Just when you thought the British ruling classes could not stoop any lower or more avidly play Limelight Leapfrog to the detriment of their electors’ well-being, we lately witnessed a deluge of fawning, flash-lit, choreographed adulation over the petty, proxy-war despot masquerading as a paladin of liberty – the fearless defender of ‘our values’  – who was not seen as the importunate beggar he is, but as some holy guru, come to grace them with his sainted presence.

This tawdry spectacle saw ministers and monarchs alike abandon all dignity of office, surrender all pretence at statesmanship and instead treat their brisk progress along the road to Armageddon like an appearance at some tasteless showbiz awards ceremony.

Not limiting the sycophancy and shamefulness to Perfidious Albion, this touring Grand Guignol repertoire of scripted braggadocio and empty rhetoric was next to be repeated in Paris and Brussels where the assembled potentates, panjandrums, and press hacks also competed avidly to abase themselves before the sniffy, little man in his trademark, faux combat fatigues.

It was all utterly nauseating: all so replete with hollow Churchillian pastiches and a cacophony of music hall bombast; all accompanied by righteous rodomontades, carefully calculated outrage, and insincere invocations of the graven idol of Democracy.  Our so-called ‘representatives’ assembled there had no more principal concern than to strive for a brief share in what they laughably thought was the reflected glory of that corrupt puppet, all presumably oblivious to the fact that each push-button effusion of hyperbole, each prêt-à-porter recitation of anti-Russian invective, each trite declaration that  ‘Carthago delenda est‘ was edging us closer and closer to utter ruin.

In truth, we need have no fear of any external foe – real or imagined, aggressor or aggressed against. We need not ‘go abroad, in search of monsters to destroy’. Britain – indeed, the West at large – has already been decisively undermined, its bulwarks eroded, its timbers eaten from within by the those supposedly charged with the care of its peoples, the nurturing of its traditions, and the succour and support of its honourable institutions – and not only by means of this latest, perilous outburst of shrill jingoism. Though the current, virulent outbreak of  hysterical and potentially suicidal belligerency may be the most immediately calamitous of their serial affronts to the common weal, the count of their crimes is a prodigious one, the record of their recidivism long and invidious.

I fear we may be already lost. I know, to my deepest regret, that my children will have a much harder, needlessly poorer, far less free time of it than did I, thanks to the hubris and wilful vanity of the ‘Davocracy’- the soi-disant elite and its straggling retinue of scribbling-class lackeys and soulless, court astrologer technocrats.

All I can hope is that, if we are indeed doomed, those who been so instrumental in bringing about our woe are one day condignly judged and then deservedly damned, whether in this world or the next.

[NB: This is a somewhat expanded version of a text originally penned as a message to a politician of my acquaintance. That particular Philippic elicited – as I fully expected it would – no comment save a brief, courteous acknowledgement of the associated private sentiment which implied that my rancour was not directed at the recipient personally. As such, I hope they will agree that its wider publication here breaches no trust nor violates any confidence.]