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Anti-Polish propaganda in Russia has reached a hysterical pitch, and its general tone is worryingly similar to the shrieks coming out of the Kremlin in the runup to the 2022 invasion of the Ukraine.

Since such poisonous seeds fall on a ground happy to receive them, some historical background won’t go amiss. So let’s just say that this sort of thing didn’t start with Putin, although he is doing his level best to uphold the fine tradition of hostility.

Russians tend to dislike Poles, a feeling fully and justifiably reciprocated. So fine, this is a generalisation, and I for one know a few Russians who feel no animosity towards their western neighbours.

Yet the Russians who matter, the ruling elite, aren’t, and never have been, in any way similar to my friends. For details, I suggest you read Dostoyevsky’s Diaries. You’ll find that the writer’s hatred of the Poles was only exceeded by his loathing of the Jews.

To Dostoyevsky, along with Russian chauvinists both before and after him, the Poles betrayed the holy (and wholly mythical) cause of pan-Slavic solidarity by adopting Catholicism, not Orthodoxy. A different confession produced a different ethos, with the Poles heavily leaning towards Western Europe, especially France.

Dynastic and cultural exchange between the two countries has been brisk throughout history. Poles would become kings or queens of France, a French woman was once the queen consort of Poland. And luxuriant flowers of Polish arts, such as Chopin, Mickiewicz and Apollinaire, blossomed in the soil of France.

They still retained their Polish patriotism though, which by the 19^th century had left little room for affection towards Russia. Three partitions of Poland, in 1772, 1793 and 1795, put paid to Polish independence, with a great part of the country incorporated into the Russian Empire.

Any geopolitical grievances the Russians may have about Poland are more ancient, going back to the early 17^th century, specifically the blood-soaked interregnum known as the Time of Troubles.

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth played a role in what was effectively a Russian civil war. Taking sides with one party against the other, the Commonwealth tried to put its own man on the Russian throne, and Polish troops even occupied Moscow in 1610-1612.

Since then, hostilities between the two countries have been mostly one-sided, and never more so than during Soviet times. When the Russian Civil War was winding down in 1920, the Bolsheviks launched a massive assault on Poland, which they declared was the first stage in their march on Berlin and Paris.

Such plans weren’t totally madcap. Lenin sensed, correctly, that the demob-happy masses in Germany, France and Britain had little appetite for another war. Luckily for the West though,  the Polish cavalry frustrated those plans by routing the Russians in the Battle of Warsaw.

That added fuel to the fire of Russian anti-Polish sentiments. The crimes the subsequent Stalin regime committed against Poland and Poles are well documented, but some are better known than others.

In 1939, Stalin and Hitler agreed to divide Poland between them, with Stalin claiming his half just 16 days after Hitler claimed his. The subsequent execution by the NKVD of over 20,000 Polish prisoners taken during that short campaign has since received much publicity, and even the Soviets eventually disavowed their lying denials of the massacre.

Less known are the mass, often deadly, deportations of ethnic Poles in Russia throughout the 1930s, before the war started. That didn’t do much to endear the Russians to the Poles, and neither did the decades of post-war Soviet domination after Poland had been delivered to Stalin at Yalta.

When communism collapsed, Russia and Poland adopted different trajectories in their development. Russia converted its communism into a fascisoid fusion of KGB and organised crime, while Poland stayed her traditional pro-Western course, if not without some hiccups caused by the post-Soviet reflux.

Russia’s ruling KGB elite found that intolerable. If former Soviet colonies do better than the metropolis, what kind of signal does that send?

Anti-Polish propaganda picked up momentum, and it was backed up with action. In 2010, Lech Kaczyński, the fiercely pro-Western President of Poland, along with 95 other passengers, was killed when his plane crashed outside Smolensk.

Subsequent analysis has proved irrefutably that the plane was blown up by a bomb, with the cui bono principle pointing an accusing finger at Putin and his clique. The Kremlin is naturally denying any involvement, just as it took Putin’s Soviet predecessors 50 years to acknowledge their Katyn massacre.

But Poles know what’s what, just as they know that, once a ceasefire has been agreed in the Ukraine, their turn may come next. Russia can’t exist without focusing the nation’s passions on some external enemy, and historically Poland has done nicely.

The three Baltic republics may well be the most immediate target but, with their combined population one-sixth of Poland’s, the Russians see them as small fry. Poland, on the other hand, has become a flourishing Western power since shaking off the tethers of Russian bondage. The Kremlin clique finds that offensive, especially since the Poles show little sympathy for the Russian invasion of the Ukraine.

Even though historically relations between Poland and the Ukraine have never been especially cordial, putting it mildly, ever since the full-scale Russian aggression started in 2022, the Poles have been among the Ukraine’s staunchest supporters. In contrast to most Western countries, they have no trouble realising that the Ukraine is fighting not only for her own freedom, but also for that of Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe – at least.

That’s why, unlike her Western European NATO allies, Poland’s defence spending not only meets the miserly target of two per cent of GDP, but more than doubles it. The Poles know what to expect from a fascist Russia, and they are doing their best to be prepared.

The Russians sputter sputum at the defensive measures taken by Poland. Each is described as a “manifestation of Russophobia”, a vice defined as resisting Russian imperial expansion in any way. When Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk recently announced the military training of 100,000 volunteers, sputum burst out in a geyser-like eruption.

Putin’s stooge, Medvedev, former president of Russia, leads the chorus of abuse by branding Poland as “a hysterical, rude, arrogant, and ambitious enemy”. Threats of nuclear retaliation thunder out of the Kremlin and in the Russian media.

Meanwhile, Poland finds herself on the receiving end of what the Russians call ‘hybrid warfare’, including subversion, sabotage and cyberattacks. And Kremlin propaganda is whipping up hostility towards Poland in what looks like an attempt to rally its own population for another war.

Whenever smaller nations dare resist Russian aggression, they are always described as proxies of a West historically bent on subjugating (enslaving, annihilating, colonising, exploiting, take your pick) Russia. But, as believers in the old principle of divide et impera, the Russians tend to particularise that overall enemy.

Thus, until recently both Poland and the Ukraine had been proclaimed as “US satellites”, proxies in the unrelenting war the dastardly Yankees have been waging against Russia since time immemorial. America was designated as “Enemy Number One” under the Soviets and kept that exalted status until Donald Trump became president.

Since then, the US has lost her top ranking in the enemy stakes, which honour has passed on to Western Europe, mainly Britain and France. Threats to “turn America into radioactive ash” and create a strait between Canada and Mexico have been replaced with detailed explanations of how Britain could be sunk with one superbomb, while other types of ordnance would inflict more terrestrial devastation on France.

In that spirit, Poland is now portrayed as the attack dog of London and Paris, an “aggressive neighbour” that “is being prepared for war with Russia”. As proof of such preparations, the Kremlin cites the recent agreement Poland has signed with France, Italy and Spain. That treaty has according to the Russians effectively turned Poland into an instrument of Macron’s “anti-Russian” policy, and I never suspected Manny of such bellicosity.

This reminds me of the thief screaming “Stop thief!” at the top of his lungs as he runs away from his pursuers. Russia has traditionally blamed others for harbouring aggressive plans just as she herself was mobilising for a massive invasion.

That happened in the early 1800s, the early 1900s, the 1930s, throughout the Cold War, and it’s happening at present. Putin is merely picking up the relay baton from, respectively, Alexander I, Nicholas II, Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev.

I doubt Russia will be in any position to launch a full assault on Poland for at least a couple of years after a ceasefire in the Ukraine, whenever that comes. After all, the Poles are forewarned and they are forearmed, or trying to be. And, Article 5 or no Article 5, they are likely to receive support from at least some other NATO members.

However, the shift in the focus of Kremlin propaganda is interesting, and it merits serious strategic analysis, provided the West still possesses the requisite know-how.

Russia has stepped on a militant merry-go-round, and it’s gathering speed so fast that jumping off may well become impossible. As Macbeth says, “I am in blood. Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

Less poetically speaking, crimes may multiply to a point where the perpetrator has to go on since changing his ways is no longer possible. Hence allowances must be made for Russian leaders acting irrationally. Should it come to that, an attack on Poland may well happen even if we feel the odds may be stacked against Russia.

The Poles certainly think so, and more power to them. They saved Europe once, in 1920, and they may well have to do so again.

Like any siblings, the two allied countries share much of their DNA.

Both are governed by totalitarian regimes preaching a violent ideology with mystical overtones.

Both are bent on murderous expansion, although for the time being they go about that task differently. Iran does her murders mostly by proxy, whereas Russia is happy to do the dirty work herself.

Both seek to exterminate adjacent nations, to extend their own power and also just for the ideological hell of it.

Both have the strength of their criminal convictions. However, and this is often ignored, both show weaknesses common to many totalitarian regimes.

Since such contrivances rely on violence and propaganda to control their populaces, they know that large groups within their own countries despise their propaganda and detest their violence.

That’s why, when totalitarian leaders promote officials to prominent positions, they don’t necessarily go by the candidates’ intellect, industry and professional expertise. Coming to the fore instead are such qualifications as unwavering loyalty to the leader and a knack for paying gluteal obeisance.

Even aspiring authoritarian leaders of democratic countries, such as Donald Trump, may suffer from the same weakness, putting loyalty to them personally before competence.

Thus a chap whose sole experience lay in the area of flogging New York properties got the world’s most sensitive diplomatic job of negotiating with Russia, the Ukraine and Iran. Or a half-crazy anti-vaxxer got the health brief. Or a bibulous, heavily tattooed TV journalist was put in charge of defence.

But at least a civilised country has (one hopes) mechanisms in place to protect itself from excessive damage such incompetents can cause. Totalitarian regimes have no such mechanisms, which makes them vulnerable to otherwise preventable disasters.

Thus, within the space of less than a fortnight, both Russia and Iran suffered strategic damage at the hands of their smaller but ingenious and intrepid adversaries.

On 1 June, Ukrainian special services executed Operation Spider’s Web, using drones to destroy some 30 per cent of Russia’s strategic bombers. These were sited in remote airfields, some of them thousands of miles away from the Ukraine’s border. And yesterday, the Israeli Air Force hit Iran with Operation Rising Lion, targeting the country’s nuclear facilities and killing some of Iran’s top military leaders and nuclear scientists.

The scale of Rising Lion was greater than that of Spider’s Web. But the two operations shared one aspect that has to do with the inherent weakness of totalitarian regimes. Both relied on large networks of operatives on the ground.

The logistics of the two operations seem different in other respects. The Ukrainians only used drones launched from within Russia’s territory. They had to be no farther than some five miles from their operators, and their range to target was roughly similar.

This means Ukrainians had to drive those drone-launching lorries across the vast expanses of Russia, park them within 10 miles of the targets, launch the projectiles and then return to base undetected and unharmed.

The Russians actually suspected that something along those lines was afoot, which is why they had moved those bombers to remote airfields. And yet they failed to protect that strategic resource from that daring raid. One gets the distinct impression that Russian security forces are at their best roughing up dissidents, not doing a vital wartime job.

Ukrainians can pass for Russians easily enough, but that operation would never have succeeded without logistic support provided by local networks. Those lorries had to take days to get to the Siberian airfields, meaning that the vehicles had to be hidden overnight, while their drivers and drone pilots needed refuge and extensive guidance.

All of this points to a massive intelligence effort overlooked by Putin’s lackeys adept at praising their leader’s genius but themselves lacking most basic professional skills. The same goes for Operation Rising Lion.

Unlike those Ukrainian drones, Israeli planes took off from airfields within their own country. But they wouldn’t have scored such a remarkable success without a huge network of Mossad spies and – as important – local opponents of the mullahs.

Iran’s nationalists, monarchists, Westernisers and other implacable enemies of the Islamic Republic formed resistance groups that have for years collaborated with their natural ally, Israel.

Working hand in glove with Mossad and IDF, these courageous people identified a long list of strategic targets and also pinpointed the exact location of the officials slated for elimination. There was also much work done on the ground that was similar to Operation Spider’s Web.

The operatives created a drone base within reach of the targets and assisted in getting launching vehicles in position, which then went on to paralyse Iranian air defences. And, like their Russian colleagues, Iranian security services slept through all those extensive preparations.

Moreover, the Russians have had to contend with Ukrainian and pro-Ukrainian resistance only since 2014, and especially since 2022. The Iranian security services, on the other hand, have had almost half a century since their 1979 Islamic Revolution to root out resistance. And yet they’ve failed spectacularly – in spite of having no legal or constitutional constraints on their gruesome work.

Western security services do operate under such constraints, and they too sometimes suffer from incompetence. That’s why they often fail to protect their countries from terrorist attacks. As I never tire of repeating, in this world we aren’t blessed with perfect institutions, including security services.

However, in the West such lapses aren’t symptoms of a structural malaise, and most Western countries at least try to promote capable and intelligent people to sensitive positions. Totalitarian regimes select their personnel on different principles, and this is part of the reason all of them come crashing down sooner or later. Alas, if it happens later rather than sooner, they manage to run up a horrific score of death and devastation.

For the time being, we must congratulate the Ukrainians and Israelis for planning and executing operations that will be studied at military academies around the world for decades. I hope that, having exposed the weaknesses of the two allied totalitarian regimes, they can now also hasten their demise.  

As someone with a strong luddite streak, I am always sceptical about new technology and especially the grandiose claims made for it.

Such naysaying must have something to do with my latent humanism, understood in this case as love of people, flawed as they may be. When machines begin to encroach on human prerogatives, such as thought, knowledge and understanding, I’m prepared to man the epistemological barricades.

In terms of using new-fangled appliances, my approach is to go only for things I couldn’t do without, not those I could do with. Thus, though I’m writing this on an Apple computer, I must be the only man in His Creation who doesn’t own a smartphone.

The other day, when I pulled my antediluvian Nokia out at my tennis club, the coach asked me what on earth it was (he actually used a stronger word). Oh, it’s that outdated contraption, I explained. One that lets people talk to one another, rather than exchanging enciphered electronic monosyllabics. The young man’s expression reflected his genuine compassion for someone so obviously inadequate.

Years ago, when chess computers were making their first tentative moves, people argued whether the machines would ever be able to beat human masters. For once in my life, I belonged to the majority: most people were sure the human mind would always prevail over chips, diodes and wiring.

Well, we were wrong. Today’s chess software packages can wipe the board not just with masters but grandmasters, indeed world champions. They can beat human players as easily as a car can outpace a human runner, even if he happens to hold all sorts of records.

Now Artificial Intelligence is all the rage, and my misgivings are as strong as ever. If people expect Artificial Intelligence to make up for their lack of the natural kind, I keep saying, they are likely to come a cropper. An AI programme may translate a thoughtful article into Urdu or whatever, but it’ll never be able to write one.

And then, this very morning a good friend sent me an e-mail that has left my heartfelt convictions tottering if not yet collapsing. Even worse, I saw an imaginary redundancy note flashing before my eyes, a feeling of dread only assuaged by the realisation that I have no job to be fired from.

This is what my friend wrote: “I continue to be amazed by the burgeoning capabilities of AI, even though it’s still in its infancy. In response to the question ‘Can you write a few polemical paragraphs in the style of Alexander Boot, about a subject of your choice?’, it replied as below. Not a bad attempt, but clearly nowhere near as good as the real thing!”

Thank you for that last sentence but, having read the damn thing’s effort, I’m not so sure. Oh well, you be the judge. Here is that work of the devil trying to be me:

“Certainly. Here is a short polemical essay in the style of Alexander Boot, who is known for his acerbic wit, erudite prose, and unapologetic traditionalism. The subject: The Infantilisation of the Modern West.

“There was a time – recent, but now remote – when adulthood was both a state of being and a state of mind. Today, it is neither. The modern West, in its terminal stage of civilisational decline, has chosen the nursery over the academy, emotion over reason, and self-expression over self-mastery. We are governed not by statesmen, but by emotionally incontinent adolescents in ill-fitting suits, squealing about ‘lived experience’ as if feelings were epistemologically authoritative.

“Every institution, from the classroom to the cathedral, has become a playpen for perpetual children. Our universities, once crucibles of reasoned thought, now serve as daycare centres for hypersensitive ideologues, where the only dangerous idea is the suggestion that not all ideas are equal. The cathedral has not fared better: where once incense rose with solemn chant, we now get rainbow flags and sermons on recycling. There is more dignity in a Punch and Judy show.

“Responsibility – once the hallmark of the mature citizen – is now seen as oppressive. The idea that one must subordinate personal impulse to transcendent order is not merely foreign, but offensive. In this brave new infantilised world, the adult virtues – discipline, duty, self-denial – are recast as psychological pathologies. Stoicism is ‘repression’. Tradition is ‘trauma’. Orthodoxy is ‘violence’. One is reminded not of the Enlightenment, but of the spoiled brat on the floor of a supermarket, shrieking because he has been told ‘no’.

“The modern West, having rejected the authority of God, nature, and history, now genuflects before the altar of the Self – a god far less merciful and infinitely more capricious. Our civilisation, once built by grown men with spines of oak, now totters on legs of jelly, infantilised and insipid, afraid not of war or want, but of disapproval. And like all overindulged children, we may very well find that the nanny state cannot save us from ourselves.”

This kind of spooky parody can drive one to drinking earlier in the day than usual, if not yet to suicide. The electronic plagiarist writes with verve and in perfectly measured cadences. There isn’t a thing that Artificial Intelligence wrote that my natural, but obviously stale and formulaic, intelligence couldn’t have churned out.

Moreover, if my friend is right that AI is only in its infancy, what will it be able to do when it reaches maturity? Will future writers just tap in the subject, push the button and watch impeccable prose take shape before their very eyes?

Push another button, and the artificial piece instantly lands on the desk of an artificial editor equipped to enunciate in a perfectly censorious voice “You can’t say that”, “Take it easy on the God thing, will you?” and “I don’t want to have the PCC on my arse.” (That’s the Press Complaints Commission, for those of you in a different line of work.)

Actually, I’ve misled you: the e-mail in question wasn’t the first one along the same lines I’ve serendipitously received over the past couple of days. Another friend had already horrified me with her own efforts, but she sent them in a PDF format I can’t reproduce here.

Other than that, her AI output was as scary and its similarity to my style as uncanny. Where will it all end? If AI can cannibalise my writing so easily, will it set itself much loftier targets next? Aquinas? Shakespeare? Burke? Peter Hitchens?

My heart screams no, while my mind smirks yes, perhaps, can’t put it past that blasted thing. Yet that cloud isn’t without its own silver lining.

I stand convinced that even a prepubescent AI could do a better job of running the country than our government of nincompoops, as feeble of mind as they are febrile of ideology.

Given the choice of Labour, Tories or AI, I know which way I’d vote. AI couldn’t do any worse and, on the evidence of my friends’ missives, it can do a whole lot better.

According to Bruno Kahl, the outgoing head of Germany’s intelligence, the Russians are likely to test NATO commitment to Article 5 of its Charter within a few years.

“We are very sure, and we have intelligence evidence to back this up, that [Russia’s full-scale invasion of] Ukraine is only one step on Russia’s path towards the west,” he said. “We see that NATO is supposed to be tested in its mutual assistance promise. There are people in Moscow who don’t believe that NATO’s Article 5 still works.”

There are people, one person to be exact, in the room where I’m writing this who tend to agree. Putin sees the Ukraine not as the final destination but a step along the way to reconstructing the Soviet Union.

Things may change but, as they stand now, I can’t see NATO countries counterattacking Russia should her tanks roll into Lithuania or Estonia. They are more likely to take the tail end of Article 5 literally, where it says that NATO would be “taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force.”

No tripwire exists, in other words. Should push come to shove, NATO may well deem the use of armed force unnecessary and wash its hands, Chamberlain-style, on “a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing”.

However, I disagree with Germany’s defence minister, Boris Pistorius, who says that: “Our experts estimate that it [Russian invasion] could be possible within a period of five to eight years.” Two to three years seems more likely, for afterwards there will be a different president in the White House, one conceivably less friendly to Putin and more committed to collective security.

Yet my subject today isn’t NATO but Russia, specifically her people’s readiness to expand the on-going war all over Eastern Europe. A comparison with the Second World War seems instructive.

Then Stalin’s people went into the war having suffered unimaginable persecutions in the previous 20-odd years of Bolshevik cannibalism. Some 40 to 60 million Soviets had perished in CheKa cellars and death camps or starved to death in deliberately created famines – and that’s after 10 to 15 million had died during the Civil War the Bolsheviks had started.

There was hardly a family in the Soviet Union that hadn’t lost some relations under the wheels of the Bolshevik juggernaut. Add to this the Baltics and parts of Poland and Romania annexed by Stalin after his Pact with Hitler, and you can see why swaths of the Soviet population hated Stalin and his regime.

This they proved during the initial phase of the war, when Soviet soldiers happily surrendered en masse, four million of them in the first three or four months. They simply didn’t want to fight for Stalin, although over a million of them were happy to fight for Hitler.

Those interested in how Stalin forced his people to change their minds could do worse than to read the book Stalin’s War of Extermination (Stalins Vernichtungskrieg 1941–1945) by the late German military historian Joachim Hoffman. Suffice it for me to say here that the situation in today’s Russia is different.

Her KGB government has expertly pushed the right buttons within the popular psyche, and by and large the Russians support Putin and his war on the Ukraine.

Unlike their Soviet great-grandparents they have lived through a couple of decades of relative prosperity (understood by Russians as having enough food, some clothes on their backs and a roof over their heads, even if it comes with no indoor plumbing) and, again relative, freedom (if you say nothing against the government, you’re unlikely to get arrested).

What to any sensible Westerner would look like appalling destitution and despotism looks to Russians as a decent life. Moreover, those who don’t see it as decent enough have been free to leave, an option that wasn’t available to Stalin’s slaves.

Hence you’ll see many outbursts of febrile patriotic fervour complete with the kind of mass belligerence I never saw during my life in the Soviet Union. However, screaming “We can do it again!!!” at rallies is one thing and joining the fight is quite another.

Here is another massive difference between Stalin’s Red Army and Putin’s version. Stalin’s was an army of recruits, most of them reluctant to lay down their lives for the motherland, at least in the early stages of the war. This though, technically at least, the Soviet Union was a victim of a foreign invasion.

By contrast, Putin’s army is mostly one of contract soldiers, those ready to murder, loot and rape for money. The pay is considerable by Russian standards: somewhere between £2,000 and 3,000 in our money as a one-off sum, plus salaries some 15 per cent higher than the median income in the country, plus compensation for wounds.

Moreover, the families of the soldiers killed in the war are well taken care of, again by Russian standards. They too get a one-off payment, all sorts of discounts and privileges, a preferential treatment for their children going to universities and so forth.

If the Russians refer to their part of the Second World War as Great Patriotic, this war could justifiably be called Great Transactional. Please keep in mind that, if in 1941 Russia was a victim of aggression, in 2022 she became the aggressor. This doesn’t deter all those swarms of guns for hire.

Nor does it deter their parents and wives who encourage their men to enlist as a way of improving the family fortunes. In fact, even Kremlin sources accept that it’s mostly not patriotism but money that’s drawing young men into Putin’s criminal army.

But there is a problem with armies that fight a criminal war in criminal ways. Such an army also becomes a criminal enterprise internally, not just externally.

In fact, many Russian soldiers have to part with much of their blood money just to go home alive. Russian officers have a menu of ‘services’ they can provide, and the soldiers can choose those that may help them keep life and limb.

These include being excused from going on what the Russians call ‘meat storms’, paving every inch of gained terrain with corpses, mostly their own; an assignment to rear duty; transfer to a unit far from the frontline.

Officers don’t just offer such services. They also extort money in more direct ways, such as beatings, torture, refusal to compensate for wounds and even threats to throw a recalcitrant soldier into battle unarmed.

The business is brisk, and not just for officers. Another rapacious category is made up of women called ‘black widows’. These young ladies start correspondence with soldiers on the frontline and marry them during their brief R&R specifically to get the ‘coffin money’ should their newlywed husband get killed.

If in 2022 and 2023 the widows of fallen soldiers would beg the commanders to send the body home, these days, according to Russian military sources, they don’t bother with such sentimental nonsense. Never mind the body, just give us the dosh.

Recruiters are also having a good war, and again the capitalist profit motive is strong. Since recruiters get a percentage of every joining-up fee, they lie to youngsters that they would be used only in the rear, far from the frontline. Such recruiters operate mostly in the provinces, where people are more gullible.

Old-fashioned pressganging is also practised widely, with the recruiting kidnappers often able to gain access to their victims’ bank accounts and withdraw the joining-up fee. This supplements nicely the crowds of youngsters actually willing to kill for a fee.

Would the situation change if they saw not Ukrainians but Lithuanians or Poles in their crosshairs? I can only answer this question with an unequivocal ‘that depends’.

The Russian population is so thoroughly corrupted that I can’t envisage any moral barriers in the way of expanding the war all over Europe. But these aren’t the only possible barriers.

Although the Russians are kept out of the reach of independent media, rumours have a way of spreading. As more and more young men return home in body bags or, if they are lucky, without a full complement of limbs, a growing number of families will be genuinely bereft. The stories of soldiers being cheated of their blood money can’t be kept under wraps for ever either.

It’s also quite possible that, should Putin decide to test NATO’s commitment to Article 5 by attacking Europe, he may have to test the Russians’ commitment to fighting by introducing general conscription. That he has so far refused to do so suggests that this isn’t a test he thinks he can pass.

Neither is it certain that he can embark on a new adventure before the war in the Ukraine has ended, and it is showing few signs of doing so soon. Of course, Putin may decide to hasten the end by using nuclear weapons, but I don’t wish to go there. That would be one conjecture too many.   

I have for Greta Thunberg that warm feeling of gratitude I reserve for people who vindicate my ideas.

The idea relevant to my theme today is that all those rebels in search of a cause don’t really care all that much about the cause, once they’ve found it. The cause is strictly secondary to their primary motive: hatred of Western civilisation.

They don’t care what weapon they use to strike at their bogeyman, as long as they do strike at it. Otherwise, it’s hard to find a logical link between climate change and Hamas, and yet it’s a safe bet that whoever fights against the former also fights for the latter.

Proceeding, as I often do, from language, I marvel at the ease with which zealots have replaced ‘global warming’ with ‘climate change’. That strikes me as a shift from being misguided to being deranged.

The misguided part is believing that our cars and aerosol sprays have made the climate warmer that it has ever been. I never tire of suggesting to anyone holding that view that he read Ian Plimer’s book Heaven and Earth, in which that prominent climatologist debunks that myth thoroughly, stacks of research data in hand.

However, campaigning against global warming may be put down simply to ignorance, not knowing the relevant facts. Campaigning against climate change, on the other hand, is so illogical that one can be forgiven for doubting the campaigners’ mental health.

Simple logic suggests that climate can change by becoming not just warmer, but also cooler. Hence, climate change zealots are in fact demanding that climate remain constant for ever, which is a demonstrable impossibility both logically and historically.

No one is so ignorant and stupid that he’d fail to realise this. And yet thousands of fanatics demand that Western governments duplicate a miracle so far only in God’s purview: “Then spake Joshua to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon…”.

That alone is enough to vindicate the idea that these people don’t really care whether or not the sun can stand still and keep its activity constant, which is one precondition for an unchanging climate. They simply use their zealotry to undermine the West in every way they can.

Without doing an extensive study, I am therefore sure that the same people who go on net-zero marches must also hate Israel, the sole oasis of the West in a desert of barbarism. That’s why they are eager to support any organisation, no matter how hideous, that works towards the destruction of that objectionable land. “Save our planet” and “From the river to the sea” are complementary slogans.

This brings me to Greta Thunberg, who has now blossomed from an evil child into an evil young woman. A vague, beatific smile of insanity never leaves Greta’s face, whereas one fails to see any sign of intelligence there.

Her deficit in that faculty explains why she doesn’t even bother to conceal her true motives. While haranguing against climate change, Greta honestly says that what bothers her isn’t just polluting industry that’s frying ‘our planet’, but especially the profits that industrialists make in the process.

Having dropped out of the news for a while, she has now barged back in to support the cause of Hamas, freedom fighters fighting gallantly against Greta’s pet hatred, Israel.

This time she ran a Gaza-bound boat carrying “symbolic” amounts of aid in defiance of Israel’s naval blockade. The blockade has been in place to stop the flow of arms into Gaza, in the hope of saving some Israeli lives.

The boat was flying a British flag, which stands to reason because it had been arranged by a London-based Hamas operative, Zaher Birawi.

The amount of aid was indeed symbolic, meaning negligible. But aid wasn’t the point, was it? The point was to create more pro-Hamas, anti-Israel noise, drumming up even more international support for the murderers.

On Sunday, IDF boarded and seized the Hamas boat, arresting Greta and her 11 accomplices. The Israelis’ plan was to deport the fanatics, but not before making them watch an “uncensored” 43-minute video of what the Times of Israel called “people being massacred and bodies mutilated during the onslaught.”

That was an understated way of putting it, but I’ll spare you the graphic description of the horrors perpetrated by Hamas on babies, children, women, old people and anyone they could get their hands on. These are in the public domain, and the sturdier people among you are welcome to satisfy their curiosity.

It has to be said that the Israelis didn’t invent the video punishment they planned for Greta and her gang of Hamas admirers. This honour belongs to the US occupation administration in Germany, 1945.

Surviving Nazis were forced to watch the footage of Auschwitz and other death camps, complete with skeletal bodies, piles of corpses and gas chambers. The idea was both punitive and rehabilitating: the Nazis were supposed to undergo some sort of moral catharsis.

I don’t know if the ploy worked on them, but it certainly didn’t work on Greta and her pals. They simply refused to watch the video, and again the Israelis displayed uncharacteristic softness by allowing the zealots to get away with it. I would have forced them to watch, not that I think that would have had the slightest effect.

As it was, Thunberg and six of her accomplices were put on a plane in Tel Aviv and deported to France, where I happen to be at the moment. I only hope she won’t linger around here for too long — to paraphrase an English judge of old, the air of France is too pure for the likes of her to breathe.

Incidentally, Thunberg had to agree to be deported, which five of her accomplices refused to do. All of them are French citizens, and France now has a judiciary fight on her hands.

These anomic savages are fortunate that Israel is indeed a Western, which is to say civilised, country ruled by law. A less benign government would have clapped them in a hellhole of a prison and thrown away the key. Oh well, the rule of law isn’t without its downside.

Back in the day when I was still creative director at an ad agency, I had a stock reply to any suggestion that I bring my partner to some social event.

“Which one?” I’d ask, enjoying my interlocutor’s look of perplexity mixed with quiescent respect for my virility. “Do you have more than one?” he’d ask.

“But of course. I have four, actually: Dave, Dan, Nigel and Mark. Which one should I bring along?”

In the other chap’s eyes, my profligate virility would begin to acquire a slightly naughty edge. As a man of the world, however, he wouldn’t let on that he found anything wrong with an alternative lifestyle, even when practised on such a scale.

“Oh yes, I forget,” I’d add. “There’s also John, my doubles partner. I’ll have to ask him if he’s available when we play on Saturday.”

At this point, my interlocutor would realise we were at cross purposes. I misunderstood, he’d explain, heaving a sigh of relief. He didn’t mean partners in any business or tennis sense. He meant the partner I lived with.

“Oh, you mean my wife,” I’d say with the smug expression of a man who had made his QED point. Yet that was a point only made, not taken.

No modern person would challenge the meaning of the word ‘partner’ as used by my interlocutor. This is one good word cannibalised, abused and perverted, giving me any number of occasions to vent my loathing of such verbal vandalism.

This sounds like needless pedantry, and so it would be if there weren’t a nefarious reason for that semantic debauchment. Yet there is such a reason, as there always is. All such lexical assaults are part of glossocratic subversion, with words used as tools for modernity to put its foot down.

Yesterday I wrote about the word ‘populist’ used as a tool of such semantic indoctrination, but the same could be said about almost every term in the modern political lexicon. Take, for example, the word ‘liberalism’ and its cognates.

Its traditional, which is to say correct, meaning includes aspects of limited government, personal freedom, laissez-faire economics at home and free trade abroad. But that’s not how the word is used today, is it?

In America, liberalism means, mutatis mutandis, socialism: replacement of individual responsibility with collective security, plus as much government control and as little personal liberty as is achievable this side of concentration camps. In Britain, it means the platform of the Liberal Democratic party, which stands for roughly the same and also the negation of Britain’s sovereignty.

For the nineteenth-century liberal, the 10 percent of the nation’s income the government was then spending was too high. For today’s liberal, the 40-odd percent it spends now is too low. So if one wants to use ‘liberal’ in its proper sense, and it is after all a cognate of ‘liberty’, then one must either modify it with ‘classic’ or replace it with ‘libertarian’, thus rendering the word useless.

The same goes for its cognates, such as ‘liberation’. When applied to places like Central Africa, ‘national liberation’ means a transitional stage between colonialism and cannibalism. When applied to much of the ‘former Soviet Union’, it means a shift from de jure to merely de facto Russian control. When applied to Asia, it means Mao, Ho and Kim.

The word ‘conservatism’ suffers as much attrition at the hands of lexical vandals. It’s used in a whole raft of meanings, mostly pejorative, except the real one: desire to preserve everything worth preserving in our civilisation.

Words have always been used as weapons in political jousts, but in the past they tended to be used in their real meaning. Thus a British Liberal in the late 1930s might have found both Winston Churchill and Oswald Mosley reprehensible, but he would have properly reserved the descriptor ‘fascist’ only for the latter. Today’s heirs to that Liberal sling the word at anyone they dislike, hoping that the mud sticks.

The abuse of the word ‘partner’ seems to have nothing to do with politics but, as Thomas Mann once remarked, “all intellectual attitudes are latently political”. Using ‘partner’ to mean spouse or lover is an illustration of that latency.

An assault on family and more generally relations between the sexes is another prong in the same offensive, a systematic effort to bring down Western civilisation, whatever little is left of it. To that end, sex has been taken out of its traditional context of familial or at least romantic interplay and put into that of the sex manual enlarging on the purely mechanical aspects of carnality.

That shift happened in the 1960s, when the war on our civilisation went from a chronic to an acute stage. It was only then, by the way, that church attendance in England dropped like a stone, rather than reducing slowly by tiny incremental steps, as it had been doing for a century or two.

Sexual liberation (another misuse of a political term) was inscribed on the banners of that paedocratic revolution perpetrated for, and largely by, barely postpubescent youngsters at the height of their bubbling gonadic output.

That’s what the poet Philip Larkin meant when writing: “Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three”. It didn’t of course. Mechanical copulation free of romantic involvement had always existed, but it was only then that society began not just condoning but actively encouraging what used to be called fornication.

All revolutionaries find traditional, not just amorous, vocabulary wanting. Much of any vocabulary comes from books, and lovers used to talk about one another in the language of Shakespeare’s sonnets and Shelley’s poems, minus the mastery. Such literary sources were now deemed inadequate.

Those youthful revolutionaries needed a different inspiration, and found it in sex manuals. These didn’t talk about spouses, lovers, fair ladies and their swains. They talked about partners, and the word instantly gained the kind of currency it had never had before.

Hence the kind of dialogue I described above wasn’t just an exercise in annoying pedantry. It was a quixotic attempt to spike one gun aimed at the heart of Western civilisation.

Whenever I wax indignant about the depredations of modernity, my pragmatic readers ask the quintessential British question: “What can we do about it?”

Alas, my answer has to be “Not much”. But one thing we can do is refuse to succumb to linguistic assaults on everything we hold dear.

At the risk of social opprobrium, we can use words only in their real meaning, refusing to understand the politically charged patois of modernity. We can continue to use ‘gender-specific’ words, always following a singular antecedent with a singular pronoun. We can even go through the charade of feigning failure to understand pernicious non-words used by woke non-thinkers.

I doubt efforts along those lines can ever save any souls other than our own. Yet even such a limited success is worth having, as my partner Penelope will doubtless agree.  

During the dreary England-Andorra match yesterday, English football lovers were singing, to the tune of a popular song I’ve never heard, “Starmer is a c***, Starmer is a w*****!”

Since Sir Keir couldn’t be held personally responsible for England’s woeful performance on the pitch, one has to infer that the fans were venting their dissatisfaction with Labour’s woeful performance in government.

One has to praise the political acumen of our footie-loving masses, free as they seem to be from any partisan bias. Just a few months ago, the very same people were chanting “Tories out!” with the same gusto – and with the same justification.

Throughout the West, similar sentiments are echoed in reference to the mainstream parties taking turns in office. All of them fall short of people’s expectations; none of them seems fit to govern. Electorates are more and more willing to vote for someone different, which increasingly means anyone different.

This explains the rise of what is usually called populism, although the term is a misnomer. The trouble with mainstream parties isn’t that they aren’t populist, but that they are, albeit in less direct ways.

One of our greatest political minds, Edmund Burke, outlined what he saw as a proper democracy, but what was in fact a proper republic. He defined the role of parliamentarians as that of people’s representatives, not their delegates.

Elected officials, wrote Burke, should act according to people’s interests, not people’s wishes. When the two diverged, people’s wishes had to be ignored because they couldn’t always be careful what they wished for.

Burke, of course, lived in the second half of the 18^th century, and he fashioned his ideas out of the political fabric available to him. In those days, Britain and most other Western countries were governed by people trained for statesmanship from their cradle. They had a clear idea where the people’s interests lay and how best to serve them.

This doesn’t mean they were always right, far from it. In this world we aren’t blessed with perfection of any kind, only with some approximations thereof. And one doesn’t have to go beyond common sense to accept that intensive and extensive training helps in all sorts of fields of endeavour. And the more complex the field, the more it helps.

That situation has changed. Burke’s wise prescriptions have fallen by the wayside, as has the blueprint he drew for a constitutional (in Britain, monarchic) republic. Once modernity was ushered into history, different ideas took hold – this irrespective of the best-laid plans of the usherers.

In 1806, John Adams, America’s second president, wrote, “I once thought our Constitution was a quasi or mixed government, but they had made it… a democracy.” It didn’t take long, did it? What was in fact Burke’s notion of government was ousted so fast, in just one generation, that one has to think that a button had been pushed for a list of ineluctable begets.

The republican idea can’t coexist with the egalitarian Enlightenment ethos built around the unchallengeable advancement of the common man endowed with inalienable rights. These are bound to be understood sooner or later as the equal rights not just of human beings but also of political beings.

The egalitarian ethos clashes with the republican idea and, since numbers are on its side, wins. Defying Burke’s prescriptions, people’s representatives gradually become people’s delegates, catering to people’s wishes rather than serving their interests.

A new dominant political type evolves, the demagogue driven to assuage his powerlust by telling people not what they should know but what they want to hear. His own hold on power depends on how many people his empty phrases and promises can sway, or rather swindle because little he says bears any resemblance to reality.

Modern politicians’ power depends on how many deadly sins and their derivatives they expiate and glorify. Pride, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, sloth, wrath – take your pick, although you don’t have to. They can all work together as mechanisms sustaining political power.

In that sense, all modern Western politicians are populist. If they weren’t, they would be drummed out of politics. Yet the term is reserved for a particular sub-group within that group, one that steers clear of the mainstream.

The difference is purely tactical: mainstream politicians operate from the base of traditional, if debauched, institutions. ‘Populist’ politicians, on the other hand, go over the head of such institutions to sweettalk the masses without any institutional mediation.

Those politicians are usually described as populist right-wingers, but the adjective is more correct than the noun. Political terms and words in general these days mean whatever we want them to mean but, if we try to introduce some semantic rigour, such politicians aren’t right-wing.

From its inception in the days of the French Revolution, the term has been more or less synonymous with ‘conservatism’, an attempt to retain some core civilisational values in a rapidly evolving world. If we agree on this definition, then I struggle to name a single right-winger or conservative among today’s populist politicians.

This stands to reason for the populace they try to mollycoddle doesn’t want conservative civilisational values. Such values steer people away from the deadly sins they hold dear. They feel entitled to those sins and expect politicians to honour that sense of entitlement.

For example, if we accept Weber’s view of the Protestant work ethic as the propellant of economic prosperity, then there isn’t a single Western politician acting in that spirit. The constituents of that ethic are hard work and thrift, and both are too far outside the cardinal sins for today’s governments to countenance.

Which ‘right-wing populist’ politicians do battle for fiscal conservatism, which is the political expression of the Protestant (in fact, any sensible) work ethic? Not one, meaning that none of them is right-wing, although they are all indeed populist. Centuries of populism have rendered fiscal conservatism unthinkable.

An electorate will instantly vote only for those promising instant gratification, something for nothing. Granted, some voters aren’t like that, but they aren’t the ones who form the critical mass. Once that point has been reached, a countdown button is pushed for global bankruptcy.

Yet people, like pagan deities, are still athirst. Their appetites are translated into wishes, wishes into demands, and demands into inalienable rights. Over a couple of centuries, this has created a certain politico-economic model that any government can challenge only at its peril.

That’s why no Western governments are paying their way, nor is a single politician, however right-wing, populist or conservative, insisting they should. The most right-wing of them all in public perception, Donald Trump, is desperately trying to add trillions to the public debt, a valiant attempt copied everywhere, if in a scaled-down version.

This kind of penny has to drop sooner or later, and it’s only a matter of which country will go bust first. Starmer’s government is doing its level best to make Britain win this race, but several contestants are still neck and neck.

People sense this is the case, hence the tune they sing even at football matches. But how would they exercise their vocal chords should a ‘right-wing populist’ politician suggest that the whole economic model of the welfare state be scrapped?

If he said that we must balance the budget first and then start repaying the national debt, and if that means dismantling the welfare state, then so be it? This is pointless conjecture because such words can no more cross any politician’s lips than a call to slaughter every firstborn son (slaughtering babies before they are born is perfectly all right though).

That’s why His Majesty’s Loyal ‘right-wing populist’, Nigel Farage, is converging in his economic policies not just with Starmer but even with Corbyn. In France, the economic views of their own equivalent, Le Pen, are barely distinguishable from those held by the Trotskyist Mélenchon, or, in Holland, by Geert Wilders, another right-wing populist of modern nightmares.

You’ll notice that I’ve singled out the most obvious aspect of modern politics, economics. The situation in all other aspects is equally dire: culture, social structure, education, manners are all of them populist and none of them conservative. All have been cut to the egalitarian stencil of modernity, created in its vulgar, deracinated image.

So yes, had I been in that stadium yesterday and known the popular tune, I might have joined in. Provided, of course, that Penelope had stayed at home: she has no truck with such swearwords.

P.S. Speaking of modern politicians, I take vicarious delight in the squabbles unfolding within Trump’s administration. Apparently the black eye sported by Elon Musk a couple of weeks ago was caused by a punch thrown by Treasury Secretary Bessent in retaliation to Musk’s rugby tackle on him.

Why can’t today’s politicians settle their disagreements in the manner of Burr and Hamilton or, for that matter, Canning and Castlereagh? It would be so much more dignified and conducive to public good.  

John Adams, the second US president, identified the founding constitutional tenet of the American republic as “a government of laws, not of men.”

A third possibility never occurred even to that sage man, an oversight corrected by Donald Trump. Under his tutelage, America is run by a government of neither laws nor men, but by that of just one man, Trump himself.

Watching from afar, I’m amazed that a nation that has always venerated its constitution can so blithely watch it being crushed underfoot. The checks no longer check, the balances have lost their fulcrum, laws have fallen by the wayside. But one law looms large: Trump’s arbitrary will.

He began his second term in office by issuing a blanket pardon to all 1,500 people arrested after riots at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 – including those few directly involved in assaults on police officers. Trump started as he meant to go on.

A new legal principle was beginning to take shape: no one wearing a MAGA cap and playing lickspittle to Trump is ever guilty of any crime, even if convicted of one. Any such conviction will be quashed by a presidential pardon.

The mechanism usually involves an intercession by dubious characters Trump sees as his political and cultural kin, most prominently the rapper Kanye West and his ex-wife Kim Kardashian. It was this hideous couple who set the wheels in motion during Trump’s first administration.

In 2018, Kim, who turns a bad case of lipoedema into a cash-spinner, interceded on behalf of Alice Marie Johnson, 70. She was serving a life sentence for cocaine trafficking, a little transgression she had committed, according to Kim, only “to keep a roof over her family’s heads”.

I don’t know if Miss Johnson’s tough childhood was also cited, along with her having suffered the trauma of sexual and/or racial abuse, but one way or another Trump was moved. A few days later, after Kim’s then husband, Kanye West, had paid his main man Donald a visit in the White House, Johnson was freed.

When Trump returned to the White House, he was seething with hatred of the American judiciary who he knew were out to get him and his supporters. Well, not on his watch. He was prepared to pardon any MAGA convict irrespective of his crime.

(“Even paranoiacs have real enemies,” goes the old saying. Trump’s feelings weren’t wholly unjustified, for the Biden administration had disgracefully tried to commandeer the law to pursue Trump and his acolytes even when nothing illegal had been committed. However, Trump’s vengeance outdoes Biden’s bungling ten-fold.)

The scale of that planned undertaking was so large that a special position had to be created in the administration, that of ‘pardon tsar’. Or rather, in this case, tsarina, for Trump found a perfect candidate for the job: the very same Alice Marie Johnson.

One can see some warped logic in that appointment: an army general knows how to fight a war, an economist knows how to run the economy – and a pardoned criminal knows how to pardon criminals.

Such as the Chicago gangster Larry Hoover, serving six life sentences for running a cocaine empire with sales of $109 million a year. This pardon can also be traced back to that 2018 meeting of souls between Donald Trump and Kanye West, whose affection for the Donald is only matched by his declared admiration of Hitler.

Hoover is languishing in a Colorado maximum security prison, but he was also sentenced to 100-200 years for murder in Illinois, meaning he is unlikely to go free soon. But miracles do happen, especially when Kanye and Don are such good pals. For the time being, Trump has issued a federal pardon.

“It’s very important for me to get Hoover out,” said Kayne. “Because in an alternate universe, I am him.” I can just see his main man Don flashing an avuncular smile. Misusing ‘alternate’ for ‘alternative’ comes right out of the Trump textbook of English, while the MAGA cap covers up Kanye’s self-declared identification with a murderous drug runner.

The president can justifiably claim to be rappers’ best friend, always provided the ‘artists’ sport the regulation headgear. During his first term, he pardoned a whole batch of degenerates, and last week he laid his exonerating hands on NBA Youngboy, convicted of gun crimes.

And, should ‘P Diddy’ be found guilty of sex trafficking, he needn’t fret. “I would certainly look at the facts,” said Trump. Or, by the looks of it, just one fact: the design of the criminal’s baseball cap.

Trump’s underlings are quite forthright about this novel approach to jurisprudence. Last week, Johnson told Fox News she had pardoned two TV stars guilty of bank fraud because they were the “Trumps of Georgia”. And Ed Martin, Trump’s pardons attorney, freed a sheriff doing a tenner for bribery because “No Maga [is] left behind”.

Trump isn’t the first president abusing the pardoning privilege. Both Obama and Biden did so as well, the latter issuing a wholesale pardon even for those friends and relations who hadn’t even been indicted yet. Well, foresight is better than hindsight, we can all agree on that.

Yet Trump’s natural tendency to rule by fiat, bypassing legislative and judiciary bodies, poses a greater threat to the Constitution. Thus he usurps the constitutional domain of Congress by imposing arbitrary tariffs. Yet the executive branch can only take control of international commerce in an emergency.

The nature of such emergencies has never been tightly defined, although it’s assumed that constitutional documents understood them as wars or natural disasters. This gave Trump a loophole to interpret an emergency as anything he says it is.

Hence he can wreak havoc on domestic and international commerce unimpeded by any constitutional constraints. Perhaps the president could benefit from a remedial course taken by any naturalised American, specifically the chapters on the separation of powers and the three branches of government.

America is a resilient country able to withstand recessions, depressions, wars, civil unrest, assassinations of presidents. But that resilience comes from the country’s solid constitutional core that has stayed intact ever since the Civil War put the final touches on it.

An egomaniac bully combining the traits of a Mafia godfather and a self-appointed messiah can cause an accelerated erosion of that core. This would have a devastating effect even if some policies he pushes through are beneficial, as Trump’s doubtless are.

His attempt to slash government spending is ham-fisted and only marginally successful, but the instinct behind it is good. Trump’s refusal to be swayed by the net-zero madness should make any Briton envious, as should his effort to stem the flow of illegal immigrants.

But the constitutional sabotage Trump is perpetrating, along with his much-publicised corrupt shenanigans, will undo all the good things he does and make the bad things much worse. I don’t think America can afford a president like that.

When I read the headline Flagrant Sexism is Spoiling the French Open, I was shocked.

That reaction wasn’t caused by the putative demise of the year’s second Grand Slam event. What little of it I’ve seen suggests that the tournament is running smoothly enough, and it’s certainly not lacking in attendance statistics.

The word that went through me like a jolt was ‘sexism’. The effect was especially jarring because the offensive term appeared in The Telegraph, our supposedly conservative broadsheet.

The only context in which this coinage should ever befoul a conservative paper is scathing mockery of the New Age jargon. Using it as a meaningful term is an outrage.

This is no trivial matter for he who controls language controls the mind. By accepting glossocratic usages as meaningful and standard, a conservative paper betrays its core readership and its heritage. To use a tennis term, it forfeits a match to the enemies of everything such a paper is supposed to uphold.

It was only after I overcame the initial shock that I read the rest of the headline, which then led me to read the rest of the article. I undertook that effort to find out what on earth the author, Fiona Tomas, could possibly mean.

If I understand the word ‘sexism’ correctly, which is never to be taken for granted with this lexical stratum, it denotes a preferential treatment of men over women (never the other way around). Like all such non-words, it boasts astounding elasticity, easily expanding to castigate any attempt to suggest that men and women are biologically different.

At that point, sexism can neatly segue into other transgressions regarded as felonies by the New Age lot, such as misogyny, transphobia, homophobia and, well, conservatism. But the term’s narrow meaning is unequal treatment of men and women, in this case those playing in the French Open.

Such inequality could be interpreted as the two groups getting unequal prize money. But that charge no longer applies: the prize money is the same even though the men spend twice as long on court and show ten times the skill. I’ve often fumed in writing over that gross iniquity, brought about as it was by heinous political pressure exerted by the kind of people who wield words like ‘sexism’ naturally.

Anyway, the wrong side won that battle a long time ago, so in what form has sexism reared its ugly head at this year’s Roland Garros? Alas, curiosity can not only kill a cat, but also draw a chap into an article he knows will be idiotic and pernicious.

It turned out that Miss Tomas’s beef concerns the allocation of prime-time slots to men’s matches, leaving the women to do battle while Parisians and European TV audiences are at work. That, according to her, constitutes sexist bias at its most glaring.

She quotes one of the more vociferous players, Ons Jabeur, as “summing it up magnificently”: “Honouring one side of the sport shouldn’t mean ignoring the other.”

Now, as a Muslim, Miss Jabeur grew up with a religion whose tenets famously place a strong emphasis on equality between the sexes. Thus, one can understand the strength of her feelings, while still lamenting the weakness of her argument.

Honouring one side over the other has nothing to do with it. Rien, as they say at Roland Garros. The decision to schedule men’s matches at a time when more people can watch them is dictated by commercial considerations and also a proper concern for the audience.

Jabeur’s – and vicariously Tomas’s – argument would only make sense if more spectators would rather watch a women’s match than a men’s. But that’s not so, as any tennis fan would tell you, other than those who like peeking under short skirts more than watching a great game.

Show me a spectator who says that he’d watch Ons Jabeur play Coco Gauff in preference to, say, Alcaraz playing Sinner, and I’ll show you a liar – or else an upskirting pervert.

Miss Tomas anticipated that line of argument and set out to preempt it: “This flagrant sexism is based on the flawed rationale that women’s matches – by virtue of being played over three sets rather than five – lack quality, which risks broadcasters being left unsatisfied and fans not getting as much bang for their buck.”

What’s flawed isn’t the organisers’ rationale, but Miss Tomas’s silly notion. First, women’s tennis is inferior to men’s not just because it’s played over three sets, not five – although, in terms of “much bang for their buck”, enjoying five sets and not three does offer more enjoyment, other things being equal.

But they aren’t. Men’s tennis is vastly superior on every level, including those that have nothing to do with men being physiologically faster and stronger. This is something Miss Tomas either doesn’t understand or refuses to accept.

That’s why, having dug a hole for herself, she spurns traditional wisdom and goes on digging: “Aryna Sabalenka’s forehand was exceeding speeds of some men’s players at last year’s US Open.” Irrelevant if true.

That sentence alone proves that, unlike most spectators, Miss Tomas has never struck a tennis ball in anger. If she had, she’d know that any of those feeble-hitting men would play Sabalenka, world Number One, off the court without losing a game.

There’s more to a tennis shot than sheer pace. It’s true that Aryna Sabalenka, an Amazon six footer built like a middle linebacker in American football, can hit her forehand with awesome power. But all professional (and most semi-professional) male players hit the ball with a much greater variety of spin and placement – and an infinitely higher consistency.

Anyone can whack the ball very hard, provided you remove the net and the requirement to keep the ball between the white lines. Any grown-up without obvious physical impairments could probably drive a tennis ball the length of several city blocks.

But only a highly skilled player can strike the ball hard over the net and into the court time after time, moving his opponent corner to corner and keeping the rally going for 30 shots if he has to.

Watch the French Open, and you’ll notice that the women can hit hard and they can hit consistently, but they can’t hit hard consistently. Most points even between top players end with one of them dumping the ball into the net or driving it several feet over the line.

The men, however, usually commit fewer unforced errors in five sets than women do in three. For example, Sabalenka can’t hit three of her monster shots in a row, an inability that shows she hasn’t worked as hard on her technique as the men do.

Miss Tomas thus satisfies two essential requirements for a modern journalist: wokery and ignorance of her subject. Let me tell you, this young woman is going places. There’s no way of knowing where The Telegraph is going. Judging by this article, the paper has already arrived.

Since Trump first started uttering statements in public, he has been obsessed with tariffs. Over the past 40 years or so, the obsession has gradually turned into a mania.

Any country that had a trade surplus with America was ripping her off, such was Trump’s understanding of economics. And even countries like Britain that had a trade deficit with America were plotting to turn it into a surplus so that they too could start ripping America off.

The only way for America to protect herself against such predators was to hit back with punitive tariffs, thereby making America great again. Entreaties by conservative economists, such as Milton Friedman, were falling on deaf ears.

He and his University of Chicago colleagues were arguing that a country’s economic strength is defined by her imports, not exports. It’s when the former exceed the latter that a country has a favourable trade balance.

After all, if a butcher can afford to spend more on vegetables than a greengrocer can spend on meat, which one is doing better? Those bastards who are ripping America off, that’s who. No rational arguments could dislodge Trump sitting astride his idée fixe.

During his first term at the White House, when Trump was still compos mentis, he introduced a 25 per cent tariff on steel imports and declared victory: he saved 2,000 American jobs. Happiness all around; tariffs had done their job.

So they had, but that wasn’t quite the job Trump had in mind. True enough, 2,000 jobs of steel workers were saved. And then what happened?

A tariff is a tax imposed on both foreign exporters and domestic consumers because it makes the goods, in this case steel, more expensive. The trouble is that 80 times more Americans were (and continue to be) employed in steel-using industries than in steel-making ones. The cost of doing business went up in those industries, and redundancies ensued.

Some 77,000 of them, which equalled a net effect of 75,000 American jobs sacrificed at the altar of Trump’s mania. Now, Trump may be becoming deranged, but not so much that he has forgotten Einstein’s caution that, if you continue to do the same thing over and over again, you can’t expect different results.

In his current tenure, the president has taken those wise words to heart and refused to do the same thing over again. Rather than persevering with 25 per cent tariffs on steel, he has doubled them to 50 per cent. And now the new generation of Friedman’s colleagues at the University of Chicago are again warning that the measure will harm US consumers and cost US manufacturing jobs.

General Motors has already announced closure of plants in Maryland, Michigan, Ohio and Ontario, citing steel tariffs as part of the reason. Trump has winced at that development, yet has so far failed to do anything about reversing his bungling raid on the economy. But don’t despair: these days the Donald reverses his decisions as often as he brushes his dentures.

At the same time, he has announced his “Big, Beautiful Bill” of sweeping tax cuts accompanied by only token reductions in public spending. This is another crazy idea, and if he wants to find out how crazy, he ought to study Liz Truss’s tenure as Britain’s PM and why it only lasted 49 days.

This is something that even his closest acolytes know. In fact, when Elon Musk left DOGE the other day, he correctly stated that a bill can be either big or beautiful, but not both. Economic experts – but what do they know, eh? – are confidently predicting that any attempt to put this bill into practice will add four more trillion to the already existing national debt of 36 trillion, while pushing annual deficits over seven per cent of GDP.

No wonder credit rating agencies have stripped America of its top AAA rating, and investors are now charging five per cent interest on America’s borrowing. This can only rise if Trump persists in his amateurish bungling, and America is already paying a trillion dollars a year to service her national debt.

Musk cuts a frustrated figure. Say what you will about him, but he can add up with the best of them. Unfortunately Musk found out the hard way that his mathematical ability counts for nothing when it comes to negotiating his way around the political Beltway.

He took his job at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) fully intent on fulfilling his task of cutting two trillion a year off public spending. Alas, Elon had to discover that, for all his business acumen, when it comes to DC politics he is a rank amateur.

He, and his former boss Donald, should read the book The Triumph of Politics by David Stockman, Reagan’s head of OMB. He too attacked a similar task, albeit it with smaller targets, only to find himself buried under an avalanche of Washington mandarins.

Stockman realised it’s impossible to introduce large tax cuts without similarly huge cuts in spending. These he was unable to achieve, but neither Musk nor, more important, Trump learned from that experience.

As a result, Musk claims only $175 billion in savings, but even that amount doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The actual figure is probably half that but, even if Musk’s sums are correct, considering the gargantuan size of the federal budget, $175 billion falls within the range of a rounding error.

Many years ago, there was an exhibition of amateur art at the V&A. The clever poster advertising it said, “Noah’s Ark was designed by an amateur. The Titanic was designed by a professional.” I’m sure the headline worked as a way of drawing punters in, but the implied idea manifestly doesn’t work in politics.

Expertise gained in making cars, launching rockets or, for that matter, manipulating the US bankruptcy laws to one’s benefit doesn’t translate to the political arena.

This is a difficult idea to sell to today’s public paper-trained to believe that an expert in one area has to be an expert in all. Hoi polloi take on faith political ideas mouthed by various actors and pop stars whose credibility is boosted by the time they spend on TV screens.

Trump knows this, which is why he has successfully turned a negative into a positive, a standard weapon in the arsenal of any adman. Yes, I’m an outsider, he shouts at every turn. That’s why I can work miracles. I was on TV, wasn’t I?

Hence at least 20 members of his administration stepped into their jobs straight off the screens of Fox News and other media outlets. Most of them are puerile eccentrics, putting it mildly, who even lack the capacity to learn on the job, as Stockman eventually did. But then he was a bright young economist to begin with.

To be fair, Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, is a grown-up economic professional and there are a few others. Yet their influence is negligible because Trump wants sycophants around him, not intelligent advisors. By all accounts, the latter have to turn into the former if they want to stay in their jobs.

One word out of turn, and their wildly erratic and unpredictable boss can sack them with the same ease he paraded in his TV show The Apprentice. Hence they wisely tell their boss things he wants to hear, pretending they don’t realise how deranged he is becoming.

The American presidential democracy can’t oust a bungling president as efficiently as Britain’s parliamentary democracy can get rid of a bungling prime minister. But it has other, mostly legal, ways to protect itself.

That’s why, as Tocqueville spotted with his eagle eye two centuries ago, political problems sooner or later become legal in America. The courts have already tried to stop Trump’s tariff madness, with him so far being able to slow them down with appeals. Yet it doesn’t take a genius to realise that legal challenges will be coming thick and fast.

And, if the Americans’ standard of living shows a decline, as most economists are predicting it will, after the mid-term elections Trump may become a lame duck president unable to push his madcap ideas past a hostile Congress and obstreperous courts.

That situation will be fraught with such dangers not only for the US but for the whole residually free world that it’s hard to wish for it. Yet we may have no choice.