Author: Alexander Boot

Next to Chesterton, C.S. Lewis is my favourite Christian apologist of the 20^th century.

From where I’m sitting, which is the seat of a reasonably well-informed layman, Lewis was sound on doctrine, even though he failed to appreciate the fundamental difference between Roman Catholicism and Anglo-Catholicism.

His friend and frequent correspondent, Evelyn Waugh, set him straight on that matter in an instructive letter. That issue apart, the two men had much in common. In addition to being clear thinkers, they were both superb writers, if in different genres.

Lewis’s style was cogent and lucid, and he demanded these qualities not only of himself but also of anyone putting pen to paper. I couldn’t agree more: a writer is duty-bound to make the reader’s task as easy as the subject-matter allows.

This raises the question of biblical translations, and that’s where I’m not sure I entirely agree with Lewis. He thought that each generation was justified in translating the Bible into up-to-date vernacular. After all, what really matters about Scripture is the message, not the style. And the more quickly and unerringly is the message understood, the better.

Thus, Lewis had problems with the beautiful prose of the King James Version – precisely because it’s beautiful. Readers, he felt, would be so riveted to the glorious cadences that they’d be liable to miss the nuances of content, especially when conveyed in an archaic language.

True enough, some cultured atheists read the KJV just for its prose, which Lewis finds outrageous. An argument can be made, though, that many of those who begin by reading Scripture strictly for aesthetic reasons may end up seeing its truth. Not just Christian texts but also Christian art, especially music, can use beauty to claim converts.

In fact, the link between beauty, truth and morality has attracted the attention of some of history’s greatest minds: pre-Socratic philosophers like Parmenides, then Plato and Aristotle, followed by mediaeval scholastics like Albertus Magnus and Aquinas, then subsequent Catholic theologians, and of course classical German thinkers, most notably Kant.

Both Plato and Aristotle devoted much attention to what they called ‘transcendentals’, the ontological properties of being they defined as Truth, Beauty and Goodness. They existed as Three in One –what’s true and moral is also beautiful, what’s beautiful is also moral and true – and hence what’s ugly can be neither true nor moral.

Aquinas saw the obvious link between those transcendentals and Christian doctrine. God is One, and He is Truth, Goodness and Beauty. The unity of the three thus made a natural journey from philosophy to theology.

What follows from this is that all beauty comes from God and hence may lead to God. Bach’s cantatas, Fra Angelico’s paintings or Dante’s verse – and yes, the poetic music of the KJV – can lead one close to God more surely than the same message delivered by basic melodies, crude images and primitive doggerel.

Before Jesus Christ became a superstar, our mediaeval ancestors understood that perfectly, which is why they strained every physical and fiscal sinew to erect magnificent cathedrals, houses worthy of acting as God’s dwellings. In due course, they drew in the best painters to create iconic images and the best composers to write liturgical music.

The men of the Holy Roman Empire knew that beauty could act as a teaching aid, educating communicants on the truth, and hence beauty and goodness, of their faith. Then, centuries later, both the art and the music began to leave their original habitat to settle in private collections, museums and concert halls.

That broadened their appeal, and also diluted it. But not to the point of disappearance.

The Erbarme dich, mein Gott duet from St Matthew Passion, perhaps the most beautiful piece ever written, retains its celestial, God-like splendour in any secular context – and reminds listeners that secular isn’t the only context there is. All it takes is a modicum of sensitivity to grasp the divine inspiration behind such music. It’s not for nothing that Bach wrote Soli deo, gloria on his scores – “To God alone, the glory”.

It’s easy for a believing Christian to take exception to devotional art demeaning itself in this fashion. And it’s true that today’s youngsters may not know the Biblical stories behind many Renaissance paintings. Most of them don’t see God moving the artist’s hand. All they see is a combination of colours and shapes, just like modern art.

But ‘most’ is the operable word. Some of them may respond not only to the beauty of a painting, poem or musical piece, but also to the truth they convey. The sublime Russian pianist, Maria Yudina, made that point when writing that “Many paths can lead to God, but music is the one available to me.”    

As for Biblical translations, Lewis makes a good point that until the Reformation the Church had frowned on any of them, good, bad or indifferent (other than St Jerome’s 4^th century translation into Latin Vulgate). That restricted Scriptural access to those who could read Hebrew and Greek or at a pinch Latin, which is to say to the educated elite.

In fact, even in the century immediately before Lancelot Andrewes and his team produced the KJV, such translators risked their lives. William Tyndale, whose own translation formed the basis of the KJV, was in 1536 burned at the stake for his trouble.

One could argue in favour of such exclusivity, if not necessarily in favour of the method of its enforcement. Regardless of the language it’s in, the Bible is more easily misunderstood than understood by those not trained in theology, philosophy and textual analysis. Priestly mediation is thus essential for most believers, provided, of course that the priests themselves possess the necessary qualifications.

In the past, that was taken for granted; now, less so. In any case, it’s possible to argue against the very idea of vernacular rendering – even though, ignorant as I am of the original scriptural languages, I myself would be at a disadvantage. (The only thing I have in common with Shakespeare is that I too have “small Latin and less Greeke”.)

But even conceding the validity of vernacular translations, I still disagree with Lewis when he insists, in a characteristically Protestant way, that Biblical texts should be instantly comprehensible to even uneducated readers. To that end, they shouldn’t be written in a language other than the one people speak.

Now, polling my Orthodox friends, I hardly ever find any who are fluent in Church Slavonic. Yet every Sunday they are exposed, with no visible ill effects, to the Mass largely celebrated in that language. They don’t seem to suffer from the gap separating the language of the street from that of the liturgy.

Until the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), millions of world Catholics happily celebrated Mass in Latin, even though, unlike Lancelot Andrewes and his friends, they didn’t typically converse in that language. This goes to show that for almost 2,000 years people accepted the existence of liturgical languages different from those they spoke.

The Catholic Church decided to go populist then, and at about the same time Anglicans began to rebel, at first meekly, then aggressively, against the greatest religious texts in the English language, the KJV and the Prayer Book. Both denominations suddenly felt an acute need for more up-to-date replacements.

(In some Protestant denominations, such populism produced texts along the lines of “Don’t dis your Mum and your Dad, it ain’t cool”, which presumably would make Mr Lewis happy had he lived long enough to enjoy such prose.)

Since the KJV was Protestant, the Catholic Church dropped it altogether, although it would have been an easy enough matter to make the doctrinally required amendments in the same style. Instead, it produced inoffensive but anodyne texts, lexically and phonetically devoid of any sense of grandeur and rhythm.

For example, anyone who thinks that “have mercy on us” is an improvement on “have mercy upon us” should be taught a remedial lesson in English and have his hearing examined, and I’d even be in favour of public flogging. But at least the Catholic Church has a ready excuse: it had to produce its own vernacular translation after doing to Latin Mass what the Anglicans did to the KJV and the Prayer Book.

The latter, on the other hand, are out of excuses – unless they think that “This ring is a symbol of our marriage” is better than the traditional “With this ring I thee wed”. Empty pews all over Britain testify to the failure of this liturgical populism.

It’s true that people in close, personal communion with Christ don’t need aesthetically perfect accoutrements to maintain that dialogue. But the Church has known from time immemorial that some, perhaps most, believers need help – and some unbelievers need grandiose architecture, a tingling voice and a moving painting to cross the threshold.

Lewis also objected that the language of the KJV is more beautiful than the Greek of the Evangelists and Apostles, who were no poets and scholars (although Luke and Paul were educated men). True, but the people who produced the translation were just that, and they decided that beautiful prose might add something to the appeal of eternal truth without taking anything away from it.

People who insist that church art belongs only in the church display the sort of dogmatic rigorism I find both admirable and alien. Let’s just say I won’t feel guilty next time I put on the recording of Christa Ludwig singing Erbarme dich.

Anyone who possesses even a cursory familiarity with history will know that the much-vaunted special relationship between Britain and the US is rather one-sided.

It’s certainly not a relationship of equals, at least not in any economic or strategic sense. In such matters, Britain is the junior partner if she is a partner at all.

Tender recollections of the two countries fighting side by side during the Second World War don’t cut much ice. After all, both were also allied with Stalin’s USSR, possibly the most diabolical regime the world has ever known.

That alliance was a marriage of convenience, and so is the special relationship, such as it is or probably isn’t. Still, the in-coming US president has often spoken about the warm feelings he has for Britain, where his mother was from.

And as I understand Trump, personal likes and dislikes matter to him. His view of life seems to be circumscribed by “the art of the deal”, to quote the title of his book. Put into practice, such transactional Weltanschauung can only work if the two parties to the deal trust each other, and Trump, who spent much of his business life in the murky world of Atlantic City casinos, probably thinks in Atlantic City categories. Nothing is just business; it’s also personal.

In addition to that – or probably as an extension of that – he is notoriously sensitive to disrespect. If he isn’t seen as The Man, he has to deal from a position of weakness, which is seldom a guarantee of success.

Paying respect or, better still, obeisance to Trump is a shortcut on the road to his heart. Liking Donald is the trait he most values in people, and never mind other traits. A foreign dictator may be a mass murderer and a despot, but a few well placed compliments can put him on Trump’s good side.

This I believe was expertly utilised by Russia’s KGB rulers who put their tradecraft to profitable use. As a result, during his first term Trump said he trusted Putin more than his own intelligence services.

It’s Putin that Trump now has a special relationship with, though that doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll be acting in Russia’s rather than America’s interests. But it does mean that Trump will find it easier to do a deal with Putin than with a politician who hasn’t genuflected before him or paid him fulsome compliments.

Conversely, a foreign politician who disses The Donald (I’m sure he thinks in such terms) will never endear himself to him, and neither will his country even if it shares much history and culture with America.

Morbid sensitivity to slights is a salient feature of any narcissistic character, and Trump’s is as narcissistic as they come. We all hate to see our loved ones insulted and attacked, and that goes for self-love as well. “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance,” wrote Oscar Wilde, and Trump’s romance is still going strong after all these years.

I am not offering this character sketch as criticism, although I do find Trump’s character rather off-putting. This outline is just an attempt to point out the task facing foreign statesmen and diplomats who’ll have to find an accommodation with Trump’s government. The task is arduous, and I fear we’ll have to discover exactly how arduous over the next four years.

For Starmer’s government – I hate to call it British – can forget about having a special relationship with Trump’s administration. They’d do well to have any working relationship with it at all. Members of the Starmer cabinet, including Sir Keir himself, have said so many nasty things about Trump over the years that even a man with a much thicker skin would feel the stings. Or, more to the point in this case, wouldn’t forgive them.

The Mail has kindly put together a small, by no means exhaustive, collage of the insults members of the Starmer cabinet have flung at Trump. All you have to do is decide whether my take on his character is true to life and, if so, what kind of special relationship Britain can hope to have with the US while Trump is in the White House.

1 Sir Keir Starmer: “Humanity and dignity. Two words not understood by President Trump.”

2 Angela Rayner (Deputy Prime Minister): “The violence he [Trump] has unleashed is terrifying, and the Republicans who stood by him have blood on their hands.”

3 Liz Kendall (Work and Pensions Secretary): “Like most bullies, Trump doesn’t like it up him.”

4 Louise Haigh (Transport Secretary): “We must stand up to this belligerent and reckless President.”

5 Steve Reed (Environment Secretary): “The rest of us will show the racist bigot what we really think of him.”

6 Hilary Benn (Northern Ireland Secretary): “As well as deliberately sowing division, Donald Trump demeans the office of President of the United States.”

7 Wes Streeting (Health Secretary): “Odious, sad, little man. Imagine being proud to have that as your President… an imbecile.”

8 David Lammy (Foreign Secretary): “Racist and KKK/neo-Nazi sympathiser… a troll… beneath contempt… a tyrant in a toupee… a profound threat to the international order.”

9 Yvette Cooper (Home Secretary): “Watching Trump has been truly, truly chilling… vitriol and abuse.”

10 Jonathan Reynolds (Business Secretary): “Disregards all but himself – like Brexiters.”

11 Ed Miliband (Energy Secretary): “A racist, misogynistic, self-confessed groper.”

12 Lisa Nandy (Culture Secretary): “Human rights nightmare.”

13 Anneliese Dodds (International Development Minister): “Doesn’t heed democratic values.”

14 Peter Kyle (Science Secretary): “History was always going to be the best judge of Trump and his snivelling acolytes.”

15 Lucy Powell (Leader of the House of Commons): “Can Donald Trump just butt out.”

Some of our papers have suggested that Trump may make Britain exempt from the protectionist tariffs he will impose on everyone else. It has even been mooted that he may sign a free trade agreement with Britain, which would be hugely beneficial to us.

(In his first term, that agreement fell through because we refused to import American chlorine-washed chicken legs. You might say Britain chickened out but you shouldn’t – a pun is right next to sarcasm as supposedly the lowest form of wit.)

That strikes me as a pipe dream, in light of everything said above. But I’ll be happy to reassess my evaluation of Trump’s character if he can rise above his wounded ego to such an extent.

Whether or not that happens, I’ll do my best to separate my view of Trump’s personality from my judgement of his policies. As I said the other day, the policies already revealed or hinted at are more appealing than their source.

My Dutch is a bit rusty. To be more exact, my total vocabulary in that language is about a dozen words, of which haring takes pride of place.

If your Dutch is even rustier than mine, it means the greatest delicacy inspired by God and produced by man: the barely marinated herring one gets from Amsterdam street vendors. But you probably guessed what it means without my prompting since the word is practically a homophone of the English equivalent.

I’m allowed to guess too. And my guess is that the Dutch for pogrom is, well, pogrom. As someone born in Russia, I’m proud of that country’s contribution to most Indo-European languages, and I’m sure Dutch is no exception.

The word stands for an outburst of mob violence against Jews. Recently its meaning has been expanded to designate any riot aimed against any group. However, as a conservative, I’m happy to report that the Dutch are busily restoring the original, anti-Semitic, meaning of ‘pogrom’.

That restoration project started when supporters of the football team Maccabi Tel Aviv descended on Amsterdam the other day. Their team was to play Ajax, a team that, like our own Tottenham Hotspur, has Jewish roots.

The Hebraic nature of the occasion was too much for pro-Palestinian thugs, sorry, I mean protesters, to bear. When they espied a group of Maccabi supporters in the city centre, they began to chant pro-Palestinian slogans and wave Palestinian flags.

Now it’s never difficult to confuse a group of football lovers in any country with a bunch of shrinking violets. So the Israelis responded in kind, flipping fingers at the mob, shouting “F*** you” and “F*** Palestine” – in English. It’s good to see how the English language acts as lingua franca, bringing people of different nationalities together. This is another reason for me to feel proud.

What followed brings back fond memories of mass violence in Russia’s Pale of Settlement, circa 1880, or else in Berlin, circa 1938. Outnumbered Maccabi fans were beaten unconscious, kicked, stomped, clubbed, stabbed, chased around the city where they desperately tried to hide in hotels, made on pain of death to shout “Free Palestine”, robbed. Some victims begged for their lives, some offered the louts the ransom of all the money they had on them.

“It’s for the children, mother****ers,” roared their Anglophone assailants. “Now you know how it feels.”

As anti-Israeli violence began to spread and turn into an old-fashioned anti-Semitic pogrom, things got so desperate that President Netanyahu had to send over two transport planes to evacuate the Israelis. In the aftermath, various Dutch politicians offered profuse apologies, promised to prosecute all the thugs involved, and assured the world that those brutes were in the distinct minority.

That, no doubt, is correct. Evildoers never constitute a majority in any country. However, they often punch above their weight.

It’s useful to remember that card-carrying Nazis made up only about 10 per cent of the German population, and the communist parties in both the Soviet Union and China couldn’t claim such meagre membership even at their peak. Moreover, when the Russian tsar fell in February, 1917, there were only 24,000 Bolsheviks in the country, of whom only a few hundred were actively involved in taking over Russia. Yet that’s precisely what they did just a few months later.

It’s tempting to think that the thugs were mostly Muslims, either recent arrivals or those born in Holland. Yet looking at the scowling feral mugs of the pogromshchiks (do let’s import not just the root word but also its derivatives), one also sees many true-orange Dutchmen, doubtless of the left-wing persuasion.

Courtesy of Hitler, anti-Semitism is widely regarded as a right-wing phenomenon, which is false on several levels.

First, Hitler’s NASDP was a socialist party, flying the same red flag as their parteigenossen in the Soviet Union, albeit with a different superimposed symbol. However, since leftists like to tar conservatives with the Nazi brush, Hitler had to be portrayed as a German precursor of Maggie Thatcher.

Actually, the Nazis only became right-wing in the eyes of progressive mankind when they attacked the Soviet Union. Until then, they had been widely and correctly seen as a socialist heresy. But since Stalin was undeniably left-wing, Hitler had to be his opposite.

Second, parties that are usually described as right-wing today tend to be nationalist populist, or perhaps even national conservative if you’d rather. Most of such parties are staunch allies of Israel, which they see as a fellow nationalist – and essentially Western – state fighting for its survival.

Thus Geert Wilders, the politician of that hue who won last year’s Dutch election, is a loyal friend of Israel (as is Donald Trump). He correctly identified the Amsterdam mayhem as directed not just against Israelis but Jews in general.

“Looks like a Jew hunt in the streets of Amsterdam,” he wrote. “Arrest and deport the multicultural scum that attacked Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters in our streets. Ashamed that this can happen in the Netherlands. Totally unacceptable.”

The key word in that rebuke is ‘multicultural’, although Wilders might not have seen it as such. He probably was making an anti-immigration statement, which is one of his recurrent themes and perhaps the most salient one. But he stumbled on the root of that particular evil in its modern incarnation.

Anti-Semitic sentiments lie dormant in gentile populations, where they affect more people than those who ever vent such feelings. Yet even if conservatives dislike Jews, mostly for snobbish reasons, they are unlikely to be vociferous, much less violent, anti-Semites. One of my conservative friends (I really have no other) once defined anti-Semitism in jest as disliking Jews more than absolutely necessary.

Yet, snide offhand remarks at boozy parties apart, conservatives seldom say or do anti-Semitic things. They are by definition civilised people who refrain from such self-expression because it’s vulgar and tasteless.

Anti-Semitism may not be alien to some conservatives, but it’s certainly not an essential ingredient of conservatism. And they despise wild-eyed Muslim terrorists, which by some dialectical mechanism moves them towards respect for Israel.

Not so with the Left, especially its Marxist wing (I’m not sure there is any other). The Jew for them is the embodiment of the Capitalist, the perennial bogeyman. That’s why many Marxists emulate the virulent anti-Semitism of Marx who repudiated his own Jewish roots.

Such is the tradition of long standing. However, following the Holocaust, many Leftists, those who purloined for their own nefarious use the term ‘liberal’, eschewed that tradition by tucking it away for future use as appropriate.

Enter Israel, which provides a ready outlet for left-wing anti-Semitism. It can now come out of its hidey-hole in the guise of multiculturalism, one of the blunderbusses the Left aim at the heart of our civilisation. The existence of Israel is an equivalent of a carte blanche saying “now you can” to the Lefties, and they grab it with avid alacrity.

Thus the most recent outrages of public anti-Semitism in Britain occurred within the ranks of the Labour Party, especially but not exclusively when it was led by Corbyn. By and large, the more influential the loudmouthed Leftist minority is in the country, the more often will anti-Semitic outbursts occur.

That’s why I’m not surprised that the latest pogrom happened in Amsterdam and not, say, in Paris or London. Even though the Dutch delivered more parliament seats to Wilders than to anyone else, the country continues to be in the forefront of the European Left assault on Western tradition.

The country leads from the front by pushing through such subversive measures as euthanasia, transsexualism, same-sex marriage. And even though the largest party in Holland is pro-Israel, Palestinian flags fly over Amsterdam and other Dutch cities in perhaps greater numbers than anywhere else. Pro-Hamas, pro-Hezbollah and generally pro-Islamic propaganda is in the mainstream of the Dutch press – even more so than in our own dear Guardian and The Independent.

Hence the air of Holland is galvanised with ostensibly anti-Israel but in fact anti-Semitic charges. The slightest provocation, and sparks begin to fly all over the place.

They did so the other day, and Wilders is right to be “ashamed that this can happen in the Netherlands”. Yet we should all be ashamed that this can happen anywhere, where the Left rule the roost.

In fact, I can think of one such country taken over by radical socialists bent on class war, cultural war and in general war on the West. You know the one I’m thinking of?

P.S. Speaking of The Guardian, it offers its employees counselling to help them cope with the trauma of the US elections. May I suggest a lobotomy instead?

A negative trade balance makes all God’s children uneasy. There’s something, well, not positive about it. Positivity is better than negativity any day, as we must agree.

The same goes for a trade deficit. ‘Deficit’ means shortage, not enough of something. The opposite of that is abundance, which is much better, isn’t it?

Exploiting our kneejerk reaction to words like ‘negative’ and ‘deficit’, economists describe a situation where a country imports more than it exports as an economic catastrophe, a notch short of total collapse. And if you argue with them, they’ll bury you under an avalanche of graphs and charts proving that you are an ignoramus in the science of economics.

But here’s a thing about economics: it’s not really a science because it doesn’t go beyond common sense. As the late Prof. Lewis Wolpert argued, modern science always does.

If we look at photons getting to us from faraway stars by unerringly and, on the face of it, rationally choosing the shortest path of least resistance for millions of years; if we even begin  to consider the implications of quantum mechanics, universal constants or modern genetics with its undecipherable codes, we’ll see that common sense will help us grasp none of these.

Economics is different. It not only doesn’t go beyond common sense but invariably and miserably fails when trying to do so. Economists unfurling all those graphs aren’t trying to elucidate the problem. They are trying to obscure it, and probably for nefarious reasons.

The father of economics, Adam Smith, never had to do this. His books rely on plain common sense to explain a simple problem: how to get out of people’s hair and let them get on with what they know how to do best: make a living. Yet for modern economists, economics is too simple to understand.

So let’s engage in homespun, commonsensical economics to ponder trade deficits. Let’s begin by imagining a butcher and a greengrocer running their shops in the same neighbourhood. Most people living there ignore BMA guidelines and eat lots of meat while shunning fruit and veg.

As a result, the butcher is prospering, while the greengrocer is teetering at the edge of bankruptcy. Thus the butcher can buy all the greengrocer’s produce he wants and gorge himself on Brussels sprouts and broccoli. The greengrocer, on the other hand, looks wistfully at the chops and steaks in the butcher’s window, swallows his saliva and moves on knowing he can’t afford such delicacies.

The butcher thus has a negative trade balance with the greengrocer, and the latter a positive trade balance with the former. And it’s the butcher who is much better off.

Extrapolating from a neighbourhood to a nation, the same observation may apply. One country may be so much more successful than another that it can import more than it exports. Its trade deficit is a sign of prosperity, and long may it continue.

I’m not saying that a negative trade balance is always good. But it isn’t always bad either. It all depends on a multitude of other factors, such as the size and health of the domestic market, the quality of the products and services the country offers for sale abroad, and – above all – political and strategic considerations.

Germany, for example, shows how a positive trade balance can make a country flourish first and suffer second. The Germans know better than anyone how to make things people want to buy. Just look at their cars and you’ll see that, pound for pound, they are better than any other.

The frugal French mostly drive their own cars, but they buy them for price, not quality. Give a Frenchman a Mercedes for the price of a Renault, and you know which one he’ll choose. Replace a Renault with a Ford, and an American’s choice would be the same.

However, an economy that lives by exports may also die by them. That’s what is happening to Germany’s motor trade and other manufacturing industries. Its two biggest markets, America and China, now buy fewer German cars.

Both countries find it easier than the EU to manipulate their currencies, keeping them artificially low. America, because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency; China, because its communist government rules by fiat. A low exchange rate is meat for the exports and poison for the imports – the population finds it much harder to buy other people’s goods, while the other people can gorge on the cheap goods they import.

Add to this the protectionist tariffs practised by China and soon to be practised by America on an even larger scale, and you’ll understand why Volkswagen has had to close three of its factories, with the other car makers (and other German manufacturers) soon to follow suit. This explains why the German economy languishes at zero, soon to be sub-zero, growth and, consequently, why the governing coalition has collapsed.

Donald Trump and most of the billionaires forming his coterie, especially Musk, are protectionists. Fortunately, unlike most European countries, America has a vast domestic market and can do rather well without relying on imports too much. Musk certainly wants Americans to buy his Teslas rather than cheap Chinese exports.

Parenthetically, the prominent role Musk is slated to play in Trump’s administration worries me. His IQ is doubtless higher than that of any Democratic candidate, but man doesn’t live by IQ alone. Bobby Fischer, for example, had an IQ of 184, but he was an idiot in any field other than chess, and insane to boot.

While one can’t question Musk’s cleverness and business acumen, his sanity is open to doubt. I don’t know how else to explain his vast financial commitment to settling millions of earthlings on Mars, which is crazy, and implanting AI chips into people’s brains, which is sinister.

Apparently, his role will be trimming billions from the federal budget – and thousands of freeloaders from the federal payroll. Godspeed to him, and I hope he succeeds where so many have failed. But the problem with madmen is that they may be geniuses in one area and unpredictable eccentrics in all others.

Just like Trump, Musk also bewails foreign imports, and both men don’t care if they hurt American consumers with protectionist tariffs if the Germans, Chinese et al. hurt even more. Trump in particular is at his most populist when he talks about protecting American manufacturers from greedy foreigners.

“They do it to us, we’ll do it to them,” he says every chance he gets. Doing it to them may lead to lower tariffs on American products, which would be lovely. But it may also lead to an out-and-out trade war, which America isn’t guaranteed to win.

This apart, I like the early noises emanating from the Trump team. They want to cut taxes and, apparently, government spending. They also credibly promise to make America energy-independent again by increasing the production of oil and also by reverting to fracking. Idiotic and ruinous net zero also has a target on its back: one good thing about Trump is that he sees all this climate nonsense for the scam it is.

The corollary benefit of increased hydrocarbon production will be a collapse in oil prices, which will hurt the countries one doesn’t mind hurting, notably Russia and Iran. Iran will get it coming and going if Trump restores the strangulating sanctions he imposed in his first term, as he probably will.

That’s what makes national economies more complex than those of families. All economic policies can’t be just about economics. Strategic and political factors inevitably come into play, queering the pitch (or, for my American readers, throwing a monkey wrench in the works).

Yet the purely economic case against a trade deficit isn’t as straightforward as Trump wants his adulating audiences to believe. As often as not, it’s a sign of health, not illness. But I suppose no one has ever won an election by giving two sides of every story.

In the wake of Trump’s landslide victory, many world leaders sent The Donald their congratulations, heartfelt or otherwise.

Starmer offered his “hearty” and “fond” felicitations, adding that David Lammy also sends his regards. Nevertheless David insisted on adding his own message.

“Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Trump and Heil Donald,” was how our Foreign Secretary expressed his own fondness for the president-elect. “Arbeit macht frei,” he added with multilingual ease befitting a top diplomat. Mr Lammy was doubtless alluding to Trump’s intention of making America great again through hard work.

“You know what you can do with your congratulations?” wrote Trump in reply. “You can shove them into your drawer and keep them ready when I win another term in four years. You know what they say in New York? Constitution, schmostitution, as long as you play your cards right.”

President Putin also sent his congratulations, although his choice of words may be regarded as unorthodox in some quarters. “Death to the Ukies!”, he wrote. “Say these words and that dossier goes away. Long live The Donald! As the Russian saying goes, you wet your bed, you lie in it. And Donald? I know where you’ll live from 20 January. Best of luck with that!”

Yet it was Manny Macron whose congratulatory note touched an innermost chord in Trump’s heart. He did so with that celebrated Gallic je ne sais quoi for which the French are so justly famous.

The note was on the prolix side, as any writing in French tends to be, yet it was so full of subtleties that, though they might have escaped Trump, Manny’s reputation for epistolary attainment – even in a language other than his own – will be further reinforced.

“Monsieur Le Donald,” he wrote. “I’d like to congratulate you du fond de my heart. As vous savez, I share most of your convictions, and those I don’t yet share I soon may.

“Your every sentence rings a cloche in my coeur, reminding me of the trials facing every leader. You have already served one four-year stretch, and it is testimony to your appeal that you now have another four years tagged on.

“Our two great peuples have been accomplices for a long time, and let me assure you that as long as I am the chieftain of France, we’ll aid and abet you in all your undertakings. Should you ever have problems, you can always count on La Belle France to bail you out. And you can count on me personnellement for a get out of jail free card whenever you need it.

“Now that your presidency is an open and shut case, je sais que the jury is finally in. I know you’ll do your time in Maison Blanche with honneur and élan. Once again, félicitations, mon ami.

“J’espère que you will believe my sincérité when I and ma mère adoptive Brigitte express les sentiments of notre profond respect and amitié. Politiquement, Manny.”

“What’s that frog on about?” commented the president-elect off the record. “Them cheese-eating surrender monkeys can’t even write good.”

Trump’s victory may or may not be a reason to rejoice, but it’s definitely a reason to gloat. The anguished contortions of left-wing faces are precious.

And yes, there is such a thing as a left-wing face. You can recognise it by the smug expression of someone who knows what’s good for you better than you do. It’s Gnosticism without the gnosis.

Nor is it just facial reactions. Lefties are keen to bewail the depth of the tragedy that has befallen the world. Reading their whingeing comments, one can be justified to think that the SS has come back and is rounding up all lefties. Hail to the Chief ought to be replaced with Heil Hitler.

The impression is strengthened by The Guardian’s call for “resistance”. I think the word they were looking for but for some reason didn’t find was ‘opposition’. That’s what political runners-up do in civilised societies. ‘Resistance’ evokes the images of Frenchmen wearing berets and shooting Nazi occupiers with Sten guns dropped by SOE planes.

What happened yesterday caught the ‘liberals’ by surprise, but I can’t imagine why. The result has been confidently predictable for quite some time.

Appearing on a New York podcast a fortnight ago, I broke my lifelong custom of never predicting election results. “Trump will win,” I said, “and he’ll win comfortably”.

My host, a MAGA Republican, said, “Well, yes, common sense would suggest…”. “Common sense has nothing to do with it,” I replied. “The polls say so, as long as you know how to read them.”

My plebiscitary prescience has been acquired not by an exercise of any extraordinary gifts, but simply by the experience of closely watching US elections from Nixon onwards. And extreme Left candidates only ever win there by subterfuge, when they successfully put on centrist airs.

Biden took the trouble of doing that in 2020 and won. Harris didn’t in 2024 and lost. Kamala didn’t even bother to conceal her unwavering allegiance to the NYT version of woke socialism – and her feeble grasp of the visceral instincts of Middle America.

She’d even introduce herself at mass rallies by informing the audience that her pronouns are she/her. Though I haven’t lived in the US for 36 years, that’s too short a time for Americans to have changed so much as to countenance such glossocratic power grab.

The electric-hybrid and Prosecco states bookending the continent on either coast predictably went for Harris. The more numerous pickup-truck and Bud states in between just as predictably didn’t.

Having played Cassandra once, I’m not going to do so again by trying to second-guess Trump’s policies. As everyone knows, he is rather unpredictable, although I imagine domestically he’ll try to do roughly the same things he did the first time around.

It’s his foreign policy that makes me look to the future with apprehension. Trump wasn’t a bad peacetime president, although he wasn’t quite the saviour of MAGA fantasy. However, the West is no longer at peacetime, and we can no longer make do with just a reasonably competent if eccentric administrator at the helm. We need a war leader, and that calls for a different DNA.

Churchill, for example, has few equals among statesmen who have ever led their countries at war. As a peacetime prime minister, on the other hand, he was unremarkable. Mind you, looking at our government today, I’d happily settle for unremarkable, but the fact remains: good at peace doesn’t necessarily mean good at war, and vice versa.

Speaking of Trump’s foreign policy, one obvious development requires no crystal ball to predict: Foreign Secretary Lammy can’t possibly remain in his job past Inauguration Day. Yes, I know our national pride can’t allow a foreign power to dictate our cabinet appointments. But needs must.

Trump doesn’t strike me as a magnanimous type who is likely to forgive the epithets Lammy has been throwing at him for years. A narcissist is like an elephant, and Trump will never forget Lammy’s vile insults, such as calling him a “neo-Nazi sociopath”, a “fascist” or a “KKK type”. Hence the poor chap won’t be welcome at Trump’s new home, and Britain needs America more than America needs Britain. Lammy should start looking to life on the backbenches or ideally out of public life altogether.

Unlike my New York host, I’m not overcome with joy. I’m only glad we’ve been spared the gloom of Kamala ‘She/Her’ Harris at the White House. However, under normal circumstances either candidate should only have been able to enter that building by going on a guided tour.

Yet our circumstances throughout the West are anything but normal. We are witnessing a tectonic shift in political strata, with the centre being crushed by the two extremes.

The seismic activity is brisk: the whole bulk of Western politics has been pushed so far out of kilter that the old notions of left, right and centre have lost whatever meaning they ever had. I’ll leave it for the wielders of such terminology to sort themselves out, but I only hope they’ll stop referring to the likes of Trump as conservatives.

Conservatism no longer has a reliable constituency anywhere in the West, which is why I can’t think offhand of a single Western leader who merits the conservative sobriquet. Yet it’s not only nature but also politics that abhors a vacuum. The space vacated by conservatives has been filled by radical right-wing demagogues.

What goes for right-of-centre conservatives also goes for left-of-centre socialists. Most of today’s Democratic (and Labour) politicians are closer to Lenin and Trotsky than to Humphrey or Gaitskell. And a clash of the two extreme poles is fraught with danger.

Newton’s Third Law says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This law works in politics too because the two extremes see each other not as opponents, friendly allies who happen to disagree on some points. They see each other as implacable enemies and act accordingly.

Hence, when one extreme emerges victorious, it seeks to expunge every trace of the other extreme’s policy. Such an action produces an equal and opposite reaction when the roles are reversed. No one minds how vindictive the reaction is and how many babies are thrown out with the bathwater.

Swift’s brilliant satire features Big-Endians and Little-Endians locked in eternal arguments about how best to break a boiled egg. The writer satirised his contemporaneous Tories and Whigs, pointing out in his lucid style how trivial the political differences between them were. We should have such risible problems, those typical of a civilised society.

The sharp polarisation of today’s politics is a characteristic of a disintegrating civilisation. Ever since the Girondists took their place right of the aisle at the National Assembly, and the Jacobins left of the aisle, Western civilisation – certainly including its political expression – has been coming apart.

The present clash between a right-wing demagogue and a left-wing nonentity incapable even of coherent demagoguery emphasises this point, drives it home with deafening force. Still, as I’ve been saying throughout the campaign, given the two extremes, sensible people should choose the more acceptable one.

Thus Americans have made the right choice, although I’m sorry that was the only choice on offer. The simulacra of their dilemma dominate the politics throughout what used to be the civilised world on either side of the Atlantic. So my congratulations have to be tinged with sadness.

Though he writes about the US election, William Hague unwittingly shows why the Conservatives lost their own: because of wet mock-Tories like him.

The title of his article in The Times, Trump Is No Reagan – We All Need Him to Lose, is only half right. Trump is indeed no Reagan, a truism amply communicated by his name.

But the second part makes so little sense that one has to doubt Lord Hague’s mental competence. He seems not to realise that, for Trump to lose, Harris has to win. Yet Lord Hague doesn’t even attempt to show why that victory would be any good for America or, for that matter, Britain.

Parochially speaking, Trump is rather well disposed toward Britain, while Harris hates her with a barely concealed passion.

Her Jamaican father, a Marxist professor of economics, was oppressed by dastardly British colonialists all the way to Stanford. And her scientist mother was downtrodden in Madras to such an extent that she had to take her emotional wounds to Berkeley. Kamala mentions her parents’ CVs often, and with much passion. One could be forgiven for believing that she regards moving from Jamaica and India to California as a harrowing ordeal, for which she holds Britain responsible.

Lord Hague is so effusive about Ronald Reagan, and so derisive about Trump, that I for one am ready to vote for the former in preference to the latter. That, however, isn’t an option, and Lord Hague’s animadversions are as pointless as they are malevolent.

This isn’t to say Trump is above criticism. It’s true that his obsession with protectionist tariffs isn’t normally associated with fiscal conservatism. It’s also true that he seems to advocate the same mistake David Stockman, Reagan’s economic guru, made by putting too much faith in the Laffer Curve.

Arthur Laffer drew that geometrical shape to show that higher tax rates don’t necessarily produce higher tax revenue. However, when he became the OMB Director under Reagan, Stockman found out to his horror that, as he put it in his book, “The Laffer Curve doesn’t pay for itself.”

That is, tax cuts must be accompanied by a concomitant reduction in spending, a harsh economic reality that seems to escape Trump. In general, his economic pronouncements tend to be the kind of demagoguery that plays big in downmarket public bars, but has little chance of improving public finances.

Lord Hague waxes nostalgic about the Republican Party when “it was in the safe hands” of “the great Senator John McCain” and Mitt Romney. Their ideas were so closely aligned with Mr Hague’s (as he then was) that “the transatlantic bonds of conservatism held fast.”

Add the adjective ‘wet’ or, better still, the particle ‘non-’ before ‘conservatism’, and Lord Hague’s nostalgia would be justified. He makes that clear by saying that “political ideas flow freely across the ocean. Isn’t Britain’s new government influenced, in its ambitions for renewable energy and deficit spending to fund public investment, by the confidence of the Biden administration in pursuing those goals?”

Indeed it is: both governments are united in their wholehearted commitment to destroying their economies with foolish policies based on fraudulent science. If such is Lord Hague’s idea of economic unison, then both countries would be better off each treading its own path.

Meanwhile, he continues to tug on our heart’s strings: “It is hard for British Conservatives to accept that the Republican Party we knew so recently has become inhabited by something quite different, by a cult of personality rather than a political philosophy. It is as if a close friend has died, or at least taken leave of their senses.”

Hold on a moment, where did I put those damn handkerchiefs… There, we can talk now, and let’s ignore Hague’s woke use of a plural pronoun with a singular antecedent.

Fair enough, the Republican Party has changed since Reagan’s time, as has the Conservative Party since Maggie’s tenure. However, the impression one gets from Lord Hague’s dirge is that the main opposing parties, Democratic and Labour, have remained the same.

He is right in saying that Trump is no conservative, although on balance he is more conservative than Lord Hague. But the opposition Trump faces isn’t the Democratic Party of Jimmy Carter or even Walter Mondale. It’s a crypto-Marxist group, with ‘crypto-’ on its way out. Similarly, our own Labour Party has just passed a whole raft of Marxist legislation designed to stoke up class war along the lines of The Communist Manifesto.

It’s reasonably clear to those who, unlike Lord Hague, can reason, that the gentlemanly ‘conservatism’ dripping wet is powerless to stem the flow of subversive Marxism threatening to engulf Britain first and America second. Since real political conservatism is moribund in Britain and well-nigh nonexistent in America, perhaps it takes the radical populism of a Trump or a Farage to put up effective resistance.

Lord Hague is sympathetic to our allies facing barbarian onslaught, the Ukraine, Israel and, potentially, Taiwan. He correctly remarks that today’s world is turbulent and the maelstrom jeopardises the West and hence world peace. Faced with such threats, he thinks the West would be unsafe if led by Trump – and it was much safer when led by Reagan.

That may be true, especially since during the eight years of Reagan’s presidency the US defence spending increased by 66 per cent. Trump, on the other hand, makes regular pronouncements on America’s defence budget being bloated because she ill-advisedly has to pay for the defence of others. He has also said occasionally that, if other countries can’t look after themselves, he is inclined to let them sink or swim on their own.

However, Trump isn’t the paragon of verbal responsibility. He may say one thing and do another, keeping everyone guessing. He may also come off the wall like Humpty Dumpty, and with the same effect.

Lord Hague deplores Trump’s unpredictability, comparing it unfavourably with Reagan’s unwavering commitment to the defence of the West, not just the US. I share his fears for the future of the Ukraine especially, what with Trump’s transactional eagerness to do a deal with Putin.

Kamala Harris, on the other hand, is entirely predictable, something that escapes Lord Hague’s attention. She is guaranteed to continue Biden’s policy of dripping just enough lifeblood into the Ukraine’s arm to keep the country in the fight until it bleeds out. And I have to remind Lord Hague once again that it’s not Reagan but Harris who is the alternative to Trump.

It takes two not just to tango but also to stand in elections. Sniping at Trump is good knockabout fun, and he is indeed an inviting target. However, saying on that basis that we need Harris to win has as little to do with conservatism as does Lord Hague’s career.

Given the actual choice facing the American electorate, I’d vote for Trump any day and ten times on Tuesday (a voting pattern perfected by the Democratic Party).

These days it’s fashionable for supermarkets to list ingredients down to the molecular level. In the spirit of openness and transparency, some lists read like the whole periodic table of elements reshuffled.

And yet I believe they conceal one important fact: unbeknown to us, all their beef is halal. This conclusion is conjecture, but it’s not baseless conjecture. I simply trust the comparative evidence before my eyes.

I started gathering it in 1974, when I settled in Texas where I was to spend the next 10 years. And in that state beef isn’t just a staple meat. It’s an object of veneration and pride. It’s a cult, with the steak sitting atop the totem pole of beef worship.

Perhaps half a million square miles in Texas are taken up by pastures and feeding stations. The latter, as I recall, do little to improve the olfactory environment. Driving west out of Houston one has to go through 20 miles of dung stench, piercing enough to defeat the capacity of any air conditioner to cope.

I don’t know if Texans take an oath of allegiance to beef, but they are certainly prepared to go to war against its enemies. This they proved at the end of the 19^th century, when sheep farmers dared to move into the state.

When I was little, I read O. Henry’s Western stories where every gung-ho cowboy was prepared to shoot any ‘shepherd’. I couldn’t understand the nature of that hostility until Texans told me about the Range Wars.

Those were shooting wars with hundreds of casualties. They were fought for control over ‘open range’ used for cattle grazing. Before oil made Texas rich, cattle farming was the state’s main industry, which is why the ‘shepherds’ threatened the livelihood of the indigenous population.

Hostilities broke out, people died, and the ‘cowboys’ won. Since then no self-respecting Texan will touch sheep’s meat, which I found out the hard way when trying to serve leg of lamb to the boss of my first ad agency. He apologised most courteously but still refused to touch the offensive substance. Mercifully, the supermarkets were open late and I could pop out to buy some steaks.

Texas steak houses competed for custom, but none believed that size didn’t matter. The restaurant next door to me offered three sizes: one pound (for children), two pounds (for women) and three pounds (for Men, always implicitly capitalised).

Not only were the steak houses particular about who should eat what size but they also dictated how the steaks should be ordered. “The management isn’t responsible for steaks ordered well-done” was the ubiquitous sign. Steaks were supposed to be cooked rare or medium-rare, and that’s how I grilled them at home perhaps three times a week on average.

My favourite cut was ribeye, two inches thick and weighing only about a wimpish pound. Once the steaks were grilled, one was supposed to let them rest for 10-15 minutes to make sure the juices spread evenly throughout the fibres. However, no matter how long a steak had to rest, some blood always squirted out when the knife went in.

Now, by that meandering route, we’ve finally reached the point of my detective story. You can follow its plot by buying a steak from a British supermarket or butcher, cooking it rare and then cutting into it immediately – without letting it rest.

Committing that sacrilege in Texas would result in a geyser of blood squirting up to the ceiling. However, doing so in Britain will be a bloodless experience. Not one drop will come out.

You are welcome to offer your own explanation, and I promise to listen. But until then, I’ll be able to think of only one possible answer to the question “Where did the blood go?”. It was drained into the ground because the animal was slaughtered the halal way. (Since Muslims outnumber Jews 12 to 1 in the UK, it has to be halal rather than kosher butchering.)

The reason for this is fairly obvious. Since Muslims make up some six per cent of Britain’s population, much of the meat has to be halal anyway. Hence supermarkets benefit from the economies of scale by using a single halal abattoir, rather than different suppliers for halal and haram meat.

Though I dislike cruelty to animals, I’m not a great champion of animal rights. In fact, I question the validity of the term. Rights are dialectically linked to responsibilities and, since animals can’t have the latter, they aren’t entitled to the former.

I do, however, support essential freedoms. Hence, if some religions demand that cattle be slaughtered in a cruel way, then by all means adherents to those creeds must obey. Moreover, I don’t have a strong gastronomic objection to halal meat, which I prove with gusto when eating at Turkish or Lebanese restaurants.

But I object strongly to purveyors of food not informing us that the food they purvey is halal. If Muslims have a right to eat halal meat, we have a right to know that the steak we buy conforms to the standards of a religion other than our own.

Is this an attempt to sneak Islam in by stealth? I doubt it, and in general I don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories. In all likelihood, supermarkets’ motives are pecuniary rather than subversive. However, something about it all isn’t kosher. It’s halal.

“Their [Tory] brand is broken and they have lost the trust of the British people,” writes Nigel Farage.

It’s hard to argue against the second part of that statement. A party beaten by a 282-seat majority is no longer trusted to govern the country, this much is clear.

But the first part is worth talking about. First, I dislike the word ‘brand’ and other marketing terms in this context.

In its natural habitat the word ‘brand’ describes the image projected by a product. More often than not, it has nothing to do with the product’s quality, price, service backup or any other tangible characteristic. In today’s world, tending as it is to uniformity, a brand is a distinction without a difference.

If you wish to disagree, you’ll have to explain to a Briton why he should ‘just do it’ with Nike and not, say, Adidas, or to an American why it’s ‘Miller time’ and not, say, Coors time.

Miller’s time-honoured jingle says, “When it’s time to relax, one thing stands clear. If you’ve got the time, we’ve got the beer”. Without straining my memory I could instantly name half a dozen other brands that could say exactly the same thing, and they’d all similarly taste of equine urinalysis. (Sounds so much more elegant than ‘horse piss’, doesn’t it?)

The jingle reflects what ad people call ‘preemptive benefit’: claiming for one’s brand the benefits of the whole product category. This trick may be of long standing, but it’s just that, a trick.

Every American knows the phrase “It’s Miller time”, and I’ve heard it used at the end of a workday or even of a tennis match, after which the people would drink something else or nothing at all. This testifies to the excellence of the brand’s ad agency, but it says nothing unique or even specific about the product.

British conservatism, on the other hand, can issue a slogan its chief competitors can’t possibly duplicate or appropriate: God, king and country. American conservatives can come up with slogans, but not those that communicate uniqueness.

For example, MAGA can be used by any political party whatsoever. Not only the Democrats, but also the Green Party, the Libertarian Party, the Alliance Party and numerous others can also claim that they want to make America great again.

But the party that thrashed the Tories in the general election can’t possibly plagiarise their slogan. It doesn’t believe in God, is lukewarm at best on the king and puts ideology before the country.

Just imagine Keir Starmer proudly declaring in the Commons that his government stands for God, king and country, and you’ll know what I mean. This would be as unthinkable as him defining working people or indeed a woman.

‘God, king and country’ is the essence and philosophy of British conservatism, not just its brand. The three elements are arranged in the order of priority: the first one communicates the timeless metaphysical underpinnings of British politics, the second one the continuity of the constitution from the past to the future, and the third one the fusion of both into a properly functioning commonwealth of free subjects.

Everything else that British conservatism may stand for is strictly derivative, however essential it may be. For example, practising the philosophy contained in that triad would mean devolving political and economic power to the lowest sensible level, all the way down to the individual. “God, king and country” goes against the grain of an omnipotent bureaucracy lording it over the people. It presupposes government by justice, not by fiat.  

The three elements exist in a synergistic unity, as such tripartite entities tend to do. This unity used to be personified by the Tory Party, and the problem is that it no longer is, not that the Tory “brand is broken”.

It’s from this perspective that I think one should assess Kemi Badenoch’s elevation to Tory leadership. Because she has been an MP for many years we can judge the things she has said, and, because she was a government minister for two years, we can judge the things she has done.

Will the Tory Party succeed under her aegis? That depends on how you define success.

Assuming, against recent experience, that Mrs Badenoch will lead the party into the next general election, I don’t think she has to do much to win it. Starmer and his merry men will do all the work for her by destroying the country to a point where the British will vote for any opposition, even if it’s led by a hybrid of Attila the Hun, Bluebeard and Jack the Ripper.

That would be the success of the Tory brand but not necessarily of Tory principles. It’s Britain, not the Tory brand, that’s broken. And it’s not some brand values that can put the nation together again, but the sage, courageous and consistent application of the conservative essence.

The Tories lost the election not because they were too different from Labour but because they were too much like it. They’ll never be able to heal Britain if that situation doesn’t change.

Will Mrs Badenoch be able to change it? I don’t know, you don’t know, and no one knows. However, most of the time she says all the right things. Her detractors say she talks too much about principles and too little about policies, but that ignores the political standing of her party.

It’s no longer in government. It’s now in opposition where, barring some cataclysm, the Tories are going to remain for the next four years at least. And a Shadow PM has to operate mostly in the negative mode: throwing bricks of criticism through the windows of the governing party.

This is a relatively easy task, certainly compared to the work of a political glazier who has to put glass in those windows. The task becomes easier still when the government’s policies are as destructive and subversive as those of Starmer’s government, and we ain’t seen nothing yet.

Much more difficult is to establish the solid grounds from which the bricks can be thrown. Mrs Badenoch should devote her greatest efforts to recapturing and rebuilding the conservative soul of the Conservative Party, and it remains to be seen whether she has what it takes.

She lists as her influences Roger Scruton and Thomas Sowell, which isn’t a bad way to start. Thomas Sowell is today’s most honest, intelligent and non-ideological economist and sociologist, while Scruton was a conservative philosopher and, more important, my first editor when I began writing for Salisbury Review.

I can hear the echoes of Sowell when Mrs Badenoch rages against the critical race theory. As far as she is concerned any school that teaches “elements of political race theory as fact, or which promotes partisan political views such as defunding police without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law”.

Prof. Sowell would also flash an avuncular smile when hearing her say that a new ‘progressive’ ideology currently on the rise is built on “the twin pillars of constant intervention on behalf of protecting marginalised, vulnerable groups, including protecting us from ourselves – and the idea that bureaucrats make better decisions than individuals.”

And Mrs Badenoch’s spirited defence of free expression is also something I’ve heard from Prof. Scruton. “Exemplified by coercive control,” she once wrote, “the imposition of views, the shutting down of debate, the end of due process, identity politics is not about tolerance.” True. It’s about imposing fascisoid controls by glossocratic methods, as any conservative will agree.

Just like Roger Scruton, Mrs Badenoch describes herself as an agnostic, whose “cultural values” are nevertheless Christian. This sort of thing makes me uneasy, whoever says it. Christianity is an essential part of British conservatism not because of its culture or morality, but because of its truth. Rejecting the truth while upholding the “cultural values” is tantamount to believing that a successful society can be based on a lie.

This, however, is a minor glitch in the modern context. Conservatism has been secularised like everything else, and the first part of my favourite triad has been reduced to lip service. Still, that’s better than no service at all, and it may be possible, just, for a conservative to be an agnostic who respects our civilisation.

In general, Mrs Badenoch has consistently campaigned against wokery, which is more valuable in my view than even conservative economic policies. Policies can be changed but a nation corrupted by wicked ideas may never recover.

What I like most about Mrs Badenoch is the spittle-sputtering hatred she elicits from the Leftists. Thus Dawn Butler, a black Labour MP, confirmed my conviction that negritude is no longer a race but a left-wing political ideology.

Since Mrs Badenoch doesn’t espouse that ideology and is in fact openly contemptuous of it, she, as far as Miss Butler is concerned, represents “white supremacy in blackface”. Why not just call her a coconut, Dawn, and be done with it? Tell us what you really think — and what your party really is.

On balance, Mrs Badenoch talks a good game, and time will show whether she is also capable of playing it. I wish her well and hope she’ll be able to heal the soul of the Conservative Party. Provided, of course, that there is still something left to heal.

The ringing argument was made by Horace (b. 65 BC) in his Ode: Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt. (“They change their sky, not their soul, who rush across the sea”.)

Translating this into our prosaic realities, it’s wishful thinking to believe that millions of new arrivals can be successfully assimilated into the ethos of their new country. Recognising this, Britain doesn’t even try to absorb arrivals from exotic lands into British culture.

Hence our mandated commitment to diversity, a fanciful belief that, since all cultures are equally valid and valuable, they can happily co-exist in fraternal proximity. Such is the British approach to the problem.

The French approach is different. They proceed from the assumption that, since French culture is God’s gift to mankind (although God doesn’t exist), there is no need for any other culture and hence for diversity. All new arrivals must be absorbed so deeply into the new ethos that they become French by some osmotic cultural anointment.

Anyone who has ever visited the banlieues around Paris will know that the French way has failed miserably. However, a visit to the comparable areas of London will confirm that the British way has failed just as badly.

And a short trip northwards, to places like Leicester, Leeds or Bradford, will illustrate the price of failure. Demographically, culturally, linguistically and even legally, large swaths of those places have been transformed by large-scale immigration so much that an outside observer may not recognise them as British cities.

Simple arithmetic shows that, if immigration from culturally alien places continues unabated, within a couple of decades all British cities will lose every trait that makes them British. But help is on the way, and it’s going to come from the Labour Party, the most consistently pro-immigration group in the country.

This realisation dawned on me this morning when I read Janet Daley’s article If the West Is Finished, Why Are the Huddled Masses Flooding Here?

Mrs Daley seems to believe that the huddled masses flooding here are living proof that the West isn’t finished. Since so many Westerners are pessimistic naysayers, mass immigration must be welcomed as the reassuring evidence of the West’s rude health.

After all, people from all over the world aren’t falling over themselves trying to get into Russia, Iran or North Korea. They do, however, know that “the combination of liberal democratic government and free market economics [she probably means ‘economies’, but what’s a couple of letters among friends?] is the unbeatable, absolutely irresistible formula for maximising personal fulfilment, mass prosperity, and social justice.”

Put another way, Mrs Daley believes – correctly, I think – that most people come to France, England or Germany not because they want to become culturally French, English or, God forbid, German. They do so in the hope of having a more comfortable life. This can be delivered either by free markets (“mass prosperity”) or state handouts (“social justice”).

More power to their elbow and all that, but when the influx of culturally alien immigration reaches a certain critical mass, it transmogrifies the host culture into something potentially hostile to it. This, to me, far outweighs any economic benefit we may derive from cheap labour, and even any pleasure we get by eating in ethnic restaurants.

It may come as news to our “liberal democratic government”, but most Britons don’t want to live in areas run by Sharia law and wake up every morning to the sound of a muezzin singing from a minaret (or is it the other way around?). That’s why the issue of curbing, stopping or even rolling back immigration enjoys a perennial presence in British political discourse.

One government after another undertakes to do something about it, some of them even try, but all of them fail. However, I have an inkling that this Labour government will succeed without even trying.

If Mrs Daley is right, and I think she is, that it’s mostly Britain’s relative prosperity that attracts immigrants and not their affection for Shakespeare, Turner, Vaughan Williams and warm ale, then one may logically conclude that any diminution of that prosperity will reduce the flow of immigration.

Poland illustrates this hypothesis persuasively. When the country had just dropped the shackles of communism but hadn’t yet cured her economy of its fallout, the huddled Polish masses rushed to these shores. Since Britons no longer had either the skills or the desire to work as plumbers, builders, scaffolders and electricians, Poles took over those functions.

However, in the subsequent couple of decades the Polish economy (economics?) has picked up momentum and is rapidly closing the gap with Britain. Poland’s GDP per capita has already reached two-thirds of Britain’s and parity is just round the corner.

Vindicating Mrs Daley’s supposition, thousands of Poles are going back, leaving Britain’s rusty plumbing unattended. Before long we’ll all have to learn DIY, although I don’t quite see that happening in, say, scaffolding.

Since it’s reasonably clear that Labour policies will impoverish Britain in short order, the incentive to come here will gradually disappear – first for Eastern Europeans, then, by incremental steps, even for Jamaicans, Somalians and Syrians. Why expose yourself to the hardships of emigration when you can do just as well at home?

I think that I’ve just outlined the PR strategy for our government, and Mrs Daley must take some of the credit. Rather than denying the obvious truth that Labour’s policies will beggar the country, its spokesmen should turn the negative into a positive.

Within a year or two, they’ll be able to make a verifiable claim that they are succeeding where several Tory governments had failed. Immigration, legal or otherwise, is now under control and in fact some dinghies are even beginning to sail in the opposite direction. Job done.

Jokes aside, the only immigrant group I know intimately and not by hearsay is the Russians who, like me, have left their homeland in the past half-century. While all of them claimed they were attracted by freedom, I’d suggest that some 80 per cent at least were primarily motivated by economic considerations.

Most of them found what they were looking for in the US, and many of them became Americans, or as near as damn. But becoming an American is much easier than evolving into an Englishman, Frenchman or, God forbid, German.

Even Mrs Daley, who has lived in Britain for yonks still reasons like the American she was born to be. Arguing ab oeconomia comes more naturally to American conservatives than to British ones. That’s why she managed to write a whole article without once mentioning the cultural and social traditions of Europe.

I hope I don’t sound like a Tommy Robinson type if I suggest that, notable but hardly numerous exceptions aside, arrivals from what is imprecisely called the Global South can never assimilate in Britain, nor even adapt to it. It’s easier to believe that they can force the country to adapt to them, and in fact one can already see that happening.

Horace was right, as those Romans usually were on such matters. But I doubt the poet knew he was making an anti-immigration statement.