent’ or ‘adversary’.

Let me see if I can backtrack to the root of that error. The prefix ‘counter-’ can mean not only ‘corresponding’ but also ‘opposed’. The late Mr Haniyeh, for all his moderation and pragmatism, was staunchly opposed to Israel. Therefore, decided whoever wrote that news report, he was Israel’s counterpart. An easy mistake to make – if one happens to be an ignoramus.

And speaking of ignoramuses, yet another reporter described a handshake between Haniyeh and Iran’s ayatollah as ‘fulsome’. That word doesn’t mean ‘wholehearted’ or ‘enthusiastic’. It means ‘insincerely effusive’, and contextually that’s not what the reporter had in mind.

At this point, you may think I’m a pedantic nit-picker, but let me assure you that I’ve never picked a nit in my life, nor have ever even seen one (has anyone?). The matter isn’t trivial. It’s as serious as a coffin lid closing.

The systematic destruction of English, whether undertaken out of institutional ignorance or for glossocratic reasons, spells a full frontal assault on our whole civilisation – I’d even go so far as to say it undermines the very essence of humanity.

God gave us the gift of language so that we may give shape to the output of our reason and consciousness. What we are doing is throwing that gift back into God’s face, and the deity punishes such slights severely.

Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat, was how the Romans translated Sophocles who wrote, in Greek, that “Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first deprives of reason” – and hence of language.

We seem to have forgotten what the Greeks already knew 2,500 years ago. That’s a punishable transgression, and the penalty notice is on its way.

P.S. Sky presenters also mentioned approvingly that Home Secretary Angie is considering banning the EDL. This simple idea never crossed their mind: what’s sauce for the EDL goose should also be sauce for the Just Stop Oil gander. And there I was, thinking the spirit of fair play is still alive. 

On Monday, the town of Southport in Greater Manchester witnessed a horrific crime. A young Muslim broke into a children’s dance class and began to lay about him with a knife.

Three little girls died, eight others, along with two adults, were stabbed. Six of those victims are in a critical condition.

A reaction came within hours. A report appeared on Twitter/X saying that the murderer was an illegal migrant who had arrived in Britain by boat. He now sought asylum and was on an MI6 watch list. That report was as false as the criminal’s name it circulated.

Never mind. Two million people read the news, and hundreds of them, mostly in Manchester and Liverpool, got on Southport-bound trains. Many of those travellers were either members of the English Defence League or its supporters.

The EDL was co-founded in 2009 by Tommy Robinson, a thug with a long list of convictions for crimes ranging from mortgage fraud to football hooliganism and a drunken assault on a police officer. Since then, he has shown a knack for organisational activities, and the activities he organises are mostly riots.

Eventually Tommy decided the confines of the EDL could no longer contain his bubbling personality and struck out on his own. He is currently out on bail after showcasing his talents yet again in Folkestone and London.

A curious aside: Americans supporting Trump, those who regard him as the messiah and not just the lesser evil, see Tommy as their own. There are only two possible explanations there: one is that they are ignorant of British realities, the other is that there is indeed some kinship between Donald and Tommy. I sincerely hope it’s the former.

Anyway, Tommy had no hands-on involvement in the riots that broke out in Southport following the knife attack. He was there only in spirit, and it did what spirits are supposed to do: inspire.

So animated, the mob besieged the local mosque and the fun started. Yobs were pelting the mosque with stones, bricks and everything else they could get their hands on: privately owned wheelie bins, parts of the garden wall they tore apart, fireworks. Windows shattered, worshippers cowered inside, cars burned.

When the police arrived, the same weapons were turned against them, their vehicles and even their dogs. Eight cops suffered serious injuries, as fires broke out all over the town centre. To keep up with the fine tradition of such outbursts, many shops were looted.

Three police dogs were also injured, one of them supposedly bitten. If so, this shows that fair play isn’t alien even to our thugs. Eschewing indigenously human achievements, they chose to fight their canine enemies only with the same weapon the dogs had at their disposal.

The masked or hooded yobs were shouting “No surrender!” (a Unionist slogan popularised during the strife in Ulster), “Stop the boats!” and “English till I die!” That last one upset the pedant in me because it was a bowdlerisation of the football song England Till I Die, typically sung at international matches together with the immortal classic If It Wasn’t for England, You’d All Be Krauts.

The police issued their own report, denying the criminal had arrived by boat. In fact, they said, he was born in Britain, Wales to be exact. However, since they hadn’t denied he was Muslim, the mob felt that was a moot point, and they may be right.

Unlike some other ethnic and religious groups, Muslims, wherever they were born, have trouble assimilating, or even integrating, into British society. Many perceive themselves as strangers in a land they refuse to see as their own, and one can’t deny the accuracy of that observation.

Islam is incompatible with the West, even in its present secular incarnation. Individual Muslims can become perfectly British, but only if they are Muslims in name only, not ardently devout followers of Mohammed. That’s why I often say that the only good Muslim is a bad Muslim.

As you may have gathered, I detest any violent mob, whether it’s described as far-Right, far-Left or far-anything. They are violent not in support of a cause, but in search of a cause.

The same people who scream “Stop the boats!” today may well use their mobiles to set up football brawls tomorrow. And the same ‘protesters’ who block motorways in defence of ‘our planet’ may the next day scream “From the river to the sea!” as they clash with police outside the Israeli embassy.

A civilised society is civilised partly because it offers its members many legal ways of venting their grievances and demanding restitution. We can write to our MPs, petition the whole government, demonstrate in an orderly fashion. If we feel the government isn’t listening, we can vote it out. And so on, so forth – I can keep spinning out truisms till the ministers come home.

Yet there may come a moment when people – and I mean civilised, law-abiding subjects of His Majesty – feel that an intolerable situation is getting worse, and licit protest isn’t making any impression on the government.

Such people then decide they have no recourse and try to put up with the situation as best they can. Yet there exist whole swathes of the population to whom such docility is alien.

They are the creepy-crawlies lurking in the woodwork and looking for any opportunity to come out. Anomic violence is boiling inside them and, given the right pretext, it blows the top off.

Such people then act as illegitimate catalysts of potentially legitimate protests, as they are in this case. For, while no decent person can treat Tommy Robinson types with anything other than squeamish contempt, the cause in the name of which they parade their feral tendencies has merit. They give it a bad name, but the cause is real.

The situation with Muslim immigration, legal or illegal, has become intolerable – and not just in cities or boroughs that have become predominantly Muslim. For example, Southport’s population is only about 5.5 per cent Muslim, which is the national average.

When hundreds of thousands feel that Sharia has precedence over the English Common Law, and when many children born in Britain honestly believe they live in a Muslim country, the rest of the population becomes restless.

Some feel new arrivals put severe pressures on jobs and public services. Others justifiably fear the ensuing increase in crime rates. Still others cast a glance at Bradford, Leeds or Leicester and see something that resembles a kasbah more than the Britain they used to know.

Most deplore the collapse of legality and HMG’s failure to protect the country’s borders, which is after all one of the few fundamental functions of any government. Yet all such civilised people justifiably feel helpless to do anything about it.

They may not know the details, but they sense they are up against not just an ineffective policy or an incompetent ministry, but what’s called ‘the establishment’. That term used to stand for an upper-class elite, predominantly Tory, who saw themselves and were seen around the world as the quintessence of Englishness.

Today’s establishment is different. It’s a nomenklatura of Left-wing, internationalist apparatchiks who seek to incorporate Britain into some pan-European socialist utopia. They correctly see any vestiges of genuine Englishness as obstacles to overcome. Diluting such oases with an influx of cultural aliens is an effective way of eliminating them – and any mass resistance to the creeping subversion.

Lord Mandelson, cabinet minister in the Blair and Brown governments, openly admitted that some 10 years ago, when he said Labour had sent out “search parties” to get immigrants to come to Britain.

This outrage isn’t party-specific. During their 14 years in power, the mock-Tories did nothing to stem the influx.

Hence Britons have a legitimate grievance, which is unresolved by the government and taken advantage of by illegitimate thugs like Robinson and other EDL types. When civilisation fails, barbarians come out in force.

My own view is that thuggery can’t and shouldn’t triumph. Any victory won by them is defeat simply because they are the ones who have won it. The cause of controlling our borders is just, but we should still deplore the thugs who champion it. If they are our only hope, the hope is already forlorn.

A Britain more Islamised than it is already will be nightmarish, but then so will be a Britain run by Tommy Robinson types. If our civilisation can’t avoid such extremes, it’s no longer civilised.       

…the more you beat them, the better they’ll be” – so goes the old ditty. Before I proceed, I want it on record that I unreservedly repudiate this sentiment as utterly objectionable (Penelope agrees).

But apparently the International Olympic Committee (IOC) doesn’t share my distaste for the message of that rhyme. I don’t know what position that august body takes on dogs and walnut trees, but it wholeheartedly approves of men beating women.

That’s why it sees nothing wrong with Algeria’s Imane Khelif, and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-Ting competing in the Olympic boxing competition – for women.

Now that I’m sharing with you my tastes and distastes, women’s boxing definitely falls in the latter category. Call me an inveterate romantic or, if you’d rather, a male chauvinist and report me to the Equalities Commission, but my ideal of femininity doesn’t leave much room for two damsels pummelling each other to a bloody pulp.

That said, those dainty creatures fight against my stereotypes with gusto, in pubs. According to a recent statistic, women are involved in pub brawls more often than men. And they take up boxing with alacrity – why, even our French friends’ daughter is a pugilist.

However, as far as I know, she only fights other women. The opponents of Khelif and Lin don’t enjoy the same privilege. Because – how can I put this without offending anybody – those two boxers are, well, men.

That’s why they were both disqualified from last year’s World Championships for having XY chromosomes, which makes them biologically male. That decision was taken after the International Boxing Association (IBA) introduced what the press unanimously called controversial DNA tests at its championships.

IBA president Umar Kremlev couldn’t quite understand what was so controversial about those tests. They were introduced, he said, to expose “athletes who were trying to fool their colleagues and pretend to be women”.

That troglodyte is well behind the times if he thinks that men identifying as women pretend to qualify for that honour to cheat their way into women’s competitions. Doesn’t he know they are women, bred if not necessarily born?

We are what we say we are. If someone with a black great-grandparent identifies as black, that’s what he is. And, as the American teacher Rachel Dolezal insisted some 10 years ago, even having no black ancestry whatsoever didn’t mean she wasn’t genuinely black if she said she was.

Now, you can think whatever you want about such abominations, but I’ll say one thing for them: they’re unlikely to have lethal consequences. That sort of thing may offend the sensibilities of people of taste and conservative disposition, but at least no one will die.

Biological men boxing against women is something entirely different. Research shows that, all other things being equal, men pack 162 per cent more punching power than women do. As anyone who has ever laced on a pair of boxing gloves will tell you, that difference may well be a matter of life or death.

But hey, any revolutionary movement must have its heroes, and so must every religion. Sanguis martyrum semen Ecclesiae (“the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church”), as Tertullian wrote.

The current transsexual madness barely makes it to a pagan cult, never mind religion. Yet it too demands the lives of its adherents as a building material of its ethos. So if men pretending to be female kill a few women in the ring, those girls will die so the ideology can live.

In that spirit, the IOC has withdrawn its recognition from the IBA, citing good and bad reasons for that censure. The good reason is that it’s apparently funded by Russia. The bad reason is that the IBA has those antediluvian ideas about men and women.

The primary sex characteristics are these days seen as irrelevant details getting in the way of a creed that towers over mundane concerns. The chief of them is that men and women aren’t just equal but, barring some architectural fixtures, the same.

This is a self-fulfilling ideology, for men are growing increasingly feminised, with women meeting them halfway. The hope is that eventually the differences will disappear, and if those appendages get in the way, well, it’s nothing that an expert surgeon can’t handle.

This is just one reason the Paris Olympics look more and more obscene from where I’m sitting. That started with the opening ceremony that belied the French reputation for good taste. I wrote about it the other day, but I forgot to mention one nice touch.

By the looks of it, one athlete set out to prove, consciously or otherwise, that some physical differences between the sexes still survive. During the ceremony, he wore such skimpy shorts that one of his testicles fell out for all to see. The public gasped and applauded, and the press treated that testicular episode as a major sensation.

Not as major, however, as its burst of hysterical enthusiasm about the French diver Jules Bouyer, whose tiny swimming trunks emphasised his bulging masculinity. Judging by the reaction in the media, Pierre Coubertin’s Olympic slogan, citius, altius, fortius (“faster, higher, stronger” should now be augmented with et maxima (“…and bigger”).

I wonder if the French have made such a big deal out of this because they see Bouyer as a reassertion of national virility, an asset that lately has been somewhat compromised by their president. If so, more power to them – and to Mr Bouyer.

Meanwhile, the triathlon competition has had to be cancelled because the water in the Seine is too polluted for the swimming part of the event. That’s not surprising because in France, unlike Britain, both sewage and drainage use the same conduits. (A few years ago, we found that out the hard – and malodorous – way in our own house, but I’ll spare you the details.)

Just before the Games, Anne Hidalgo, Paris mayor, publicly swam in the Seine to prove its water is pristine. Now all our Parisian friends hope she drinks it next.

One last detail before I get off the subject of the Olympics. I haven’t seen any statistics on the number of tattoos per competitor, but the briefest of looks suggests it’s higher than one – even if we regard a whole tattooed arm as just one such ornament rather than several of them together.

Treating the human body as a canvas to paint on has traditionally been associated with the primitive tribes inhabiting faraway fragments of the earth in various oceans. Now Olympians are making a visual statement asserting that all tribes on earth have become primitive.

Conversion is proceeding apace not only between men and women, but also between civilisation and barbarism. Actually, the two processes are parts of the same thing.

Can you name a few sciences off the top? Right, physics. Chemistry, certainly. Biology, definitely. Astronomy? Yes, of course.

But what about philosophy? Or, God forbid, theology? No, of course not. These, as any modern man weaned on the Enlightenment knows for sure, aren’t sciences. Because, even if the modifier ‘natural’ is sometimes omitted before ‘sciences’, it’s always assumed.

Science is something that deals with various aspects of matter. If it deals with anything else, it’s not science.

Now, the French philosopher Jacques Maritain disagreed. Not only is philosophy a science, he argued, but it’s superior to natural sciences because it deals with first principles. And theology sits above even philosophy, while towering over natural sciences.

Both philosophy and theology deal with questions that natural sciences can’t answer, nor even ask. How could something come out of nothing? Why did it happen? To what end? Is there a purpose to life? What’s good or evil?

Answers to these questions have to exist, but they can’t be found in the material world. They inhabit a different reality that’s easy to notice but hard to understand. So hard, in fact, that some two centuries ago Western Man decided not even to try. As a result, he became Modern Man.

He lost interest in things that are outside the remit of natural sciences, insisting instead that such things don’t exist. And if they do exist, then sooner or later natural sciences will explain them. All it takes is time. How much time? As much as it takes. Millions of years if need be. We’re in no hurry, are we?

Meanwhile, natural sciences can explain everything of interest in life, including life itself. What’s there not to understand? Life is progress, constant movement from the primitive to the simple, from the simple to the complex, from the worse to the better.

Subatomic particles become atoms, atoms become molecules, molecules become matter, matter becomes cells, cells become biological life, biological life produces single-cell organisms, they in turn produce more intricate biosystems and so on all the way to Shakespeare and Bach. True, science hasn’t yet got around to explaining where those first subatomic particles came from, but it’s early days yet. Give us another few millennia, and your curiosity will be satisfied.

This line of thought inevitably had to lead to the notion of axiomatic progress. Everything is in flux, things change, and they always change for the better. Natural science says so, and whatever it says applies to everything: man, society, morality, politics – every little thing.

Once that understanding of life got to be accepted as indisputable orthodoxy, Darwinism absolutely had to appear and feed the orthodoxy the way tributaries feed rivers. Darwinism was the biological expression of all-encompassing progress, and, since natural sciences reign supreme, human progress can only be understood in Darwinist terms, those of continuous meliorative development.

The needle of progress was stuck in Modern Man’s vein, and he became a junkie in short order, needing his fix all the time. His view of the world had to boil down to the certainty that newer means better. And if reality refused to be forced into that intellectual straitjacket, then so much the worse for reality.

Man’s everyday life is made up of myriads of things, but man himself has to be both the starting point and the destination of analysis. And there our progress junkies have to deal with an uncomfortable truth. While man has indeed managed to improve gradually every thingamajig propping up his everyday existence, he himself hasn’t progressed at all since the time he painted those sublime drawings in Santander caves.

Anyone arguing against this observation will be on a hiding to nothing. He’d have to insist that Derrida is a better philosopher than Plato, Emin is a better painter than Rembrandt, Boulez is a better composer than Bach, Pinter is a better playwright than Shakespeare, the Lloyd’s building is better architecture than Lincoln Cathedral, Kingsley and Martin Amis are better novelists than Dickens and Tolstoy.

No? Then what about morality? Does Hemingway’s morality (“If it feels good, it’s moral”) strike you as superior to, say, the Sermon on the Mount? Does Rousseau’s fallacy that man is born in primordial goodness lead to a more moral world than the doctrine of original sin?

At this point, any modern man worth his salt will whip out his laptop, key in a few words and triumphantly show you the screen. We now have more food than ever, more and better medicines, we live longer, travel the world faster, have painless dentistry and instant access to information. Isn’t that progress?

Don’t ask me. Ask respondents in regular polls around Western Europe. They’ll tell you what they unfailingly tell those pollsters: their lives are worse than the lives their parents had, but better than the lives their children will have. That sounds more like regress than progress to me.

People, even those hooked on progress, realise that quality of life is made up of many imponderables that can’t be expressed numerically. They notice, for example, that, while their parents spent their spare time reading serious books or playing cricket, and they themselves reading potboilers or playing football, their children don’t read at all and play computer games. The rest of the time, the youngsters remain glued to their high-tech gadgets, chatting in monosyllabics and acronyms to friends they’ll never meet.

As a result, they gradually lose the gift of speech and any ability to function socially in civilised society. They also lose the lean physique of their parents’ generation, acquiring pillows of fat around their girth and all sorts of attendant diseases. But not to worry: our better medicine and pharmacology will control those diseases nicely. That’s progress for you.

However, if you say anything against progress, you’ll be bombarded with variously inane sound bytes. Don’t you prefer driving a car to riding in a carriage? Yes I do, though more people are killed in car accidents than ever were killed in carriage accidents.

Isn’t it better for surgery to be painless? Yes it is, though as a result we probably have more surgery than is strictly necessary.

Wouldn’t you hate to write with a quill? Yes I would, though more great books were written with that implement than ever will be written with a word processor.

But all those drugs, nuclear power stations and cars only constitute progress if they are used to good ends by good people. When this condition isn’t met, progress begins to look rather less progressive.

Suddenly we notice that the same company that gave us the VW Beetle also gave us the V1 rocket. The same conglomerate that first synthesised aspirin also mass-produced Zyklon B gas. The same American automaker who pioneered mass production of cheap cars also delivered 20 per cent of all vehicles used by the Wehrmacht, not to mention thousands of lorries that carried millions to Soviet concentration camps. And, as some unfortunate Japanese could have testified, the same technology that can heat our houses can also incinerate them.

Of course, the moment we mention human goodness as a necessary precondition, we leave the domain of material, quantifiable progress and enter the realm of things metaphysical but nonetheless real. It’s there that we see not progress but ever-accelerating failure. And it’s this failure that’s putting dents, soon to become holes, into material progress as well.

Meanwhile, we’ve replaced religion with (at best) religionism, freedom with liberty, wisdom with cleverness, sentiment with sentimentality, justice with legalism, art with pickled animals, music with amplified noise, statecraft with politicking, love with sex, communication with sound bites, self-confidence with effrontery, equality before God with levelling, sensitivity to others with wokery, self-respect with self-esteem – in short, everything real with virtual caricatures.

That’s progress for you, as I’m sure Darwin would argue if he were around. While at it, it would be nice if he could explain why some 99 per cent of the species that have ever inhabited the world have become extinct, and why modern biology shows that most mutations are degenerative rather than meliorative.

Progress has become the faux god of modernity and, like real God, it moves in mysterious ways. But I’ll leave them for our progress junkies to explain.

I’ll give you a few tips, but I’m warning you – you’ll still have to connect the dots. So here goes:

Tip 1. I currently hold one of the most important political posts in the West.

Tip 2. My forename starts with a K. I didn’t say ‘Christian name’ because any link to Christianity is, well, I wouldn’t say abhorrent to me, but certainly uncool. Moreover, my use of such a committal term might offend much of my core support.

Tip 3. I’m a firm believer in a nationalised, universal health system. If it were up to me, I’d do away with private medical insurance altogether, but I need to consolidate my power before I can pull something like that off.

Tip 4. I’m opposed to hydrocarbon fuels as a matter of high principle.

I firmly believe that all offshore drilling must be summarily stopped, fracking must be banned, nuclear power stations phased out, and all energy must be supplied by solar panels and wind farms. What if the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow? Trust you to ask that subversive question.

You miss the point. It’s not about energy supply, and it certainly isn’t about the science behind the idea of global warming. I don’t care if the science is wonky, and I don’t even care if we’ll have to freeze in the dark from time to time. It’s not about such trivial things, is it? It’s about human virtue and a way of signalling it loud and clear.

Yes, my stance may result in us importing more hydrocarbon energy produced elsewhere. But let those other countries show how backward they are.

Tip 5. I think our police are institutionally racist. If you don’t believe me, just look at the proportion of racial minorities in the prison population. What better proof of racial bias do you need? I’m sympathetic to the idea of defunding the police, but, whether or not we go that far, their power to harass minority people must be curtailed.

Tip 6. I’m in favour of expanding the franchise as much as we can. For a start, prisoners should get the vote. Their right to vote trumps their victims’ right to keep their property or indeed life.

Tip 7. This one is less concrete than the others. It’s more in the nature of a credo, a statement of faith. I believe the government should spend much more than it does, and if that involves raising taxes, then so be it. You see, the more a central state spends of its citizens’ money, the more power it acquires over them. That has to be a good thing.

That’s it. How are you doing so far? Have you established my identity yet? I’ll give you five more seconds.

Here comes the buzzer. Ready? Good, let’s hear it.

If you guessed that I’m Sir Keir Starmer, congratulations. You have a sound knowledge of politics, and you’ve been following press reports with unflagging attention.

However, congratulations are also in order if you guessed I’m Kamala Harris. You are right, all those tips lead to me as surely as to Sir Keir. And oh, by the way, my forename is stressed on the first syllable. If you put the accent anywhere else, you are a bigot, ignoramus or Donald Trump.

Here ends our game, which really has no winners. It does, however, have plenty of losers: almost 400 million of them if you combine the populations of Britain and the US. Or twice as many if we recall that just about every other Western country is cursed with similar leaders pursuing similarly wicked and even suicidal policies.

Now on a seemingly unrelated subject: the obscene Walpurgisnacht called the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics plumbed new depths of depravity.

As part of the entertainment offered for the benefit of retards the world over, the pageant featured a scene of 18 half-naked drag queens mocking Last Supper, as rendered by Leonardo.

One degenerate in the middle had a halo over his/her/its head. Another, a man who is probably transitioning (or should be if he isn’t), was painted blue and had only vine leaves covering his genitals that hadn’t yet been removed.    

Why did I call this subject seemingly unrelated? Because it really isn’t. Never mind the blasphemy of that disgusting show – few people do nowadays. But even atheists should cringe at the armour-piercing tastelessness and vulgarity of it. To the applause of the baying throng, that scene throws a bucketful of faeces at the aesthetic picture lovingly assembled over centuries by discerning and talented men.

A quick surf through the net shows that only pious Christians seem to have found anything wrong there. Most people accept that sort of thing as par for the course. But the course is charted to lead to the civilisational rocks just over the horizon.

As all that was going on, the skies opened and a mighty rain came down on that parade, drenching the performers, athletes and gawpers alike. Perhaps God was trying to tell them something.

‘Hybrid war’ is often in the news these days. The papers use this term to describe the Russian strategy of combining military aggression with information warfare.

The impression an uninitiated reader may get is that this is a novelty developed by Putin’s strategists in the FSB. True, that attempt to rape and seduce the West alternately or even simultaneously was indeed concocted by that organisation.

But this happened not in the 2020s but in the 1920s, when that sinister setup was still called the Cheka. Since then that state within a state has undergone seven or eight name changes. But neither its evil essence nor its strategy has ever changed for over 100 years.

Both, however, have always displayed great elasticity in responding effectively to the vicissitudes of foreign and domestic politics. The core was immutable; the periphery wasn’t.

Outside observers who can’t trace this continuity or even realise it exists have no chance of understanding modern Russia. They are destined to remain for ever exactly what Lenin called them: useful idiots.

This breed reacts with enthusiasm to every zig and zag of Russia, accepting each at face value. Useful idiots don’t realise they are being duped – after all, no one has ever done it to them on such a scale for so long.

It all started in 1920, when the Bolsheviks felt they were already strong enough to KO the West with a quick punch. The Red cavalry yelling “On to Berlin and Paris!” rode west, but only got as far as Warsaw where Marshal Pilsudski’s horsemen chopped their historic enemies into mincemeat.

Clearly, the Red Army was too blunt a weapon for what was developing into a delicate task. More perfidious subtlety was required if what Sidney ‘the Ace of Spies’ Reilly called a “hideous cancer” was to spread. And perfidious subtlety was something only the Cheka had.

The first few years of the Bolshevik era saw the formulation of two policies which, mutatis mutandis, Russia has been following ever since: Military Communism and New Economic Policy (NEP).

The purpose of the former was to rape first the country and then the world into submission. The chief objectives of the latter were to mitigate the effects of the former, backpedal a bit, let some steam off, and set up the next round by presenting to the world a picture of ‘change’, ‘liberalisation’, Stalin’s ‘perestroika’ (let’s give that term its true provenance), Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’, Gorbachev’s ‘glasnost’ and so forth.

Sudden shifts in Russian policy can never surprise anyone familiar with this alternating pattern: the bloodthirsty collectivisation followed by Stalin’s caution against “vertigo from success”; post-war purges followed by ‘the Thaw’, which was bound to adumbrate Brezhnev’s reaction, which in turn set the stage for the on-going NEP-like binge. 

But it’s not enough to execute this policy of two steps forward, one step backwards domestically. The West’s support, or at least acquiescence, is a sine qua non. That means disinformation and strategic deception don’t just lie at the heart of Russia’s policy. They are Russia’s policy – and that’s what really makes the Cheka “the essence of Bolshevism”, in Lenin’s phrase.

This organisation has demonstrated its ability to string the West along. Its strategic debut in the early 20s was an auspicious event: Operation Trust. It was designed to neutralise the White emigration that remained a formidable force, especially with Western support.

The OGPU, as it was then, created a bogus anti-Bolshevik network inside Russia and dropped a few telling hints in the West that the ‘hideous cancer’ was about to go into remission – given inactivity on the West’s part and a little help with financing and technology.

The West swallowed the bait and was immobilised at a time when the ghouls were at their most vulnerable. OGPU ‘ops’ were being financed by their targets and, as an additional benefit, the Trust lured some prominent émigré leaders, Reilly among them, into Russia, where they were murdered.

The history of the Cheka is one continuous string of such successes. An extremely abbreviated list would include:

The post-war peace movement, as a result of which Western atomic scientists, such as Oppenheimer, Szilard, Fermi, Pontecorvo and Bohr, felt called upon to share their secrets with the Russians.

The bogus anti-communist guerrilla movements in the Baltics in the late 40s-early 50s, which pre-empted any real resistance.

The detente and SALT of the 70s, during which the Soviets embarked on an unprecedented military build-up.

The ‘Prague Spring’, a perestroika rehearsal possibly designed to test the West’s reaction.

The Polish Solidarity movement, infiltrated by the KGB from the start.

And even to a large extent the dissident movement of the 60s and 70s which too was infiltrated by the KGB, and many of whose leaders are now known to have been KGB plants. 

Secret police was the cutting edge of the Party, but the two were often at odds. The Party was committed to its ideological rigidity; its head was in the Marxist clouds. The Chekists, on the other hand, had their feet on the ground. They were pragmatists and as such always championed more flexible means to achieve the same end.   

The Cheka’s most outstanding figure was Lavrentiy Beria who in effect led that organisation from 1938 to 1953. In that capacity he displayed requisite monstrosity, but also certain administrative abilities. Beria ran not only the secret police and intelligence, but also the vast GULAG empire, where emaciated inmates supplied the country with vital commodities, from gold to uranium.

During the war, GULAG’s economic value increased no end, and so did Beria’s power. In addition, he was put in charge of the atomic project and brought it to a successful conclusion in 1949.  

After Stalin’s death, which Beria welcomed and, according to circumstantial evidence, might have accelerated, he proposed to his Politburo colleagues a glasnost and perestroika programme that anticipated the ‘op’ of the late 1980s in such details as the introduction of private enterprise, abolition of collective farms, withdrawal from Germany, a greater accent on the production of consumer goods, etc.

The objective was all-familiar: presenting a human face to the West, luring it into disarmament, blackmailing it into a massive transfer of funds and technology, finlandising first Europe and then the rest of the world.

While the rigid Party apparatchiks welcomed those objectives, the means made their heads spin, and Beria was knocked off in gangland style. But, as Bolshevik obituaries used to say, “Our comrade is dead, but his cause lives on.”

Beria’s people were purged from the organisation (just as Beria purged Yezhov’s people in 1938), but his plan survived. It was passed like a relay baton to subsequent KGB leaders, from Shelepin to Semichastnyi to Andropov.

When the latter became Secretary General in 1982, the secret police finally got to run the country unimpeded and put Beria’s designs into effect. A few years later the Russian language contributed the words ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’ to the OED. It’s useful to remember that the principal players of that game, Gorbachev and Yeltsyn, were closer to the KGB than most of their Party colleagues.

Gorbachev owed his ascent to Andropov who plucked him out of the wilderness of the Stavropol region, where Gorbachev was Party secretary. He moved to Moscow and jumped several steps up to a position in the Politburo. Andropov, the custodian of Beria’s plan, was dying and he needed a safe pair of hands to succeed him.

Before moving to Moscow, Yeltsyn had run the Sverdlovsk region, the site of numerous defence installations, including nuclear bomb factories. These were under the auspices of the KGB, whose massive presence made Yeltsyn’s leadership strictly nominal.

It was these two men who succeeded in realising Beria’s plan in broad strokes, if not in every detail. At some point their control might have slipped, and they allowed the Soviet Union to fall apart. But Beria’s overall design remained intact.

When Russian émigré writers tried to explain what was going on, their words fell on deaf ears. Western useful idiots sat behind the first line of defence: “What you are saying is groundless nonsense”.

When, in the spirit of glasnost, the Russian government itself released some of the relevant facts, the useful idiots fell back to the second line: “Yes, you were right in factual details, but there’s no sinister subtext there. Beria and his disciples Andropov, Gorbachev and Yeltsyn simply realised that the people wanted change.”

That version is now coming across in everything useful idiots are writing, including the book on Beria by the American writer Amy Knight. She actually argued that Beria (who, unlike Himmler, tortured and murdered his victims personally) cared for the people’s well-being. That shows a lapse not only in historical knowledge but also in understanding human nature.

What we are witnessing at the moment is the downswing of the Beria rollercoaster. The KGB/FSB fronted by Putin is trying to regain control partly relinquished by Gorbachev and Yeltsyn, and they are doing it by the same hybrid methods as those the Cheka devised a century ago.

This will doubtless be followed by an upswing. The war will stop, new people will take over, and a new round of perestroika will kick in – to the hosannas chanted by useful idiots unaware that they are being duped yet again. Another rude awakening will then come with a bang, for that cancer never stops metastasising.

Westerners find it hard to fathom a behavioural stereotype that’s dramatically different from their own. They think that if their leaders are benign ignoramuses whose idea of a long-term objective is a minuscule growth in GDP, then Russian chieftains must be like that too.

Well-meaning philistines are incapable of understanding unalloyed evil, which is why they’ll never understand modern Russia until it’s too late – just as they never understood Nazi Germany until it was too late.

“It’s the economy, stupid”, was how Clinton’s strategist James Carville defined the key message of any electoral victory.

He therefore thought that people voted not so much their hearts and minds as their wallets. This is an utterly cynical view of the American electorate and, like most other cynical views of humanity, it’s by and large correct.

Moreover, this concept easily crosses the Atlantic and goes to work in England’s green and pleasant land. A strategy based on the economy wins almost every time, but ‘almost’ is the operative word. This time around, the Tories floated their economic record before voters and were shot down in flames, giving Labour a landslide hardly ever seen in Western politics.

Such a crushing defeat means a change in leadership, and contestants are off the starting blocks. At present, Shadow Security Minister Tom Tugendhat is the favourite, and he rejects Carville’s prescription.

Mr Tugendhat is a general good egg boasting perfect Tory credentials. He grew up in Westminster, where his father was a High Court judge. St Paul’s School for boys, Cambridge, Master’s in Islamic Studies, journalism, military service in Iraq and Afghanistan (terminal rank major), MP for Tonbridge, good age (51).

He is seen as someone in the centre of the Tory Party, meaning that under Mrs Thatcher he would have been seen as loony Left. But Mrs Thatcher hasn’t been around for a while, and things have changed. Let’s accept that and hear what Mr Tugendhat has on his mind.

It’s not filthy lucre that matters, he says, or rather implies, but principles. And here is the good news: while Labour are “squabbling” already, the Tories stand united on their core tenets.

To be fair to Labour – and I never thought these words would cross my lips – they have 411 seats in the Commons, to the Tories’ 121. Numerically speaking, it’s much harder to establish a common ground among 411 MPs than among 121.

Still, such base calculations aside, every Tory heart should rejoice. All God’s children love principles, and having a parliamentary party boasting such cohesion and uniformity is a good start on the road to regaining power.

Or rather would be, if Mr Tugendhat was speaking English. But he was speaking political, and in that language seemingly the same words mean something else. In this case, the word ‘principles’ as Mr Tugendhat uses it isn’t just different from its dictionary definition but the opposite of it.

Now in opposition, the Tories will concentrate on regaining trust with voters, not on policy debates, says Mr Tugendhat. Out of interest, how can such trust be regained if not by offering promising, realistic policies that would appeal to the electorate?

You see, in the language of politics, ‘sound principles’ stand for sound bites. Never mind policies, never mind issues – just tell voters anything that caresses their ears. That’s how you win their trust.

Mr Tugendhat helpfully listed the issues that are off limits for discussion:

“The ECHR. Gender. Tax rates. Defence spending. Net zero. These are things that aren’t up for debate in this leadership election. Why not? Because politics is about principles and all Conservatives are guided by our basic principles here.”

If we stubbornly insist on words meaning what they are supposed to mean, one is expected to applaud Tory unity on all such issues. What’s there to argue about if they all agree?

Yet I for one would like to see what it is that the rump Tory Party agrees on. Let’s look at the list cited and slide our finger all the way down.

The ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights) is one of the key documents of the European Union, of which we are no longer a member. More Britons voted to leave that organisation than have ever voted for anything else.

Mr Tugendhat, however, voted Remain, and so did most of the high-ranking Tories, who thereby parted ways not only with over half of all Britons but, more ominous, the majority of their party’s rank-and-file. This, along with his dual British-French citizenship, probably means he has a warm spot for all European institutions, including the ECHR.

He now says that, if the ECHR stopped serving British interests, he’d be prepared to leave it. That commitment isn’t especially binding because it presupposes that, under normal circumstances, the ECHR is a good thing to keep.

It’s not and never has been. To begin with, Britain’s historical record on human rights stacks up favourably against every major member of the EU, emphatically including Germany and France. Hence we need neither lessons nor diktats from them on this subject. And nor do we need the ECHR.

It lists free movement of people as an essential human right, which is fine in theory. But in practice it makes controlling national borders much harder, and that’s one issue on which the Tories have lost voters’ trust, leaving us at the mercy of Labour’s open-door policy.

Ditching the ECHR should be one principle the Tories qua Tories should agree on – it should be obvious to anyone other than a rank Remainer that the ECHR can serve British interests neither in theory nor in practice. Instead, Mr Tugendhat joins the chorus of wishy-washy waffle we are used to hearing from politicians.

Next on his list is “gender”, and I assume he isn’t talking about grammatical categories. If he means transsexuality, then I’d like to know what it is that the Tories agree on.

The only proper Tory position is that transsexuals should enjoy all the same Englishmen’s rights, as they used to be called, as everyone else.

But they should have no rights specifically reserved for them: not to puberty blockers, not to surgery at public expense, not to their own pronouns, not to be legally or institutionally recognised as belonging to any other than their chromosomal sex. If the Tories agree on this, fine. But if they don’t, some debate would come in handy, if only for the public to know where they stand.

“Tax rates” is next. Under the Tories, the tax burden on the populace was the greatest ever suffered in peacetime. If Mr Tugendhat wishes to imply that the Tories are now uniformly committed to lowering it, he should say so outright. Otherwise, voters may think he means more of the same.

Then comes “defence spending”, and here Mr Tugendhat commendably campaigns for raising it to 3 per cent of GDP. However, having been in government for 14 years, the Tories had ample opportunity to do so. Instead, they chose to degrade defence of the realm to a risible level. Have they now seen the error of their ways? Do they all now agree with Mr Tugendhat? Somehow I don’t think so.

And finally, “net zero”. There’s nothing I’ve ever heard from any Tory frontbencher about this economic suicide that might suggest they regard it as such. On the contrary, every pronouncement makes it clear they agree with this basic policy and only wish it were pursued fervently, rather than fanatically.

In fact, this commitment to net zero reflects an explosive combination of scientific ignorance and ideological zealotry. Is that what the Tories are united on? Or do they merely hope we’ll agree to cut our collective economic throat inch by inch, rather than with one quick slash?

There’s something to discuss there, but not as far as Mr Tugendhat is concerned. This and all other vital issues “aren’t up for debate”. Nor is the issue of the Tories’ electoral chances for the next generation.

After all, of the potential leaders, Tugendhat really does seem the best. The parliamentary Tory Party is indeed united – in its mediocrity, absence of any principles (much less conservative ones), amoral powerlust. United they fall, and we are stuck with Labour.

Can we please have some “squabbling”?  

The political season is upon us, and though politics can’t be the entirety of one’s current interests, it can certainly inspire ratiocination. And that dangerous pastime can take one in all sorts of directions.

When I was reading up on J.D. Vance the other day, I noticed that he had been raised an evangelical Christian but converted to Catholicism at an emblematic age of 33.

For me, that’s a sign that he had outgrown his insalubrious background and achieved intellectual and cultural maturity. As a man now in full command of his faculties, he must have realised that Catholicism is the only Western confession that’s the true heir to the early Church.

St John Henry Newman reached the same conclusion and made the same journey, although his starting point was High Anglicanism, the most Catholic of the Protestant denominations. “To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant,” he wrote.

People who are deep in history tend to be highly educated, and Anglophones boasting such credentials, especially if they also happen to be writers, tend to turn to Catholicism tropistically.

The list of such converts is long: Dryden, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh, Kirk, Muggeridge, Spark, Clair Booth Luce, Fr. Richard Neuhaus and so on. At the same time, I can’t think offhand of a single writer or thinker who made the journey in the opposite direction.

One is tempted to define a Catholic as a thinking Christian, but that would be unfair to many serious Protestant thinkers. On the other hand, defining a Christian strikes me as easy, but even such a seemingly simple task defeated one writer I’ve mentioned, Malcolm Muggeridge.

In his moving book Jesus Rediscovered, he described Leo Tolstoy as “not only one of the greatest writers of all time, but also one of the greatest Christians of all time”. That one sentence inspired me to write my own book, God and Man According to Tolstoy, arguing that Tolstoy wasn’t a Christian at all (nor much of a thinker), never mind one of the greatest ever.

Tolstoy rejected Christian doctrine wholesale, starting with the divinity of Christ and Virgin Birth. Mary simply got pregnant by someone the usual way, and Joseph kindly agreed to marry her and accept her illegitimate child as his own.

Tolstoy rudely mocked every sacrament and described the Holy Trinity as incomprehensible and nonsensical. Jesus, whom Muggeridge rediscovered, was to Tolstoy simply a good man, and he regarded worshipping him as blasphemous. Nonetheless, he considered himself not only a Christian, but the only true one left in the world.

In that spirit, Tolstoy set out to write what he called “the gospel of Christ the Materialist”. He merged the four gospels together, excised all the miracles and everything supernatural, and gave a general impression that God was just like Tolstoy, if a bit older.

A similar project had been undertaken a century before Tolstoy by Thomas Jefferson. He too practised a selective approach to Christianity: some of it was acceptable to him, some wasn’t. So he clipped the acceptable passages out of the Bible and pasted them into a notebook, thus creating his own Scripture. One can argue that possibly all Protestants go through the same exercise in their minds, if not literally.

St Augustine warned against such voluntaristic arrogance half a millennium earlier: “If you believe what you like in the gospel and reject what you do not like, it is not the gospel you believe in but yourself.”

In other words, the Scripture must be accepted in its entirety. But does the Scripture include the entirety of Christianity? Evangelical Protestants, from Zwingli to Vance in his youth, believe so. Sola scriptura is one of the founding tenets of Protestantism.

But which scriptura? St John, who first quotes Jesus as saying “I and the Father are one”, but then quotes “My Father is greater than I”? St Luke’s Annunciation to Mary or St Matthew’s Annunciation to Joseph? St Mark who wrote about James and John approaching Jesus with a request or St Matthew who states it was their mother who was the supplicant? Mark and Luke who talk about demons being cast out of a man, or Matthew who says there were two men? St Luke who has shepherds visiting the manger at the Nativity or St Matthew who says it was the kings who followed that star?

The four gospels are four polyphonic themes, similar but not identical, that are then woven into a glorious whole with the rest of the New Testament. But who can be that weaver? Just about anybody, if we agree with Tolstoy, Jefferson, Martin ‘Every Man Is His Own Priest’ Luther, and all evangelical Protestants.

In the end, we’ll end up with many different Christianities, and true enough: in addition to the main Protestant denominations, there exist, at the latest count, 35,496 independent or non-denominational churches, all of them Protestant.

At some point, one becomes justified to ask the question in the title above. Does Christianity even exist as a single religion? Not according to Hilaire Belloc, who wrote in his book The Great Heresies that:

“There is no such thing as a religion called ‘Christianity’ – there never has been such a religion. There is and always has been the Church, and various heresies proceeding from a rejection of some of the Church’s doctrines by men who still desire to retain the rest of her teaching and morals.”

That’s a cogent, if somewhat radical, expression of the Catholic view and a profound rejection of Protestantism as one of the eponymous great heresies. By equating Christianity with Church doctrine, Belloc was arguing that only the Church preserves the Revelation in its entirety, without fracturing it into pieces appealing to various sects.

J.D. Vance talks about a mystical experience that drew him to Catholicism, which makes him one of many communicants who were thus inspired to travel to Rome, whither, as we know, all roads lead. But it’s possible to pave one such road with nothing but rational thought.

Other Western confessions simply don’t make sense, historical, philosophical, cultural or any other. I’d add social and political to this list, for the seditious Reformation was really the anteroom of agnosticism, which the subsequent Enlightenment converted into mass atheism.

That was an attempt to harness man’s sinful nature and lead mankind to virtue by DIY means, secular and political. The attempt failed, which John Adams either diagnosed or prophesied as early as in 1798:

“We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.”

Amen.