It is reported today that Virgin Trains (R. Branston prop.) is hoping – nay, expecting – to run at least 20 high-speed services a day between London St Pancras and Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam, starting in the early 2030s. The billionaire entrepreneur still has a number of hurdles to clear. Every country along the way has to give its approval. But British rail regulators – not known for their fast-track approach – have given him a green light

And it doesn’t stop there (as thwarted travellers at Ashford International are often heard to observe). The Italian and German state operators Trenitalia and Deutsche Bahn, as well as two putative British start-ups, Gemini and Evolyn, are keen to enter the fray.

Trouble is, the London-Calais railway line, via the Channel Tunnel, is dual track throughout. As things stand, some 400 trains a day use it, including 62 car-transporters operated by Le Shuttle. A train passes through the tunnel each way every four minutes at peak times. Add another 60 run by companies currently champing at the bit and the gap between trains would be reduced to two minutes, or less. Is this safe? I know they’ll say it is, but is it? (How long before a lobby grows for a second tunnel, costing, oh, a trillion pounds, and counting?)

Much better, in my not so humble opinion, to extend services to a few more key destinations (Frankfurt; Stuttgart; Bordeaux; Lyon; Geneva) and then divide the aggregate franchise between the different contenders. Why on earth should there be 28 trains a day to Paris, especially if new destinations come on-stream, making it possible to travel directly to the various capitals of la France profonde? Three services a day to each of the five cities I have listed would add just 15 trains to the total, not 60. Europe, as Arthur Daley once remarked in Minder, would be our lobster.

What would really open up the Continent would be Sleepers to, say, Berlin, Munich, Marseille, Barcelona, Turin/Milan and Prague. Plus, of course, the full-fat Orient Express, going all the way to Istanbul. These four-star mobile hotels would pass through an uncongested tunnel overnight and would, I believe, make a fortune for the operator who did it right. Just think, dinner on the train followed by a good night’s sleep in your cosy compartment, then breakfast, before arriving, refreshed, in Berlin or wherever sometime after nine the next morning. Not cheap, but what is these days? Just this month, I bought return airfares for me and my wife from Nantes to Dublin for the preposterous sum of 899 euros.

The main reason we are still waiting is that the UK is not part of the Schengen zone, which would, of course, require it to be part of the European Union. So, bugger Brexit! Those who argue that granting freedom of movement would result in England being flooded by illegal immigrants have to bear two things in mind. First, that ship has sailed: illegal immigrants, by definition, pay no heed to national frontiers, which is why hundreds arrive each day in Kent by small boat. Second, all seats on Eurostar (and on any future competitors) have to be reserved in advance. You can’t just walk on. You need tickets, passports and, where appropriate, visas. The line of control in the UK is at St Pancras, where travellers are vetted by both British and French customs officers.

Yes, but what about at the other side? Well, at Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam and Lille, the same rule applies. British police and customs officials stand ready to repel borders. The same would apply at major destinations, like Frankfurt and Lyon. But there is no reason why passengers for London from interim stations, such as Liège or Macon, should not, in a variant of this, have to show their papers prior to boarding. Only tickets marked “approved” (i.e. checked by rail and customs officials) would be allowed onto the platform. Any illegals getting through would be thrown off at the next station or at Lille or Calais, and any poor sods who somehow made it through would still have to run the gauntlet at St Pancras. It’s not rocket science. Platforms for London-bound trains would have to be isolated during the boarding process, but only three times a day, and in the other direction – i.e. from London into Schengen – no special rules would apply. After Calais, going east or south, the only hindrance to boarding fast trains from London would be seat availability, assured by reservation.

Is all this making sense to you, as it does to me? I’m guessing yes. But that, needless to say, is no reason for it to happen as described. The Little England nay-sayers will always be with us. So don’t expect to see easy, smooth-running rail services from London to Europe anytime soon, or indeed until sometime after the Twelfth of Never. As I may have said earlier, bugger Brexit!

There is surely no reason any longer to doubt that Iran is being led by men who are not just competent but convinced that their cause is just and must ultimately prevail. The fact that they are bound to religious zealots who order the machine-gunning of protesters and take pleasure, like Hitler, in watching the death agonies of their opponents is beside the point.

Iran’s war leaders – cobbled together from the survivors of US and Israeli air strikes – are also literate. Consider the latest comments on X by the Iranian deputy foreign minister Kazem Gharibabadi in response to the latest threat from Donald Trump to force open the Strait of Hormuz and – bewilderingly – to annex it as a spoil of war.

“This strait,” wrote Gharibabadi, “will be opened and closed only under Iran’s command, and so long as you do not accept the reality of defeat and stop indulging in fantasies, Iran will continue to enforce the blockade … The Strait of Hormuz cannot be seized by a tweet or an aircraft carrier, by issuing an order or by ‌delivering an election speech.”

Compare this with the ramblings of Trump as he faces up to rising fuel prices, stubbornly high inflation and the growing realisation, even among his supporters, that the war is a busted flush.

“What we’re doing is a great service for the world, not only for ourselves ... and we’re really doing a great job,” he told the faithful at a campaign rally in Long Island, adding: “After we finish defeating Iran, which is being very badly defeated – pretty soon I’ll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States.”

Bizarrely, the President even took a swipe at the crew of the US aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, who have complained that after being deployed in the Gulf for 260 days, they were desperate to be relieved. Trump was having none of that. Their record deployment, he said, was “not nearly long enough”.

It is as if The Art of the Deal and How to Make Friends and Influence People had collided, like matter and anti-matter, leaving only chaos and confusion behind.

Tehran’s position, that it holds all the cards, was reinforced by Gharibabadi’s boss, foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, who announced on Saturday that Iran would not be taking part in the peace talks that Trump repeatedly claims are imminent and that the only way forward is for the US is to pack up its weapons and head for home.

You don’t have to admire the aims and policies of the Islamic Republic to admit the stoicism of its leaders. As far as anyone can tell, they are, to a man (and they are all men), ready to die for their cause. Many of them already have, but they keep popping up, bloody but unbowed, each more more determined than his predecessor. What they have demonstrated to the world, if not to the current administration in Washington, is that a fully mobilised citizenry, chock-full of patriotic ardor, remains defiant and is in no mood to contemplate defeat. America’s only remaining hope of victory in what was from the start a needless conflict would be a full-on ground invasion, but not even Trump, in his madness, is crazy enough for that … we hope.

It shouldn’t be forgotten that the bulk of the Iranian people, other than the ayatollahs and members of the Revolutionary Guard, never wanted war with America. What they seek is the emergence from the rubble of their country of some form of secular democracy that grants freedom to new ideas and, in particular, equality of the sexes. But even they are repelled by Trump, who promised them liberation but did nothing to make it happen. Though they don’t share the ideology of the regime, in any fight to the death they would more likely back the military (who have proven themselves masters of the art of war) than stand back and watch as a rapacious America moves in to steal their oil.

If there is hope, it lies not in the lies and empty threats of Donald Tump, but in the good sense of the Iranian people. I don’t doubt that Gharibabadi and Araghchi are practising Muslims. Most Iranians are. But my sense is that a they pay mainly lip service to the extremism of the mullahs, including the badly wounded Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei. They remind me somewhat of Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s pugnacious successor, who steered the Soviet Union way from the naked terror and narrowness of view of the previous regime towards a better inclined standoff with the West. Once a Stalinist strongman, Khruschev chose pragmatism over confrontation (which didn’t mean he was weak), and it may be that those Iranian leaders wearing suits in place of turbans and robes could come to be seen as realists who, with luck and a following wind, might just allow their country to chart a different path.

After all, under the Shah (both an autocrat and a puppet of the West), Iran’s middle classes flourished and the country’s economy was racing ahead – all without any ban on the observance of Islam. So we’ll see.

As we wait, it is hard not to dismissTrump and his war cabinet, made up exclusively of useless idiots (Pete Hegseth, J D Vance, Mike Waltz, Steve Witkoff, Susie Wiles and Stephen Miller) as intellectually and mentally ill-equipped for their roles. Conversely, Iran’s emerging nomenclatura (whose names, alas, are so difficult to pronounce) look to be men whose hour has come round at last. If you were forced to fight an existential war and you could choose either Hegseth or Iran’s defence minister, Majid Ibn al Reza, to come up with a winning strategy, which of them would you go for? Which of the two would you regard as sane? And which of the competing supreme leaders would you reckon to be worse than the other?

A close call.

Here’s something not many people know: The United States, with a land area of 3.8 million square miles/ 9.9m square kilometres, is 40 times bigger than the United Kingdom but has a population only six times larger.

If the US was as densely settled as the UK, its population would jump from 342 million to just under 2.3 billion, close to twice that of China.

If you then consider that England, on its own, occupies half of the total UK land area (with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland making up the rest) while being home to 90 per cent of the combined population of 70 million, you will get some idea of how tightly packed the English are.

They live cheek by jowl. If you ever wondered why the British have such tight gun control laws, the answer is right there in the numbers.

And they all have to look to Westminster if they want to get anything done. England has ended up as a colony of London.

Administratively, the Union is an affront to democracy. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each have their own “national” assemblies, or parliaments, with decisions taken in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast covering a wide range of responsibilities. The principal exceptions are foreign policy, trade, defence, national security and the terms of any constitutional settlements, which remain reserved to London. England, by contrast, is governed largely by diktat from Whitehall. Yes, there are elected councils that take charge of street lights, refuse collection, local planning and the like. But only in a handful of large cities, such as Manchester. Liverpool, Birmingham and, most obviously, London, is there scope for taking far-reaching regional decisions.

Andy Burnham, Britain’s latest prime minister (the seventh since the Brexit referendum in 2016), has decided this must change. He wants to restore decision-making closest to where the people actually live. As the former mayor of Greater Manchester, with its population of 2.9 million, he has seen what regional government can achieve when given the appropriate powers. The city is now the second-most prosperous in England, with a growth rate eclipsed only by the capital.

But not everywhere can be an exception, just as not every pupil in a school can be described as above average. What matters is that while the best thrive, the rest are encouraged to do better and given the means to do so. Levelling-up doesn’t have to mean that everyone gets paid the same money regardless of what they do.

Last Friday, Burnham turned up in Manchester, as Labour’s first prime minister since 2010, to announce that a building in the city centre which up to then was best known as an annex of GCHQ, Britain’s cyber-intelligence agency, would henceforth be known as 10 North, with its own logo. The idea was that the PM – nicknamed the King of the North and a longtime believer in devolution – would spend one day a week there listening to the concerns of those parts of England that exist beyond the Tube network or that lack a view of either Windsor Castle or the White Cliffs of Dover.

It is a silly idea – a waste of time and money. Westminster and Whitehall are where the power lies in England, and to pretend otherwise is nonsense. Burnham and his ministers – eleven of them from northern constituencies – should certainly spend more time out of the London beltway, which is to say the area within the M25 orbital motorway that is home to more than ten million people. They need to get to know every part of the country for which they are responsible, from Berwick to Penzance and from Carlisle to Lowestoft, which will require more of them than possession of a weekly return on the high-speed line from London to Manchester.

What England really needs is a fundamental re-organisation of they way in which governance is delivered to the many distinct regions that make up its national territory.

The US has its 50 states, Germany its 16 Länder, France its 100 départements and régions administratives. In each case, as with corresponding divisions in Spain, Italy and most other European countries, these matter. In rural France, where I live, democracy begins with the commune (in the case of my village, home to just 600 inhabitants), followed by the department (in my case the Côtes-d’Armor, with its population of 615,000), the region (Brittany, population 3.6 million, with its capital in Rennes) and only then the national government, with its parliament, senate, prime minister and, of course, President.

And what do the English get? They get a total of 319 “principal” councils, plus a plethora of local authorities and civil parishes, only a handful of which, as in Manchester, have any real authority over long-term development. I won’t attempt to describe the range of powers involved. Instead, I will let the map of the current setup speak for me:

I am reminded of the famous remark by France’s President De Gaulle to the effect that it is impossible to govern a country that makes 246 kinds of cheese.

Small councils (not to be confused with the King’s advisors in Game of Thrones) that concern themselves primarily with refuse collection, streetlights, speed limits and planning applications have a clear practical value. These correspond to the communes of France. But at the regional level, the powers that make most sense are those that would allow, for example, Yorkshire, East Anglia or the West Country, to take decisions on the shape of their economies, industrial development, transport, health provision and adult education – all within parametres agreed with Westminster. Manchester can do that now, as can nine other “combined authorities,” including Greater London. But whole tracts of the country are left out, and in some cases obvious regions have found themselves divided into competing sub-regions, as in Yorkshire, where three directly-elected mayors have established entirely separate bailiwicks.

England, like Italy and Japan, is awkwardly shaped, being for the most part long and thin, so that no part of the country is more than 70 miles (112 kilometres) from the sea. Some regions, such as London, Yorkshire, East Anglia and the West Country, write their own ticket. But where to draw the lines in the South, the Midlands, the so-called Heart of England and the Far North, bordering Scotland? Is Berkshire part of the South East or should it be joined with Oxfordshire in the Home Counties. Should Bristol be included with Devon, Cornwall and Somerset, or does it sit better alongside Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and Shropshire? Have the Geordies of Newcastle, population 325,000, have much in common with the sheepherders and forest dwellers of Cumbria, 100 miles to their northwest? And so on and so on. These are real questions and they deserve careful consideration. But it has to be possible to divide England, for the purposes of mid-level administration and strategic planning, into properly organised regions, each with an elected assembly disposing of powers not far short of those enjoyed by the “nations” of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Andy Burnham showed what could be accomplished in greater Manchester, a city that in my book should be subsumed into the North West alongside Liverpool, Cheshire and what remains of Lancashire (home to just three types of cheese), and he is not the only one. Manchester’s loss would be the North West’s gain, with itself as the single-largest component and capital of the new body, able to stand up to London, with all but the biggest decisions falling to its mayor and elected councils. York would once more be a significant power centre, as would Birmingham, Newcastle, Exeter and Norwich, with each becoming a pole of attraction to which its voters could be drawn in a way that has proved impossible with London.

The alternative, an England divided up like a jigsaw puzzle, in which all the big decisions are handed down from Whitehall, cannot be allowed to continue. Andy Burnham knows this but has yet to show, beyond the somewhat dubious 10 North, how devolution can be put into practice. Time for him, as the Scots used to say when they they were bested by the English, for the Labour leader to go home to the real Downing Street and think again.

Donald Trump is a fading force, which is good and long overdue. But so was Hitler in 1944. Consider the number of villains on the world stage. Let’s not call them bad actors, which makes them sound as if they don’t know how to play their parts, which clearly they do:. Think of them, rather, as ogres out of a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, for who could deny that they are monstrous? There’s Trump himself, of course, combining the characters of Mad Emperor and court jester. Then there’s Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Kim Jung Un, whoever’s in charge these days in Iran and the wacamole generation of dictators in Africa and Latin America.

In America, whose multi-billionaire class looks to have bet the farm on cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence, the illusion that military might is the ultimate answer when the chips are down is starting to give way to the realisation that anything they can do, China can do better. Does anyone believe that if Beijing decides to annex Taiwan by force, Donald Trump will ride to its rescue? And even if he did, is there anyone who thinks that China, fighting in its own backyard, would not come out on top?

In Europe, meanwhile, where it is Russia, not China, that poses a threat, the old order is vanishing before our eyes, replaced by a society drained of both energy and conviction, Europeans have heard the alarm go off many times, but just as often they have groped for the snooze button and gone back to sleep.

What is to be done? It’s hard to know where to start. The most obvious question, other than the rise of the machines, is the place of China in the fractured system now emerging. Beijing increasingly views Washington as yesterday’s news and itself as the one future superpower. When Xi Jinping recently met the American President, each believed himself the most powerful man on Earth. But only one of them was right, and it wasn’t Trump.

In former times, empires grew out of conquest. You only have to think of Rome, Persia, the Moors, the Conquistadors, the Ottomans and the British and French of the nineteenth century to recall the message that land is money and the more land you control, the richer you are.

The “unsullied” empire of the United States, starting with its belated intervention in the Great War, upended the age-old imperial model, while revealing a temptation to world domination that had been building for the previous 25 years. For the most part, there was no interest in acquiring territory outside of North America. The focus was on controlling the world’s wealth, exposing a ruthlessness that Clive of India would have applauded. While always pretending to be on the side of liberty, the US plundered the Earth’s resources as if there was no tomorrow.

But tomorrow has arrived. The American century has ended. It is over. Trump’s grotesque posturings in Venezuela and Iran, coupled with the President’s attempt to rearrange international trade and manufacturing to the exclusive benefit of his family and his country’s merchant class represent the last gasp and grasp, of a dying animal.

It may well be that America’s current dominance of Big Tech and AI, along with its vast yet increasingly outdated military, will drag out what remains of its Golden Age, much as the UK’s acquisition of Germany’s African colonies in 1919 made its empire appear greater than ever when in fact it was starting to fall apart. Even here, however, China is inching ahead, developing new systems at breakneck speed and producing chips at a scale the US cannot match. When the Chinese-engineered kalaedoscope has ceased to twist, the US, looking, Janus-like, to the Far East and Europe, will remain a large and influential country. But Americans will no longer be the masters of the universe.

It will be Beijing to which the children of tomorrow will look as they head into the mid-century. Mandarin, I would suggest, is unlikely to replace English as the world’s go-to language. It is notoriously difficult to master and the Chinese themselves might prefer to keep hold of the linguistic component of the Forbidden City. But it will be the depth and scale of Chinese technology, allied to demography and an uncompromising will to win, that will decide the fate of the world in our time and beyond.

If there is any comfort to be found in this, it is that China needs to be aware of its own long-term vulnerability. The wheel never stops turning and history doesn’t stand still for anyone. But for the next fifty years, maybe longer, it will be the Chinese who call the shots and the rest of us who have to live with the consequences.

For Europe – and I write from France having lived and worked auyjh cross the continent since the 1970s – the challenge is to remain relevant and interesting, conscious of its past, aware of the strengths that down the centuries since Roman times made it the world’s preeminent continent. Put simply, Europe needs to get back in the ring. The Volkswagen approach to confronting Chinese ambition – close factories, sell off assets and take to the hills – is to be resisted at all costs. If China has grown rich and powerful by making everything from ballpoint pens to electric cars and nuclear reactors, which they then sell to us at knock-down prices, how can our only response be to throw in the towel? Henry Ford, the apostle of assembly-line production, said it was necessary to pay his workers enough so that they could afford to buy his cars. He would have been shocked to learn that VW had accepted defeat at the hands of such Chinese interlopers as BYD, Geely and Chery, slashing its workforce and retreating to the margins.

The proper response, it seems to me, would have been to build better cars at lower prices, but apparently that is beyond the German giant. What is truly alarming is that the same thing is happening in the US, where the Ford Motor Company and General Motors look to have given up on innovation and, between them, now share less than 10 per cent of the global automobile market.

The US has to hope that its bet on AI and bogus money pays off before China cleans up on making things. Europe, at the same time, needs to rebuild from the ground up. Two thousand years of innovation, invention and thinking themselves the winners of life’s lottery have to count for something. They cannot allow themselves to become China’s bitch.

Easier said than done, of course, and Europe won’t be alone in fighting for a place in the new disorder. India, Africa, Latin America, the Middle and Far East, Canada and Australia and whatever Russia ends up as after the depredations of Vladimir Putin: in the coming decades, all of these will be in play, watched with grim-faced patience and self-assurance by the new lords of creation in Beijing.

The good news is history is not destiny, and Europe, in spite of appearances, is not under a spell that cannot be broken. It can rise again. As American power wanes and that of China rises, Europe has to reinvent itself. It needs, most urgently, to rediscover the will and the self-assurance that sustained it for centuries.

Time to turn the page.

Far from the madding crowd in my little corner of rural France, I have been trying to work out a way in which my generation, in their seventies and above, can begin to help create a better future for the world’s remaining democracies.

And this is what I’ve come up with: men and women over the age of 75 should give up the right to vote. We should be disenfranchised so that the young and the middle aged, who actually have a future, are better able to address the issues of tomorrow.

In parallel, those elected to public office should have to retire at the end of the year in which they turn 75. This would have barred Donald Trump from standing for the presidency in 2024 and would also have excluded him from seeking a second, consecutive term in 2020. As a bonus, it would have stopped Vladimir Putin from being re-elected for a fourth term as Russian President after he turned 72.

I would apply the same age criterion to judges, including justices of the US Supreme Court. Wisdom is often said to come with age, but the brain’s agility declines after, I would say, 65, meaning that judgments by those in their seventies and eighties are being handed down by men and women who in other walks of life would be regarded as well past their prime.

I should add that I am not a fan of lowering the voting age to 16. Who ever thought that was a good idea? Twenty-one still seems right to me, though 18 at a pinch. Why should young ticks, whose best friends and mentors are often AI creations, be given a say in who runs the country? Under my dispensation, they could exercise their right to vote from 18 to 75. That’s 57 years – enough surely for anyone.

Oh, and I would make voting in national and presidential elections mandatory. “Don’t blame me, I voted for Hilary Clinton” only works if you actually bothered to get in line. A bumper sticker doesn’t cut it.

As it happens, I haven’t had a vote anywhere since 1997, when I voted for Tony Blair in the UK general election. In the US, where my wife and I lived for nearly 15 years, the franchise was denied to me because I wasn’t American, and in France, where I have lived since 2015, you have, similarly, to be a French citizen to take part in national elections.

But that’s as may be. I can reveal that I would probably have switched my vote to the Liberal Democrats in the UK in 2025 and, while sometimes holding my nose, would have voted Democrat down the ticket in my New York years. In France, Emmanuel Macron convinced me back in 2017 that he was the new broom that would sweep the country clean, but five years later I would have gone for anyone from the Left who wasn’t Jean-Luc Mélenchon (who in violation of my proposed age ban plans to stand for the presidency again next year, aged 75).

Good choices or bad choices? All I can say is that I was unable to predict the future.

As a 77-year-old, I am markedly less confident and self-assured than I was at, say, 57. I find it harder to keep up in conversation and I value silence much more than used to be the case. My brain isn’t addled (not yet anyway), but I’m not sure that, as someone who gets up late and goes to bed early, I would be the best choice to have my finger on the nuclear button. For goodness’ sake, I have problems getting beyond page 50 in the sort of plot-driven novels that I used to devour two-at-a-time. I get bored and my mind starts to wander. It’s hard enough trying to remember to take my pills and remove my hearing aids before getting into bed. Would you really want me sitting round the table when crucial political decision have to be made?

More to the point, my future is limited. I am running out of time. And the same is true of everyone over the age of 75. It shouldn’t be us, as we watch the days go by at bewildering speed, who decide the issues of tomorrow. There are, of course, 90-year-olds still sharp as a tack. But far too many of us are curmudgeons, unwilling, or unable, to see beyond our own needs as pensioners, invalids or members of a defined ethnic group. It is the old, not the young who carry elections. Trump, with his MAGA hat on, is a case in point. Another is Brexit, decided by voters many of whom have since died, leaving the succeeding generations to live with the consequences. The truth is, we’ve had our chance, and look what a balls we made of it. It should be the young (provided they’ve turned 18), the middle-aged and those still working towards retirement who make the key decisions. They, after all, are the ones who will have to live with them.

And before you get started (for I know what you’re like), I’m not saying that nothing good happens after 75. Soylent Green is not for me. I continue to enjoy life. I write on Substack and Facebook; I cut our grass and hedges; I enjoy good food and a glass of wine and go to the pub three times a week. I try to help my son and his family in London and travel “home” to Belfast at least once a year. Next Spring, we’re off to New York on a family visit, and in-between we always find an excuse to spend time in Paris or to have lunch and a stroll on the never-disappointing Breton coast. I may even – who knows? – write another book.

The thing is, I’m not dead yet. Though I could keel over tomorrow (having forgotten to take my pills), I could still be here ten years from now, railing against the embalmed presidencies of Trump and Putin. But time’s wheel is moving on, not necessarily, as the late Emperor of Japan might have said, to my advantage. Those of us, eight million in the UK alone, who measure out our lives in teabags, should be asking what, if anything, it all adds up to and what did it mean, not trying to put the kybosh on immigrants or demanding an above-inflation rise in our state pensions.

Some of you will be wondering if expecting the elderly to give up the vote isn’t like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas – and there is no doubt that in the required referendums or election campaigns, the zimmer vote would be out in force. I would simply ask impending octogenarians to think of their children and grandchildren rather than themselves. As baby-boomers, they had it as good as it gets, which is not to say they have nothing to complain of. But with issues such as climate change, energy shortages and artificial intelligence impossible to ignore, what is needed most is fresh thinking and long-term commitment.

Give way, I say. Let it go. Time to sit back and look up at the stars. We’ll always have Paris.

Cracking piece in yesterday’s Belfast Telegraph by its star writer Sam McBride. In warning us that a border poll could be a lot closer – or a lot further away – than many people think, he reminds us that Irish unity depends not only on the wishes of northern voters but on the willingness of those in the South to risk all that has been built over the last forty years to create the 32-county Republic bequeathed to them in their minds by the men and women of 1916.

Sam seems (to me) to believe that unity will most likely come in the end, but not any time soon and not without convulsions on both sides of the border.

On his theme of split thinking in the present-day Republic, I can’t help wondering what the views of Ireland’s rapidly growing immigrant population will be on the National Question. When push comes to shove, that is, and the decision has to be made. I read last week that the population of Dublin’s north inner city is reckoned to be more than 50 per cent foreign-born. Overall, the proportion of non-natives is heading towards 25 per cent, with more new arrivals every day chasing the extraordinary wealth created in recent decades. This is astonishing and it changes everything.

Because here’s the thing. Looking ahead, if you are the children or grandchildren of immigrants who came to Ireland to build a new life for themselves and their families, why would you vote to import some two million conflicted Nordies, half of whom don’t even think of themselves as Irish? From the point of view of the newbies, Year Zero began the moment they got off the boat. Clontarf, the Norman invasion, the Flight of the Earls, the Battle of the Boyne, the United Irishmen, the Famine, Parnell, 1916, the Civil War, Archbishop McQuaid, the Orange State, the Troubles: none of these carry any resonance for those whose origins are worlds away and who, in 90 per cent of cases, will have little or no interest in the Irish language, the martyrdom of Michael Collins, the reforms of Sean Lemass or the perfidy of Charlie Haughey, still less in such dinosaurs from the Rare Old Times as Sean O’Casey and Brendan Behan.

I could, of course, be wrong. Will Afghans turn out to be naturals at hurling? Will Nigerians form a majority of the Irish scrum in 2035? Might a Latvian give us his version of Tommy Makem’s Four Green Fields? And could a Fianna Fail TD born in Mumbai serve as minister for the Gaeltacht before going on to be elected President?

Or will they all want to work for Google?

I don’t know. But these are questions to be asked. History is not destiny.

I’ve just been listening to The Lowdown, Nick Cohen’s podcast, in which this week he interviews the journalist John Kampfner to mark the publication of Kampfner’s new Book, Braver New World: The Countries Daring to Do Things Others Won’t. The podcast and Cohen’s accompanying Substack post, No-can-do Britain, make so many good points that the wonder is so few of them are central to the agendas of any of Britain’s political parties.

In essence, what Cohen and Kampfner – a couple of up-market, Old School lefties – are saying is that the UK can’t move forward on just about any front because its leaders are terrified that the voters, and the media, will punish them and hand over power to their opponents, who in turn will do nothing for the same reason and with the same result.

Whether it’s care for the elderly, welfare benefits, pensions, the NHS, climate change, sewage, income tax, housing, infrastructure, defence or immigration, the instinct of the present Labour government, led (if that is the word) by Keir Starmer, is to do only what is necessary to keep the show on the road in advance of the next election. If there is a substantive difference between Starmer and his Tory predecessor Rishi Sunak, it is that Sunak at least knew what he wanted to achieve even as he ran out of electoral road.

It’s not as if Starmer doesn’t know what the problems are. He does. It is simply that he lacks the steel to do anything about it.

One example: In Braver New World, Kampfner considers the response of successive governments in Japan and South Korea to the double whammy of plummeting birthrates and a sharp increase in the numbers of citizens in their eighties and beyond. In both countries – but also in Taiwan and Singapore – the answer has been to oblige those still working to pay into state-sponsored long-term insurance schemes. In their old age, they then get back what they put in, with help from the state. In Britain, with similarly dismal demographic prospects, precisely nothing has been done, which means that at some point in the next 25 years the state and the system will run out of resources, leaving the growing army of pensioners to fend for themselves, like feral cats.

Yes, but don’t you see? The next election isn’t twenty-five years away. It could be forced on us as early as 2027. So let’s concentrate on that, shall we? And the Hell with posterity – for what did posterity ever do for us?

This refusal to face up to long-term certainties can be seen in respect of each of the other ticking clocks. Last year, Kampfner visited Morocco to see for himself the impact of that country’s revolution in the use of solar power and wind turbines. Morocco has invested massively in renewable energy and from a start close to zero expects to be 52 per cent self-sufficient by 2030, with further progress to come. Some of the energy released is being used to build desalination plants, providing water for millions. The rest powers the country’s surging industrial base while affording Moroccans access to reasonably priced electricity. Fifteen years ago, the King, Mohammed VI – no slave to the vagaries of popular acclaim – took the bold decision to override objectors (of whom, as it happens, there were few) and to go for a long-term solution to a worsening dilemma. He was right, and Morocco, with a still-growing population of 38 million and scant reserves of oil and gas, is now the seventh-richest country in the Arab world.

In Britain, hidebound by an intrusive, out-of-control democracy, every attempt to “go green” is opposed by the Right and Far Right, which would much prefer to drill ever deeper in the North Sea. But even the Left is lukewarm on the subject, witness the snail-like progress of reforms deemed vital by the Energy Secretary Ed Miliband but viewed by many in his party as a hostage to fortune.

And on and on it goes. Housing, defence, infrastructure, pensions: whatever reforms experts come up with, they will find ways to head them off – “they” being the very politicians of all parties elected to build a better Britain. The only thing the UK has got done in recent decades is, ironically, Brexit, a calamitous mistake, amounting to a historic error, based on the miscalculation that complex issues arising from mass immigration could be resolved by “taking back control” from Brussels and, in so doing, Making Britain Great Again.

If you want to know how crazy that sounds today, all you have to do is list off the names of the “leaders” who gave us Brexit: Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Daniel Hannan, David Frost, Gisela Stuart [who she?-Ed.]. Would you trust any of these to run a whelk stall?

Britain’s answer to a falling population and a growth in the number of the seriously old has been the importation of millions of migrants, legally or otherwise. Workers would rather sign up for Netflix and HBO Max than pay into any kind of insurance scheme that would provide for their old age. At the same time, millions of Brits resent the immigrants on whom the NHS and elder care are increasingly dependent. They want them deported. They want the very people on whom they rely to be sent home, to be replaced by … who? Robots?

So it’s not just politicians who can’t face up to the truth. It is the British people themselves, or at any rate enough of them to act as a deterrent against meaningful change. Clinging to the belief that they should be free to carry on as they are, but with higher pay and more generous benefits, they refuse to acknowledge that the world doesn’t owe them a living and that only through sustained effort, intelligent long-term planning and a determination to get it right, is there any hope of a national revival.

The chronically embattled Starmer, with his entirely fortuitous parliamentary majority of 140, could have set out to convince voters of this indisputable truth. He could, for example, have done a reverse ferret on Brexit and campaigned for Britain to rejoin the EU, which, according to the polls, is what a majority of voters – disabused of the myth of sovereignty – now wants. Instead, he opted for a slow, incremental “reset” that in the age of Trump only nibbles at the edges of the country’s economic and political isolation. Okay. So what else might he have done? He could have picked the triple lock on year-on-year pension increases that keeps a large section of elderly voters onside but piles up problems for the future. He didn’t. “Old” Labour wouldn’t wear it. He could have pushed through on housebuilding, or welfare reform, or income tax threshholds, even defence (on which he is all mouth and no trousers). But that would have meant taking on key lobbies bent on preserving the status quo, or – worse – the voters. So he backed off and made smoke.

As Nick Cohen has pointed out, Starmer could have tried to persuade the country that he meant business and was determined (like Margaret Thatcher) to take Britain down a different path. It would have been a high-risk strategy. The Far Left and the Far Right – even many in his own party – are up for the fight. Bring it on, they say. But the potential rewards had he succeeded would have been historic. Even if he had failed, his courage and conviction would have shone through and posed a challenge to future leaders. The choice was Starmer’s to make. He chose not to choose, pursuing the easy, do-little course instead. And look where that has got him!

The tool-maker’s son has chosen office over power, giving him, like France’s Emmanuel Macron, a chance to strut on the world stage. In “normal” times, such an approach might have worked. Starmer could have been the Harold Wilson de nos jours, keeping Britain out of America’s wars while cosying up to the unions and exchanging pleasantries with the monarch. But in the age in which we live, beset by global threats and technological change, what is needed is a leader who tells the truth, sets out a course of action and pursues it without fear or favour. The trouble is, the way things are going, that leader could turn out to be Nigel Farage. If so, it would be no more than we deserve.

I was thinking about Margaret Thatcher the other day for the first time in a while. As she has receded into history – out of office since 1990, dead since 2013 – it should matter less and less that she did what she did. Yet the nation she bequeathed was changed utterly.

From being a manufacturing nation, however stutteringly in its later phase, the UK became dependent on the City of London, which, having banged bigly in the 1980s, entered a downwards spiral from which it is unlikely to emerge with anything like the strength and reputation it once enjoyed. Banking and financial services, wrapped into a “property-owning democracy”, were intended to underpin a revolution that would propel Britain into the twenty-first century as the West’s most “modern” economy. Instead, with nothing left to sell, the country descended into a ruinous cycle of borrowing and making-do. London thrived briefly, as if it were a city state, while the North and the Midlands, along with Scotland, Wales and the West Country, were left to fend for themselves.

According to Thatcher, there was “no such thing as society”. Individuals, families and small businesses were what counted. It was the duty of citizens born without obvious advantage – that is, without money – to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They should not look to the state. Neither should they expect the rich to be in any way parted from their wealth. For good or ill, they were on their own, which was what Jesus, apparently, would have wanted.

A reaction to Thatcherism was inevitable. But it took a while. Tony Blair was Thatcher Lite; David Cameron saw himself as Blair’s logical successor; Boris Johnson was the Iron Lady as a cartoon character; Liz Truss was a parody of the cartoon. Only with Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer was there anything like a return to normality – the tragedy – if tragedy isn’t too grand a word – being that by then it was all too late and the cupboard was bare. There was no money left to do anything, so nothing became the go-to instrument of government policy. Were the voters shocked when it turned out last month that the mighty Royal Navy had only one ship ready to go to war? They shouldn’t have been, anymore than they should have been surprised when it had to return to port after running out of drinking water.

Thatcher’s impact on Europe – which she could neither love nor leave – was equally long-lasting. She never endorsed the concept of a European Union. She was too much of a nationalist. She saw sense in the Single Market. Indeed, she was its guiding light. But other than that, it was “No! No! No!” She wanted no part of an ever-closer union, governed from the centre, which was why she campaigned tirelessly for enlargement, believing that coralling an EU of 29, 39, even 44, would be like herding cats. It is largely due to her – flush as she was with the prestige accorded her, however passingly, as Ronald Reagan’s trusted confidante – that Europe ignored the advice of François Mitterrand and extended its ambitions all the way to the frontier of what would become the Russia of Vladimir Putin. It was also following the example of Thatcher as Reagan’s soulmate that Tony Blair bound himself to the fortunes of George W Bush, joining the President in avenging 9/11 by invading Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

And yet and yet … while history’s second draft has stripped Thatcher of much of the golden glow that surrounded her in her pomp, she is still recalled by what remains of her Conservative Party, and the Right in general in Britain, as a messiah – the woman who single-handedly rescued her country from penury and restored its reputation as a world power. In the wider world, the Thatcher myth is not entirely dispelled either. Many Republicans in the US continue to look to her as an example of what the Special Relationship was all about, while even in Europe – even in France – there are those who think she brought steel to the negotiating table when all around her were dealing in soft words and platitudes.

There is also, of course, the fact that Thatcher’s post-war predecessors as prime minister, as well as her successors, bar Blair, were not exactly stellar. Think of them. After Churchill and Attlee (individuals of real achievement), there was Eden (author of the Suez fiasco), Macmillan (“You’ve never had it so good”), Lord Home (“What belongs to everybody belongs to nobody”), Wilson (the “white-hot heat of technology”), Heath (“Who governs Britain?” – answer: “Not you.”), Wilson again (out of ideas but with early-stage dementia), Callaghan (the Winter of Discontent), Major (not yet into his Elder Statesman role), Brown (“I saved the world from bankruptcy”), Cameron (austerity followed by Brexit), May (“Brexit means Brexit”), Johnson (“Let’s get Brexit done”), Truss (“Let’s blow up the economy”), Sunak (“Let’s stop smoking and fix the potholes”) and Starmer (“My father was a toolmaker”). What a shower! If political history is about the movers and shakers, how many of them, other than Thatcher and Blair (and Johnson as a character out of Viz, like Johnny Fartpants) would be worth more than a footnote? Starmer at least has some time left in which to show what he’s made of (if anything), but if he doesn’t get his skates on, the moment will be gone. What is it he wants to achieve? Does he know?

At least Thatcher believed in something and knew how to get stuff done.

And after Starmer? Andy Burnham, the King of the North, if the Labour Party has any sense, but more probably Nigel Farage, the man who actually gave us Brexit before promising (until this month) that he would do for Britain what Donald Trump has done for America.

Is the odious Farage really the best that Britain can offer? I think not. But the voters, in a mood to do damage, can only elect whoever is put in front of them, and it has been years, even decades, since a UK politician displayed even the faintest trace of greatness. Perhaps there is someone out there who has what it takes – a Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood. We can only hope.

Like just about everyone on the planet who isn’t part of Trump’s demented entourage or a Republican member of Congress, I find myself wondering how on Earth – I mean, how the fuck – the 47th President of the United States hasn’t been removed from office and sent either to jail or a home for the criminally insane.

The process of extracting him from the Oval Office needn’t be a coup. Top military officers wouldn’t have to break their oath. The men and women in white coats could stand back and watch. Why? Because an entirely legal means exists to have him stripped of office and placed under house arrest pending resolution of the case against him. It’s called the US Constitution and it just needs the right people to pull the right levers for the present nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue to be brought to an end.

But therein, I’m afraid, lies the problem. The once great Republican Party – the party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight D Eisenhower, even, at a pinch, of Ronald Reagan and George W Bush – has become a conspiracy against decency and good government, totally in thrall to to Trump and about as likely to move against him as Goebbels and Goering were to join Claus von Stauffenberg in attempting to assassinate Hitler.

Earlier this month, I wrote in Substack about the redundant status of Article II, Section IV of the Constitution and section four of the twenty-fifth amendment, both of which could have been written with Trump specifically in mind. These require the Vice President and other top officials of the Government, backed by the Supreme Court, to remove a sitting President guilty of treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors or, alternatively, of displaying manifest incapacity to run the country in a responsible manner. But, as I pointed out in my previous piece, no one has as yet stepped forward, neither the Vice President, nor any member of the Cabinet, nor even a single justice of the Supreme Court.

As far as they are concerned, the President, and the President alone, directs the conduct of the nation. He may engage in reckless and unsanctioned warfare, at enormous cost in blood and treasure; he may attach his name to storied institutions and the currency; he may plan an Arc de Trump to be constructed opposite to and obscuring the Lincoln Memorial; he may cosy up to America’s enemies while deriding his allies abroad as both fools and cowards; he may, in office, vastly enrich himself and his family. He may, aged 79, do all of these things while displaying every sign of cognitive decline. But he does so secure in the knowledge that he can do what he likes and there is no one in a position of power and authority to stop him.

Back in 1787, the signatories of the US Constitution, convening in Philadelphia, clearly believed that they had thought of everything when it came to the rights and privileges of each branch of government. The famous preamble to the document – “We the People” – set the tone for the next 200 years, yet today can be revealed as a hostage to fortune.

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Oh well! To Trump, all of US history prior to his emergence as President was but a preparation for this hour as he and destiny walked hand in hand. The nation’s deepest tragedy was not slavery, or the Civil War, or the Great Depression or the struggle for the civil rights of its black citizens. It was the shameless theft of his office by the Democrats in 2020, which, however, gave rise to the patriotic uprising of January 6 and his return to glory four years later after an attempt on his life as emblematic as the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima. To this bizarro Messiah, the only true Americans are those, like his Secretary for War, Pete Hegseth, who bow before him and offer him tribute – those who (and I kid you not) award him fictitious prizes, commission statues of him, rename institutions in his honour and vow to have his likeness added to the current quartet of presidential greats on Mount Rushmore.

I wonder if I, as the holder of an Irish passport and the author of pieces such as this, will be taken out of the line next time I visit, to be questioned about my social media history before, quite possibly, being put back on the next plane to Paris. I hope not. I am rather looking forward to spending some days with friends and family in New York and Washington. But we will see.

Because the worst – by which I mean the very worst – doesn’t have to happen. A new course could be set if the Democrats win the mid-term elections in November, especially if they secure a majority in the Senate. At that point, the wheel would begin to turn against Trump. His many illegal interventions and impositions, including the war on Iran, the enrichment of his family and absurd, over-the-top tariffs on America’s friends and allies, would be declared void and subject to investigation. The President himself could be impeached.

Ah yes, but what if the mid-terms do not take place? What if they are cancelled due to the overnight declaration of a federal “emergency” or “postponed” until Trump is either dead or reinstalled as President for Life. You think this unlikely? You may be right. You think Trump wouldn’t dare? Oh, come on! His whole history is of daring to do the unspeakable. And if he is wounded and fearful, anything is possible.

In the meantime, the conceit that the United States, its script written by the Founders, is the greatest democracy in the world, with its separation of powers and interlocking system of checks and balances, has been exposed as bogus. The truth is that Trump has got away with ignoring nearly everything that was dreamt up in Philadelphia. His war on Iran received no congressional approval. Nor did Congress get a chance to vote on his egregious tariffs regime. His raising of an armed militia to seize and deport migrants had no grounding in law. Time after time, he has trampled over the courts, knowing that when push came to shove the Supreme Court would buckle and his supporters would fall in line. The Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, is not so much a loyalist as a conspirator after the fact, as are almost all of his Republican Party colleagues. Decrees are issued from the Oval Office that are endorsed without question by men and women for whom bathing in the Emperor’s approval seems to be their only goal in life. The Senate is just as bad. Its past claim to be the world’s greatest deliberative body was always vain as well as grossly exaggerated, but today’s Senate is little more than a rubber stamp for Trump, its Democratic minority, save for the semi-detached Bernie Sanders, reduced to voices in the wilderness.

As for the Deep State, most men and women of any worth have been removed and replaced by loyalists, many of them, like Kash Patel, Trump’s FBI director, almost comically inappropriate to the roles they are assigned. The Justice Department is run by Pam Bondi, a fanatical Trumpian, as if it were the President’s private law office. Hegseth, a cartoon character, like Bluto out of Popeye but less restrained around women, contends that war should be conducted as“viciously” as possible, without regard to rules of engagement. The State Department, under “Little” Marco Rubio, is said to be so empty of talent and experience, and indeed everyday staffers, that visitors can hear their footsteps echoing as they make their way through the building.

I could write an entire post about the Supreme Court, but I won’t. With its inbuilt majority of hardline Republicans, three of them appointed by Trump, it occasionally rebukes the President for going over the top, but, overall, shies away from its bounden duty to ensure that governance is conducted in accordance with the rule of law. Should one of the three Democratic-appointed justices die in office over the next six months, do not doubt for a second that another Trumpian will be added to the bench. The court is a slow-burning affront to reason that will be seen by historians of the period as a key component of the madness.

The one piece of good news, albeit on the still far-off horizon, is that Trump, pushing 80, will not be around for ever. The mid-terms, should they go ahead, are due in November, and come 2028, unless he emulates Julius Caesar and declares himself Dictator, Trump will be obliged to relinquish the presidency. At that point the choice for voters will, in all likelihood, be between a Trump-anointed Republican (JD Vance, Rubio, perhaps even – God help us –Don Junior) and whichever Democrat gets to stand as Mr Normal. But whoever follows the current occupant of the Oval Office (whose resumé includes twice impeached, six times bankrupted, convicted of sexual assault, mentioned more than a thousand times in the Epstein files), the damage done to the good name and international standing of the United States will endure for at least a generation to come. It will be Year Zero for America. The 48th President will have a mountain to climb.

I have been holding off on posting about the French municipal elections for two reasons: 1. they were (dare I say it?) just a tad boring, making a headline difficult, and 2. it’s not entirely clear to me what they mean, if anything.

In summary, the far-left and the far-right increased their vote, but not by much, while the traditional parties of right and left recovered some lost ground, taking votes from the short-lived and rapidly-dissolving Macronist centre.

If I were to predict the result of next year’s presidential elections on the basis of votes cast this month in the big city contests, I would probably look to a hard-fought first round involving all shades of opinion followed by a second-round run-off between the candidates for the rebranded National Rally and the mainstream Socialists. But the bigger picture cannot readily be discerned from the metropolitan and municipal mosaic. The two are not the same, and even if they were, the presidential contest will not take place until next April, followed by elections to the 577-seat National Assembly, and a lot can happen between now and 2027.

What we know is that Paris remains a Socialist fiefdom. The outgoing mayor, Anne Hidalgo, Spanish by birth, was controversial for turning the city green and raising taxes while getting rid of gas-guzzlers in favour of electric vehicles and improved public transport. Motorists and others resented her, but she was able, quite comfortably, to bequeath her office to her former deputy, Emmanuel Grégoire, who, in celebration, rode to City Hall on his bicycle, promising more of the same. Hidalgo’s long-time rival, Rachida Dati, whose parents immigrated to France from Algeria and Morocco, ran as a rather grim, no-nonsense conservative, having served as a minister under three former Presidents, but ended up coming a poor second to Grégoire.

In Marseille, France’s second city, with a population of more than two million, the youthful veteran Benoît Payan, was re-elected mayor having rejected a pact with the far-Left France Unbowed of Jean-Luc Mélenchon (born in Algeria), a congenital agitator whose first words must surely have been “Aux barricades!”. Payan – of Italian heritage – is a realist, who accepts that holding together his sprawling Mediterranean port city, with its large Muslim minority, is fundamentally a management problem, with ideology best left at the hustings.

The story was similar in Lyon, where the incumbent mayor, Gregory Doucet, was re-elected on the Green ticket, with the backing of the Socialists and the Communists, but not – significantly – France Unbowed. The one notable gain for the Right was the Riviera capital, Nice, which fell to the firebrand Éric Ciotti, another heritage Italian, closely allied to the insurgent National Rally of Marine Le Pen.

Elsewhere, just about every faction had its ups and downs. There were victories and defeats. The extremes of left and right slugged it out in the economically struggling far North and deep South, with both able to point to an increase in their support. But the real story (if only we could be sure) was the recovery of the Socialists and the centre-right Republicans, with President Macron’s ill-named Renaissance Party (“neither right nor left”) barely in the race.

Macron will remain President for another 14 months, but already it is safe to refer to him in the past imperfect. In office, but not in power, his only remaining function is to provide a voice for France in the international arena while hosting visits by foreign leaders and keeping (just) on the right side of Donald J Trump. This month, he sent a naval squadron to war-threatened Cyprus, getting one over on the British, whose ships, lamentably, proved unable to get up steam. But since arriving “somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean“ little has been heard of the “La Royale”, whose warships have yet to fire a shot, let alone confront the enemy.

In the larger battle to come, between Far Left, Left of Centre, Centre, Right of Centre, Further Right of Centre and Far Right, plus the Greens, the smart money is on the National Rally, whether it puts up as its candidate for the Élysée the eternally hopeful Marine Le Pen or her half-Italian protogé Jordan Bardella, just 31 but already bursting with entitlement. How many times, though, has the smart money turned out to be stupid in politics? It could be that the old-school Socialists are on a roll and that the further right Republicans, with either Ciotti or former Interior minister Bruno Retailleau as their candidate, could yet give Le Pen & Co a run for their money. There is even an outside chance that Edouard Philippe, Macron’s first choice as prime minister, back in 2017, newly re-elected as mayor of Le Havre, will come through on the rails, sporting the colours of the centrist Horizon Party. Who knows?

For, as King Solomon (no fan of the hustings) might have said, the race is not always to those with the biggest backers, nor those who have been battling it out for decades, neither yet to those who are leading in the polls, for time and chance happen to them all.

For comparative purposes and to provide a baseline,here’s my rating of Canada:

7 7 7 7 9

Have I got it right? Feel free to comment.

I don’t know what the US Constitution has to say about what is to be done if a President goes crazy, or plain bad, or threatens the peace of the world for no good reason.

Article II, Section 4 of the world’s most famous founding document reads as follows:

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Yes, but the Vice President and the Speaker of the House, plus the entire Cabinet and the leaders the CIA, FBI and Department of Homeland Security, are personally beholden to Trump and 100 per cent MAGA, as are a majority of members of the Senate and House of Representatives. The Supreme Court, meanwhile, is two-thirds hardline Republican, three of whose justices are Trump appointees.

It doesn’t seem to matter that the President has been impeached twice, or that he stands convicted of sexual assault and is mentioned literally thousands of times in the Epstein files. It is evidently of no account that he is a six-times bankrupt who brazenly encourages his family to enrich themselves, piggy-backing on the insider-trading that counts for him and them as diplomacy. He insults America’s friends and allies while shamelessly sucking up to Vladimir Putin as the Russian President does his utmost to swallow up Ukraine. Worst of all (for now), as avowedly the world’s most powerful man, he takes his instructions from Benyamin Netanyahu, a ruthless mass-murderer, joining Israel in the rape of Iran and the serial slaughter of its leaders while looking on benignly as the IDF surges into Lebanon.

So much for the crimes. But let us not forget the misdemeanors. The President invites supporters to invest in his personalised $TRUMP crypto currency. He sells gold plated guitars and “God Bless the USA” bibles on Trumpstore.com. Just don’t forget, If you want to buy any of the above, or even a Make America Great Again baseball cap, you must first give out your email address so that you can be kept abreast of the latest offers and added to his list of potential voters.

Today’s lunchtime headlines in the Financial Times includes one, “Trump has broken it, now he owns it” that refers to the chaos he has unleashed on the world. I was reminded of a printed card on the shelves of a shop in Brittany selling porcelain – Vous cassez, vous payez – and wondered if such a thought had occured to French President Emmanuel Macron as he rushed to provide ships to defend countries under attack from Iran without actually appearing to endorse the death and destruction brought about by the American’s recklessness.

The shamelessness is breathtaking. What would the Founders think? You might think that section 4 of the twenty-fifth amendment to the Constitution might ride to the rescue here. This allows the Vice President and other top officials, including the Speaker and Cabinet secretaries, to intervene and remove the President if he has become manifestly “incapacitated”, which is generally understood to mean too sick to continue, or – in layman’s terms – “gone apeshit”. But you would be wrong. Section 4 has never been invoked and is looked upon as a nuclear option to be honoured in the breach rather than the observance.

It would, apparently, take Trump to be seen naked and frothing at the mouth while firing off rounds from a semi-automatic weapon for the Establishment to actually step in and rescue their country from the actions of a madman.

Which means that there is nothing to be done. We just have to suffer what we must while Trump does whatever he likes.

So much for the Constitution. So much for the Founders. So much for the separation of powers.

The only hope that remains is that, come November, in the mid-term elections, enough American voters will turn out, in defiance of Trump, to strip him of his majority in the House, and, if possible, the Senate as well.

My assumption, widely shared, is that this is what will happen – though it is far from assured. The Right in America has been enjoying a moment and, against all the evidence, continues to believe that Trump is their champion. Millions of working class voters, facing sky-high gas prices at the pumps, a doubling of healthcare costs and the savage impact of randomly imposed tariffs – not to mention his repeated assurance that he would not engage America in foreign wars or regime change – choose to believe that the one-time casino owner and reality show host gone rogue in the White House is their saviour.

And let us not forget that even if his senior colleagues are not willing to reach for the nuclear option, Trump himself suffers from no such restraint. He could very well cancel the elections or declare them invalid by dint of widespread fraud, as he attempted to do in 2020. In short, he might toss the constitution into the trash and carry on as President-for-Life until his overweight body and over-stressed mind finally give up the ghost.

And after that, what … ?

It makes no sense. But then nothing does anymore in Trump’s America, not least in the response of the know-nothing, do-nothing Democrats.

No one is suggesting that the Generals, backed by the men in white coats, should stage a coup, still less shoot the President. God knows what would unfold after such a rash act. But if we look back at those who tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944 as heroes and martyrs, how should we look upon the cabal now forming a shield around Donald J Trump? How does JD Vance think he will be remembered if he does nothing? What does Senator Lindsey Graham imagine will be his reputation after years spent as Trump’s Mood Whisperer? And how does Speaker Mike Johnson, on record as saying that “the Word of God is, of course, the ultimate source of all truth", manage to convince himself that the present occupant of the Oval Office is a Christian, doing what Jesus would have wanted?

Men of straw, every one of them., with “Craven” written though them like the resort’s name on a stick of rock. But that’s the way it is in the United States of America in 2026. Gawd help us all.

There is so much going horribly wrong in the world just now that I feel embarrassed to admit that I have been sorely grieving this week over the death of our little cat, Patrick. He was just nine-months-old when he died, savaged in his own home by a neighbour’s dog.

He and I were on our back terrace. I was brushing up leaves and he was running around my feet. It was the first sunny day of Spring and he had been out for several hours exploring his new territory. I was nervous for him because the dog, a German Shepherd, just the other side of our boundary fence, barked angrily every time she caught sight of him.

“Ignore her,” I tried to tell him. “Don’t go near her.” But, of course, he didn’t understand.

It was as I shovelled leaves into our wheelbarrow, out of sight of the fence, that the attack was launched. Unbeknownst to me, the dog had burrowed beneath the wire and, suddenly, was making for Patrick, who flew like the wind towards the open French doors behind which he must have thought he would be safe.

Aged 77, I hobbled after him, shouting out to my wife, Louisa, that Patrick was in danger. She appeared at the doorway, her hand on the dog’s collar, dragging her out of the house, shutting the door behind her. But it was too late. Patrick had been cornered in the bathroom at the top of the stairs, and suffered a fatal wound.

Astonishingly, he was somehow able to make it downstairs and hid behind the sofa in our living-room extension, and it was there, after dragging the sofa away from the wall, that I found him, on his back, his face covered with blood, scrabbling at the air in a final act of defiance.

I gathered him up. He was shaking and his golden eyes were filled with fear. As I took him towards the kitchen to wash the blood off, he bit my finger, leaving a tiny cut, and then he shook once more and died in my arms. He was terrified.

Hoping against hope that he had somehow survived, we drove him to the vet’s, but there was nothing to be done. The vet listened to his little heart and shook his head. He couldn’t have been kinder. Nor could his assistant, who after a previous, routine visit, had said Patrick was such a lovely little cat.

And he was. He was beautiful. I never knew that tabbies were so lovely, with fur like silk. He had been offered to us by a friend from a nearby village who had found him abandoned as a tiny kitten. She already had two cats and knew that we had been thinking of adopting a stray if the right one came along.

He was very sweet. He played with me all the time, frequently jumping up onto my desk and disappearing behind my computer screen, where there was a cracked mug filled with pennies. He liked to dip his claw into the cup and draw out a coin, which he would then carry in his mouth down to the floor behind my chair, and, with his paw outstretched, deposit it under the rug. I don’t know why he did this, but the coins are still there, all 25 of them.

He liked me to chase him, which I could manage only notionally, causing him to gallop up the stairs, then down again, at breakneck speed, and into the extension and out into the hall and the kitchen and back again. Often, he would run just part of the way up the stairs, before halting and looking down at me through the bannisters. If I reached up to him, he would bat my fingers.

In the evenings, when we were eating dinner or watching television, he would sneak up behind us, looking for attention, before jumping down and settling on Louisa’s lap.

Being a cat, he slept a lot during the day. I have counted eleven places where he liked to nap. His overnight arrangements were equally varied, a favourite being our laundry basket. But most nights, before dawn, he would jump onto our bed and snuggle down between us, hoping – as Louisa put it – for some serious strokage. When he was happiest, he purred loudly, which I found deeply affecting. He loved us and we loved him.

My hope was that when I died, in my eighties, Patrick would remain as Louisa’s trusted companion. But they were both to be denied that blessing.

I couldn’t save him.

On Tuesday, we buried him in the garden, with two paper bags from Intermarché as his shroud and three firebricks to mark the spot. We have still to find the right plant to place next to him.

What have I learned from all this, between the tears? I have learned that love comes in different forms and that Patrick, at the end, was a most remarkable little friend.

I will miss him desperately. But now I have to turn my attention once more to the big world, where terrible things are happening. And we have to prepare for a visit to London, where we have a beautiful new granddaughter, Romy, a sister for Eden. I just wish I could wipe the image of Patrick’s shocked and frightened little face from my memory.

I don't know about you, but I am getting sick and tired of commentators and others who bracket Brexit together with the 2008 financial crash, the pandemic and the energy crisis as if Britain's decision to leave the European Union was just one of a number of things inflicted upon us, without direction or planning, in the course of an unusually turbulent period in recent history.

Bollox! Britain left the EU because the Tory Party, goaded by Nigel Farage, persuaded a narrow majority of voters that a "sovereign” UK would rid England of Romanian cab-drivers and Polish plumbers and, in so doing, make Britain great again.

So how did that work out, bearing in mind that Romania and Poland are enjoying the sort of economic growth of which Britons can only dream? On immigration, as both Farage and Boris Johnson realised full well, the fact is that the number of arrivals from Africa and Asia was bound to balloon in the wake of Brexit as some two million European citizens returned to their homelands.

The claim that, freed of the constraints imposed by Brussels, Britain would quickly re-emerge as one of the world’s great trading nations, was equally fraudulent. Australia and New Zealand (total population 30 million) were apparently gagging for British products, while the other 500 million consumers of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, plus India and our Commonwealth friends in Africa, were said to be licking their chops in anticipation of an influx of Raleigh bikes, Burberrys and single-malt whisky. As far as the EU was concerned, Britain held all the cards and could look forward to a surge in exports unhindered by the demands of the overly-controlling and pusillanimous European Commission.

Modest deals were struck with Australia, India and the Pacific Rim that typically benefited the overseas signatories more than they benefited Britain. At the same time, trade with the EU either stagnated or shrank beneath the weight of restrictions made inevitable by the UK’s revised status outside the single market.

The simple truth is that there was no upside to Brexit. The world shook its head, unable to comprehend the idiocy of the decision to leave the world’s largest trading bloc. From being one of Europe’s Big Three, Britain was reduced to the status of a medium-sized offshore island. The so-called Indo-Pacific tilt turned out to be delusional, based on the absurd proposition that it made more sense for Britain to target trade with Thailand and Peru, on the far side of the world, than with France, Germany or Spain. Meanwhile, overnight, Britons lost the right to live and work in Europe. If they owned homes on the Continent, they couldn’t stay in them for more than 90 days at a time. The use of EU lanes at ports and airports was ended. Henceforth, Brits, clutching their new blue-black passports, were obliged to line up with visitors from the rest of the world.

Those who backed Brexit were either knaves or fools, who for the most past have since crawled back into their holes, refusing to acknowledge that they were wrong. When did you last hear Farage or Jacob Rees-Mogg or (God help us) Bill Cash or Tim Martin boasting about the miracle of our deliverance?

Instead, the argument shifted away from principle – and billions extra for the NHS – towards a defeatist, yet somehow defiant, pragmatism. In the most recent edition of the Sunday Telegraph, Lee David Evans, billed as “a historian of the Conservative Party,” who says he voted Remain in 2016, argued that Britain should carry on regardless because readmission to the EU would be fraught with difficulties and end up less advantageous to us than if we’d never left in the first place. The Tories would rather die than admit it, but this is now the unofficial party line. Yes, Brexit was a bit of a bummer (whose idea was it anyway?), but now that we’ve done it, all we can do is lie back and think of England.

Prominent among those who have bought into the revisionist line is the current Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, who when asked recently if leaving the EU had been a mistake, responded: “Brexit is something the country voted for. I’m not litigating it. The point I’m making is that we don’t have a time machine to go back and ask the country to do something different.”

Well fuck me! Nothing to do with the Tories then. Just something that happened, like a freak tornado or spontaneous combustion.

Contrast this with her maiden speech in the House of Commons in 2017, when she described the result of the referndum as "the greatest-ever vote of confidence in the project of the United Kingdom"

Yes, but, ten years on, what does Ms Badenoch think about the damage done to the economy? “What I’m saying right now is that Brexit created opportunities and challenges. People need to seize the opportunities, including the Government more than anyone else where [sic] they’re not doing that.”

Not exactly a ringing endorsement of what she and her party assured us would be an overwhelmingly beneficial existential change. And they have the gall to ask voters to restore them to power at the next general election!

Labour, as it seeks an incremental reset with Brussels, is realistic on Europe, though it would be nice if Keir Starmer, if he survives as prime minister, would stop pussy-footing around and include rejoining the Single Market and Customs Union in his manifesto for 2029. Starmer’s take as both a lawyer and a democrat is that the result of the referendum has to be respected, at least in this Parliament. Fair enough, but it if he wants to remain in Downing Street, he needs to show that leaving Europe cannot be dismissed as if it was a no-fault divorce or, in insurance terms, an Act of God, but was in fact Britain’s most calamitous, bull-headed decision of the last 50 years.

In 2016, Farage and the Tory hard right combined to convince credulous voters that the EU was a bureaucratic imposition that was simultaneously sucking the lifeblood out of Britain and filling its green and pleasant land with immigrants who didn’t speak English. Today, the Reform Party, under Farage’s leadership, would have us believe that Brexit, for good or ill, is yesterday’s news and that the real issue is, once again, people not speaking English on trains. They cannot be allowed to get away with it. Labour has to stand up and show that, while tackling immigration (which it has been doing) is important, the key issue is that Labour should be seen not only as a party of the Left, but a party of Europe.

Or, ten years on from the Referendum, is that too much to ask?

My friend Tony Allen-Mills wrote an excellent piece this week on Substack [Misgendering a cabbage and other challenges] in which he confesses the difficulties he has experienced speaking French down the years – this in spite of the fact that he now lives in retirement in France, has a French wife and studied the language at university.

“I’ve lost count,” he tells us, “of the number of times on social occasions when I’ve failed to keep track of who’s saying what, and moments after someone has announced that they’ve just attended their grandmother’s funeral, I brightly enquire: ‘And how’s your grandmother?’ It doesn’t help, of course, that I’m going deaf fast.”

As you should expect, Tony is very funny, as well as honest, about his plight (such as it is), but I have little doubt that when he and I finally organise a get-together in Lyon, along with the travel writer Mark Porter, a long-time resident of Cannes, it is I who will be exposed as linguistically challenged.

Mark’s French is impressive. He doesn’t seem to notice when he switches from English into French or French into English. He just barges on, reminding me of a conversation I once overheard between two elderly gentlemen in Strasbourg who would begin sentences in French and end them in German – unsurprisingly, perhaps, in a region that had changed hands five times since 1871.

I have no doubt that Tony will be the same. He also enjoys the advantage that he knows Lyon well, including its restaurants, whereas I haven’t been to the city since 1987, when I covered the trial of the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie for the Sunday Telegraph.

My own French is lame. I understand and can speak a lot more than the average Brit (admittedly a pretty low bar), and I can make sense of Le Figaro and Le Monde provided the stories don’t go beyond 400 words (after which I become exhausted). But I still get lost in conversation with my neighbours and need French subtitles to make sense of such comedy dramas as Dix Pour Cent or Lupin. The buggers just speak so fast.

Decades ago, when I was the European Correspondent of the Irish Times, based in Brussels, my grasp of French went from rudimentary to what I think is called these days limited working proficiency. But the gap between then and my arrival (together with my wife) in Brittany as a retiree after years spent in New England and New York was a good 38 years.

In the interim, I had lived and worked in Bonn and Amsterdam, as well as London, achieving limited working proficiency in Dutch and German, with in each case (as with my French) a good accent but only a degree of understanding.

It helps, of course, to have studied languages at school, which I never properly did. You don’t have to understand the parts of speech, or when to use which tense, in order to speak English fluently. You just need to have been born into it. But to speak any foreign language well requires either deep immersion for several years (that is, living and working with native speakers) or a proper, step-by-step progression from basic through intermediate and advanced to – Sonnez les trompettes! – fluency. Even then, there is in most cases a gap between being entirely competent and being able to, for example, take part in high-level political debate. My journalist friend, Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, part-educated in America, is a rare example of this kind of exalted fluency. Her French is obviously better than mine, but so is her English.

Closer to home, my neighbour Bertie, from the Ruhr, worked for years as a customs officer on the border with the Netherlands. As a child, he helped his parents who owned a restaurant patronised by British Army officers, and throughout his teenage years he spent a part of each summer in Redon, in southern Brittany, where he became addicted to pétanque. The result? He speaks German, Dutch, French and English and now, in retirement, runs a German-style coffee shop called Fredonia, named after the region in Colombia in which his wife was born. How many of us could have benefited from such an upbringing? By contrast, I grew up in East Belfast and was 18-years-old before I even met a Catholic, never mind a foreigner.

Not so Boris Johnson, born in New York but raised in Brussels, where his father was a senior Eurocrat, Boris was for years presented to us as multilingual. He may have been a useless prime minister, but at least he could hold his own with Johnny Foreigner – or so we were told. But any time I heard him being interviewed on French or German television, he very quickly lapsed into English, much to the relief of the bemused presenters. It is possible that he would have fared better on Ancient Roman TV, shooting the breeze in Latin with Cicero or Tacitus, but I doubt it. The man not only talks rubbish, he talks it badly.

The two most talented linguists I ever knew were both hard-drinking and larger than life: the journalist Peter Millar and the historian Norman Stone, both now dead. Millar spoke German, French and Russian with the force and precision of a strip-club barker, and in his last years added Spanish to his lexicon. I was told by speakers of the first three of his languages that when he switched gears from English he instantly became someone else, with an altered personality, and I believe this. The newspaper mogul and arch-criminal Robert Maxwell (himself multi-lingual) was so impressed that he took Millar with him to meetings with foreign political leaders with whom he hoped to conspire.

Norman Stone was even more infuriating. It was said that he spoke nine languages as professor of modern history at Oxford, enabling him to interrogate the murky files of the KGB and Stasi after the fall of communism while persuading those in charge of the archives over a glass or three to let him dive ever deeper into the past. In his last years, during which he agreed to work with me on a never-to-be-written novel about the fall of Constantinople in 1453, he learned Turkish so well that he was able to swap jokes with students of history and politics at the University of Ankara.

But me? Put it this way: If Millar and Stone were competing in the Champions League, I was struggling to avoid relegation into League One. They could score goals while I was rubbing my shins. Fred Astaire once remarked that Ginger Rogers and Cyd Charisse – two of his most famous dance partners – were “naturals,” meaning that they were blissfully accomplished, but that Judy Garland, for all her other talents, was a “hoofer”. As far as languages are concerned, I am a hoofer.

Fluency – the gold-standard of linguistics – is either easily come by or hard-earned. If you are born to parents who speak different languages or go to school in one language and talk your mother tongue at home, you will likely end up bilingual. I know several young men raised in France by English parents who don’t think twice about switching from French to English. One year at school aged seven was all it took. The rest of us have to work at it, either through years of study or (as I may have mentioned) by spending months on end speaking only the sought-after language (can you imagine?). The alternative is to accept that you can only hope to achieve so much, especially if you are older (and I am 77) or, like Tony and me, going more than ever so slightly deaf.

But all may not be lost. I have just paid close to 300 euros for access to an online course called French Today, which has classified me as an intermediate French-speaker and aims to push me up at least a notch into the advanced category. I’ll let you know how I get on. Lunch with Tony and Mark in Lyon is only months away.

Let’s get started. Reasons why Donald Trump was right to launch an assault on Venezuela and kidnap its President, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores:

1. Maduro is a murderous thug. Whatever Socialist principles he may have started out with gave way after the death of Hugo Chavez to a lust for power and the acquisition of wealth and privilege for himself and his family. Elections were rigged and criminal gangs operated with impunity. The oil-rich country ceased to be prosperous and became instead a failed state.

2. Er, that’s it.

Reasons why Trump should have played golf instead:

1. Venezuela is a sovereign state one-and-a-half thousand miles from the US. Its population, even after the depredations of Chavez and Maduro is reckoned to be some 24 million. And it is no Juan-come-lately. It gained its independence from Spain as long ago as 1830. Simon Bolivar, known across South America as El Libertador, was born and raised in Caracas.

2. Trump’s claim that the regime allowed drug lords to transport vast quantities of fentanyl and cocaine is false. Almost all the fentanyl that ends up in the US is manufactured in Mexico, and 90 per cent of the cocaine comes from Colombia, from where it is delivered, usually via Central America, to California and the Gulf coast.

3. Maduro has been indicted on drugs and weapons charges in New York following pressure from Trump’s Justice Department. In reality, he can only reasonably be accused of doing nothing to stop Colombian traffickers from using Venezuela as an occasional conduit for their product. Trump’s record in such matters is, to say the least, spotty. Juan Orlando Hernández, the right-wing former president of Honduras, who in 2024 was convicted of actual drug trafficking and weapons violations and sentenced to 45 years in jail, was given a “free and complete pardon” by Trump less than two months ago. It is to be assumed that no such pardon will be extended to Maduro – always assuming that he is convicted as charged.

4. Trump says that the mismanagement of Venezuela’s oil reserves affects not only the Venezuelan people but has a knock-on impact on the US. He argues that the nationalisation of the country’s oil production by former President Carlos Andres Perez in 1976, was an act of theft, since it was American oil companies that created and sustained the oil boom from the 1930s on. This claim is not only exaggerated but fails to point out that America’s oil majors made considerable fortunes from their stakes in Venezuela and, in combination, were widely held to be a state within a state.

5. The simple truth is that Trump wants Venezuela’s vast reserves of oil and gas to be controlled by American interests. It can be only a matter of time before Jared Kushner and Trump’s sons, Eric and Don Jr, turn up in Caracas.

6. If we are to believe Trump, the US will “run” Venezuela for years to come. He has said that, if necessary, he will put boots on the ground but that, if they know what’s good for them, the current vice president, Delcy Rodriquez, and her ministerial colleagues will do what they’re told. Venezuela is to become, in effect, an American crown possession.

7. Should widespread insurrection break out in Venezuela, most of whose people will not mourn Maduro but have no wish to be ruled by a Trumpian cabal, the US will have only two choices: either cut and run or else settle in for yet another forever war along the lines of Afghanistan and Iraq. No one in America wants either of these outcomes, but, short of a dramatic economic recovery that significantly improves the lives of all Venezuelans, it can surely only be one or the other.

8. Today, it is Venezuela. But where tomorrow? Iran? Gaza? Greenland? Panama? Even Canada and Mexico? He has threatened them all. Trump’s imperial ambitions, defined in his new-coined “Donroe Doctrine”, know no bounds. The one-time casino operator and failed real estate magnate is well and truly off the leash. From now on, anything can happen, and it probably will.

9. Finally, what business is it of Trump’s to decide, without reference to Congress or the Constitution, that he can kidnap the President of Venezuela and his wife and make their country a commercial annex of the US? He has frequently said that he is not interested in nation-building or regime change. What he failed to add was that he is very much in favour of asset-stripping.

So there you have it. For and Against, laid out with all the indifference of a spreadsheet. I leave it to you, dear reader, to make up your mind on the rights and wrongs of the last few days. I couldn’t possibly comment.

I see the 84-year-old businesswoman Martha Stewart has joined fellow Americans Snoop Dog, Stephen Kaplan and Jason Levien as a co-owner of Swansea City football club. Championship football clubs have become toys for rich Americans looking for a fun way to spend their spare cash. They enjoy turning up for big games along with their partners and pals, who are treated like royalty. Up a notch, in the Premier League, ownership, with a few exceptions, is American, Gulf Arab and Far Eastern, with a couple or three billion dollars the entry price for a slice of the action. The top players and celebrity managers are nearly all from overseas, bent on retiring with at least £50 million in the bank, and the international fan base, largely served by foreign television stations, is a key element in assessing the bottom line. I know I've said it before, but as far as I can tell, the only "English" thing about the English Premier League is that it is physically located in England – and even that is under threat as the demand grows for a percentage of matches to be played outside the UK.

But hey, it's as homey as the Hunger Games and we're loving it.

Closer to home (which would be the case if I was from Merseyside and had ever been to Anfield), "Come on Liverpool! is a battle cry stripped of all geographical and cultural meaning. "My" club, valued at $5.1 billion (dollars note, not pounds), is owned by Fenway Sports Group of Boston. In 2019, FSG tried to trademark "Liverpool" as a brand name, but was turned down because of the "geographical significance" of the name. The manager, Arne Slot and the captain, Virgil van Dyck, are both Dutch. None of the assistant coaches is English. Of the 30-man first-team squad, only six are English, and just two – Joe Gomez and Curtis Jones – are regular starters. A great team, yes. Multi-millionaires to a man. But Jones aside, is there anything Scouse about them?

Being rooted in the community used to be a key part of the English football scene. It's what made derbies so hard fought. Today, it's all about money, and England doesn't have any.

But don't let me put you off. It’s Christmas after all. This Saturday, in what for them is a rare Saturday afternoon outing, Liverpool, take on mighty Wolverhampton Wanderers, currently propping up the bottom of the table. Wolves are owned by the Chinese Fosun Corporation (described as a multinational conglomerate holding company), headquartered in Shanghai, and the club has only one Englishman on its roster, reserve goalkeeper Dan Bentley. But the manager, Rob Edwards, is English (born to Welsh parents), so watch out You Reds!

I realise that I am not the first to express the horror felt by Europeans in the face of the newly-published US National Security Strategy. But bear with me. This landmark document envisions a Europe, including the United Kingdom, reduced to vassal status, utterly dependent on the whims of a Trumpian White House.

I am from Belfast, which means I am part British and more than a little bit Irish, with the latter side, post-Brexit, increasingly to the fore. But above all else, I am European. I believe in the European family. Though we have fought and squabbled among ourselves down the centuries and have often done stuff of which we should be ashamed, what unites us is an over-arching sense of ourselves as nations bound together by a common heritage and culture.

The poet W B Yeats said once that his Anglican community in Ireland, though small in numbers, was “no petty people”. He meant that we all had a place in deciding and debating our shared future. That Donald Trump, J D Vance, Elon Musk, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller and the rest of the third-rate desperadoes currently in charge in Washington think they can dismiss the most consequential continent in history is a measure not only of their ignorance, but of their emptiness.

Consider those names for a moment. What links them, apart from the fact they they are, to a man, of direct European heritage, is that at their core there is nothing – certainly no humanity. They are entirely vacuous, filled with malice in the same way that a balloon is filled with air.

The one surprise for me in surfing the latest review is that it is concise and well written. But that only confirms the certainty that it was drafted by others familiar with the language and speech patterns of the Founders, who, having sat in on the ravings of Trump’s White House cabal, shaped what emerged into a statement intended for the ages.

What ought to be remarkable about the thinking behind the 29-page document is the contempt it reveals for the nations that are supposed to be its closest and most important allies. Under the Trump Doctrine, Europe is set for “civilisational erasure”. Its leaders are weak and woke. Its people (as we are constantly reminded in the President’s Truth Social diatribes) are increasingly Third World migrants – terrorists and rapists for the most part – who have less and less in common with the United States and only exist to indulge their un-Christian foreignness. Particular loathing is reserved for the European Union, which, according to Trump, was created with the exclusive purpose of “screwing” America. He wants the EU to be wound up and for its member states, once liberated, to be governed by the Far-Right as supplicants of an ongoing Trumpian Ascendancy.

Russia, though clearly a malign actor on the world stage, is endorsed in the review as a regional power with appetites appropriate to its size. Trump seems content (as we have seen) to give the Devil his due, which means letting Vladimir Putin have his way with Ukraine (and – who knows? – Poland and the Baltic states) so long as he acknowledges a broader US suzerainty across what we used to call The West. Much more space is devoted to China, the power and ambitions of which can no longer be halted, or even slowed, by threats, tariffs or shows of force. The US Treasury, the Fed, the office of Trade and the Pentagon all know that their country as the world’s apex predator may be numbered. But they are not yet willing to admit it. Instead, they have opted for a policy of containment that in all likelihood will end up as a managed retreat behind carefully delineated boundaries.

Europe is presented in the review as easy prey. America may not be able to see off China. It may not even be able to stand up to Putin’s Russia. But, by God, France, Germany and the UK, to say nothing of the feckless and ill-intentioned EU, had better do what they’re told or else face the consequences. And the question that has to be asked is, is he right? Can Europe, with or without the EU, hope to defend Europe’s sovereignty from seizure by a power-mad Donald Trump?

As for the developing world, it only exists in the minds of White House strategists as a marketplace for American goods and a source of natural resources at rates to be set by Washington. The Administration looks to have accepted that Africa, except for a handful of resource-rich individual nations, will cleave to China, but has registered its claim to the entirety of Latin America. The drive to remove the quasi-Marxist Nicolás Maduro as President of Venezuela is gathering momentum at a dizzying pace, with an Iraq-style invasion seemingly imminent. At the same time, it is evident from everything he says and does that Trump will not be happy until Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Colombia accept their role as client states of the US.

Japan and India are barely mentioned in the review, apparently because though of obvious economic importance, they are not perceived as a threat to the MAGA project. The same applies to the Gulf States, with whose strongmen leaders Trump feels a relaxed affinity. He wants their money, their oil and their diplomatic cover. Beyond that, so long as they don’t get too big for their sandals, he is more than content to leave them be.

No. It is Europe that most vexes him. Under the ironic headline “Promoting European Greatness,” the document makes clear that what is required of Europe is that it should renounce its current wickedness and become a willing adjunct of the US, dedicated to its hegemony, ready at all times to rush to its defence. To this end, seven goals are listed, including rapprochement with Russia, the throwing open of European markets to US goods and services [with no role for the EU] and “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations” – in other words, backing right-wing populists against the established Order. As the anonymous authors put it:

We will need a strong Europe to help us successfully compete, and to work in concert with us to prevent any adversary [other than us] from dominating Europe. America is, understandably, sentimentally attached to the European continent – and, of course, to Britain and Ireland. The character of these countries is also strategically important because we count upon creative, capable, confident, democratic allies to establish conditions of stability and security. We want to work with aligned countries that want to restore America’s their former greatness.

Lucky us.

You know me. I always try to look on the bright side.

But the state of Britain’s armed forces is nothing short of pathetic.

Last week, it was revealed that the UK’s entire fleet of Ajax armoured vehicles, costing £10 million ($12m) each, have been taken out of service due to a recurring problem of engines that generate so much noise and vibration that they drive their crews mad. A total of 600 vehicles have so far been delivered or are on order. But they don’t work. General Dynamics UK, which designed and manufactured the Ajax, had recently assured the Ministry of Defence that the noise and vibration issue, first uncovered three years ago, had been resolved. It wasn’t, at a cost thus far of £6.5 billion.

Meanwhile, no fewer than 6,000 – that’s six thousand – military lorries made for the British Army by the German MAN Corporation, have been recalled over issues with the bolts holding them together. The entire consignment is literally falling apart, leaving the Army unable to re-supply troops on active duty with food and fuel.

Not that there are many troops. The total number in uniform now stands at 72,000 – two-thousand less than the capacity of Old Trafford, Manchester United’s football stadium. In 1980, the number was 159,000. By 2010, just 110,000 remained, since when the reduction in strength has been relentless. A year ago, the Ministry of Defence promised a further 4,000 recruits. The reality has been a net addition of just 240.

America’s top brass have dismissed the UK’s armed services as a serious military force. They say it would struggle to put even one division of troops in the field (always assuming there were lorries available to get them there). Whatever the Special Relationship meant between 1940 and the end of the Cold War, it means next to nothing now.

But we should not despair. Keir Starmer assures us that everything is about to change. Defence spending, he says, will rise to 2.7 per cent of GDP in 2027 and – if he is still in office, which seems increasingly unlikely – will hit 3.5 per cent after 2031. But can we believe him? In October, it was reported that every branch of the military had been ordered to cuts costs, and even if we take the prime minister at his word, much of the new money will be spent on salaries, pensions and improved infrastructure, including accomodation for service families. As for reserves, just 25,000 part-timers are on call, many of them veterans retained under the terms of their service contracts. Young Brits simply don’t want to don the uniform.

Did I mention tanks? Britain’s Royal Armoured Corps is so reduced in strength that it could barely deploy as many obsolescent main battle tanks as are lost typically in a month by Ukraine. The Challenger 3 programme – essentially an upgrade of the Challenger 2 – is years behind schedule and is poised to deliver a total of just 148 units by 2030. Belarus, never mind Russia, has 1,800 tanks. No wonder both the defence staff and the Pentagon say that Britain could not hope to participate in a major conflict lasting more than three months and would be totally devastated in six.

Drones? What drones? At the last count, the Army had no more than a dozen attack drones in its inventory, against the Ukrainian total, on any given day, of more than 2,500. Germany – currently engaged in a defence rethink that could take them ahead of Britain and France combined over the next ten years – is set to help bridge the gap between supply and demand via a collaboration between the multinational Stark Corporation and Germany’s Rheinmetall. Construction will begin in Swindon, creating – wait for it! – no fewer than 100 jobs. That should do it.

But if you think the Army is in a bad way, spare a thought for the Navy. The Senior Service has two aircraft carriers, the Queen Elizabeth and the Prince of Wales. They are handsome enough, bigger than any ships previously built, but neither of them works very well. Their propellers keep failing and they spend half their time in dry dock. Carriers are supposed to deliver shock and awe. The problem for the RN is that, in order to save money, the two ships were denied angled flight decks, catapults and arresters, so that the only fixed-wing aircraft they can launch are short-take-off-and-landing F35bs, made by Lockheed Martin. Almost as bad, the pair have no serious means of defending themselves from attack, causing Russia and China to mock them as floating targets, while, with the ongoing limitations of the helicopter-based Crowsnest programme, intended to provide the Eyes of the Fleet, they lack a fully-functioning means of airborne early warning.

The type 45 destroyer, hailed at its launch as the epitome of area control against aircraft and missiles, has been plagued with difficulties from day one. All six ships (out of the twelve originally planned) had to have their engines replaced because they turned out not to work in warm water. Since then, a myriad of issues has arisen, leading to the ships’ remaining in port for most of what ought to be their “active” lives. By comparison, the US Navy (which, it should be said, has of late experienced its own issues with warship design), has 74 Arleigh Burke destroyers in service, with more on order.

At least the Navy’s anti-submarine frigate programme looks to be progressing well – for what it’s worth. The issue here is that only eight type 26 units are to be built, along with six of the cheaper type 31s. Canada has ordered 15 type 26s. Norway, with a population of 5 million, will take at least five, the same as Australia. Good for Britain’s BAE Systems, not so good for Britain itself.

Beneath the waves, the new Astute-class nuclear-powered attack submarines are in deep trouble. They rarely, in fact, get beneath the waves, spending most of their time in repair and maintenance. Problems under the bonnet keep surfacing, unlike the boats themselves. It is said that, when they are working, they are the quietest and most stealthy in the world. The trouble is, they are alongside more than they are ever at sea.

Anything else? Well, if the Navy had to send the Royal Marines into battle, it would first have to make bookings with Stena Line or DFDS. Bulwark and Albion, the only two surviving amphibious warfare ships were prematurely retired from duty last Spring. Apparently they were rusting away and risked becoming an embarrassment. In 2022, it was reported that replacements were under active consideration, but none to date has been confirmed, leaving Marine planners scouring the websites of ferry companies for special offers.

How many marines, I hear you ask? At the last count, there were just under 5,750, including musicians serving in no fewer than five bands. The US Marine Corps has 169,000 men and women under arms, with ships to match, but fewer bands.

Supply lines at sea are as important as they are on land. The Royal Fleet Auxiliary has the dual task of replenishing the Navy’s ships at sea and delivering troops and marines to conflict zones. The issue in the latter case is two-fold. The RFA doesn’t have enough crew to sustain an effective rotation between its three landing-dock ships, meaning there there can never be more than one of them at sea. Adding insult to injury, the only ship with a built-in hospital deck, RFA Argus, nearly 46-years-old, was this year declared “unsafe” to leave port. As many as six (which invariably means three) multi-role assault ships are under consideration, but even if confirmed, the first is not expected to be delivered until sometime in the 2030s. For now, an “outline business case” is all that has been achieved, moving to an “assessment phase” sometime next year. Let us hope that British troops won’t have to go to war in numbers anytime soon.

What, though, of the Royal Air Force? Exactly how many are the “Few” these days? The answer, predictably, is, not enough. A total of 138 fifth-generation F35 attack jets were ordered from Lockheed Martin back when David Cameron was in power, but just 40 have so far been delivered, to be shared with the Navy, with a further 12 capable of nuclear strikes to be negotiated. By way of comparison, the USAF currently operates 500 F35s, with another 200 in service with the Marine Corps. For now, the mainstay of the RAF remains the supremely capable Eurofighter, or Typhoon, which is, however, starting to show its age. In general, more of everything is what is required, but with cost-cutting still the overriding order of the day, contracts are signed off only over the dead bodies of those in charge of procurement.

Those who oppose increased defence spending like to point out that Britain is not in Russia’s sights and that if there is a European war, the worst that could happen would be that Paypal and YouTube would go down for a couple of days. Should they take their heads out of the sand, they might reflect on the fact that the UK has precisely no land-based anti-missile systems capable of taking out supersonic or ballistic missiles and is entirely dependent on the Navy’s six type 45 destroyers (see reference to same above). If Putin, having cut most of Britain’s underseas cables, decided to launch a phalanx of top-end missiles at London, the destruction and loss of life would be off the scale.

As it happens, I don’t believe that Russia’s already stretched armed forces could possibly defeat a united Europe, They don’t have the numbers and they don’t have the money. That doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be a bloody business, with losses on all sides. It would be a turning point in history, and if Britain wasn’t able to play its part, the shame would echo down the years.

At bottom, the question facing Westminster and Whitehall is simple: does Britain regard itself any longer as a major European power, or would it prefer to follow the example of Italy and Spain, spending only the absolute minimum required on defence in the belief that the threat from Russia is either exaggerated or relevant only to Poland, the Baltic states and Scandinavia? I suspect that millions of voters would opt for the course of least resistance – more bands, more pipes and drums, fewer tanks and warships – but if Britain retains a sense of itself as a global player, then it needs to stiffen the sinews and summon up the blood. The country’s armed forces have to be able to do more than put on a show at royal funerals.

My sermon this morning will be short and to the point. A growing number of British entrepreneurs under 40 are leaving the UK for the Gulf states, usually Dubai, which in recent years have done a brilliant job at selling themselves as the new Shangri-la. They say they are going because the current Labour government threatened to bring in an exit tax on the capital gains of those giving up on Britain – the country where they were educated and made their fortunes – which must be paid before they board their private planes, using British passports, and disappear into the ether.

They say that such a tax, on top of the taxes they have already paid into the Whitehall exchequer down the years, is both onerous and mean-spirited, and they are getting out before it comes into force.

In fact, they are leaving because although they are extremely rich, they are determined to be richer still. They don’t care about the NHS – they never use it. They don’t care about the condition of state education – their children go to the best private schools. They don’t care about the state of the railways or the size of the bills they have to pay to heat their homes and swimming pools. Nor do they give much thought to crime (so long as they re not the victims) or the surge in immigration (they are going to countries where immigrants make up almost the entire servant class). In short, they care only about themselves.

Take the case of Herman Narula, a 37-year-old start-up investor, whose £780 million fortune derives from a variety of sources, including gaming and ticket sales. According to an interview in Saturday’s London Times, Narula, the son of a wealthy Indian property developer, is setting up shop in Dubai because, in spite of all the success he has enjoyed in the UK, the Government is not doing enough to incentivise ambitious entrepreneurs like him.

As it happens, the idea of an exit tax has been dropped (no doubt because the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, feared a gadarene rush of tycoons towards Heathrow). But for Narula, who he says spends a lot of his life in airports, the reprieve has come too late.

“I’m still leaving. The thing, is, they’re clearly thinking about it, right? What if they change their mind? What stops them doing it in the next budget?”

Another intending exile, Lewis Morgan, co-founder of the clothing brand Gymshark, with a current net worth of £125 million, is among those heading for the (untaxed) exit.

He and his family are leaving for Dubai which, he told The Times, offers “more investment opportunities, better weather, a more active lifestyle, safety for my kids, and on top of all that, no tax”.

Morgan believes that lots of his fellow multi-millionaires. nearly all of whom made their fortunes in short order while living in Britain, are poised to follow his example.

“Once an avalanche starts, it’s impossible to stop. Each budget pushes more and more people. Now this exit tax propaganda will push even more.”

I am reminded of the departing words of a multi-millionaire footballer (whose name escapes me) who said he was moving to Monte Carlo because he had to think of his children’s futures, which apparently would be insecure if they attended private schools in England and grew up in a mansion in Cheshire. How much could he leave them if he stayed in the UK (I’m extemporising here)? Who knows? Maybe £5 million each, possibly £10 million. But after 30 years in Monaco? Oooh, could be £20 million easy. So, having grown rich at the expense of his fans over a fabulous 15 year career, he wasn’t happy to pay British tax. Much better to live big in Monte while paying no income tax or capital gains tax or property tax. I mean, who wouldn’t?

Need I go on? I’m not opposed to wealth, especially wealth-creation. The UK should have its share of billionaires, multi-millionaires and what they used to call in Texas “little old millionaires”. But if the UK is where they have made their fortunes, they should expect to pay all reasonable taxes and, by so doing, help keep Britain a country fit for heroes.

Is that too much to ask?

I’ll end with this: if, under the current, outgoing tax system, a very rich individual in Britain could expect to end up worth £500 million, but under a more “mean-spirited” tax regime would be left with only £400 million, what reason would he have to complain? £400 million is a great deal of money, even in 2025, and the extra £100 million lost to tax would surely be repaid in kind as he, and others like him, looked around at a better Britain.

But there I go again. I wonder what the phrase is in Gulf Arabic for pissing in the wind.