As I strolled through the frozen winter streets of Moscow a few years ago, a worrying idea came to me. Were speech and thought now more free in Russia than in what we used to call the West? I rather think that they are.

Last week, Kevin Roberts resigned as executive chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi for publicly questioning ultra-feminist beliefs.

He is not the first. A similar wild frenzy of persecution burst around the head of the Nobel prize-winning scientist Sir Tim Hunt, shamefully driven from his position as an honorary professor at University College London.

Despite the smears of many, I have no illusions about Mr Putin’s Russia. It is a sinister tyranny where those who challenge the president’s power or expose his wrongdoing suffer very nasty fates

It doesn’t matter whether you agree with these men’s opinions or not. Can it be right that they have been treated in this way for expressing them?

Of course, neither of them has been marched off to a gulag for his thought-crime. But so what? Isn’t loss of employment and position a very serious punishment?

Despite the smears of many, I have no illusions about Mr Putin’s Russia. It is a sinister tyranny where those who challenge the president’s power or expose his wrongdoing suffer very nasty fates.

But in public, in private, in offices, on public transport, you have no need to guard your tongue as you did in the communist days, when a poem could get you executed and a joke could send you to an Arctic labour camp for 20 years.

I saw all that filth end, in person, and rejoiced to see it go. And I recall the brief few years when I thought foolishly that the world had been cleansed of a great evil for ever.

And then I began to notice that the nasty totalitarian ideas that had once been trapped behind the Iron Curtain had now escaped into the once-free West. You couldn’t say this and you couldn’t say that. You had to be careful about writing certain things, especially if you worked in the public sector.

There was a genuine fear behind all this. It was worst of all at universities, where boot-faced commissars patrol the minds of the young, enforcing speech codes – and the wrong ideas can get you marked down in more ways than one.

This simply isn’t so in Mr Putin’s Russia, now astonishingly the most conservative, patriotic and Christian country left in Europe.

Orthodox religious icons were found among the debris after the shooting down of a Russian helicopter in Syria, and Russian airborne forces last Tuesday celebrated the feast day of their patron, the Prophet Elijah.

People who think that Russia is still the Soviet Union, or that intolerant, militant Marxism died when the USSR fell, don’t understand Russia or Marxism. And they’re not paying much attention to what’s going on here, either.

Holy smoke! I've made the Church retreat

As the vast Goddard inquisition lurches off the rails, are we finally recovering our sanity about child abuse? Terrible as this crime is, it is not an excuse for losing our heads and trampling on justice.

This week I record a small victory in one such case of injustice, that of the late, saintly and much-loved Bishop George Bell. He was publicly smeared as a paedophile without a hearing by the Church of England – on the basis of a single, ancient uncorroborated accusation.

I am pleased to say that, under cover of a cloud of holy smoke, the C of E has retreated.

As the vast Goddard inquisition lurches off the rails, are we finally recovering our sanity about child abuse?

The Church doesn’t understand English law (hence the kangaroo court) and has a nasty habit of using the anonymous complainant, an elderly lady known as ‘Carol’, as a human shield. Any criticism of the Church’s injustice is falsely alleged to be an attack on her.

The current Bishop of Chelmsford, The Rt Revd Stephen Cottrell, recently said in the House of Lords that defenders of George Bell had ‘made hurtful comments’ about ‘Carol’. It was a nasty thing to say, and it was not true. I have been pursuing Mr Cottrell, helpfully pointing out to him what the Bible says about bearing false witness, and about owning up to wrongdoing. He is, after all, a modern sort of Bishop and can’t necessarily be expected to be well-versed in such things.

And now I have wrung out of his spokesperson a pathetic, grudging so-called ‘clarification’. By this word, the C of E actually mean ‘admission’, but they obviously don’t believe that confession is good for the soul.

It runs ‘when he said in the House of Lords that “some in the Bell Group had made hurtful comments” about “Carol”, it would have been more precise to say that these were comments that she found hurtful’.

More precise! They mean ‘true’. And of course the two things are totally different. When I derided this formula, they retreated a few more inches, saying: ‘He acknowledges that what he actually said was mistaken, hence the clarification explaining what he meant to have said… When the new parliamentary term begins he promises to look into how a proper clarification can be produced.’

When I said I would report this as ‘the Bishop now admits that what he said was untrue, and that he intends to correct it in the Lords at the earliest opportunity’, they moaned this would be inaccurate.

You may judge for yourselves. I’ve been fairer to them than they ever were to George Bell.

Paintball plod taking on the wrong enemy

I am not even slightly reassured by the weird fashion show staged by the Metropolitan Police, in which they paraded in face-masks and comic-strip tough-guy outfits, with macho motorbikes, sniper rifles and sub-machine guns. They looked, as they posed self-consciously, like Walter Mittys on a paintballing day out.

How absurd. Sometimes I think some people in our Government actively want us to be the kind of country where a big-booted, heat-packing, masked militia of this kind is needed.

I am not even slightly reassured by the weird fashion show staged by the Metropolitan Police, in which they paraded in face-masks and comic-strip tough-guy outfits

But we are not. Anxious as they are to believe our streets are perpetually threatened by an octopus of evil directed from Islamic State by a turbaned and bearded mastermind, it is not so. The danger, as I have often pointed out, has more to do with the mind-altering drugs whose use the police do nothing to stop.

For instance, the supposedly IS-inspired Muhiddin Mire, the Leytonstone attacker, was so mentally ill that he was first sectioned in 2006. And he then smoked so much cannabis that he genuinely believed (I am not making this up) that Tony Blair was his guardian angel.

I noticed also that the new militarised rapid-reaction police boasted they were on the scene of the (non-political) Russell Square killing in London within six minutes. This is nothing to boast of.

Dreadful things can happen in six minutes. When we had proper foot patrols, such a busy tourist area would have had a constant police presence.