Oligarchs – Blood and Porridge

September 26, 2023September 26, 2023

Now expose it to garlic, holy water and sunlight

A while ago on this blog, I conducted the following thought-experiment. Imagine that current trends result in the world becoming a globally-warmed, war-ravaged hellhole inhabited by only a few surviving remnants of humanity. But those remnants somehow manage to lay their hands on a time machine and realise they can send an assassin back in time, in the manner of the James Cameron / Arnold Schwarzenegger movie The Terminator (1984). Who would they have their assassin target in, say, the late 20^th century to change the course of history and prevent the world from turning into crap?

As I mused at the time, “The young Donald Trump? The young Vladimir Putin…? Neither. I suspect those guys would be considered small beer compared to the one the time-travelling assassin from the future would really go after… Rupert Murdoch.”

Wizened 92-year-old media mogul Murdoch was recently in the news because he announced his decision to step down as head of News Corp and the Fox Corporation in favour of his son Lachlan. Murdoch certainly looks his age, but it sometimes felt like he was going to live forever and keep running his media empire forever. Regular nocturnal blood-meals sucked from the throats of helpless victims are evidently good for the constitution. That said, lately, the old monster had begun to look a little vulnerable, both in his business dealings and in his personal life.

April this year saw his Fox News network fork out nearly 790 million dollars to settle a lawsuit brought against it by the voting-equipment company Dominion. This was after the network told outrageous porkies about the company switching votes in the 2020 US presidential election so that Donald Trump wouldn’t win it. Among the guff peddled by Fox was the claim that the company was owned by Venezuelans and had experience of swinging elections for the late Hugo Chavez.

Meanwhile, though old Rupe had once wooed the ladies with confident charm, like an extremely shrivelled George Clooney, he’s also looked less sure-footed on the romantic front recently. In 2022, he ended his fourth marriage, to Jerry Hall, by unchivalrously sending her an email to inform her that she’d been dumped. Hall was unsurprisingly miffed, as during the Covid-19 pandemic she’d gone out of her way to ensure her aged husband stayed isolated and avoided getting the virus, which for someone of his years would probably have been a death sentence. Earlier this year, he announced his engagement to former radio host Ann Lesley Smith, but this lasted just two weeks. That’s even shorter than a Liz Truss premiership. Apparently, Murdoch started to panic at Smith’s loopy evangelical-Christian pronouncements, which included the assertion that Tucker Carlson was ‘a messenger from God.’

But you can’t keep an old horn-dog down. Rupe is currently engaged again, this time to Elena Zhukova, who was once married to the Russian billionaire – don’t mention the ‘O’ word – Alexander Zhukova. At this rate, Murdoch will have got himself betrothed 16 more times before he reaches treble-figures.

© Prana Film / Film Arts Guild

Now that Murdoch has stepped back from the media-controlling activities that have kept him busy for the past 71 years, ever since the age of 21 when he inherited an Adelaide newspaper, the News, from his dad, what legacy does he leave? If he had a shred of conscience, morality and decency – which of course he doesn’t have, which makes this an academic statement – he’d surely howl in despair and incarcerate himself in a Trappist monastery for the rest of his days to do penance for his multiple sins. Or just top himself. Murdoch’s media operations have, over decades, caused massive harm to the well-being of humanity.

He pushed the rapacious neoliberal agenda of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, with its credo that greed is good, the market should be worshipped and the financial safety nets and infrastructure that held societies together, and looked after their most vulnerable members, weren’t worth bothering about. Thatcher said it all when she declared in 1987, “There is no such thing as society.” His outlets have gone to great lengths to ignore and discredit the overwhelming scientific evidence that manmade climate change is happening and poses a terrifying threat to our civilisation’s future. In Australia, a country that’s already baking and burning as the climate catastrophe unfolds, Murdoch newspapers like the Australian and Sydney’s Daily Telegraph cheer-led right-wing moon-howler Tony Abbott into power in 2013 – Abbott once dismissed climate change as ‘absolute crap’. And in the USA, Murdoch has used Fox News to build up a vast, paranoid, delusional, far-right-wing ecosystem whereby millions of gullible people now accept the lies of Donald Trump as gospel truth. Fox could very well see to it that Trump wins the presidency again in 2024. At which point, the world’s biggest superpower will make the transition into authoritarianism.

Murdoch is truly the man with the reverse-Midas touch. Everything he sticks his finger in turns into manure. Yet this never seems to stop him generating huge amounts of money, so he’s happy. No wonder his son James, that rare thing indeed, a Murdoch with a conscience, quit the board of News Corp in 2020, sickened by the horrors his old man had empowered.

In the UK, Murdoch has long exerted his toxic influence through the swathe of national newspapers he owns: the Times, Sunday Times, Financial Times, Sun and Sun on Sunday. His reign of terror began when he acquired the Sun in 1969. The history of that particular tabloid since then, when it hasn’t devoted itself to gleeful, lowest-common-denominator stupidity with headlines like ‘WEREWOLF SEIZED IN SOUTHEND’ and ‘FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER’, has been an unrelenting saga of horribleness.

In the 1980s, when the Sun was under the stewardship of the repugnant Kelvin MacKenzie, it revelled in homophobia and gloated over the AIDS epidemic, which it dubbed the ‘gay plague’ and insinuated straight people had nothing to worry about. It catered for the ‘dirty mac’ brigade with its ‘page three’ girls, at least one of whom, Samantha Fox, was only 16 when it displayed her topless. And it lied through its teeth about the behaviour of Liverpool football fans at the 1988 Hillsborough Disaster, to cover up the failings of the police that day. That led an embargo of the Sun in Merseyside, which is still in force now. If only the British population generally treated the rag with the same contempt that the Scousers do. (I also admired the attitude of the late playwright Dennis Potter, whom the Sun dubbed ‘Old Flaky’ on account of his crippling psoriasis. When he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he named his cancer ‘Rupert’.)

More recently, the Sun provided a platform for Katie Hopkins, someone even more repellent than MacKenzie, who likened migrants to ‘cockroaches’ and advocated the use of gunboats to stop them. And its incessant abuse of the European Union, European countries and European people (‘frogs’ and ‘krauts’ to a man and woman) climaxed with the newspaper’s enthusiastic support for Brexit – ‘BELEAVE IN BRITAIN’, its front page declared on the day of the referendum in 2016. It was no surprise that Murdoch welcomed Brexit, regardless of the economic, diplomatic and reputational damage it inflicted on the UK. He famously commented that while he could impose his will on one country’s leader, at No 10 Downing Street, he wasn’t powerful enough to do that with the combined force of 28 countries’ leaders, in Brussels.

From dailysabah.com / © Sun

Meanwhile, during the noughties, the Sun’s sister paper, the News of the World, under the editorship of flame-haired gorgon Rebakah Brooks, was so determinedly on the sniff for a good story that it hacked into the phones of, among others, murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, dead British soldiers and victims of the 2005 London bombings. This proved too much for even its ghoulish proprietor and he axed the News of the World in 2011. Mind you, he soon replaced it with the Sun on Sunday, so not much changed.

With the Sun leading the way, Britain’s other, supposedly more ‘respectable’ right-wing newspapers – the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and Daily Express – happily dived into the same midden of lies, slander and xenophobia, with the result that over the past half-century the popular press in Britain has done much to cheapen public discourse, making it shrill, prurient, mean-spirited and pig-ignorant. Murdoch can also take credit for inspiring the birth, or spawning, of alleged news channel GB News in 2021, which clearly wanted to become the British equivalent of his ghastly Fox News. The conspiracy theories it peddled about the Covid-19 pandemic and Covid-19 vaccines, often voiced by that havering bawbag Neil Oliver, mirror the work Fox News did in the USA to make people resistant to vaccinating themselves against the virus. The fact that Murdoch was one of the first people on the planet to get the vaccine, yet he happily let his media outlets promote scepticism of it among their audience – who tended to be older and more at risk from Covid-19 – shows his ethics are non-existent.

Sadly, in Britain, non-Conservative politicians are so frightened of Murdoch’s newspapers that they feel obliged to cosy up to him. In the late 1990s, Labour Party leader Tony Blair got so thick with Murdoch that he became godfather to one of Murdoch’s kids. In return, the Sun displayed the front-page headline ‘THE SUN BACKS BLAIR’ prior to the 1997 general election that saw him win power. Murdoch’s newspapers subsequently supported Blair during his participation in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, an operation founded on lies and resulting in disaster. I have no doubt that Keir Starmer, the current Labour Party leader, and basically Tony-Blair-lite, will prostate himself before Murdoch in a similar, craven manner.

Though the Nosferatu-esque Murdoch is no longer at the helm of the media empire he’s built, he’s made it clear that he still intends to exert influence from the sidelines. And his son Lachlan is such a piece of work it sounds like that empire will conduct its business with even more malevolence in the future. The fact that Lachlan has just appointed Tony ‘climate-change-is-crap’ Abbott to the Fox board doesn’t bode well.

When Murdoch informed his employees of his decision to step down, he told them to “make the most of this great opportunity to improve the world we live in.” Really, Rupe? Improve? You did nothing to improve the world. Rather, your shitty news outlets helped turn it into a sewer.

© Prana Film / Film Arts Guild

November 28, 2022

A peripheral vision

© Penguin Books

For someone who’d normally describe himself as a ‘voracious’ reader, I’ve read a shockingly small number of books in 2022. I’d like to think this was due to the stress and disruption I’ve suffered this year while moving from Sri Lanka (which had been my home for the previous eight years) to Singapore. However, back in January 2022, I contracted Covid-19. Although it was a very mild dose, and seemed to have minimal effects on me, I’ve worried since then that it impacted on my powers of concentration, made me less able to process information, and slowed down the mental faculties I use when reading.

This worried me particularly a few weeks ago when I started reading The Peripheral, the 2014 novel by cyberpunk maestro William Gibson – which, coincidentally, has lately been made into a TV series starring Chloë Grace Moretz. During The Peripheral’s first 100 pages or so, I struggled to follow what was going on, found everything bewildering and came close to giving up on it. Was Covid-19 brain-fog stopping me from getting to grips with the book?

In fact, beforehand, I could have just read the blurb on The Peripheral’s back cover, where the book’s central gimmick that caused me so much initial confusion is plainly explained. But I didn’t read it, wanting to avoid ‘spoilers’.

All of William Gibson’s fiction – of which I’ve read two-thirds of the Sprawl trilogy (1984-1988), all of the Bridge trilogy (1993-1999) and two-thirds of the Blue Ant trilogy (2003-2010) – is disorientating at first. Gibson is not one for exposition. He drops you straight into the action, which invariably unfurls in some near-future scenario with characters peppering their speech with unfamiliar techno-talk, jargon and cultural references. All of which your reading-brain simply has to get acclimatised to. So, I knew what to expect, but with The Peripheral I was alarmed at how long the process of acclimatisation took. For a large, early section of it, I felt I was sinking.

But finally, after the 100-page-mark, I began to swim. That’s when the book became really enjoyable, as enjoyable as anything else that Gibson’s done. And before I proceed any further, I should warn you that there’ll be spoilers here too.

Once you grasp the novel’s basic premise, following it becomes much easier. For events aren’t happening in one future scenario but in two. There’s a setting not too far into the future, featuring a rural American town where life isn’t much different from that in 2022 – just a bit cruddier. The environment has been even more degraded, it sounds like warfare has become more high-tech but no less brutal, there are possibly even more chain stores and fast-food joints, and much of the local economy seems based on drug production. Meanwhile, the characters make extensive use of 3-D printing and drone technology, and we hear of a recent fad where kids played with cute little Transformers-like robots that had iPads instead of heads.

In this setting, the novel’s heroine, Flynne, fills in for her brother Burton for a few days while he’s out of town. Burton, a former soldier, gets paid for playing a role in a strange new virtual reality / video game – presumably testing it out – by an ask-no-questions company that’s supposedly based in South America. Flynne takes over his role in the game and, while playing, witnesses a murder in a cityscape that looks weirdly similar to London but at the same time isn’t London.

This strange version of London provides the book’s other setting. It’s a real place, only seven decades further into the future. The murder that Flynne believed she witnessed in a game has happened in reality, and a publicist called Wilf Netherton and his wealthy pal Lev Zubov, scion of a family of London-based Russian oligarchs, are informally investigating the disappearance of the person Flynne saw killed. Lev has been using a form of time travel – well, time-travelling communication via a mysterious ‘server’ created in China – to hire people in the past to carry out operations for him. Those hirelings believe they’re working in computer simulations in their own time. It becomes obvious they need to get in closer contact with Flynne, who’s the only witness to what happened. However, whoever engineered the murder has access to the server too and is soon hiring assassins in Flynne’s time to take out her and her brother.

Gibson explores the book’s two-different-futures-in-communication gimmick to the full. The protagonists living in the further-away future have full knowledge of the earlier one, including its economy. Thus, using the server and their knowledge, they can manipulate that economy to finance interventions in it. While Wilf and Lev tamper with the world around Flynne and Burton, making them exponentially richer, able to create their own corporation and pay for their own protection, the villains of further-future London intervene too – not only staging assassination attempts, but also recruiting to their cause the unsavoury corrupt politician / drug manufacturer who controls Flynne and Burton’s hometown, and sending against them a cult of demented Christian fanatics (whom Gibson has evidently modelled on the real-life, loathsome Westboro Baptist Church).

Things step up a further gear when Wilf and Lev manage to send back in time some advanced technology, via a 3-D printing company run by Flynne and Burton’s friends. This allows Flynne, Burton and others to transfer their minds to the future London, where they’re embedded inside ‘peripherals’ – artificial, semi-cyborg bodies that can be humans, animals or homunculi – which the people of the era hire out and inhabit for special occasions in the way that people of past eras hired out and wore fancy dress. And Wilf amusingly gets to make a trip in the other direction, where he’s psychically installed inside one of the iPad-robot toys of Flynne’s time.

One thing that I’ve noticed about Gibson is the importance he attaches to communities. This was especially noticeable in his Bridge trilogy, where he had San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge taken over by a band of outsiders, misfits and radicals and turned into a township where they live their lives according to their non-corporate, eco-friendly ideals; or a ‘cardboard city’ of homeless people at a major Japanese railway station that’s actually a refuge for computer hackers, otaku and general ‘cyber-gypsies’. In The Peripheral, much is made of the rundown, hard-pressed and exploited community that’s home to Flynne, Burton and their family and friends – many of those friends being military veterans like Burton. They don’t have it easy, but they stand by one another, even when threatened by murderous thugs employed by dark forces from the future. This includes looking out for an ex-soldier called Conner, who’s returned from the battlefield both mentally and (severely) physically damaged. Indeed, one highlight is when Conner’s mind get transferred to future London and, to his joy, he finds himself inhabiting a full-bodied peripheral. A full body is something he hasn’t had for a long time.

Meanwhile, Gibson’s description of London in that further-off future is ripe with satire. Russian oligarchs are so established there they’ve practically become the aristocracy, while advanced technology has allowed areas of it to be turned into tourist-orientated recreations of the Victorian past – as if parts of London aren’t that way now. He also gently takes the piss with the character of Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer, a police detective investigating the murder who seems to know more about what’s happening than she lets on. Lowbeer embodies every imperturbable, raffish crime-fighter in a long tradition of non-realistic British crime stories. I wondered at first if Lowbeer was conceived as a female version of John Steed from the TV show The Avengers (1961-69), but recently on social media I saw Gibson state that he’d imagined her as ‘Tilda Swinton channelling Quentin Crisp.’

Faults? Well, occasionally, Gibson’s description of the action – the full-on action scenes, with danger and violence – can be frustratingly sparse, to the point where you have to reread his descriptions a couple of times to figure out what’s just happened. He’s a writer who’s interested in fast-moving narratives but not so much in action itself. Also, while the peripherals are a logical plot-component, the concept of them seems slightly old-hat after James Cameron made extensive use of the same concept five years earlier in his movie Avatar (2009). Not that that’s Gibson fault, of course.

And connoisseurs of time-travel stories might find it a cop-out that Wilf and Lev can interfere in their past as much as they like without suffering any effects in their present. This is because, Gibson explains, the moment they start interfering they create a ‘stub’ – an alternative timeline where the reality containing Flynne, Burton and the others begins to branch off from the established, ‘official’ timeline, developing in its own way towards its own, unknown future. The idea makes sense, but some may miss the complexity of a traditional time-travel story where interference in the past has unexpected and unwelcome consequences in the interferers’ present. See Ray Bradbury’s 1952 short story A Sound of Thunder for the classic example.

The Peripheral is very entertaining, then, but there’s a grimness at its heart that’s rather like finding a dollop of ultra-sour cream within an ice-cream sundae. The grimness is something called the Jackpot. This isn’t a single cataclysmic event but a protracted series of smaller ones – “droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves” – that represent humanity reaping what it sowed with its onslaught against the natural environment. The Jackpot occurs between the novel’s two time-settings and accounts for something Flynne notices when, in peripheral form, she arrives in future London. There seem to be very few people around.

Late on in The Peripheral there are suggestions that, as their timeline diverges from the established one, Flynne, Burton and her friends, empowered by future technology and investment, can do something to avert or at least alleviate the Jackpot and create a better future for themselves. Meanwhile, away from the pages of Gibson’s novel and looking at the dismal, real-life events of the early 21^st century, I fear we’ll be hitting our own Jackpot all too soon.

From wikipedia.org / © Gonzo Bonzo

March 18, 2022March 18, 2022

It’s time Putin’s pals were put in the bin (Part 2)

© Cold War Steve

Continuing my rant about miscreants who support Putin and / or are generally making arses of themselves during the current crisis in Ukraine – this time miscreants in the United Kingdom.

Vladimir Putin – presently stuck in a big, bloody hole he’s dug for himself in Ukraine, but still determinedly digging, using thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives as his shovel-blade – has never been short of pals in Britain. Back in 2001, soon after Putin had won his first presidential election in Russia, and not long after the start of the second Chechen war, which saw the deaths of at least 25,000 civilians, a third of Chechnya deemed a ‘zone of ecological disaster’, and most Chechens left suffering ‘discernible symptoms of psychological distress’, then-British Prime Minister and Labour Party leader Tony Blair jetted out to Moscow and cosied up to Putin. El Tone praised him for showing ‘real leadership’ and giving ‘strong support’ in the ‘fight against terrorism’.

Even today, Blair is hero-worshipped by certain centre-right politicians and commentators in Britain. Ironically, while later Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is commonly loathed and belittled as a traitorous, anti-Western, lefty scumbag, it’s worth recalling what Corbyn said about Blair’s visit to Moscow in 2001. “When the Prime Minister… meets President Putin this evening, I hope that he will convey the condemnation of millions of people around the world of the activities of the Russian army in Chechnya and what it is doing to ordinary people there. When images of what is happening are translated into other parts of the world, many people are horrified…” Exchange ‘Ukraine’ for ‘Chechnya’ and you realise how Corbyn’s words resonate in 2022.

No doubt nowadays Blair keeps his mouth shut about Putin’s supposed statesmanship. But another well-known British politician is less reluctant to express his admiration for the warmongering Russian ogre. Right-winger, Europhobe and wannabe broadcaster Nigel Farage has said of him: “I wouldn’t trust him and I wouldn’t want to live in his country, but compared with the kids who run foreign policy in this country, I’ve more respect for him than our lot.” Meanwhile, the donkey-faced, and full-of-donkey-shit, Farage has made copious appearances on Russia Today, coming out with such gems as the claim that Europe’s modern democracies have been run ‘by the worst people we have seen in Europe since 1945’. Worse even than Putin? Yes, I’m sure Nige thinks so.

By the way, let’s not forget Aaron Banks, Farage’s compadre in the Vote Leave campaign that managed in 2016 to tear the UK out of the European Union, possibly helped by a wee bit of Russian funding. In 2017, Banks did his bit for the Putin cause by tweeting: “Ukraine is to Russia what the Isle of Wight is to the UK. It’s Russian.”

Elsewhere, there’s multiple evidence suggesting that Boris Johnson’s Conservative government, if not totally in love with Putin’s habit of inflicting atrocities on neighbouring countries that annoy him, is certainly in love with the wealth of the Russian oligarchs who surround the man. Recent claims about the amount of donations the Conservative party has received from such oligarchs have ranged from 1.93 million to 2.3 million pounds.

Johnson seems particularly enamoured with members of Russia’s mega-wealthy elite. In 2018, while he was serving as Theresa May’s foreign secretary, he was seen stumbling about an Italian airport suffering from a hangover, and lacking his security detail, after attending a shindig thrown by Russian media magnate Evgeny Lebedev at his castle near Perugia. Lebedev subsequently received a peerage and now, technically, is ‘Baron Lebedev, of Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond on Thames and of Siberia in the Russian Federation’. Johnson has sheepishly denied allegations that he used his influence to secure the peerage for his buddy.

Though late last week the British government announced it was freezing the assets of seven Russian billionaires (including Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich) with close ties to Putin, this only came after weeks of prevarication. Originally, it looked like the UK wouldn’t be clamping down on dodgy Russian money until late in 2023, which would have given those likely to be affected a good year-and-a-half to sell their assets and move their money off British soil. Even with this new change of heart, Abramovich and co. have already had a fortnight’s grace-period to shift some of their wealth. Basically, Johnson’s regime is reluctant to do anything that might sully London’s reputation as a haven for dodgy money.

Summing up the absolute state of the Conservative Party on this issue is its wretched co-chairman Ben Elliot. Simultaneously, Elliot’s been sourcing donations from super-rich Russians and been offering services to them in Britain through his ‘concierge’ company, Quintessentially. “Quintessentially Russia has nearly 15 years’ experience providing luxury lifestyle management services to Russia’s elite and corporate members…”, ensuring that from “restaurant bookings to backstage concert access, a bespoke lifestyle is at our clients’ fingertips.” So drooled the blurb on Quintessentially’s website until recently. Then, suddenly and mysteriously, this obsequious drivel was deleted from it.

While we’re heaping abuse on the British government, we shouldn’t overlook the smirk-faced Priti Patel, who – until another apparent U-turn last week – seemed determined that the Ukrainian refugees Britain was allowing in should be vastly outnumbered by the Russian oligarchs it was welcoming with open arms. At one point, while other European countries had taken in Ukrainian refugees in the tens of thousands, the UK had dished out a mere 50 additional visas to them.

Besides Patel, it’s worth castigating government minister Kevin Foster, who advised people fleeing Ukraine to apply to Britain’s ‘seasonal worker scheme’, which would allow them to spend their time in the country picking fruit. Such humanity, Kev! Also, some hatred should be directed towards whatever nasty piece of work in the Home Office complained to the Daily Telegraph that Ireland had allowed in too many Ukrainian refugees. All those shifty Ukrainians, claimed the anonymous source, would “come through Dublin, into Belfast and across to the mainland to Liverpool”, thus creating “a drug cartel route.”

Needless to say, Britain’s resident community of publicity-seeking, rent-an-opinion gobshites have fastened onto the Ukrainian crisis like flies fastening onto a cow-plop. George Galloway, that fedora-wearing gasbag whose rhetoric seems to weave between old-school socialism (when he’s in England) and hardline British nationalism (when he’s in Scotland), and who’s a fixture on the Russian-owned Sputnik radio channel, tweeted recently: “Me, Farage, Hitchens, Carlson and Rod Liddle are a pretty broad front of people who think NATO expansion to the borders of Russia was a pretty bad idea. Maybe pause and think about that?” When I paused and thought about it, my immediate thoughts were: “George Galloway, Nigel Farage, Peter Hitchens, Tucker Carlson, Rod Liddle… Wow, what a team! Couldn’t Marvel make a superhero movie about them? Maybe call it Arseholes Assemble?”

Hilariously, Galloway’s Putin-sympathetic stance has ended all unity in the All for Unity party, the staunchly pro-UK outfit he set up in Scotland prior to the last Scottish parliamentary elections. Jamie Blackett, the party’s former deputy leader, and also the Deputy Lieutenant for Dumfriesshire and a Daily Telegraph writer, recently disowned his old boss and announced the disbanding of the party.

Meanwhile, Neil Oliver, the alleged Scottish historian and talking head on right-wing outlet GB News, lately delivered a bewildering monologue, the gist of which was: “I’ll be honest. I don’t know what’s happening in Ukraine. I don’t understand it either.” Oliver’s professed ignorance of the situation didn’t stop him talking about it for nine minutes, however. It’s also strange that when it comes to Putin and Ukraine Oliver is so hesitant to climb off the fence, considering how quick he’d been in the past to condemn, say, the Scottish National Party (‘disastrously incompetent’, ‘small’, ‘not worth bothering about’), or the Black Lives Matter movement (‘anarchists and communists’ eating ‘into the built fabric of Britain’). Very strange indeed.

One other thing bugging me about Putin’s current horror show is how certain people have pounced on it and tried to use it to promulgate the right-wing agendas they’ve been pushing for years already. Take the ‘culture wars’, in which Putin’s ‘anti-woke’ position had until recently won accolades from Western pundits on the right of the spectrum. Well, now that Putin is officially a Bad Lad, they can’t praise him directly anymore. Instead, they’re pushing the narrative that woke stuff no longer matters during the crisis that good old Vlad, sorry, bad new Vlad has created.

Here’s the absurd Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson, recently opining: “The outbreak of war has shone an unflattering light on our society… Watch issues like LGBT, net-zero, Partygate, Black Lives Matter and farcical ‘Stay Safe’ Covid restrictions all fade into well-deserved insignificance now that war is back.” According to Pearson, in other words, now that Putin’s behaving like a c*nt, we should all stop fretting about being civil to our fellow human beings, about preventing them from dying of Covid, about preventing the planet from burning up, and about our leader Boris Johnson being a lying, unprincipled sack of shite.

And here’s the barmy Spectator pundit Lionel Shriver, writing: “Decolonisations, contextualisations, gender-neutralisations – it’s all a load of onanistic, diversionary crap, and the West having shoved its head up its backside is one reason that Putin feels free to do whatever he likes.” Though I suspect Putin would still have attacked Ukraine if fewer people on Western social media had been using the pronouns ‘they’ / ‘them’ in their profiles.

One last thing for which Britain’s right-wingers must be thanking Putin is the attention he’s diverted from the looming issues of manmade climate change and the dire state of the environment. Thanks to the headlines being dominated by Ukraine, not much attention has been given to, for instance, the apocalyptic floods that have stricken Queensland and New South Wales. And, somewhat inevitably, the afore-mentioned Nigel Farage is currently trying to relaunch his political career by demanding a new national referendum – this time, not about the UK’s membership of the European Union, but about the British government’s supposed adoption of Net Zero policies to combat climate change. Farage, of course, wants us to vote against them.

I wonder why he’s doing this. Could he be thinking of a country that helped finance his previous, successful referendum campaign? Or could he be thinking of an oil-exporting country that would stand to gain if Britain gave up on green energy and became wholly dependent on fossil fuels again?

I can’t possibly think of a country that falls into both categories.