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It’s at times like ours that I regret having decided not to pursue a university career. Academics seem to have so much fun while uncovering new layers of reality.

I don’t wish to create a false impression that an academic career was a viable option for me. As a friend, himself a professor, explained to me 50 years ago, “It’s assumed that every member of a humanities faculty is a liberal.”

That requirement alone would have disqualified me, but I also failed on many other grounds: I was white, male, heterosexual (in those days rather actively so) and, although not yet a Christian, certainly not an atheist either.

By contrast, Prof. Kathleen Stock comes close to perfection as far as academics go. Yes, she is white, but this sole stain on her CV is wiped off by her other impeccable credentials.

Prof. Stock is a woman – tick. She is a proud lesbian – tick. Not only that, but she is an activist campaigning for lesbian rights – tick. She is married to another woman – tick. She is Left-wing – tick. She is a philosopher who strongly believes that ‘sexual objectification’ and ‘sexual orientation’ fall under the purview of her discipline, a view of philosophy that somehow escaped Messrs Aristotle, Kant and even Russell – another tick.

What’s there not to like? More to the point, what’s there to prevent Prof. Stock from having a glittering career at a university? Nothing at all, and she did have just such a career, even having been appointed at its zenith Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE).

Yet zeniths dialectically coexist with nadirs, and Prof. Stock was reminded of this Hegelian insight when she was accused of transphobia, ‘cancelled’ and forced to leave her post at the University of Sussex in 2021.

A year earlier Prof. Stock had the audacity of disputing that trans women (former men) are real women and insisting that “’spaces where women undress and sleep should remain genuinely single-sex in order to protect them”.

To protect Prof. Stock’s reputation, I must insist that such contentious views in no way compromise her core woke beliefs. She didn’t say, for example, that gender dysphoria is the domain of psychiatrists and endocrinologists, not philosophers and sociologists.

On the contrary, she is ready to do battle for ‘trans rights’, just not the right of biological males to use women’s dressing rooms and lavatories.

Yes, she did write that many trans women are “still males with male genitalia, many are sexually attracted to females, and they should not be in places where females undress or sleep in a completely unrestricted way.”

However, she is committed to the sacred cause of ‘trans rights’: “I gladly and vocally assert the rights of trans people to live their lives free from fear, violence, harassment or any discrimination… I think that discussing female rights is compatible with defending these trans rights”.

Lest she may be accused of academic detachment, Prof. Stock readily acknowledges personal interest in the issue. Thus she has opposed the provisions for transsex self-identification because they would “threaten a secure understanding of the concept ‘lesbian’.”

Now, if you still dispute my lack of qualifications for an academic post, I’d oppose that abomination on entirely different grounds. I’d say that trans people have no rights specific to them.

Like all other subjects of His Majesty, they are protected by laws allowing them “to live their lives free from fear, violence, harassment”, although perhaps not from discrimination. After all, normal people have rights too, and among them is the right, say, not to have their children educated by pregnant men. After all, Prof. Stock lists aesthetics among her academic interests, so she must understand the notion of incongruous ugliness.

I’d also ask for clarification of exactly what constitutes fear-causing violence and harassment. These days such concepts have acquired the kind of elasticity they never had before.

For example, does using wrong, which is to say correct, personal pronouns amount to harassment or even violence? They have to be because otherwise laws dear to Prof. Stock’s heart would be redundant. After all, we already have a plethora of injunctions protecting HM’s subjects, regardless of sex, from assault and persecution.

Now, anyone offering such views in our withering groves of academe would be tarred and feathered, possibly even lynched. Prof. Stock’s punishment for dissent from a lesbian position was relatively mild, if unpleasant.

After she published a book on ‘gender identity’, student riots hounded her out of Sussex University. In general, students at British universities now possess powers similar to those of Mao’s Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. So far they are merely driving professors out, not “smashing their dog heads” in the parlance of their Chinese counterparts. But the powers are nonetheless real.

Prof. Stock might have saved herself by recanting but stuck to her guns. After losing her job, she has kept insisting that biological sex is real, and I invite you to classify a society where this notion is regarded as controversial, not to say toxic.

In 2023 she gave a talk at the Oxford Union debating society, or rather tried to. Incensed fanatics drowned her presentation in chants and loud music.

While the Red Guards screamed “no more dead kids”, the trans activist Riz Possnett glued ‘theirself’ to the floor. As someone who used to advertise Loctite Superglue, I am happy that my claims for its sticking ability have been vindicated.

Prof. Stock protested to the Office for Students (OfS) and amazingly she was heard. OfS criticised the University of Sussex’s policy statement on ‘Trans and Non-Binary Equality’ and fined the university £585,000 for its affront to free speech.

According to OfS, the University’s insistence on “trans people being positively represented” and its threat that “transphobic propaganda [would] not be tolerated” could force staff and students to “self-censor”.

However, Sussex didn’t take its punishment lying down or even bending over. The judgement, according to its spokesman, is an “unreasonably absolutist definition of free speech” that could lead directly to horrendous abuses, such, presumably, as saying ‘herself’ instead of ‘theirself’.

Doing battle on the side of Sussex is the LGBTQI+ society. It has issued an open letter of protest signed by 100 academics who are all aghast at such “libertarian” excesses. One wishes their literacy were a match for their flaming conscience.

“Trans students should not be made to debate their existence,” they wrote. “We also refute that this is a free speech issue – disinviting someone is not preventing them from speaking.”

Those 100 dons think ‘refute’ means ‘deny’, and they refute the self-evident fact that someone whose invitation to speak is withdrawn is thereby prevented from speaking. Of course, Prof. Stock wasn’t ‘disinvited’ to speak at the Oxford Union but merely muffled by chants and what passes for music these days. Does that qualify as prevention from speaking?

To Prof. Stock’s credit, she is prepared to insist on precise definitions. To that effect, she has joined Martina Navratilova and the writer Julie Bindel in launching The Lesbian Project. Its main objectives are taxonomic and semantic, “to put lesbian needs and interests back into focus, to stop lesbians disappearing into the rainbow soup…”

As Prof. Stock explained, she is out to assert lesbian identity as discrete from all others: “Lesbians will always exist but we’re in a crisis in which young lesbians don’t want to be associated with the word. Some of them want to describe themselves as queer and some of them prefer not to see themselves as women but as non-binary.”

Perish the thought.

You may have detected some not-so-subtle irony in my description of the on-going clash. Don’t get me wrong: I’m happy to see Sussex University being slapped with a hefty fine for abusing free speech, and I’m glad Prof. Stock’s detractors got their comeuppance.

I do, however, find it ridiculous that one perversion can only be attacked from the beachhead of another. Had Prof. Stock not established her impeccable credentials as a woke lesbian activist, she would have lost not only her job but also any hope of another academic employment, possibly even her liberty.

OfS would have doubtless applauded: people espousing views that have for centuries been considered mainstream aren’t entitled to freedom of speech. That, I’d suggest, is a much worse tragedy than any that befell Kathleen Stock.

I don’t know whether or not Tucker Carlson is on Putin’s payroll, but if he isn’t he certainly deserves to be.

He isn’t the only Western hack who admires Russian fascism and its leader, but he’s the one with the greatest following. And his millions of viewers are consistently fed lies concocted in the Kremlin.

Also, Carlson treats Trump with unremitting sycophancy and canine devotion, which makes him a reliable source in the president’s eyes. No man who loves him can ever be wrong, no man who doesn’t love him can ever be right – such seems to be the guiding principle of Trump’s life.

Still, Carlson can only affect US policy at several removes. Steve Witkoff, on other hand, is very much hands on. He is the US envoy at all negotiations involving Russia and the Ukraine, and what he says or does can literally be a matter of life or death.

Witkoff is Trump’s colleague and friend of long standing, having made a fortune in property development. Such credentials are seen as ample qualifications for perhaps today’s most vital diplomatic post, something Witkoff proved during his interview with Carlson the other day.

One seldom finds such congenial similarity between interviewer and interviewee, this side of totalitarian regimes at any rate. Both men are equally sycophantic to Trump, admiring of Putin, contemptuous of Zelensky and ignorant about the issue discussed.

It was a long if illiterate conversation, and I can only give you a few snippets, with some parenthetic comments from me. The two men set their stall at the beginning:

SW: I think we’ve made more progress again. Look, Tucker, I’m not just saying it – every solution comes as a result of President Trump. And I don’t get paid to say that. [Yes he is.] I say it because it is the absolute truth. Putin’s got a huge respect for the President. And, you know, you saw what happened in the Oval Office with Zelensky and the President. [Yes, that uppity Ukie meekly suggested that some peace terms are worse than others.] Disrespecting him is not a healthy way to have a good relationship.

TC: The arrogance of small countries. It’s like, get some perspective. I mean, come on, how can you imagine acting like that? [Quite. Small countries should just shut up and do as Trump tells them.]

SW: And they’re dependent on us. [True.]… And we’ve been so good to them. [False.]

TC: Do you think Zelensky, the question of Zelensky. I think there are good things to say about Zelensky. I think he’s got a kind of bravery which I admire. I think the Ukrainian military is legit, brave, doomed because they’re just fighting a much bigger country. He’s not going to win. But I think they’ve behaved with valiance. [It’s ‘valour’, Tucker.] But the Russian position is he’s not elected and so we can’t sign any kind of treaty with him. [Zelensky was elected, but Tucker has sympathy with the Russian position anyway.]

[Then the two men exchanged their views on the nature of the conflict, competing with each other in who is more ignorant and mendacious. Thus]:

SW: Well, first of all, I think the largest issue in that conflict are these so-called four regions. Donbas, Crimea. You know the names. [He doesn’t really, and neither does Witkoff.]

TC: Lugansk.

SW: Yeah, Lugansk. And there’s two others. They’re Russian speaking. There have been referendums where the overwhelming majority of the people have indicated that they want to be under Russian rule.

TC: Yes.

SW: I think that’s the key issue in the conflict. So that’s the first thing that, when that gets settled – and we’re having very, very positive conversations – and Russia controls that.

TC: In fact, some of those territories are now, from the Russian perspective, part of Russia, correct?

SW: That’s correct. But this has always been the issue.

TC: Right.

[Wrong. That many people in those regions speak Russian doesn’t necessarily mean they are dying to become part of Russia. In fact, they are dying not to.

At the last general elections in those areas, the pro-Russian party only got between 18 and 20 per cent of the vote. Nor are the people there as universally Russophone as all that. For example, in one of the five regions, Kherson, only about 25 per cent of the population list Russian as their mother tongue. In the other areas, that proportion is higher, but still under 50 per cent.

Second, Russia doesn’t really control these areas. The Ukraine still controls a great part of the Donetsk region, along with the other regions’ cities and towns to the west of the Dnieper.

As for the referendums, it’s stupid and crass even to mention them in this context. Most countries in the world, along with international organisations, declare them illegitimate because they were conducted at gun point in territories occupied by the Russians. Documents proving this are in the public domain, but the two propagandists don’t care about such details.]

SW: The question is will they be, will the world acknowledge that those are Russian territories? Will Zelensky survive politically if he acknowledges this? This is the central issue in the conflict. Absolutely.

[It’s not, not even relatively. The central issue is that Putin has dedicated his political life to rebuilding the Soviet empire. That’s why he committed a blatant aggression against the Ukraine, and that’s why he’ll never be satisfied with merely any chunk of Ukrainian territory. Nothing short of turning the country into a Russian satellite will do.]

SW: I hear people describe this last conversation that the President had with President Putin as unsuccessful. It’s preposterous. [Of course it is. Trump’s conversations with anyone can only ever be epoch-making. That much is a given.]… And there are conditions that the Russians will need for an ultimate ceasefire, because an ultimate ceasefire is complicated. There’s Kursk where Ukrainian troops are surrounded. Fact. [It isn’t. They aren’t surrounded, according to US intelligence data.] And the Russians…

TC: Kursk is within Russia. [Well-done, Tucker. Brilliant erudition.]

SW: Kursk is within Russia. The Russians have taken it back. [False. Since the Ukrainians never took Kursk, the Russians haven’t had to take it back.]

[No such dialogue would be complete without an exchange of frank opinions about the Europeans, those vermin Witkoff’s colleagues call “pathetic freeloaders”. Hence]:

TC: Then what is? If I can just say, like, what the hell is going on with European League? [Does he mean Union?] Keir Starmer saying, we’re going to send British troops. Their entire military is smaller than the U.S. Marine Corps. The country is dying economically. All those countries are dying economically. Like, what are they thinking? What is that? Is that a posture? Is it a pose? [Perhaps I should find my out-of-date US passport. Who wants to live in a dying country?]

SW: Well, I think it’s a combination of a posture and a pose and a combination of also being simplistic. I think there’s this, you know, this sort of notion of we’ve all got to be like Winston Churchill, the Russians are gonna march across Europe. I think that’s preposterous. By the way, we have something called NATO that we did not have in World War II. [You mean that US alliance with dying, pathetic, freeloading countries? The one Trump seems to want to dismantle?]

TC: Do you think the Russians want to march across Europe?

SW: 100% not. [You could see me wiping my brow. If Steve says they aren’t, I can sleep peacefully.]

TC: Why would they want that? I wouldn’t want those countries. [If Tucker doesn’t want those dying countries, then it follows logically that Putin doesn’t either. Right?]

SW: First of all, why would they want to absorb Ukraine? For what purpose, exactly? [And for what purpose, exactly, did they invade the Ukraine? Could it be the same purpose?] They don’t need to absorb Ukraine… They’ve gotten – they’ve reclaimed these five regions. They have Crimea, and they’ve gotten what they want. So why do they need more? [They annexed the Crimea in 2014 and still invaded the Ukraine in 2022.]

[Then the conversation veered to Putin’s sterling personality, so much in synch with Trump’s.]

SW: I was talking to someone in the administration. They said, well, you got to watch it, because he’s an ex-KGB guy. So I said, okay, what’s the inference? Well, he’s an ex-KGB guy. He could be looking to manipulate you.

TC: Says the ex-CIA guy to you.

SW: This was not an ex-CIA guy. Well, they all are, quite effectively. [Effectively, the whole administration works for the CIA. Do they know it?] And I said, look, here’s how I see it. In the old days, the only people who went into the KGB were the smartest people in the nation. That’s who went into the KGB. He’s a super smart guy. Okay. You don’t want to give him the credit for it. That’s okay. I give him the credit for it.

[Funny, my own recollection is that “the only people who went into the KGB” were scum of the earth. But Steve knows better – after all, he is a New York property developer.]

TC: But he [Putin] did meet with you for a long time. What did you think of him?

SW: I liked him. [Who wouldn’t? Well, perhaps the families of the dissidents murdered or imprisoned by Putin, or else those of the hundreds of thousands killed in the Ukraine. There’s just no pleasing some people.]

TC: Yep.

SW: I thought he was straight up with me…

TC: Every American president until Biden has said that. Every single one.

SW: Yeah.

TC: Bill Clinton said that. George W. Bush said that. Barack Obama said that. Every president around the world I’ve ever spoken to is like, they may disagree with what Russia’s doing or whatever, but they’re like, you know, Putin’s a straightforward guy… It takes balls to say that… Well, he is a good guy.

SW: So in the last conversation, [Putin and Trump] agreed to an energy infrastructure ceasefire, which means Russia is not going to target Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and Ukraine will not target Russia’s energy infrastructure. [The Russians violated that agreement within hours.]… reinstituting the Black Sea moratorium on maritime hits – Ukrainian firing on Russian ships, Russia firing on Ukrainian ships. Now that’s going to be implemented over the next week or so… That’s big stuff, really big stuff. [Especially for Russia, whose fleet can now leave the Novorossiysk harbour where it has been bottled up for months.]

SW: And I am saying to you, not because of me, because this was President Trump sending a signal to President Putin that he wanted to resume his relationship together and that they were going to be two great leaders figuring out this conflict… And President Putin, to his credit, sent all kinds of signals back to the president that this is the path that he wanted to be on, including statements that he made.

[But enough of this dry stuff. Witkoff explained that “the two great leaders will figure out this conflict” without asking the Ukraine or those pathetic freeloaders in Europe. And you know why? Because Donald and Vlad are in love.]

SW: In the second visit that I had, it got personal. President Putin had commissioned a beautiful portrait of President Trump from the leading Russian artist and actually gave it to me and asked me to take it home to President Trump, which I brought home and delivered to him. It… was such a gracious moment. [The portrait wasn’t beautiful, and it was painted by a giftless hack, not a leading artist.]

And told me a story, Tucker, about how when the president was shot, he went to his local church and met with his priest and prayed for the president, not because he was the President of the United States or could become the President of the United States, but because he had a friendship with him and he was praying for his friend. I mean, can you imagine sitting there and listening to these kind of conversations?

And I came home and delivered that message to our president and delivered the painting, and he was clearly touched by it. So this is the kind of connection that we’ve been able to reestablish through, by the way, a simple word called communication, which many people would say, you know, I shouldn’t have had, because Putin is a bad guy. I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy.

TC: It’s like a marriage.

[I wish I could continue, but I can’t. My eyes are misting over because one seldom sees two world leaders so much in love. I don’t know if they are going to consummate this relationship, but one way or the other it’s the Ukraine that’ll get screwed.]

This adage by Georges Buffon comes close to being the exhaustive manifesto of conservatism. It also explains why European, especially British, conservatives will never accept Donald Trump as their own.

Buffon, who died a year before the French Revolution, lived his whole life in the 18^th century, the dying age of aristocratic civilisation. With some reservations, it may also be called the dying age of Western civilisation, most of whose salient milestones were built by, or at least for, aristocracy.

Buffon, himself a nobleman, was the flesh and blood of that civilisation, someone permeated with its aristocratic spirit and ethics. The word ‘style’, as he understood it, encompassed both, for at the top of any pecking order of aristocratic desiderata sat manners, tastes, form and morality (often expressed as honour).

Any entity is best described by highlighting the features peculiar to it. That’s why I didn’t mention things like intellect, religious faith or any set of political convictions. These weren’t the exclusive property of the upper classes, and neither, for that matter, could our civilisation claim ownership rights to them.

However, style, as understood by Buffon, was the distinguishing aspect of the civilisation created by or for aristocracy and imbued with its spirit – the civilisation he knew. Now conservatism, as I and most British conservatives understand it, is an intuitive, if post-rationalised, craving for preserving the last remaining whiffs of that spirit.

That intuition resides in emotional, aesthetic and intellectual predisposition, not any particular set of ideas. Intuitive conservatives may gravitate towards, say, belief in the virtue of limited government or free enterprise, but these are strictly secondary. Primary is what Buffon called style, and it’s that elusive quality that distinguishes a conservative from, say, a libertarian or a right-wing radical.

That’s why a politician like Trump is impossible to imagine within the ranks of English conservatives, for the time being at any rate. His style isn’t so much non-conservative as anti-conservative, typologically closer to the extremists of either right or left.

This isn’t a matter of good or bad policies. In fact, some of Trump’s policies are perfectly fine, and one wishes they could create shock waves reaching our shores.

By the same token, Winston Churchill was right when he warned against the dangers of appeasing Hitler. Churchill was alert to the catastrophic potential of Nazism at a time when many of his class had different ideas.

Like-minded Americans, those who deplored Charles Lindbergh and other quasi-fascist admirers of the strong German leader, couldn’t understand why Churchill didn’t climb on every available Westminster rooftop and scream defiance at the top of his lungs.

Those Americans understood politics, but they didn’t understand the English national character and hence the nature of English conservatism. As Margaret Thatcher said two generations later, “When you scream, no one will hear you”.

I’m not sure she was an intuitive conservative, but Churchill certainly was. He had the oratorial talent to rouse the masses, but he could deploy it only when the masses issued an explicit licence for him to do so. Speaking out of turn in, say, 1936 or 1937, would have offended the innate reserve of the English conservative character, its sense of style.

Churchill sensed that because he was a true conservative (even though some of his ideas wouldn’t be welcomed by many political conservatives of today). So he spoke sotto voce until the people made it clear they were ready to listen to more thunderous deliveries.

It’s against this background that one can read Lord Sumption’s article about Trump in today’s Mail. I must say straight away that I don’t think the article is especially good. Lord Sumption is one of our top jurists, but his grasp of political realities, especially American ones, isn’t exactly vice-like.

But his visceral antipathy to Trump is both typical of English conservatives and can even be described as their hallmark. This is what Lord Sumption writes:

“No nation can make itself great again by choosing a leader who would be a figure of fun if he were not so powerful: an incoherent mountebank and serial liar with a string of corporate bankruptcies, sexual assault allegations and a fraud conviction to his name. Yet that is what has happened in the United States.

“There have been other American demagogues: think Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace or Barry Goldwater. These people had some simple, fixed ideas, generally based on a limited understanding. Their response to perceived obstacles was to lash out against any one in their way. Trump is cast in the same mould: Charismatic, divisive, extreme, autocratic. His trademarks are scapegoating, lies and personal abuse. The Mussolinian scowl, chin forward, says it all.”

Barry Goldwater doesn’t belong in this company, and the other characters Lord Sumption mentions may indeed have been demagogues, but that’s the only thing they have in common with one another or indeed Donald Trump.

Notice, however, that Lord Sumption isn’t discussing any of Trump’s policies. He mostly talks about style, finding none of the conservative variety in his subject.

A parallel with Joseph McCarthy is interesting. In 1963, William F. Buckley published the book The Committee and its Critics about McCarthy’s crusade against communist infiltration. Its main point was that McCarthy was essentially right and more sinned against than sinning.

By the time the book came out, McCarthy had been dead for six years and a torrent of new information had come to light. The late senator was vindicated: there had indeed been a massive infiltration of American political and cultural institutions by witting and unwitting agents of the Soviet espionage services.

English conservatives knew this, and still rejected McCarthy for the same reasons their descendants today reject Trump. They sense something profoundly non-conservative in any shrill demagoguery, regardless of whether or not it has a point.

Buckley’s exchange with Evelyn Waugh, the quintessential English conservative, was telling. Buckley sent a copy of his book to Waugh and asked him to review it in National Review, the magazine Buckley had founded and turned into the best journal of this kind I’ve ever read (oh the good old days).

Buckley offered a fee far in excess of his magazine’s norm, but it was still paltry by Waugh’s standards who turned it down “until such time that you become much richer, which I hope will happen soon, or I become much poorer, which I fear will happen sooner.”

Above all, Waugh refused to write about McCarthy even though he felt Buckley had made his point well:

“McCarthy is certainly regarded by most Englishmen as a regrettable figure and your [book], being written before his later extravagances, will not go far to clear his reputation… Your book makes plain that there was a need for investigation ten years ago. It does not, I am afraid, supply me with the information that would convince me that McCarthy was a suitable man to undertake it.”

Now, Buckley himself was largely a cultural, intuitive conservative in the English mould, perhaps partly because he had been educated at an English public school. That’s why I’m sure he understood Waugh’s rejection, much as he might have regretted it.

Yet, to paraphrase Lord Sumption’s colleague of centuries ago, the air of British conservatism is too pure for vulgar loud-mouthed demagogues to breathe. Whether they are right or wrong doesn’t change things: their style disqualifies them as conservatives.

This brings into question their link with Western civilisation, which was after all born in Europe and, in its conservative incarnation, perfected in Britain. It also explains why Trump will come a cropper if he ever looks for allies among British conservatives – especially those who have pondered Buffon’s maxim in depth.

With a few minor exceptions, all English nouns denoting inanimate objects are gender-neutral. A husband is a he, his wife is a she, but their house and everything in it is an it.

That’s one reason English speakers struggle with perverse foreign tongues like French. How on earth are we supposed to know that in French the table is feminine and the bed is masculine? If those people had anything important to say, they’d say it in English anyway.

And if you think that someone who, like me, grew up speaking a gendered language doesn’t have such problems, you are mistaken.

Yes, Russian nouns have three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter. So does German. So does Latin. French and Italian each have two. The trouble is that the same object may be masculine in one language and feminine in another.

The Russian table is a man and the Russian bed is a woman, but in French it’s the other way around. So how does speaking Russian help me figure out noun genders in French? No, I’ll stick to the comfortably uncontroversial English – “neither male nor female”, as St Paul said in a different context.

You’ll notice that I’ve barely scratched the surface of the pitfalls inherent to gendered languages. The pitfalls I mentioned are quite shallow anyway: what does it matter if I say le table to my French friends? They’ll know I mean la table and make allowances for my barbaric (meaning non-French) heritage.

No, the real problem is that gender-specific nouns, hell, gender-specific anything, can traumatise a non-binary person for life. Such a person’s reaction to binary nouns is unpredictable. He/she/it may just wince and keep going, or he/she/it may have a fit, complete with convulsions, frothing at the mouth and rolling on the floor.

But even if it’s only the former, something needs to be done to avoid offence. That’s why, if we have to use a gendered language, we must de-genderise it, as I’m sure you’ll agree.

Fine. We are all agreed in principle. But then comes that annoying ‘how’ question that can defeat many a worthy intention. If all major languages except English are gendered, how can we correct that problem? After all, we have no authority to tell those foreigners how to speak their own tongues, do we?

(The English Football League once punished a Uruguayan player for calling his Uruguayan friend negro, which in River Plate Spanish is an affectionate term free of racial connotations. Alas, such powers over foreign tongues can’t be exercised beyond our borders. Not yet anyway.)

The title above points to one solution, but I’m man enough to realise that idea is impractical. Foreigners tend to be stubborn creatures, and they’ll continue to eat at their feminine tables and sleep in their masculine beds. Nothing much we can do about that.

True? False, says our oldest university. There’s plenty to be done, and we can start with Latin, all of whose native speakers are too dead to object.

Since the 12^th century, degrees at Oxford University have been conferred in Latin, and here an alarm bell must sound in your head. For Latin is a gendered language, meaning potentially offensive to non-binary students.

As founder and chairman of the Charles Martel Society for Diversity, I’m pleased to see that the administration of that august institution is alert to the potential for causing acute distress.

That’s why Oxford’s faculties have been told that it’s “necessary” to introduce the first gender-neutral ceremony in the university’s history. Not advisable, not desirable – necessary, sic. Well, they do say necessity is a mother.

It’s necessary, says the administration, to expurgate all gendered masculine and feminine nouns from the ceremonial text, especially the masculine ones because they can offend a broader group. Yet some such words, one might think, must be rather hard to dispense with.

For example, students receiving their master’s degrees are called magistri in Latin, which word is offensively masculine – as is the word doctores designating recipients of the higher degree. The problem seems insurmountable but, as Lenin said, there are no fortresses that Bolsheviks can’t capture. The same applies to the Bolsheviks’ descendants at our oldest university.

My suggestion is that, rather than castrating Latin, it should be abolished altogether, especially since this language is both dead and, well, elitist.

I’m proud that, for once, my idea is shared by our Labour government. It has cut the £4-million Latin Excellence Programme, citing elitism as the reason. Latin will no longer be taught in state schools, which is a good start. But let’s not stop there: there exist other elitist subjects begging for the chop.

Correct English grammar is one such, but then we needn’t bother about that: it hasn’t been taught at state schools for quite some time, if the way people speak is any indication. Although I imagine Oxford students are still encouraged to avoid solecisms, I wouldn’t be surprised if they weren’t.

After all, academic authorities have more important things to worry about. Our Russell Group institutions, comprising 27 best universities, are busily queering the pitch by, in their parlance, “queering the curricula” to make them kinder to non-binary students.

When I was younger, the word ‘queer’ was considered rude and derogatory but, as any illiterate person will tell you, languages develop. Thus, homosexual and transsexual activists have “reclaimed” the word and now use it as an “empowerment” term.

I’m glad they call it that because it emphasises that such bowdlerising is a weapon in a struggle for power. Alas, the struggle is quite one-sided, with sanity ceding its positions without a fight.

Thus the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS University of London), has instructed its staff to “embed trans, non-binary and intersex awareness into their curriculum” and invite guest lecturers who are “trans, non-binary or intersex”.

And a couple of years ago, York University’s English department held a seminar to “celebrate ways of queering the curriculum”, including studying “encounter LGBTQ+ writers from across history”. That initiative ought to be expanded to all Russell Group universities, with only such writers to be studied.

That would mean, among other wonderful things, eliminating such hopelessly binary subjects as theology. After all, it’s hard to avoid the lamentable fact that the New Testament was written in Greek, where the word Theos is masculine – which is logical since it stands for God the Father, not God the Non-Binary Parent.

The Old Testament is equally culpable, which Jesus proved by using the Aramaic word Abba when asking God to forgive his torturers. So there goes theology, and good riddance too. Such colonising subjects can get in the way of queering the curricula, and we can’t have that, can we?

It’s good to see that progress is proceeding apace. Our smithies of academically trained intellects are forging minds perfectly trained to demolish whatever little is left of our civilisation. And they are doing a sterling job.  

President Trump described his long phone chat with Putin as “very good and productive”. ‘Good’ is a matter of taste, but ‘productive’ means something specific: delivering a tangible result.

True enough, the 2.5 hours the two men spent on the phone did produce a positive outcome. They agreed to hold an ice hockey match involving American and Russian players plying their trade in the NHL and KHL.

Now I’ve heard of jolly hockey sticks, but this is ridiculous. What the puck?

First, even mentioning such trivia is beyond crass when at stake is the future of a nation (the Ukraine) or even a continent (Europe). Second, neither league had been asked if the idea appealed to them.

The KHL is run by Russia, so its agreement can be taken for granted. But the NHL is an independent organisation, not a poodle at Trump’s beck and call. Should its bosses say no, I’d be curious to see how Trump can manage to twist their arm.

Sorry to take up your time with such nonsense. I doubt you have much interest in ice hockey, and I know for certain I don’t. I am, however, keenly interested in translation, especially the kind that involves my two main languages.

The press offices of both presidents have issued statements summing up the exchange. The Russian version is three times as long, and Putin is the subject of almost every sentence, as in “President Putin expressed…”, “President Putin agreed…” or “President Putin declared…”

By contrast, the White House press release prefers going plural: “Both leaders agreed…”, “The leaders spoke…”. “They further discussed…” and so on.

This conveys the impression of two minds in perfect accord, two hearts beating as one. So they must have been, on a subliminal level. Yet such imponderables are beyond me and I’d guess you as well. So let’s concentrate on the substance of what came out, shall we?

The next day The Times ran a headline to the effect that a ceasefire had been agreed. That’s the kind of waste that’s made by haste. Had the editors taken a minute to read the two statements, they would have known that no such agreement had taken place. What did then?

Here I invite you to compare two statements on the only concrete understanding reached. Both refer to exactly the same thing, with the first one coming from the White House and the second from the Kremlin, in my word-for-word translation.

Statement One: “The leaders agreed that the movement to peace will begin with an energy and infrastructure ceasefire…”

Statement Two: “During the talk Donald Trump put forth a proposal on the mutual agreement between the two sides to cease… strikes on energy infrastructure targets… Vladimir Putin responded to that initiative positively and immediately issued an appropriate order.”

If you compare the two highlighted phrases, they differ in only one tiny word, the conjunction ‘and’. Yet that’s a world of difference.

The American version talks about a ceasefire covering all infrastructure targets, including the energy ones. The Russian version talks about energy targets only.

Granted, this is just useless pedantry because the Russians weren’t going to abide by any such agreement. And, if Putin indeed “issued an appropriate order”, it wasn’t obeyed.

The very next day, Russian missiles hit civilian targets, killing several people and destroying a hospital at Sumy. Come to think of it, they were following the letter of the agreement, as they interpreted it. A hospital may be part of infrastructure, but not of energy infrastructure. For want of a conjunction a hospital was lost.

The Ukrainians’ response showed they knew exactly what that statement was worth, with or without the conjunction. They immediately struck at a Russian oil refinery and set it alight.

The German defence minister Boris Pistorius sarcastically pointed out that attacks had “not eased at all in the first night after this supposedly ground-breaking, great phone call”. After that the Bundestag commendably voted for a massive rearmament programme, something I’ll believe when I see it.

The Kremlin press release also mentioned Putin’s conditions for a full ceasefire, something that the American version tactfully omitted.

First, opting for the passive voice the Russian version said: “Also pointed out [by whom?] were the serious risks springing from the untrustworthiness of the Kiev regime that had sabotaged and broken numerous prior agreements. Attention was also drawn [by whom?] to the barbaric crimes of a terrorist nature committed by Ukrainian militants against the civilian population of the Kursk region.”

It’s beyond my modest talents to comment on the cynicism of this remark, coming as it is from a country that has broken every treaty she has ever signed, and one whose troops have cut a murdering, looting, torturing and raping swath through the Ukraine. And if Ukrainian soldiers are ‘terrorists’ and ‘militants’, what are the Russian troops? Peacemakers?

So let’s just continue to read those passive-voiced remarks: “It has been stressed [by whom?] that the key condition for preventing the escalation of the conflict and working towards its politico-diplomatic resolution must be a total cessation in the flow of foreign military aid and intelligence data to Kiev… [and also of] Ukrainian rearmament and press-ganging…”.

This long sentence can be summed up with a single word: capitulation. That’s exactly what a 30-day ceasefire would amount to if only Russia were allowed to use it for rearming and remobilising, while the Ukraine patiently waited for a new assault on her sovereignty.

In general, the effusive Russian soul was more generous with information than the taciturn Yankee character. Thus, “The President of Russia also reacted positively to Donald Trump’s proposal on implementing the initiative concerning the safety of navigation in the Black Sea.”

That’s big of Putin. You see, his Black Sea Fleet is bottled up in the Novorossiysk harbour. Whenever a ship ventures out, she is immediately sunk by a Ukrainian drone boat. What the Kremlin thus means is that Trump’s “initiative” would provide safety specifically for Russian navigation. That’s another key word omitted, and I hope Putin thanked Trump for that idea.

You’ll notice that I often focus your attention on translation issues. This is valid because the two chaps don’t speak each other’s languages and hence have to rely on interpreters.

As the Russian journalist Babchenko pointed out the other day, Trump’s interpreters often fail to convey certain intonational nuances. Whether they do so deliberately or because their understanding of Russian isn’t good enough is immaterial. The important thing is that Putin’s habitual sarcasm towards Trump doesn’t come across.

For example, at the 2019 G-20 summit at Osaka, Putin bragged about his hypersonic missiles. Trump replied: “Oh I’d love to get those”. Putin commented with a sly smile: “Yes, they’ll be coming your way for sure.” That came across as a promise to share military technology.

Then the conversation veered towards the Middle East. True to character, Trump boasted, “No one has done more for Israel than I,” and then proceeded to list his accomplishments. Putin listened and then remarked with the sarcasm that would have been caught by any native speaker of Russian: “Well done, Donald. Perhaps the Israelis should rename their country after you?”

Yet the interpreter conveyed the text but not the mocking subtext. Hence Trump replied in all seriousness: “No, that would be too much”. One could sense though that the idea appealed to him.

One other thing is worth mentioning. Committing the NHL to hockey diplomacy without prior consultation is tactless but not scandalous. Deciding the fate of the Ukraine in particular and Europe in general without either party participating in the discussions is both – and quite a few other things besides.

I wish the West were represented in such negotiations more comprehensively and by someone with a less rebarbative personality than Trump’s. But my wishes are as likely to be considered as my interpreting services.

This sounds like a truism not worth mentioning. But of course things like, say, family, health, inner peace, perhaps even a search for truth are more important than money.

And even the crassest of materialists may hold something so dear that he’d put it before riches. Yet for some institutions money is their raison d’être, and they don’t even bother to pretend otherwise.

You don’t expect, for example, a local branch of your bank to exhibit the slogan “Neither a lender nor a borrower be”. But then Polonius offered that advice to Laertes, not Shylock. And St Paul’s statement that “the love of money is the root of all evil” isn’t likely to be inscribed on NatWest’s mission statement either.

Advertising is another institution solely dedicated to commercial gain. When I ran creative departments at various agencies, I kept telling my younger charges that we weren’t paid to keep the sales message secret.

If you do nothing else, I’d say, just state the reason to buy your product. If you can do so in a catchy and interesting way, so much the better. But don’t sacrifice the selling proposition for the sake of being cute.

Had I quoted St Paul’s comment to my unhappy clients, they wouldn’t have remained my clients. Their own jobs hinged on profits, and hence so did mine.

However, like every advertising creative in history, I hated research. I kept telling my clients that after decades in the business I didn’t need a focus group of old women to tell me if my ads were any good. That was an argument I never once managed to win.

Clients wanted to cover the lower part of their anatomy with more than just trousers. If a campaign researched well but then bombed, they had a ready excuse. There would have been none had they trusted my instincts and they proved unreliable.

So they pumped untold millions into first researching their choice of target audience, then the message the audience would find persuasive, then the best ways of communicating that message.

Each stage cost more money than they had left in the budget actually to produce the campaign, but they didn’t mind. When I screamed that advertising wasn’t an exact science, they’d reply that it bloody well should be – and would be on their watch.

Choosing the right target audience was vital of course. If you advertise, say, Big Macs to an A+ group, you might as well pile up a few million quid and have yourself a nice bonfire. Conversely, trying to sell £100,000 cars in the commercial breaks during a darts competition would be tantamount to tossing money into the bin.

Hence, if an ad was to show ecstatic customers whose lives acquired a whole new meaning due to their choice of toothpaste, one could be sure that the demographic breakdown of the models reflected hundreds of thousands spent on research. Race was one characteristic investigated to death.

If research showed that 75 per cent of the target audience were, say, white B+ and the rest black or Indian, then three out of the four happy faces shown were unmistakably Anglo. Yet it wasn’t always straightforward.

Back in New York I once worked on a hygienic product whose buyers were predominantly black women. Yet research showed that a white model would work better because the target audience would see that choice as aspirational. In the end, we backlit the model so severely that her race was indeterminate.

That, however, was an exception. Typically, I was able to cast a quick look at a TV commercial and give you the exact demographic breakdown of the target audience, as determined by marketing research.

Notice that I used the past tense: I can no longer boast that ability. Advertisers don’t seem to base their choice of target audience on strictly commercial or otherwise rational factors. They’ve abandoned their crass materialism, at least when it comes to advertising.

That’s why about 60 per cent of the models shown in TV commercial and print ads are black – irrespective of the advertised brand. Now, blacks make up 3.7 per cent of the UK population, and I for one find it hard to believe that their purchasing power is so Herculean that they make up 60 per cent of every market.

They don’t. Therefore advertisers forgo vulgar commercial concerns for the sake of higher, which is to say woke, values. After all, I can’t imagine that white audiences find black models aspirational, and racism has nothing to do with that. It’s just that by and large blacks tend to belong to an economically lower demographic group.

The upshot of this is that these days woke ideology trumps even filthy lucre: St Paul’s first reaction would be to rejoice. However, his jubilation would quickly give way to gloom when he realised how low mankind has sunk.

P.S. Celia Walden, poor Piers Morgan’s wife, has written a perceptive article on woke ideology applied retrospectively to giants of the past, including the man who put those wise words into Polonius’s mouth.

Yet she undid all her good work by using the word, or rather non-word, ‘flammable’. This locution doesn’t exist in literate speech. The correct word is ‘inflammable’, based on the verb ‘to inflame’, not on the noun ‘flame’.

That non-word, along with many others, originated in the US decades ago, when it was deemed that the largely illiterate population would mistake the ‘in’ in ‘inflammable’ for a negative prefix and decide that no danger of conflagration existed. Then someone would strike a match next to a barrel of petrol and – kaboom!

Instead of improving the level of English teaching at schools, the powers that be decided instead to mangle the language yet again. And, while good American traits find few takers in Britain, American perversions are gobbled up with alacrity, especially by our own illiterate population.

Yet one would still expect that a graduate of Westminster School and Cambridge writing for the upmarket Daily Telegraph, not a vox populi rag like The Sun, wouldn’t stoop to prole usage. Wrong expectation, wrong time.

Back in my advertising days I tried to fight a rearguard action for good usage, usually losing the argument to either my colleagues or clients. And don’t get me going on the pronunciation of ‘lived’, as in ‘short-lived’. This word derives not from the verb ‘to live’ but from the noun ‘life’. Thus it should rhyme with ‘jived’, but this is another argument I’ve never won.

Back in the 1850s Lord Kelvin took a look at the Second Law of Thermodynamics and decided that the universe was heading for energy death (otherwise known as the Big Freeze).

In terms so simple that they take me out of my depth, he hypothesised that sooner or later the universe would reach thermodynamic equilibrium, when there wouldn’t be enough free energy left to sustain entropy. The universe would then turn into one giant icicle, and everyone and everything in it would die.

That’s a harrowing prospect if I’ve ever heard one, even though I don’t know enough physics to judge how likely such a calamity is. In any case, even if the universe does freeze over, it’s not going to happen soon. Even physicists who accept this theory talk in terms of millions or even billions of years in the future, which is too long for us to worry about.

A less cataclysmic and much more immediate death by hypothermia is likely to occur in Britain long before then, and it will be self-inflicted. Next time you see a photograph of Ed Miliband, keep this in mind: he is trying to kill you after first making you destitute.

The suicidal net zero policy – and if there’s one thing I like about Trump, it’s that he has no truck with that madness – must have acquired its name because it’s based on net zero data, net zero intellect and net zero morality. All those good things have been overridden by one bad perversion: ideology.

That’s why Miliband bears the oxymoronic title of Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, which is like having a Department for Public Safety and Mass Murder. Commitment to the ideology of net zero is idiotic intellectually, ruinous economically and potentially disastrous civilisationally.

Starting on Monday, Miliband’s energy stormtroopers will start filling the few remaining shale gas wells with cement. The intention is to eliminate fracking in perpetuity, while also phasing out gas production in the North Sea.

However, even covering every square inch of our green and pleasant land with solar panels and wind turbines won’t eliminate the vital role gas plays in the energy mix. And if we don’t produce our own, we have to buy it elsewhere, mostly from Norway.

Since Norway happily continues to drill in the North Sea, the task of saving ‘our planet’ doesn’t advance at all: ‘our planet’ doesn’t care whether it’s Norway or Britain that’s trying to kill it with carbon emissions. Our economy, however, does.

Britain’s energy costs are already the highest among developed countries, and the reason is the foolish consistency that Ralph Waldo Emerson described as “the hobgoblin of little minds”. Ed Miliband and other milibandits in our government consistently try to starve our economy of domestically produced energy.

We currently spend more on importing energy every year than we do on either education or defence. Domestic energy production has decreased by 65 per cent between 2000 and 2023, and by the 2030s we’ll be importing 80 per cent of our energy.

The milibandits cite phony science in support of their socialist, West-hating ideology. However, when it comes to nuclear power, even such bogus data are missing: it remains the cleanest source of energy, and one relying on practically infinite resources of raw materials.

But never mind the data, feel the ideology. Hence HMG is busily decommissioning nuclear power stations just for the hell of it. Dungeness B, Hunterston B and Hinkley Point B are scheduled to stop generation by 2026, Hartlepool and Heysham 1 by 2028, Heysham 2 and Torness soon thereafter.

We are already importing two thirds of our natural gas in liquefied form, and its production, liquefying and transportation make ‘our planet’ less rather than more green. Optimistic commentators believe that sooner or later the milibandits will have to come to their senses and abandon this suicide attempt by net zero.

Alas, I think it’s more likely that the impending catastrophe (and the already exorbitant cost of heating our homes) will make them look for some sort of accommodation with Putin. Much of Europe’s gas still comes from Russia, and you didn’t really think her KGB government would be unable to bypass sanctions, did you?

Nevertheless the cost of natural gas will rise by a third this year, and all of Europe including Britain will bear the brunt of that. This, while sloshing underneath our green and pleasant land is enough shale gas to keep all of the UK and Europe warm for decades.

Yet European governments, including ours, prefer to talk tough about fascist Russia, while rapidly slipping again into her energy vassalage. Now, if we can’t get rid of Starmer and other milibandits, there’s only one solution that comes to mind.

They should be made to take a fortnight off their duties, which by itself would have a healing effect on society and its economy. During that enforced break, they must be made to study every sentence in Ian Plimer’s book Heaven and Earth, the most comprehensive debunking of the bogus science involved in the climate swindle.

If they still emerge at the other end prepared to destroy our lives in the name of wicked ideology, there is nothing else we can do. Barring, of course, the kind of things a civilised man should never countenance.

So spoke Dickens’s Mr Bumble, and he had a point, up to a point.

At the height of the Industrial Revolution, Victorian London was overrun with slums. Crawling out of them were thieving guttersnipes run by crime lords like Fagin and murderous thugs like Bill Sykes.

Poverty and squalor were so widespread that workhouses proliferated, with street crime providing the only alternative for orphaned urchins. A bleak picture any way you look at it, and Dickens painted it poignantly with his masterly pen.

Crime was rife, and in 1874 alone there were over 10,000 indictable offences committed in London. Are you shuddering with revulsion? I certainly am… but hold on a moment.

Fast-track 150 years, and last year Londoners found themselves on the receiving end of 270,000 violent crimes. Not all indictable offences, let me point out, just the violent ones.

Add to this non-violent crimes, such as theft, burglary, financial offences. While you are at it, add also crimes that were indictable in Victorian London but aren’t really any longer, such as shoplifting, and you’ll realise that crime has gone up by two orders of magnitude, while the population has grown by only one.

That means, and sorry about such obvious calculations, that the per capita crime rate in London is now 10 times higher than it was at the time of Fagins, Sykeses, Artful Dodgers and workhouses.

And there I was, thinking that crime is caused by poverty. I don’t want to bore you with more statistics, but take my word for it: London is much more prosperous now than it was then, and prosperity is spread much wider.

Discounting the subversive thought that it’s not poverty but wealth that causes crime, we have to toss Marxist tomes into the bin and look for explanations elsewhere. And that’s explanations, plural, because it would be too simplistic to ascribe such a huge disparity to any one cause.

Doing so may brand one as what the Swiss thinker Jacob Burckhardt (d. 1897) called a “terrible simplifier”, and I don’t wish to add my name to the already extensive list of such intellectual charlatans. That’s why I’ll single out one cause not because I think there are no others, but because it’s perhaps the most telling and overarching of all.

Jurists used to distinguish between malum in se and malum prohibitum. The former reflects an immutable injunction against attacks on life, liberty and property going back to Biblical commandments. The latter encompasses transgressions like swearing in public or not wearing a seat belt, and the two types exist in a morally hierarchical relationship.

For example, stealing a car is a worse crime than parking it on a double yellow line, and beating one’s wife is more reprehensible than making love to her without permission. But no malum is really in se; evil and good are meaningless in the absence of a detached moral arbiter whose rulings can sometimes be interpreted but never questioned.

Take that arbiter away, and we’ve erased the absolute line of demarcation, making moral distinctions relative, which is to say inoperative. Indeed, we find ourselves beyond good and evil, in a space where things are distorted to a point at which malum prohibitum can be punished more surely and often more severely than malum in se. 

When God died, and I didn’t mean to wax Nietzschean, law in the West suffered the fate of a clock smashed to pieces: all the bits are still there, but they don’t add up to much any longer. Gone is the fundamental premise of Western legality: the primacy of the individual derived from the ultimate primacy of God.

When there is no God, the secular state will enforce its own primacy, and the law will sooner or later become its pliant servant, rather than a martinet called upon to restrain its excesses. Without God, laws can fall prey either to evil design or to ill-conceived political expediency. Which is another way of saying that, without God, law is tyranny.

Western laws used to be obeyed because they were a reflection of higher laws, their secular expression. Western jurisprudence was put together by sage men over many generations, and its ability to protect both society and the individual was tested over time.

Whenever a law couldn’t pass such tests, the ruler and the ruled alike knew it was enforceable only by arbitrary force. When such a realisation sank in, the transgressor was in trouble sooner or later, and even Charles I couldn’t save Strafford.

Modern laws, by contrast, are tyrannical because our political state has usurped the power to decide which of the ancient laws should and which shouldn’t be enforced. The law has thus stopped being a complex bilateral agreement between the people and the state, becoming instead something the state can grant or withdraw at its discretion.

Most links between generations past and present have been severed, and the law no longer has the authority of millennia behind it. Intuitively aware of this, people treat laws as mere statements of intent, and break them without much fuss about morality. There is no morality in law any longer, only expediency as defined by the state.

The letter of the law hasn’t changed much but the spirit has largely evaporated. In its absence, the letter is but a collection of hieroglyphics.

By exempting themselves from obeying the spirit of the law, modern political states find it increasingly more difficult to make their subjects obey even the letter. Crime statistics in just about every major modern country bear this out, with a traditionally law-abiding Britain having overtaken even the United States in most crime categories. Britons no longer venerate laws because they know the state doesn’t.

Law enforcement becomes difficult in the absence of an absolute criterion with which to distinguish between malum prohibitum and malum in se. Without this distinction law becomes amoral and runs the risk of becoming arbitrary.

More important, when God’s law is no longer recognised as an authority superior to man’s regulations, the law loses its link with human nature, becoming instead an instrument of coercion. As a result, people treat it with fear but without respect, and fear alone isn’t a sufficient deterrent. That’s why a high crime rate is an automatic levy modernity imposes, and the more modern the society, the higher the crime rate.

This is the overarching cause of the huge disparity that caught my eye. But, as I mentioned earlier, it’s not the only one.

For example, Victorian London was ethnically and culturally homogeneous, while today’s London has relegated the same group to a minority status. Much as it pains me to admit this, diversity and crime rate exist in a symbiotic and directly proportionate relationship.

Another factor is illegitimate births, which term has itself become illegitimate. Yet whatever the terminology, if only between four and five per cent of all children were born out of wedlock in Victorian London, today that’s way over half – the same 10-fold difference as in the crime rates. That’s the kind of correlation that betokens causation.

Yet the cause I singled out, the disintegration of traditional order, is indeed overarching. All the others can be traced back to it without much difficulty. But do let’s leave that for another time, shall we?

Yesterday, Aston Villa (a Birmingham football club, for the outlanders among you) made it to the quarters of the Champions League, much to the delight of the Brummie fans in the stadium.

Yet at least one wildly cheering fan wasn’t a Brummie at all. He was our heir to the throne, His Royal Highness William, the Prince of Wales.

HRH was screaming, jumping up and down, embracing everyone around him and giving every impression of a man on his way to at least a dozen celebratory pints. I don’t know whether HRH was prepared to uphold the fine tradition of such triumphs by punching anyone less enthusiastic. If he was, I’m sure his bodyguards would have stepped in.

Since I like football as much as the next man, I can’t possibly think there is anything wrong with such an innocent hobby. Neither is there anything wrong with supporting a particular team: this adds frisson to watching a match, sort of like making a side bet without putting money down.

Problems start when such support becomes an obsession, when fans begin to identify themselves with – and by – their team. An alarm bell should sound each time a fan begins to refer to his favourite club as ‘we’ in the spirit of unabashed tribalism.

This, at least to me, compromises our humanity, based as it has been on individual choice ever since that episode in the Garden of Eden. And tautologically speaking, individual choices are made by individuals, not baying herds on their way to those 12 pints.

Man is an individual, but fair enough: he isn’t just an individual. We all, unless we are sociopaths, identify with some corporate entities, from our family all the way up to the nation and a few in between. Catholics refer to such duality as subsidiarity and solidarity, but any terms would do.

However, focusing one’s solidarity on a football club is a sign of a small mind incapable of making distinctions between trivial and important, high and low, transient and transcendent. I’d venture a wild guess that no one who refers to a team as ‘we’ has ever had tears in his eyes listening to Bach’s fugues, reading Shakespeare’s sonnets or looking at Sienese paintings (currently exhibited at the National Gallery, by the way).

Such forfeiture of any spiritual heights to which only man can ascend is unfortunate, but not tragic. Not everyone is endowed with the requisite ability, and those who aren’t shouldn’t be despised for their display of primitive tribalism at football terraces.

We are all God’s children, and he made us all different. Yes, if grownups choose to act in a simian manner every time a tattooed chap kicks a football into the net, they represent a lower order of humanity. But logic suggests that, if the lower orders didn’t exist, neither would the higher ones. We are all, including football fans or for that matter players, arranged in a vertical hierarchy, and thank goodness for that.

Yet hierarchies aren’t just spiritual, intellectual or cultural. They are also social, and Prince William sits at the apex of one. One day he will reign, meaning HRH will act as the embodiment of our ancient constitution and its link with God.

This isn’t a metaphysical statement but a factual one. Unlike their European counterparts, British monarchs are crowned and anointed, as the world was reminded of during last year’s coronation of Prince William’s father.

Judging by his pronouncements when he was the Prince of Wales, King Charles’s personal instincts were quite ecumenical, not to say secular. Yet he put them on hold to accept the pomp and circumstance of a lavish Christian ceremony because he understood something I’m not sure his son does.

Pomp and circumstance, along with some air of mystical exclusivity, are essential to the survival of the monarchy. People don’t want their kings to act like regular blokes next door any more than they want regular blokes next door to act like kings.

Our princes are driven around London in state cars, Bentleys and Rolls Royce bearing the royal escutcheon. They don’t cycle through the streets in the manner of their Dutch counterparts.

Their traditional sports are shooting, hunting, polo and other equestrian competitions, rugby when in school. Not darts, bowling or, for that matter, football. There is nothing wrong with such sports for the rest of us. But our princes must cultivate, and be seen to cultivate, princely habits – or they may not remain princes for much longer.

I’m not privy to the inner workings of the royal family, but I suspect that heirs to the throne don’t just act as they please – that prerogative belongs to their lesser relations, within ever-expanding limits. Hence there must be people, King Charles certainly one of them, gently guiding William to the kind of conduct that’s likely to perpetuate the well-being of the monarchy.

An heir to the throne must walk the royal walk and talk the royal talk because, if he doesn’t, the republican hand will be strengthened. Yet William’s walk takes him towards Villa Park, and he certainly doesn’t talk like our future king. Whoever is advising him to take his image down a few pegs is, I think, making a strategic mistake.

Things HRH says certainly don’t betoken aristocratic sensibilities. Why, for example, does he support Aston Villa, if he has to support any team? Usually, such affections are based on geography, yet William has no obvious links to Birmingham.

He was born in London, educated at Eton, which is in Berkshire, then at St Andrews University, which is in Scotland, he served as helicopter pilot mostly in Wales and has lived in London or Windsor ever since. Where does Aston Villa come in?

Apparently, this obsession started at Eton, where most of his classmates supported Chelsea or Manchester United. Yet William wanted to stand out: “I wanted to have a team that was more mid-table that could give me more emotional rollercoaster moments.”

There was another option: just enjoying the game without going out of his way to be a fan. But that would have meant missing on something important to him: “It was fantastic, I sat with all the fans with my red beanie on, and I was sat with all the Brummie fans and had a great time. It was the atmosphere, the camaraderie and I really felt that there was something I could connect with.”

Note the prole diction “I was sat”. I find it hard to imagine William’s grandmother saying, “One was sat with one’s husband at supper last night.” His father, aunt and uncle are also more likely to sit than to be sat. Nor does one expect to see them wearing beanie hats with football insignia.

Things do change, and Whig historians will even insist they always change for the better. Be that as it may, so much more important it is that some things remain constant, acting as adhesives binding our past, present and future together.

Only the monarchy and the church can perform this function in Britain, two isles of stability in the maelstrom of turbulent life around them. These institutions can’t escape some change either, but when they try to march in step with modernity, they betray their mission and jeopardise their survival.

Perhaps William ought to ponder this next time he feels like putting on a red beanie hat and a Villa scarf. Then maybe he won’t put them on, much to my delight.

It’s better to be right inadvertently than wrong deliberately. While escalating his trade war against Canada (and the rest of the world), Trump stumbled on an incontrovertible truth.

“The only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State,” he wrote. “This would make all Tariffs, and everything else, totally disappear.”

Trump loves his capitals so much, he must know what the capital of Canada is, educated fellow that he is. It’s Ottawa, but what would happen if that status were transferred to Washington DC?

Trump put his finger right on it: everything would “totally disappear”. Canada’s sovereignty. Her position in the Commonwealth and NATO. Her national pride. Above all, whatever residual affection Canadians have for America.

Since neither the Canadian nation nor its government shows the slightest inclination to be incorporated into the US, the only way to achieve that result would be by military invasion. Is that what Trump has in mind? He has pointedly declined to rule out a military solution.

For the time being, Trump has hit Canada with additional tariffs and again regaled us with his elegant prose: “Based on Ontario, Canada, placing a 25% Tariff on ‘Electricity’ coming into the United States, I have instructed my Secretary of Commerce to add an additional 25% Tariff, to 50%, on all steel and aluminum coming into the United States from Canada, one of the highest tariffing nations anywhere in the world. I will shortly be declaring a National Emergency on Electricity within the threatened area.”

Quotes around ‘Electricity’ suggest that there is in fact nothing electrical about it, while capitalising Tariffs confers on them a sort of divine status. I feel strongly that any candidate for public office must pass an English test, command of language being a reliable indicator of intellect. As for a National Emergency, Trump is it.

Swinging like a yo-yo between imposing madcap tariffs and removing them, Trump has injected uncertainty and panic into the markets. Alas, he is finding them harder to bully than even Zelensky.

Markets react to personalities but they have none of their own. They respond in a dispassionate manner typical of computers. When they detect instability, their inner switch is flicked, they go down, and you can’t even send the boys over to make them toe the line.

Thus the stock market has dropped over 500 points, and there is (possibly premature) talk of recession. Especially worrying is the plight of the Nasdaq, a tech-focused index. It fell an impressive four per cent in one day, the first such drop since Covid.

Markets all over the world followed the US on its way down. They plunged in Europe, Asia and Britain, wiping trillions off the world’s wealth. China, Canada and the EU have retaliated with tit-for-tat tariffs, which among other things creates strong inflationary pressures.

Wall Street analysts are predicting that the US inflation rate may soon climb to as high as eight percent, followed by a similar rise in unemployment, with economic growth going in the opposite direction. Four out of five experts have a grim view of America’s economic prospects under Trump.

The latter relies on that time-honoured trick, blaming the previous administration. As Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, explained: “We are in a period of economic transition … from the mess created under Joe Biden”.

The first part of the statement is irrefutable: economic transition is indeed well under way. From what to what, however, is open to debate.

Yet the second part of Leavitt’s explanation is simply wrong, but then we don’t expect any members of the Trump administration to be responsible for what they say. “Like priest, like parish,” as the Russians put it.

Biden’s administration was indeed abysmally, some will say criminally, poor, but its economic performance was surprisingly not so bad. At almost three per cent, last year’s GDP growth in America was by far the greatest in the G7 group. Inflation stood at three per cent, and unemployment at four. The subsequent – and forthcoming – debacle in all these indicators is Trump’s doing and no one else’s.

The US president has been called all sorts of things over the past few weeks: “unprincipled charlatan”, “Putin’s agent”, “gangster”, “bully”, with many of these epithets accompanied by unflattering and variously unprintable modifiers. I’m sure he is all those things, although I think he is Putin’s agent only de facto, not de jure.

Yet none of those pejorative terms explains Trump’s concerted effort to destroy the US economy. I’m sure he’ll fail in this undertaking because America has many underlying economic strengths that can prop her up at a time of crisis. However, there is little doubt that a crisis is exactly what Trump is brewing.

Moreover, anyone with a modicum of economic education could have predicted the chaos into which Trump’s policies would plunge the economy. Incidentally, Trump’s fanatics point to his wealth as proof of his profound understanding of economics.

That’s a category error. A midwife doesn’t have to understand the origin of life. A car mechanic may not necessarily be well-versed in the nuances of thermodynamics. A cleaning lady doesn’t necessarily know the chemical composition of detergents. And a property developer, especially in Atlantic City, needs a grasp of economics much less than he needs the kind of interpersonal skills immortalised in The Godfather.

I’m a rank amateur in economics and investment, but I’ve read serious books by the yard. Yet even one inch, the thickness of Smith’s Wealth of Nations, would have sufficed to know that a trade war never claims any winners. Everyone loses, especially the aggressor.

Unlike me, Warren Buffett isn’t just a professional but one of the best in the business. Correctly anticipating that Trump’s ignorant bungling would crash the shares market, Buffett has quietly but resolutely moved much of his wealth into cash.

In the process, he presciently got rid of such blue chip assets as shares in Apple, Bank of America and Citigroup. And sure enough, the stock market plunged, with the only silver lining provided by a 44 per cent drop in the value of Tesla owned by hideous Musk.

(While Trump commendably attacks climate-change madness, his right hand has a vested interest in people driving not cars but electric appliances. I smell a contradiction.)

Trump’s pronouncements on economics show a primitive mind untouched by any educational, intellectual, cultural or civilising influences. However, he does vindicate Ralph Waldo Emerson’s aphorism, “A foolish consistence is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

For Trump is nothing if not consistent. The ignorant idea that all the world’s economies conspire to “screw” America has been cherished by him for decades. Thus in 1987, following his first visit to Russia, Trump began to toy with the idea of running for president.

To dip his toe into water, Trump took out full-page ads in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. Written as an open letter to the American people, the ads criticised the Reagan administration for wasting money to protect allies who “can afford to defend themselves”.

“There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure,” wrote Trump, implicitly accusing Ronald Reagan of lacking such spinal strength. Putting aside Reagan’s unwavering steadfastness that led to the collapse of what he correctly called the “evil empire” (you know, the one Trump is desperately trying to bring back to life), that view is economically illiterate.

No sensible person will argue against European countries arming themselves sufficiently to repel any aggression. It’s foolhardy to rely too much on the US, which Trump proves by leaving Europe to its own vices and devices. However, contrary to what he claims with his cracker-barrel public appeal, America’s investment in NATO isn’t a net loss — quite the opposite.

Her post-war position as the leader of the free world has entrenched the dollar (now being weakened by Trump’s policies) as the world’s reserve currency. This has allowed the US to run up a 34-trillion debt, which is after all denominated in the currency controlled by the Federal Reserve.

In plain terms, this has enabled America to consume much more than she produces. Hence it would be just as accurate (or rather just as inaccurate) to say that America is “screwing” the rest of the world, not the other way around.

All this is the economic primer, and it’s worrying to see the world’s greatest economy falling into the hands of an ignoramus who apparently hasn’t read even that book. Five gets you ten Trump played truant throughout his time at Wharton.