Festive cheer at Kremlin, but not for our Marxists

WHAT do you think the Russian security services '“ and that means principally Vladimir Putin '“ are doing this Christmas? Are they rubbing their hands with glee or moaning like Billy?
Russian leader Vladimir Putin.Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

Well, Europe is in a terrible mess with the people ranged against the unelected European Commission. Brexit is only one manifestation of popular disaffection with the way the great European project is being run. The Germans, the largest and most prosperous nation, struggle to form a government.

On this basis, the Kremlin should be roaring with satisfaction over the vodka at the success of its long-standing objective of destabilising Western society.

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But that is not all. Few European countries are paying their full whack towards the maintenance of the so far successful defensive Nato alliance yet the idiotic Commission is trying to form a European army.

Britain and the USA are deeply in debt – Britain the more so after last week’s Budget – and saddled with electorates who want it both ways: ever more government largesse and lower taxes.

It is true that Donald Trump – his election as president of the USA yet another instance of public disaffection with the ruling classes – could go off at half cock over North Korea and so imperil the very foundations of the Kremlin by nuclear war.

What is more, China’s rise, with its peculiar form of communism red in capitalist tooth and claw, brings another threat. No doubt the Russian security agencies will seek to manage all these problems partly through the internet, trying to upset the apple cart with black propaganda, fake news and interference in elections.

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So what’s new? Not a lot apart from the emergence of the internet as the Devil’s gift to those who wish to destroy real democracies.

Long before tweeting was invented, I experienced the KGB at work. In the Department of Employment in the late 1960s I reported persistent attention from a chap in the Soviet Embassy badgering me – and failing – to lure me to lunch.

Then on a visit to the USSR with Margaret Thatcher I found my phone in the Intourist Hotel, with its view of the Kremlin, so heavily bugged that I could not be heard at the British Embassy just across the river. This was perhaps a case of excessive KGB zeal defeating its objective.

In Poland to support Lech Walesa, leader of the Solidarity movement, Mrs Thatcher became excited over lunch with his simultaneously translated remarks. “Stop,” she said, somewhat imperiously. “Mr Walesa. This is music to my ears. Your government should hear it.”

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Quick as a flash, Walesa, pointing to the chandelier, said: “Oh, don’t worry. They are hearing every word.” After that, she was in the habit of putting her fingers to her lips and pointing to the lighting whenever I started to speak my blunt Yorkshire mind behind the Iron Curtain.

But let us not be mesmerised by the KGB’s revolutionary efficiency. Its successor is not omnipotent. The hard left’s success in installing those two Marxists, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, as Labour leaders, backed by their own KGB in the form of Momentum, is looking ever less like a coup.

Latterly, in debate and broadcast, Corbyn and McDonnell have revealed their severe limitations. They carry little conviction with their image of the British as an impoverished, groaning and suffering people under the yoke of Conservative capitalism in one of the richest countries in the world.

One thing is sure, their base in Islington, the ghetto of bourgeois privilege and Champagne socialism, is 
not on its uppers.

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Even worse, in their ignorance of economic laws, they are increasingly recognised as dangerous incompetents.

It is true that Chancellor Philip Hammond did not set a good example in his Budget by putting back still further when Britain will balance its books. But you have to be deaf and blind not to realise that a Corbyn government would be the most spendthrift by 
untold £billions of any government 
since the Second World War.

They would pile up such debts for future generations that it will be a bad mark against the intelligence of the young and ambitious if they vote again for Corbyn’s comic cuts economics.

The seasonal merriment in the Kremlin will, I think, be tempered by the signal failure of Momentum to find someone with a brain to lead the threatened revolution.

When Mrs May was at her weakest, there was not another October ’17 revolution 100 years on. Nor do I think there will be one if the Tories recover their presentation skills.