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That’s the size of the aid package for the Ukraine that the US Congress has finally approved after six months of dithering.

It would be easy to ascribe the dithering to bad faith, and the change of mind to subsequent pangs of conscience, but this explanation isn’t so much simple as simplistic. This isn’t to suggest that congressmen are incapable of bad faith or have no conscience, only that the mechanisms involved are more complex.

Politicians are driven above all, not to say exclusively, by political considerations. That truism applies tenfold to any election year, such as this one, when politics easily trumps geopolitics.

The two parties are busily trying to score points off each other, and if whole nations suffer collateral damage, politicians aren’t especially bothered. They have their day job to worry about.

The Republicans held up the aid bill not because they root for Putin to win this war, although I’m sure some do. But most of them simply wanted to show the Biden crowd in a bad light.

To that end they insisted for months on encumbering the aid bill with the unrelated ballast of border controls. The stratagem worked because the electorate is more concerned about the hordes of migrants crossing the Rio Grande than about the hordes of Russians fording the Dnieper.

Eventually the two parts of the bill were separated, but even then the Republican Speaker Mike Johnson (whose own position on Putin’s aggression is rather ambivalent) did his utmost to delay the vote. Again discounting the possible but unproven accusations of a pro-Putin stance, he and his idol Trump must have felt they’d win either way.

If the Ukraine ran out of ammunition and sued for peace on Biden’s watch, the Republicans would have screamed about the Democrats betraying America’s allies and promoting evil in the world. If Trump then went on to win in November, and the Ukrainians held on until, say, December, he’d get the praise befitting a peacemaker able to mediate a ceasefire.

The last US president to receive such accolades was Bill Clinton, for his part in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, supposedly delivering peace on Northern Ireland. Both that travesty and any treaty America would be willing to underwrite in the Ukraine prove yet again that the easiest way to secure peace is to capitulate. Britain capitulated to IRA terrorists then, the Ukraine would capitulate to Russian fascists now, and in both cases American presidents would emerge smelling like roses.

Biden and his people put up token resistance to such tactics, invoking the image of a schoolgirl in the back of her beau’s car. But they had their own reasons not to fight too hard.

For one thing, they are scared stiff of that dread E-word, escalation. They fear – or pretend to fear – that, if the Ukrainians start pushing the invaders back where they came from, the Russians would respond by nuking Warsaw and Vilnius or possibly even London and New York.

Even barring such cataclysms, Putin might force NATO, and therefore America, to take more of a hands-on part in the conflict. The upshot would be that Biden would face the unsavoury choice of going into the election with the reputation of either a warmonger or a heartless betrayer of everything good in God’s creation.

This explains America’s demands that the Ukrainians refrain from striking deep into Russian territory and her refusal to provide the long-range missile capable of doing just that. The Biden administration has even managed to describe as a possible factor of escalation the purely defensive systems capable of protecting Ukrainian cities from annihilation.

At the same time, the Democrats blamed the Republicans in Congress for torpedoing military assistance to the Ukraine, and not without reason. Yet the Biden administration itself refused to use the discretionary funds already cleared by Congress. Thus several billion sat idle in banks instead of being converted into several months’ worth of ordnance for Ukrainian guns.

Neither side, and this should go without saying, was unduly concerned about thousands of Ukrainian civilians being buried under the rubble with their whole families. No one has ever accused modern politicians of being too empathetic, although some people have dared to accuse American politicians of only ever being driven by parochial interests.

So much for the dithering. But why this sudden change of heart?

I’d suggest that the Russians themselves forced America’s hand. Just look at the situation from their perspective and imagine yourself in Putin’s shoes.

The Russians have finally begun to make noticeable advances on the front. These proceed inch by inch rather than mile by mile, but the balance is shifting. The Ukrainians, outgunned 10 artillery rounds to one, are finding it increasingly hard to keep the Russians at bay.

Zelensky’s principal hope is that the US will replenish his dwindling arsenal, with his heroic troops doing the rest. Conversely, Putin’s principal hope is to prevent such a development.

Hence one would expect him to reassure the Americans, through official and other channels, that America has everything to gain and nothing to lose by withholding armaments from the Ukraine. If I were his diplomatic adviser, I’d suggest this is what he should be communicating to Biden:

“Joe, we love and respect America. We understand that political necessity made you help the Ukraine out at first. We’d do the same in your place. By the same token, you must understand why our propaganda has been hostile to America. But we don’t really mean it. You have my personal assurance that, if you block any further aid, Russia will remain your grateful friend forever, and we’ll show our gratitude. Just name your, well, America’s, price.”

(I’d also advise Putin not to use Foreign Minister Lavrov as a messenger. Old Sergei doesn’t mind using the foulest obscenities in public. The other day, when he was asked an awkward question at a press conference, Lavrov laughingly impugned the sexual morality of the reporter’s mother. Since in the past he has shown his ability to do the same thing in English, Putin really ought to find a diplomat who’s more, well, diplomatic.)   

That would be the way for Putin to exploit America’s indecisiveness to his full advantage. So what has he done instead? Exactly the opposite.

When a month ago Moscow’s Crocus theatre was shot up and burned by terrorists, Putin’s propaganda instantly held the US responsible. That’s par for the course, and the media din could have been dismissed as simply ruckus for internal consumption.

But then Putin instructed the Russian courts to charge several top US congressmen with sponsoring and financing that terrorist act. Now, unlike Russians, Americans take legal charges, even those in absentia, seriously. Since anyone in his right mind realises how risible those charges are, US legislators were put in a position where they had to respond to what was a blatantly hostile act.

And respond they did, by swiftly pushing the $61 billion aid package through and also confiscating Russian assets held in America and transferring them to the Ukraine. Now Biden has run out of excuses not to send armaments to that beleaguered country, although he may still try to sabotage the aid.

For example, Biden may use his executive powers to declare that sending over some weapons, such as long-range missiles, would run contrary to America’s national interests. But then the Democrats will no longer be able to blame the Republicans for being Putin’s stooges, and Biden will be made to suffer in November.

So hope lives on now, where just a few days ago it was beginning to look moribund. Using their new kit, Ukrainian troops may be able to check the Russian advance and then start pushing back.

Alas, I have to talk about hope, not certainty. God only knows how much time will elapse between congressional approval and the arrival of actual physical crates in the Ukraine. One can only hope it won’t be too long.   

Back in the 1970s, before Margaret Thatcher introduced a modicum of economic sanity, Britain was known as ‘the sick man of Europe’.

That was meant figuratively, as a figure of speech describing the catastrophic state of the British economy. Half a century on, the figurative has become literal.

Britain now has some three million people on permanent sickness benefits, which suggests we have more invalids than in the aftermath of either world war. Thousands more sign on every week, with overworked GPs either too weary or too scared to deny them the sick notes.

This is the situation that Rishi Sunak promises to change by stripping GPs of their power to sign people off work – if the Tories win the next election. Acting in the same spirit, I hereby undertake to eliminate bad weather if I become God.

That’s not an onerous commitment because there’s no chance I’ll become God. But then there’s no chance the Tories will win the next election either. And even less of a chance that the incoming Labour government will improve the situation. In fact, it’s guaranteed to make matters even worse.

It’s not just sick notes either. Some 10 per cent of our GDP is spent on welfare payments (excluding pensions), and that proportion is climbing steeply like a jump jet. Essentially, half the population are working to support the other half, an arrangement that spells economic, social and, above all, moral disaster.

There’s nothing new about this observation. If you’ll forgive a long quote, R.G. Collingwood (d. 1943) said it all when analysing the reasons for the collapse of the Roman Empire:

“The critical moment was reached when Rome created an urban proletariat whose only function was to eat free bread and watch free shows. This meant the segregation of an entire class which had no work to do whatever; no positive function in society, whether economic or military or administrative or intellectual or religious; only the business of being supported and being amused. When that had been done, it was only a question of time until Plato’s nightmare of a consumers’ society came true; the drones set up their own king and the story of the hive came to an end.”

Go back another century and Tocqueville presaged Collingwood by writing that “public assistance and ‘pauperdom’ exist in a symbiotic relationship”. And in the distant past both Plato and Aristotle made statements to the same effect, proving that Britain’s problem, while dire, is neither new nor unique.

A Briton would have to earn a gross salary of over £50,000 a year to match the full range of benefits on offer, and most benefit scrounges lack the qualifications to command such pay. So why would they want to work? Would you go to work every morning if you could make more money ‘chilling out’ at home? (The expression comes straight from young people explaining why they aren’t seeking jobs.)

Stating the blindingly obvious, this problem could be solved in five minutes. Technically, that is. Politically, it’s impossible to solve at all – not in Britain, nor in the US, nor in any country constituted along Enlightenment principles.

Call me a determinist, but it’s only individuals and not societies that are endowed with free will. Once a country steps on a certain constitutional path signposted by an ideology, it can only move in one direction, all the way to the precipice.

Any sociologist worth his salt will tell you how to solve the problem in question. Their research shows that people work much harder to get the basic necessities of life than they do to improve their lot further, once food and shelter have been taken care of.

There’s your solution: social programmes offering basic necessities for free must be abolished, or rather limited to the people who are too ill or too old to work. Able-bodied Britons in full command of their faculties must work for their sustenance – or starve in the street.

They won’t: given that choice, they’ll happily snap up all the lowly jobs now done by migrants from Europe or elsewhere. Such jobs exist and in huge numbers. It’s just that they pay less than our generous, compassionate Exchequer.

So much for the technical solution. Now a few words about the political impossibility.

Over the past three centuries, the Enlightenment has inexorably produced a certain mindset that can’t be changed without mercilessly cauterising the collective social brain. This mindset is at its most evident in societies calling themselves socialist or communist, but that’s just a matter of degree.

A thoroughly democratic country governed by people who have to seek majority approval every few years will inevitably empower the majority to demand handouts, especially in the absence of religious faith. The most obvious way to curry favour with the public is to bribe it by flinging the public wallet wide-open.

That’s why the welfare state is bound to appear, grow to maturity – and then turn into an ogre devouring public finances and, much worse, public morality. Everything else is just rhetoric, and we’ve bred a species of politicians who can juggle words like ‘compassion’, ‘socioeconomically disadvantaged’ and ‘social justice’ with the dexterity of a circus performer.

To paraphrase Jean-Claude Juncker, our politicians know exactly how to solve the problem of an economy sinking under the weight of the freeloading masses. They just don’t know how to get re-elected once they’ve solved it, in the only way it’s ever possible to do so.

This sort of corruption is a two-way street. Politicians corrupt the public by bribing it with blithe abandon, and the public corrupts the politicians by demanding more. Neither group is made up exclusively or even mostly of inherently corrupt individuals. They just sense the inner logic of their society and act accordingly.

As far back as in 1958, when the welfare state was still in nappies, the quintessential Tory Peregrine Worsthorne wanted his party to “pledge loyalty” to its “basic features”. He was preaching to the choir: the party calling itself Conservative already knew it would never gain power by bucking the DNA of modernity. And power is the be all and end all of modern politics – bono publico be damned.

Rishi Sunak is on a losing wicket, even though he doubtless understands the nature of the problem. Yet he also realises that a Conservative Party justifying its name would be heading for political oblivion.

Real conservatism is only possible at various gatherings where likeminded individuals exchange stories of woe, variously clever speeches and badly printed leaflets. Outside the walls of those hotel conference rooms, the welfare state will continue to grow until the economy bursts like an over-pumped helium balloon.

Rishi-washy will be fine come what may. But that’s more than one could say for the rest of us.   

Former defensive midfielder and still an offensive man, Joey Barton must feel at home in the presence of police officers.

By anyone’s criteria, the ball kicker has had a rather eventful life, with many criminal incidents he could chalk up in his list. In fact, when he was younger, Joey’s photo should have been in the encyclopaedia, illustrating the entry for ‘thug, n’.

In 2006, at the dawn of his career, Barton was investigated for exposing his buttocks to Everton supporters after a game. It went downhill from there. If Joey never quite matched the exploits of his brother, who did 17 years for murder, it wasn’t for any lack of trying.

In 2007 he was arrested for assaulting a taxi driver. That same year he beat up a teammate, who ended up in hospital with head injuries and a detached retina. Barton only got a suspended sentence and a fine for that, which proves that our courts are way too lenient.

Later that year, Joey beat a man within an inch of his life in Liverpool. That time he was sentenced to six months in prison and served 76 days.

In 2008 Barton jabbed a lit cigar into a teammate’s eye and was sued for his trouble. The case was settled out of court, with Joey ending up £65,000 poorer.

In 2012, Joey was arrested for a fight outside a nightclub. In 2019 he was investigated for assault. In 2021, he was actually charged with assault for kicking Mrs Barton, his childhood sweetheart, in the head. She later refused to testify against her hubby-wubby, and the charges were dismissed.

Nor does Barton neglect non-criminal offences. Radio presenter Jeremy Vine is currently suing Joey for describing him as “a big bike nonce”. Jeremy is indeed known for preferring a bicycle to other forms of transportation, but not for being a child sex molester, which is what ‘nonce’ means in colloquial British usage. A libel case is pending.

However, even such an uninhibited life ill-prepared Joey Barton for his current ordeal. Receiving four visits from Cheshire police in three days must have taken even Joey out of his comfort zone. What takes me out of mine is the reason for these encounters.

This time around Joey, now a cracker-barrel philosopher with 2.8 million X followers, didn’t follow his customary tendency of putting people into hospital. His crime was much worse: he said a few disrespectful things about female football players and commentators.

The latter, he said, shouldn’t be “speaking with authority about the men’s game”. Those who do, he added, kill football fans at the rate made notorious by serial killers Fred and Rosemary West.

Barton later clarified his meaning. He didn’t mean that pundit Eni Aluko and broadcaster Lucy Ward murder people physically. They merely kill fans’ love of the game with their inane, unenlightening remarks. And oh, by the way, he, Joey, would score 100 out of 100 penalties against England goalkeeper Mary Earps.

That’s where a broken clock comes in. As we know, even such a timepiece tells the right time twice a day. And even an illiterate thug like Joey Barton can sometimes be right.

As he is in his disdainful assessment of women’s football and the punditry offered by its veterans. Joey was a good player who plied his trade in some of the best premiership teams. He can thus offer insights into the game that he knows are beyond women players, who don’t merely play the game to a different standard – they play a different game.

I played football for my university and I’m still man enough to admit that professional male players like Joey Barton have forgotten more about the game than I ever knew. That’s why I’m always interested to find out what former pros think. I find their commentary enlightening, especially if they’ve taken the trouble to learn their new trade properly.

Former women players, on the other hand, tell me nothing I don’t know already. But that’s not the point. It’s not that women now commentate on men’s games, or how. It’s why.

Their new employment opportunities come from the same emetic wokery that’s observable in other sports as well – indeed in every walk of life. For example, former women boxers now even do commentary at professional men’s fights, and as to tennis – don’t get me started on that.

When Serena Williams, probably the best female player of all time, was asked a few years ago whether she could beat Andy Murray, she laughed. “I’m not going to play Andy. He’d beat me love and love in 15 minutes. It’s a totally different game.” Yes, it is. It’s only the prize money that’s the same.

Presence in commentary booths is nowadays also shared equally, much to the chagrin of the viewers. Most men watching tennis play the game themselves, some to a high standard. They’d rather listen to, say, Tim Henman talking about a kick serve than to Jo, who even in her heyday couldn’t even kick a cat.

Following the success of their racquet-wielding sisters, some feminists are now demanding that women footballers also be paid the millions earned by their male colleagues. So far they haven’t got anywhere because footballers are paid by their clubs, not by tournament organisers.

And club owners can’t be bullied as easily. They aren’t going to pay man-sized salaries to women who play to empty stadiums and a fraction of the men’s TV audiences. Not yet at any rate.

Such minor considerations don’t deter the media though. They’ve been pushing women’s football down our throats for several years now, and they don’t mind the gagging reflux.

Even five years ago, women’s football barely rated a column inch in the bottom right corner of the last sports page. Now they command pages and spreads. And women don’t just present football shows, but also do expert commentary, which makes my finger reach for the ‘mute’ button.

Since I don’t have 2.8 million followers, I’m unlikely to receive police visits for saying all this. Joey Barton, on the other hand, is something else again. Considering his previous, he may go down for a long stretch because he got something right for once in his life.

No one spits into the wind of ideology without ending up with spittle on his face. Ideology is a hurricane that’s gathering momentum as it blows inland. Watch your step, Joey.

Acting Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Stephen House, has launched the national Police Race Action Plan with these rousing words: “The Met is committed to becoming an actively anti-racist organisation that can be trusted by everyone in London.”

Except, evidently, by the Jews.

One Jewish Briton found that out the hard way when he tried to cross the street in Aldwych, an area a few hundred yards from the Mother of All Parliaments. What unfolded then made a mockery of that proximity.

You see, a pro-Palestinian march was under way, and the marchers’ brittle sensibilities could be offended by the sight of a Jew. That’s what a police officer guarding the crowd’s right to parade its grievances explained to the man provocatively wearing a kippah:

“I don’t want anybody antagonising anybody,” said the cop, “… and at the moment, sir, you are quite openly Jewish. This is a pro-Palestinian march. I am not accusing you of anything but I am worried about the reaction to your presence.”

Being openly Jewish is thus antagonising (though mercifully still short of incurring criminal charges), whereas being openly pro-terrorist isn’t. I get it, but the pest in question didn’t, not straight away at any rate. Some people just don’t understand it when you try to be nice to them.

That’s why another officer had to explain the lie of the land in no uncertain terms: “You will be escorted out of this area so you can go about your business, go where you want freely. Or if you choose to remain here, because you are causing a breach of peace, with all these other people, you will be arrested.”

Lest he may be accused of blatant anti-Semitism, the policeman explained he was only threatening arrest to protect the interloper’s safety: “Your presence here is antagonising a large group of people that we can’t deal with all of them if they attack you… because your presence is antagonising them.”

‘Antagonising’ seems to be the current buzzword of the Met. The word seems to be peculiarly defined. The police are displaying epic forbearance at the sight of a mob chanting frenzied anti-Semitic invective and waving placards of the swastika superimposed on the Star of David. It’s only the presence of an “openly Jewish” man that’s antagonising.

Since we have the rule of law in Britain, we can’t rely on arbitrary judgement to decide who is transgressing against the new directive and who isn’t. Hence it’s necessary to formalise the antagonising features.

All Met officers should then be issued instructions defining openly Jewish appearance in detail. After all, not every Jew makes life easy for the police by wearing religious garments.

That done, every bobby on the beat should be equipped with a portable phrenology kit, making it easy to perform cranial and nasal measurements on the spot. One can just hear a Met officer saying to a pedestrian: “Awfully sorry, suh, but your nose is half an inch too long for this street, like.”

As to the concern for the man’s safety, let me make sure I understand. Sir Robert Peel, then Home Secretary, created the Metropolitan Police in 1829 for the express purpose of protecting public order and the safety of law-abiding individuals.

He bequeathed to his heirs not only the monikers based on his name (‘bobbies’ or ‘peelers’) but also a clear definition of their duties. Now they openly proclaim either their reluctance or their impotence to do the job. So what are the police for? They seem to be qualified or empowered only to enforce woke diktats, not the law.

In general, vigilantly as the police guard against every manifestation of anti-Muslim or anti-black bias (real or putative), they don’t seem to mind public displays of blatant anti-Semitism. Of course, it would be defying statistics to believe that the police force has a lower percentage of anti-Semites than the national average.

I don’t know what the national average is, but on this evidence it seems rather high. There’s no doubt that not only policemen but also indignant pedestrians would disperse any procession demanding that every black in, say, sub-Saharan Africa be killed.

Yet no one seems to mind when a crowd of fanatics marches through London streets screaming death to all Israelis (that’s what ‘from the river to the sea’ actually means). And the zealots don’t distinguish between Jews living in Israel or in Golders Green.

Policemen, being a captive audience, are easier to indoctrinate than the rest of the population. The public at large, at least some of its more recalcitrant members, can still resist constant brainwashing about ‘Palestinians’ being exterminated by genocidal Jews.

Cops, on the other hand, must follow the guidelines issued by their superiors. So even officers who are personally neither anti-Semitic nor pro-terrorist must enforce the rights of racist militants while denying the rights of people peacefully walking the streets.

The line between personal inclinations and official guidelines isn’t always easy to draw. Just look at the actions of another officer and tell me what his motivation was.

A woman took exception to the posters featuring swastikas at another such march last month. She complained to a policeman on duty, who in response gave her a lesson in both dialectics and history. That little logo isn’t necessarily a sign of anti-Semitism, he explained. The swastikas “need to be taken into context”.

Which context would that be? A sun-worshipping Hindu rite, where the swastika symbolised both the star and purity? If that’s what the cop meant, one has to applaud his erudition, which isn’t widely regarded as the core strength of our police force.

However, one suspects that’s not what he had in mind. He was simply fobbing the woman off by telling her to grin and bear it.

The cop knew perfectly well that, in the ‘context’ of today’s London streets, the swastika symbolises not the sun and not even purity, but the wholesale massacre of Jews. It’s just that he couldn’t see why a Jewish woman should be offended by the sight of the symbol under which half the world’s Jews were murdered just one lifetime ago.

His colleagues, on the other hand, had no doubt that the sight of a Jew was so unbearably painful to a frenzied mob that its feelings had to be protected.

How long before our mayor Sadiq Khan declares London a Jew-free zone (Judenfrei)? And authorises rallies like those so expertly filmed by Leni Riefenstahl? Nothing would surprise me. I’m rapidly losing the ability to be surprised.

An aptronym is a person’s name that’s eerily appropriate to his occupation.

Thus, I’ve known at least three financial people named Banks. Thomas Crapper invented… well, you know what he invented. Usain Bolt is a jolly fast sprinter. Swiss psychiatrist Jules Angst published books on anxiety. Rosalind Brewer used to be a director of the Molson Coors Brewing Company.

These are all amusing enough, but nowhere near as much as the name of one of the star witnesses for the prosecution at the trial of Donald Trump in Manhattan. That gentleman is the publisher of The National Inquirer, a tabloid known for its salacious stories fittingly illustrated.

His name? David Pecker – and do wipe that smirk off your face. That really is his name, I’m not kidding.

Apparently, Mr Pecker’s publication effectively served as the PR mouthpiece for the previous Trump campaign, constantly running stories detrimental to Trump’s opponents and spiking those detrimental to Trump. Allegedly falling into the latter category was the Stormy Daniels story and another similar one, involving a former Playboy model Karen McDougal.

Let me tell you, old Donald was a busy boy, but by all accounts the American public doesn’t hold his virile exuberance against him. In fact, his core support holds nothing against him, certainly not the rapidly multiplying criminal charges.

So far Donald hasn’t been charged with the assassination of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy, but if that were to happen I wouldn’t be at all surprised. The difficulties encountered on the first day of the trial don’t surprise me either, as you can see for yourself by glancing at my yesterday’s piece.

There I used the example of this case to argue against the continuing validity of the jury system. I shan’t repeat myself, but the basic point was that the pool of humanity from which juries could be drawn has been poisoned by modernity. Thanks to instant access to information, prospective jurors learn every detail of any publicised trial long before being summoned. And their minds are firmly made up before Exhibit A is presented.

What’s true of any publicised trial is a hundred times truer of a politicised one. And the first ever criminal trial of a former president is as politicised as they come.

Reading today’s reports, I couldn’t help gloating in that ‘I told you so’ way that’s not my common currency. The jury selection has run into expected problems: 50 out of the first 96 candidates owned up to having a strong bias about the case. That means there were 50 honest people and 46 liars – none of them can possibly be impartial.

And if all Manhattanites have a bias, one can almost certainly guarantee it’s against Trump. After all, 86.4 per cent of the island’s population voted for Biden in the 2020 election, with only 1.4 per cent opting for Trump.

The very choice of Manhattan as the venue strikes me as prejudicial – that’s like trying the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in Beverly Hills or on the campus of an Ivy League university.

Even more of a travesty is the choice of the judge. Juan Merchan didn’t just support Biden but actually contributed to his campaign. Surely he should have recused himself, if only not to guarantee the success of a subsequent appeal if Trump is found guilty.

So far His Honour has made one ruling I find baffling. The prosecution wanted to admit as evidence the notorious tape of Trump explaining how grabbing a woman’s kitten can make her docile. That the judge declined to do, probably because it’s unclear what locker-room banter has to do with the case. If the aim is to show that Trump isn’t a choir boy, it’s superfluous: I don’t think many people are in doubt on that score.

But then His Honour undid his good work by allowing the prosecution to refer to the tape throughout the trial. That strikes a rank amateur like me as tantamount to admitting the tape: the jury will be getting constant reminders that Donald is a bit on the rough side.

 “Ms Daniels was living proof that the defendant wasn’t all talk,” said the prosecutor, trying to make the kitten tape even remotely relevant. But it isn’t. The subtle logic may escape me, but off the top I can’t see what Trump’s propensity for talking dirty has to do with the charge of cooking the books to conceal a hush-up payment.

Mr Trump and his admirers, among whom I proudly don’t count myself, claim that the trial is politically motivated. One has to agree: even if the accusation is true, the whole thing is too petty to warrant the cost of a trial.

However, no one can guarantee that the truth, whatever it is, will come out in a trial where the judge is a Biden activist (and therefore Trump hater – the two camps are bursting with mutual animosity), while the jury is guaranteed to be biased to begin with and made much more so by the media coverage generally hostile to the defendant.

I can’t think offhand of any real reason for taking this matter to court other than the desire to torpedo Trump’s campaign. If so – and every evidence suggests it is so – the trial represents a travesty of justice.

That is a far worse crime than any Donald Trump may or may not have committed. A country can survive a corrupt president or prime minister, but it can’t survive the rule of corrupt law. Justice is the cornerstone of a civilised commonwealth. Knock it out and the whole edifice will collapse.  

The actual phrase is ‘twelve good men and true’, and it has been used to describe English juries since the early 17^th century. In those days it meant something.

Now, any conservative certainly and any Briton probably has to cherish the English Common Law. And anyone who cherishes the English Common Law has to respect its integral part, the jury system.

It goes back to institutions that predate the Norman Conquest. And juries in more or less their present form were developed soon after 1215, when the Church abandoned trial by ordeal. Hence the institution is covered with a patina of age, which brings wisdom (for example, the realisation that making a defendant walk barefoot over red-hot coals doesn’t deliver a reliable proof of guilt or innocence).

However, age may also bring senility, thereby jeopardising wisdom. Has that happened to the jury system? Maybe. Maybe not. But the question is certainly legitimate, as are the implicit doubts.

Jurors are supposed to decide a case on its merits. They may consider the defendant a sorry excuse for a human being, a reprobate, even a monster. But as unbiased men of impeccable character and integrity, they must still acquit if they don’t feel the prosecution has made its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

Such is the theory, and by and large it still works in practice. Yet there occur more and more trials, especially those with political implications, where it’s next to impossible to find twelve people untainted by bias.

As our world is getting increasingly politicised, politics barges into areas hitherto beyond its reach. Jurisprudence especially suffers from this tendency, with judges turning into political activists and using justice as an instrument of their activism. Jurors, meanwhile, tend to decide cases on extraneous, typically political, considerations.

One such was the 1995 trial of O.J. Simpson, transparently guilty of a gruesome double murder. Yet Simpson’s defence team (assisted by inept prosecution) managed to make his negritude the central issue of the case, so much so that the predominantly black LA jury disregarded heaps of prima facie evidence.

When Simpson was acquitted, the columnist George F. Will wrote wittily that the verdict proved yet again that a black man couldn’t get a fair trial in America. Had the case been free of political animus, he added, any jury would have convicted – even if only ten per cent of the evidence had been used, and the defence had decided which ten percent to admit.

But enough history. Another politicised trial gets under way today, that of Donald Trump, who thus becomes the first former US president to stand trial in a criminal case. He is accused of falsifying his financial records to hide a hush-money payment made to Stormy Daniels, a porn star. This would normally be classified as a misdemeanour, but the prosecution insists on a felony charge because the payments might have affected the result of the 2016 election.

Since I’m not up on such intricate details of American legality, I’ll refrain from voicing a view on Trump’s guilt or innocence, one way or the other. But I do think he is perfectly capable of paying off a blackmailing lady of easy virtue to make her shut up.

Yet it doesn’t matter what I think of Donald Trump. What matters is how the selected twelve jurors will look at his case. I’m sure they are good men (and women, as one is obligated to clarify these days). But are they – can they possibly be – true, which is to say objective and unbiased?

The trial is being held in New York, where I maintain it’s impossible to find 12 people who don’t hold a strong, armour-piercing opinion of Trump. Most New Yorkers loathe him because they detest his politics. Some adore him with equal passion because they love his politics. Some see him as a saviour of America. Others see him as the embodiment of America’s perdition.

There doesn’t seem to be any middle ground – Trump is definitely the most polarising American president in my lifetime. Again, I’m not going to pass judgement on such strong emotions, although I distrust excessive political passions as a matter of general principle.

Strong feelings are in my view best reserved for one’s family and perhaps church. Politics should be a dispassionate affair, a rational weighing of pros and cons as a basis for choosing people trusted to convert public good into policy and policy into action. I do realise, however, that such expectations ignore human nature, especially what it has become these days.

That, however, isn’t my point. I have several others though.

First, it’s infinitely harder these days than it was in the 13^th century to keep politics out of the courtroom. People have been paper-trained to assign political significance to, well, everything: race, sex, music, clothes, literature, urban planning, traffic laws, you name it.

Above all, people are increasingly seen not as fallible beings capable of both good and evil, but as political agents whose personality and actions are invariably skewed or even determined by their politics. Someone who shares one’s views is a friend and a general good egg; someone who doesn’t is a foe and a general bad apple.

Second, jury selection in the distant past always included questions designed to ensure that the candidates knew nothing, or at least little, about the case. Yet our era of mass access to electronic communications has put paid to that practice whenever a case receives any publicity whatsoever.

When it comes to the trials of O.J. Simpson or Donald Trump, I doubt that even dwellers of the planets in the outer reaches of our galaxy would be ignorant of every detail. And even such aliens would enter jury service with an unshakable opinion already formed.

The upshot is that the jury system is inoperable in any publicised trial, especially since these days people don’t know how to separate their innermost feelings from the facts under consideration. Moreover, one is justified to have doubts about the jury system even when the defendants are less illustrious personages than a football star or a former president.

Are we sure it’s possible to pick 12 random people who really understand the concept of legal guilt and innocence? I’m not. In our time of politicised and ideologised psychobabble, it’s hard to persuade jurors that they are to judge the evidence, not the man.

That’s why wily advocates are known to secure acquittal by claims that the defendant had a difficult childhood, an impoverished family, abusive parents or next to no education. Belonging to a presumably oppressed minority is also routinely believed to be a mitigating circumstance, and everyone who isn’t a white, middleclass male can always find some oppressed minority he belongs to.

On balance, if we are to save the jury system, I think it requires a thorough revision. The trial of Donald Trump may be used as a test case – and please stop me before I say it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

Different time, different place, different rockets.

Last night, Iran attacked Israel with over 300 killer drones and missiles, both cruise and ballistic. Israeli air defences, assisted by the US Air Force and RAF, intercepted all the drones and cruise missiles outside Israel’s air space. A few of the ballistic missiles got through, and a full account of the casualties is forthcoming.

For once the attack didn’t catch the Israelis unawares. They knew it was coming as retaliation for their own drone strike on Iran’s diplomatic mission in Syria on 1 April, which claimed the lives of several Iranian officers, including two top generals. Forewarned is forearmed and all that, but such old maxims may not still apply as fully as they did at the time the line in the title above was written.

This was the first time that Iran attacked Israel directly, rather than through proxies. Since the scale of the attack far exceeded the magnitude of the raid that had provoked it, an Israeli counterstrike is coming. Unless of course the Israeli High Command became Quakers overnight.

That counterstrike will call for a counter-counterstrike and so forth. I suppose that’s what they call escalation. The Latin root of this word means ‘staircase’, but neither last night nor 1 April was its first step. Iran has been waging war on Israel for years, using Hamas and Hezbollah to do its fighting.

Probably only US pressure has so far stopped Israel from retaliating against Iranian targets. Such tethers have now been removed or at least loosened, and one hopes the Israelis will take out Iran’s nuclear facilities along with other military targets.

According to Mohammad Bagheri, the Iranian Chief of Staff, “Operation Honest Promise was completed successfully from last night to this morning and achieved all its objectives.” [Note to myself: Find out whether that’s his surname or nickname, and how to pronounce it without offending anyone.]

Since he didn’t specify what those objectives had been, it’s hard to judge the veracity of that statement. I’m afraid that the real aim wasn’t so much hitting particular targets as sounding the gong for a major war in the Middle East.

The other day I watched an interview with a retired Israeli general, Itzhak Brik. The interview was in Hebrew, and the only English word I could make out was ‘bullshit’, which Gen. Brik repeated several times and in high tones. The subtitles made it clear that he was referring to Israel’s lackadaisical attitude to her armed forces and their preparedness for combat.

If anyone has any doubts that Israel is a full-fledged Western country, the good general dispels them in no uncertain terms. Apparently, Israel has been as irresponsible as the NATO countries.

According to Gen. Brik, the government has let numerous military triumphs go to its head. Convinced that the IDF is by far the strongest army in the Middle East, Israel has been blithely negligent during every interbellum period, including the one about to come to an end.

That’s why, for example, the Arab states managed to catch the IDF sleeping in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and it took heavy casualties for the Israelis to hang on. In that war, Gen. Brik commanded a tank battalion, and only seven out of his 200 soldiers survived the war.

In the past several years, Israel has cut four full divisions, which would be a huge reduction for any country and especially one as small as Israel. The equipment of the remaining forces has been downgraded so much, said the general, that he wasn’t sure Israel could survive a full-scale confrontation even with Hezbollah, never mind Iran. And Israel’s intelligence has lost much of its erstwhile vigilance, which is why it failed to anticipate the murderous Hamas attack on 7 October.

Now, retired generals are notoriously pessimistic about their countries’ defences. Yet even with that proviso, the interview sounded ominous. One has to hope that Israel hasn’t lost her ability to rally quickly not only her troops but her entire nation – and that Israel’s allies don’t get cold feet, as they have been known to do on occasion.

President Biden has reiterated America’s “ironclad” commitment to the defence of Israel, which may or may not be a reliable assurance in view of the US seemingly going back on a similar vow to help the Ukraine.

Iran also has a powerful ally, Russia. The full scale of that touching friendship between two evil regimes hasn’t yet been divulged. Traditionally, it has been Russia supplying Iran with weaponry, including some of the doomsday variety. Lately, Iran has been repaying her debts by sending thousands of drones to Russia, which then level Ukrainian cities.

The media widely suspect, and Western intelligence services probably know for sure, that the Russians have been helping Iran to create a nuclear capability. Some reports suggest the country is only weeks away from acquiring her first nuclear warheads; others insist Iran already has them.

Evil is on the march throughout the world, and the situation is fraught with global dangers. Gen. Brik says Israel has failed to learn the lessons of past conflicts, but no country ever does. The West in particular has had many blood-soaked lessons in the advisability of pre-empting evil by early strikes – and has slept through all of them.

I just hope that Gen. Brik is unduly alarmist and, in this respect at least, Israel isn’t like all other Western countries. We’ll find out in the next few days, but meanwhile let’s pray for Israel, our only staunch ally in the region.  

“Everything is new that’s well-forgotten,” goes an old Russian proverb.

Seeking to vindicate that folk wisdom, the Russians seem to have forgotten something they’ve always known: winters bring much snow and ice. These then melt in spring and, if the water isn’t properly contained, rivers and reservoirs may overflow.

This past winter put an extra emphasis on this concept by bringing in unusually large amounts of snow and ice. When they turned to water torrents this month, the jerry-built dams protecting the cities of Orsk and Orenburg burst, turning their streets into rivers.

While the two cities argue which should be twinned with Venice and which with Amsterdam, and concerned citizens in possession of rowing boats busily loot the abandoned houses, the government asks the lapidary Russian question: “Who’s to blame?” Bringing to bear on the task the forensic insights for which the Russians are so famous, they’ve identified the culprits: badgers.

Apparently, those evil rodents set out to harm Russian cities by burrowing holes in the dams, making them less structurally sound and causing billions’ worth of damage. That gave rise to the next lapidary question, this one of older provenance: “Cui bono?”

Given the current geopolitical situation, the question answered itself: American wirepullers of the Judaeo-Banderite Ukie Nazis. That hypothesis, nay certainty, has been widely mooted at the highest levels of the Russian government, both executive and legislative.

The answer was so self-evident that no specifics were deemed necessary. That’s a shame because the grateful public is hankering after a detailed description of the secret farms training rodent saboteurs. Yet even in the absence of such details, the dastardly nature of American imperialism is there for all to see.

The pernicious, power-hungry Yanks, explain the Russian authorities, will stop at nothing to create a unipolar world – whereas the Russians are making huge headway in their efforts to build a bipolar one, complete with every delusion known to psychiatry.

It has to be said that, other than training and deploying those attack badgers, the US has been doing little to help the Ukraine for six months at least. The Russians are currently enjoying a ten-fold superiority in artillery ordnance, which explains their microscopic but steady advances around Avdeyevka.

The Ukrainians ought to have a talk with the Hungarians, Vietnamese, Afghanis and other American allies initially supported and then abandoned to their fate. The US has form in that sort of thing, and I for one am surprised her support for the Ukraine lasted as long as it did.

Europe, in particular Germany, is doing its best, but it simply doesn’t have the wherewithal to keep the Ukrainian army properly supplied. Meanwhile, in a touching show of bipartisan accord, the US is reneging on her oft-stated commitment to stopping Russia’s aggression.

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson is doing his level best to keep any aid bill off the agenda. Since the Ukraine and Israel are lumped together in the proposed aid package, the congressional Republicans receive support from the Democrats whose heightened moral sense balks at sending arms to those genocidal Israelis.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden and his merry men are holding back several billion in funds already earmarked and approved by Congress. One gets the impression, and I hope it’s a false one, that the US is ready to sell the Ukraine down the Dnieper.

Anything else risks that much dreaded escalation, goes the rationale. (In fact, such cowardice in the face of evil aggression doesn’t so much prevent as guarantee escalation. Study history, ladies and gentlemen.)

Now that I’m in a folklore mood, though America is reluctant to pay the piper, she still insists on calling the tune. Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin showed how when speaking to the Senate Armed Service Committee the other day.

Here the double entendre in the title above is finally revealed. For Mr Austin shamelessly badgered the Ukraine, trying to dictate how she should deploy her dwindling resources.

Rapidly running out of expensive high-tech weaponry, the Ukrainians are increasingly relying on drone attacks aimed at downgrading Russia’s strategic potential. Specifically, they’ve targeted oil refineries, some of them deep in Russian territory.

The attacks have been spectacularly successful, mainly because the Russian air defences are concentrated on the front, with nothing left over to protect the oil facilities. As a result, Ukrainian drones have by some reports destroyed up to 15 per cent of Russia’s oil-refining capability, and they are only getting started.

That was Mr Austin’s beef. Teaching the Ukrainian grandmother how to suck eggs, he explained to the Ukraine how she should fight this war. Strategically, hectored Mr Austin, the Ukraine should focus on hitting tactical and operational targets directly influencing the conflict.

In other words, the Ukrainians should concentrate their meagre resources on targets best protected by Russian air defences. Even a rank amateur like me smells a rat, or a badger if you’d rather. One could be excused for thinking that Mr Austin’s badgering makes no sense.

If that’s what you think, allow me to offer a slight correction. His hectoring makes no military sense, but plenty of the party-political kind. You see, any significant damage to the Russian oil industry will cause a global increase in oil prices. That means it’ll cost Americans more to fill up their cars as they drive to polling stations in November.

First things first. Let’s do all we can to get Mr Austin’s boss re-elected – and never mind Ukrainians being murdered en masse and their cities razed to the ground. The boldfaced cynicism of Mr Austin’s badgering is most refreshing.

I have an idea. If the US administration wants the Ukrainians to hit more tactical and operational targets on the frontline, it should give them the tools to do that job. Then it will gain the right to issue requests – not demands! – on how the Ukrainians should go about the task of defeating the fascist aggression threatening Europe and potentially the whole world.

As things stand now, we can only hope that the US doesn’t send Patriot systems to the Russians, to protect their oil facilities. God forbid US voters will have to pay a few cents more for a gallon of petrol so close to the elections.

Peter Higgs, Nobel Prize physicist who died on 8 April, came up with some original theories of his own. He also vindicated an unoriginal one of mine, that minds shining bright in one area may be irredeemably dim in some others.

To the best of my understanding (which isn’t saying much), it has been known since Einstein that particles travelling at the speed of light have no mass. But how do they acquire it at lower speeds?

In 1964, using no computers to assist his fecund mind and no equipment other than paper and pencil, Higgs came up with a daring theory: the existence of the Higgs boson, a fundamental force-carrying particle associated with the Higgs field.

This is a quantum field that gives mass to particles existing throughout the universe. In the Higgs field, the Higgs boson acts as a wave that gives mass to other fundamental particles. According to him, when the universe came into existence, particles had no mass, but acquired it seconds later when they entered that magic field.

In 1993 another Nobel Prize physicist, Leon Lederman, referred to the Higgs boson as “the God particle”, suggesting it obviated the need for a deity as the cause of life. Yet both he and other scientists regarded the boson as merely a theoretical construct. Stephen Hawking even bet $100 that the Higgs boson would never be found.

Hawking became $100 poorer in 2012, when researchers working with the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, discovered the boson particle. A year later Prof. Higgs got his Nobel Prize.

The physics involved take me way out of my depth, but even a scientific ignoramus like me can appreciate the sight of a brilliant mind at work. Unfortunately, Prof. Higgs denied similar appreciation to people holding what he saw as objectionable views in areas where he too was out of his depth.

For example, as a committed atheist, he resented the term ‘God particle’. Whenever the subject came up, Higgs refused to discuss it with believers whom he considered ipso facto stupid: “If they believe that story about creation in seven days, are they being intelligent?”

It would be tedious to deliver a roll call of great physicists who also happened to be practising Christians. Suffice it to say Werner Heisenberg, one of the principal founders of Higgs’s own field, quantum mechanics, was on that list.

What’s upsetting is that a man capable of startling revelations in one area can display rank vulgarity when dabbling in another. Heisenberg, one of those presumably dumb believers, could have explained to Higgs that Christian cosmology demands not less intelligence but a different kind. (Higgs was 47 when Heisenberg died, so that conversation could have taken place.)

My own lifelong observation suggests that even extremely intelligent atheists sound like blithering idiots whenever they try to justify their atheism by rational arguments.

One of their favourite tricks is to insist on taking Biblical allegories as literal facts and Biblical facts as figments of apostolic imagination. Thus they dismiss out of hand Christ’s miracles worked before hundreds if not thousands of eyewitnesses, while smirking at Genesis cosmology with its seven days.

They’d be on safer grounds if they simply said they don’t believe in God and left it at that. But the moment they start talking particulars, they enter another system of thought and, logically speaking, must operate with its terms and concepts. Otherwise they sound as crassly stupid as a scientific ignoramus would if telling Prof. Higgs that sub-atomic particles don’t exist because no one has ever seen one.

Now, in the system of thought so offhandedly dismissed by Prof. Higgs, God is ageless and timeless, meaning that any time units mentioned in reference to his activities can only have an allegorical significance. God’s day may be a year to us, or a century, or a millennium, or anything at all.

Using grammatical terminology, we live our lives in three basic tenses: Past, Present and Future. God, on the other hand, has only one tense, the Present Perfect. What may be ‘was’, ‘is’ or ‘will be’ to us, to God is ‘has been’. God isn’t contingent: he has no beginning, no end, and hence no time scale that we’d recognise as such.

An atheist doesn’t know how to walk through this intellectual edifice, and no one says he should. He is perfectly welcome to choose his own mental habitation. But if he chooses to enter this building, he should leave his cherished notions at the door.

If he smuggles them in and starts wielding them with conviction, he commits a vulgar solecism. And whenever he accuses the rightful owners of that property of stupidity, he brings to mind words like ‘teapot’ and ‘kettle’.

Not all atheists are Lefties, but this is the way to bet. Prof. Higgs certainly was: he championed the student riots of the 1960s, belonged to the CND and Greenpeace, supported ‘Palestinians’ against Israel.

As in the case of his atheism, I doubt he ever pondered the issues involved as deeply as they require. His mental plate was full with his physics, and there couldn’t have been much room left for other, unrelated sustenance.

Yet, unlike so many other Lefties, Prof. Higgs wasn’t a dogmatic zealot. Thus, when the CND started campaigning against nuclear power, not just nuclear weapons, he resigned. He also quit Greenpeace over its opposition to genetically modified crops.

There his extraneous political principles were helped along by his mind of a great scientist. Higgs must have seen that both the CND and Greenpeace had trespassed on scientific territory, where they revealed themselves as ignorant interlopers. Yet he had been comfortable in those ranks when they limited themselves to politics, an area in which Prog. Higgs himself was ignorant.

Such is the way of the world, and no mind shines an equally dazzling light on everything. Few of us manage to do so in even one area, and fewer still have ever shone as bright as Prof. Higgs did in quantum physics. For all his misconceptions in unrelated fields, his passing leaves the world diminished.     

When I read the news of Muslims and non-Muslims getting together in Bristol Cathedral to celebrate the last day of Ramadan, my heart rejoiced.

Along with all progressive people I believe in universal friendship and unity between, well, everyone. Men, women, and members of the other 100 sexes. Different Christian confessions. Homo- and heterosexuals. Blacks, whites, other. Conservatives and liberals. People of different nationalities.

And certainly – especially! – exponents of the three great Abrahamic religions. Christianity, Judaism and Islam are all equal, especially Islam. All progressive people are ready to cast aside their trivial cultish differences and assert their transcendent accord.

If I’m being totally honest, some progressive people would rather exclude Jews from this triune love-in, which only goes to show that certain prejudices will take a while to uproot. But uprooted they will be! It’s only a matter of time – and if you disagree, I’ll denounce you to the Equality Commission and police at the same time.

To my eternal shame, I’m not quite up on the minutiae of Islam. For example, I only learned the word iftar by reading the announcement of the event on the Bristol Cathedral website:

“The Grand Iftar is an opportunity to celebrate Bristol’s diversity, with non-Muslims joining the breaking of the fast meal (iftar) and learning about the meaning and significance of Ramadan. This year, the unifying theme of the iftar events is ‘Peace and Hope’, giving people the opportunity to reflect on recent tragic events in the city and come together in solidarity and unity.”

The tragic events in question involved some of our Muslim brothers asserting their cultural identity by violent means. While acknowledging their just concerns, all progressive people would rather they addressed them more peacefully, but enough of that.

Peace! Hope! Solidarity! Unity! Let’s concentrate on those words in the message from the Very Rev’d Mandy “Amanda” Ford, Dean of Bristol Cathedral. Especially since they were echoed by Mohammed El Sharif, speaking on behalf of the organising committee:

“The annual iconic Grand Iftar event is one of Bristol’s festivals of togetherness that brings our diverse communities together, and we are excited this year to be hosted by Bristol Cathedral.” [I especially like the word ‘iconic’, coming from a Muslim.]

“We’re excited,” continued Mr El Sharif, “to see faith communities coming together and working together in this new way. It’s vital in the multicultural and multifaith Bristol we live in that we find ways of living well together, and living well with difference.”

Hear, hear! Words to live by – and I for one decided to live by those rousing words even though I don’t have the good fortune of living in Bristol.

Having read those messages, I decided to spend next Easter at the Muslim holy places. That’s it: Good Friday in Medina, Easter Sunday in Mecca. I could make a great holiday of it: first a few days in Israel, then on to Saudi Arabia.

Yes, I know next Easter is a year away, but nothing beats planning far in advance. With that in mind, I went to see my travel agent to iron out the details. And he immediately poured cold water on my enthusiasm. Apparently, I shan’t be able to go to Israel first. No one whose passport is sullied with an Israeli visa is admitted to Saudi Arabia.

That was a bit annoying, but I always like to focus on the positives. Good on the Saudis, I said. It’s their country and they are free to admit or bar anyone they want. Perhaps they can teach us a lesson in controlling national borders.

So not to worry, I said. Let’s do it the other way around: Medina and Mecca first, Israel second. And at that point, the travel agent said something that amazed me no end.

Turns out non-Muslims, otherwise known as infidel dogs, aren’t allowed to enter Mecca or Medina, ever. That’s à propos those entrenched prejudices. Never mind that, I said bravely. Those places are always so crowded that no one will notice me if I just sneak in.

Yes, you could do that, agreed the travel agent. But beware of the risks: any infidel dog caught in those holy places must be put down immediately and not always quickly.

That offended my sense of fairness so much that I had to reread Mr El Sharif’s message, including the words “living well together”. Togetherness is a bilateral concept, isn’t it? We push our differences to one side and reconfirm the universal brotherhood of men (and even, under duress, women), isn’t that the point?

Suddenly I didn’t feel all that progressive any longer. The beautiful mental edifice I had constructed collapsed like the Twin Towers. Non-progressive words crossed my mind, addressed to the Very Rev’d Mandy Ford and her ilk: Chaps, are you out of your tree?

In the name of fashionable woke idiocies you are stamping into the dirt your religion, your civilisation, your society. Islam isn’t just different or ‘diverse’, but aggressively hostile to everything the West stands for, except the material goods it produces.

The leaders of that patchwork quilt of a religion openly call for a gradual takeover of the West by demographic and cultural colonisation. Our greatest weapon, they insist, is the womb of every Muslim woman – and presumably also every dinghy carrying burly, unshaven 30-year-old “women and children” to our shores.

Yes, we are an open society, but we can’t be so open that our very essence falls out. And no, I’m not advocating that Muslims should be barred from Britain the way non-Muslims are barred from Mecca and Medina. Certain – not unlimited – numbers of them are welcome to settle here, but with one proviso. When in Britain, they must do as the British do.

They come over here because they don’t like it over there, but then they try – with our acquiescence – to turn over here into over there. I smell a rat somewhere, not to say a pig. Britain must be fumigated, and let’s start by keeping Christian churches just that, Christian.

Muslims or anyone else are welcome, to pray or just look around. But using Christian cathedrals to celebrate the rites of a religion one of whose tenets is violent enmity to Christianity isn’t inclusive, multicultural or multifaith. It’s suicidal, and Christianity regards suicide as a mortal sin.

If the Very Rev’d Mandy Ford sees such abject and sinful surrender as part of her ministry, she must be summarily unfrocked. I’m sure that cassock weighs too heavily on her shoulders anyway. She’d be much happier as a social worker or perhaps a Labour candidate from Bristol West.