Trump doesn’t rate a royal invitation, unlike…

… Emperor Hirohito, who was cordially received at the Palace in 1971. He was the wartime leader of Japan, when tens of thousands of British soldiers lost their lives, many of them in concentration camps (see the film The Bridge Over the River Kwai). Under Hirohito’s leadership, Japan matched the Nazis in genocidal atrocities – including anti-Semitic ones in Indonesia.

… Mobutu, in 1975. The dictator of Zaire successfully combined murderous totalitarian oppression with embezzlement.

The $15 billion sum he misappropriated may be smaller than Putin’s achievements by an order of magnitude, but we must make allowances for inflation and also for the Congo having considerably less riches to purloin.

… Nicolae Ceaușescu, in 1978. He was dictator of Rumania, then the most Stalinist country in the Eastern bloc, which is saying a lot. Ceaușescu was a mass murderer, who routinely ordered his troops to fire at protesters.

… Hajji Suharto, in 1979. The military dictator of Indonesia suppressed a communist uprising in 1965-1966, which was a good thing. By some estimates, about a million people died, which sounds excessive but, if they were indeed communists, forgivable. Alas, many of them were only guilty of being ethnic Chinese, the most successful and therefore hated group in Indonesia.

… Mikhail Gorbachev, in 1989. Before the former KGB chief Andropov elevated Gorbachev to the Politburo, he had run the Stavropol province, one of the most corrupt in the USSR. Even against that background, he was nicknamed Mickey Envelope (Mishka konvert) in reference to his preferred way of doing business.

When moving into the Kremlin, Gorbachev continued Andropov’s programme of sham liberalisation, designed to save bolshevism by making it appear acceptable to the West. When that began to unravel, he ordered his troops to fire at demonstrators in Lithuania and Georgia. Before that, he had mendaciously denied the Chernobyl disaster, which was indirectly responsible for thousands of unsuspecting Soviets dying.

… Boris Yeltsyn, in 1992. He too had run a major province, that of Sverdlovsk, before moving to Moscow. Yeltsyn ran Sverdlovsk in a sort of duopoly with the KGB, whose concentration camps provided much of the region’s labour.

That kind of recruitment policy got some Nazis hanged at Nuremberg, but Yeltsyn thrived. While in Moscow, he ordered tanks to fire at the building of the Russian parliament, which was a rather radical version of Colonel Pride’s approach to parliamentarism.

In parallel with moving from Sverdlovsk to Moscow, Yeltsyn made a seamless transition from dipsomania to alcoholism and was never again seen sober. During his prolonged absences, the country was run by Gen. Korzhakov, Yeltsyn’s former bodyguard, ably assisted by the new breed of gangsters, mainly Berezovsky and Abramovich. They in fact chose Putin as Yeltsyn’s successor, a choice Berezovsky later got to rue.

When meeting Her Majesty, Yektsyn tried to paw her, with the Queen setting a good example for today’s indignant soft-porn stars by thwarting his attentions without making a big fuss.

… Robert Mugabe, in 1994. Zimbabwe’s Marxist dictator presumably rated the honour by such achievements as crimes against humanity, racism (of the forgivable, indeed commendable, anti-white variety) and championship-calibre corruption.

… Bashar al-Assad, in 2002. His qualifications for the royal honour are too current to require a comment. The only good thing one can say about him is that ISIS is even worse.

… Vladimir Putin, in 2003. Though the unrepentant, indeed proud, KGB colonel hadn’t yet got around to having his critics ‘whacked’ with radioactive isotopes in the middle of London, he had already covered himself head to toe with domestically harvested blood.

To ease his way to absolute power, he had several blocks of flats blown up, with the blame placed on Chechnya. The second Chechen war followed, easily as genocidal as the first.

At the time of his visit to Buck House, Vlad was already on his way to becoming the most successfully corrupt leader in history. Under his strong leadership, so admired in some British quarters, Russia has not only maintained but infinitely strengthened her leadership position in global money laundering.

… Xi Jinping, 2015. The communist dictator of China is a proud heir to the regime that slaughtered some 60 million and later gave the world Tiananmen Square.

Compared to these gentlemen, President Trump positively looks like a liberal trying to get in touch with his feminine side. Moreover, unlike them he represents Britain’s most important ally.

Historically the UK-USA relationship has only been ‘special’ in the warped minds of British propagandists. Ever since the beginning of the twentieth century, when America began to supplant the British Empire, the relationship has been rather one-sided. FDR, for one, transparently detested the British Empire almost as much as Nazi Germany.

Still, when American interests happened to coincide with ours, the US has been an important ally, and, in peacetime, seldom as important as now – for reasons too widely discussed at the moment to call for my penny’s worth.

And yet Mrs May’s government has allowed subversive socialists like Corbyn and Sadiq Khan to rouse enough rabble to make Trump’s visit untenable. If any justification for the modifier ‘subversive’ is still needed, this repulsive action provides it more than amply.

Personally, Trump isn’t my favourite cup of Bourbon, what with his vulgarity, narcissism and manifest absence of any discernible cultural attainment or dress sense. But his policies have by and large been the best of all other presidents’ I remember, with the possible exception of Reagan’s.

Yet our rabble-rousers object not so much to Trump’s personality or his policies as to his palpable contempt for all their sacred cows – both physical and semiotic. At the moment, for example, they’re up in arms over his describing some downmarket countries as ‘shitholes’.

Now, I don’t think leaders of civilised countries should resort to such uncivilised vocabulary, but implicitly the lefties deny countries that merit this designation exist. Having come from one myself, I can assure them that the description is apt and accurate – including in the most literal of senses.

Preventing our greatest ally from visiting Her Majesty (whom by all accounts Trump admires) shames not only the immediate culprits, but also our limp-wristed government, unable to act in Britain’s interests no matter what. Above all, it shames Britain herself, a country that allows such nonentities to ascend to government.

I hope that Trump will be able to rise above this slight, but I fear that, narcissist that he is, he won’t.