I grow more and more baffled by the priorities of the news world. Last week the chief of Britain’s electronic spying agency, GCHQ, quit without warning or adequate reason. Robert Hannigan, we were briefly told, left his ultra-sensitive £160,000-a- year post after just two years for ‘personal reasons’ . Mr Hannigan is 51 and has previously worked as ‘director general of defence and intelligence’ at the Foreign Office. He can hardly have expected the GCHQ job to allow him to spend a lot of time at home with his family. One has to suspect a controversy. (***NOTE: On Monday 30th January Charles Moore in his Daily Telegraph column said Mr Hannigan had retired because of a 'family illness'. I have not seen any other reference to this, and was not aware of it when I wrote the article. PH***)

But far more has been written in the British press about the departure of Alexandra Shulman as editor of Vogue than about the departure of Robert Hannigan as boss of GCHQ.

Now we are all in a tizz about President Trump’s (frankly bizarre) executive orders about immigration.

Just because a lot of squeaky liberals are against these measures, it does not mean they are sensible or right. Indeed, this must be the wise person’s motto in dealing with all controversies of the Trump presidency.

As someone who has for some time openly expressed doubts about the virtue of universal suffrage democracy, and suggested ways by which it could be moderated, I am stuck in a paradox.

The people who are now most appalled by the effects of that universal suffrage democracy are exactly the same people who used to gasp or mutter ‘fascist’ when I suggested that it might have risks.

Yet here I am, annoying my own supporters by refusing to support or take part in the EU referendum, and expressing doubts about the outcome; and also annoying some of my regular readers by failing to fall in love with Mr Trump.

It isn’t Mr Trump’s politics that put me off. There’s no point telling me that he has been sound on some topic or other where we seem to share a view. I don’t think he really has any politics, apart from a vague and ill-thought-out opposition to free trade. That’s why I am not specially heartened by the occasional sensible things he has said (and now retracted or forgotten) about Russia and NATO. I suspected, and events have so far proved me right, that the foreign policy establishment would rapidly turn him into a reliable Natopolitan, gargling on about the need to defend Europe from a non-existent Russian threat.

He is learning what his minders will put up with, and what they won’t. He managed to tame himself quite effectively during Mrs May’s visit, which I think will come to be seen as a premature mistake, over time.

His cautious behaviour was presumably caused by his desire to spend a night in Buckingham Palace and have his picture taken with the Queen. He is, I think, in the White House as a rather grand souvenir-collector (he keeps the lunch-menus, we learned at the weekend) . I have long thought that when he has got enough such souvenirs, he will leave, and so become the first President to resign the office voluntarily.

The NATO issue was resolved because it really matters to his minders and doesn’t really matter to him. He’d like to have people tortured . He’s probably seen ‘Jack Bauer’ on the TV in ‘24’ saving America by torturing people. He may even get his ‘ideas’ from such shows) . His occasional escapes over the White House wall will in future be on other subjects, as we saw on Saturday. He can do damage, but as long as he does not upset the juggernaut of continuing policy, they can put up with quite a bit of this.

NATO *is* obsolete. A child could see it. You might as well maintain an alliance against the Austro-Hungarian Empire as maintain an alliance against the Soviet Union. Both have vanished, and their successor states bear no relation to the empires they once ruled.

Worse, an alliance against Russia, which in 1991 withdrew into the narrowest borders it could possibly tolerate, has to be aggressive, not defensive. The former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, writing in ‘Time’ magazine, is plainly greatly alarmed, saying : ‘Politicians and military leaders sound increasingly belligerent and defence doctrines more dangerous. Commentators and TV personalities are joining the bellicose chorus. It all looks as if the world is preparing for war.’ Mr Gorbachev is one of the last really big people alive in world politics. If he thinks so, it’s worth worrying.

NATO’s chief virtue was that it was unarguably defensive. Now it is an aggressive body, promoting the very tension it claims to soothe, like a quack doctor keeping his patient ill to ensure that he carries on buying the expensive drugs he sells, and attending the costly appointments.

But Mr Trump has now clearly given up his childishly clear vision, and his sensible view that it is obsolete, , and become one of the conformist grown-ups, believing and repeating the official untruth. The Emperor has a very fine suit of clothes, after all. I’ve long thought and said the Andersen story about the Emperor’s clothes ended misleadingly. In real life the little boy and his family would have been attacked by the crowd, arrested, tortured and then (when the bruises had faded), paraded to confirm that the Emperor’s new clothes were very fine indeed, before being exiled to some pig-farm.

Now we get this stuff about banning Muslims. My response? It just isn’t serious, even though it affects quite a lot of individuals very seriously indeed. I am hilariously accused on this blog of being in some unexplained way a sympathiser with Islam, and no doubt what I say now will thicken and deepen this particular stream of ignorant, stupid drivel. My actual position is that ,if the ‘west’ really wishes to limit the influence of Islam over its societies, it needs to rediscover the Christian faith in a big way. And that crude, ignorant attacks on Muslims themselves naturally make any intelligent open-minded person come to their defence when he can, whatever he thinks of their faith.

And as long as the ‘west’ doesn’t rediscover Christianity, it flails dangerously about, mistaking strength and wealth for virtue. It puts its faith in reeking tube and iron shard, in bigger weapons, and in ‘tougher’ ‘securidee’ (which bears the same relation to true security as does ‘charidee’ to true charity), in consumer goods and in its own luxurious hedonism. This will not work. As I’ve said before, when George W. Bush used to say that Muslim militants ‘hate our way of life’, I could not forebear to chime in ‘But I also hate our way of life!’.

For I do. The ‘West’ only exists as a coherent part of the world because of the Christian morals, and the extremely high levels of trust and lawfulness based upon them, which allowed Europe and the Anglosphere to develop as they have. Islam has virtues (they have much, for instance, to teach us about hospitality and the care of the old). But Islamic societies have simply not managed to achieve levels of trust and law comparable to those in Christian lands. This could explain why Islam (if you discount oil) has not achieved any great economic success, why education, publishing, freedom of speech and thought do not greatly flourish under its influence - and I am sceptical of claims of Islamic paradises in the distant past.

But our advantages, like our infrastructure and our other stores of wealth, material and moral, are inherited. We are not replenishing them. We are wearing them out. We have drawn heavily on our balances and obtained a great deal of moral and political credit on the basis of a reputation won by others which we no longer deserve.

In military terms, our scientific advances have stalled, if not gone backwards. Modern TV techniques combined with the methods of ‘people power’ which are increasingly the main weapon in international conflict, have completely (for example) neutralised Israel’s former military superiority over her neighbours. In Iraq and Libya we merely demonstrated that superior physical force can destroy but not create. Russia’s genius in Syria was to use its superior weaponry *alongside* an existing polity which could make good use of airpower. Our stupidity in Libya was to lend our airpower to the forces of anarchy, who knew what they didn’t want but had no ability to take advantage of the victory we gave them.

I see no sign that Mr Trump, or anyone else in Washington or London, has yet understood this. His wild pledge to eradicate Islamist terror from the earth, at his inauguration, was actively alarming. How can any mentally coherent person make such boasts? But it is dispiritingly similar to the rhetorical ‘we will find these cowards and punish them’ view emitted by Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush, and British leaders, not to mention the French - now living under an absurd and futile state of emergency which shows every sign of becoming permanent.

Since Mr Trump so famously doesn’t read, can someone arrange for him to have a late-night viewing of Gille Pontecorvo’s brilliant, rending film (based on researched facts and thinly fictionalised) about terror, counter-terror, torture and propaganda ‘The Battle of Algiers’. Maybe he’ll miss the point. But perhaps he might get it, see what might be wrong with the Jack Bauer view of life, and so save us all a lot of trouble.

He is plainly listening to some establishment voices, even while appearing to be off the leash. This does not mean he is prepared to be sensible for its own sake (his Russian opinions, as discussed, were more sensible than those of the establishment), just that he will listen to others when the issue isn’t especially dear to his heart. As he revealed his chaotic, illogical and foolish ‘extreme vetting’ plan, Mr Trump mentioned the September 11 2001 attacks as its ultimate justification. But most of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt. All of these are Arab countries with which the USA maintains close military and political relations. But none of these countries was on Mr Trump’s list, which did by contrast contain Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen. You got a sense of someone saying ‘OK, have your stupid immigration ban, if you must, as long as you don’t annoy these people while you’re doing it’.

Then there’s the question of whether Mr Trump should be a guest of the Queen. I find it hard to see a principle at stake here. Her Majesty has had to spend time with Martin McGuinness, with the appalling old waxworks who run China, with the Romanian despot Nicolae Ceausescu, with Robert Mugabe (and plenty of other horrors who attend Commonwealth conferences). But I think it might be wise to set the visit quite a long way off, so that we have some leverage. Mr Trump will understand that. It is Britain’s biggest asset in any bargain with Mr Trump, he really wants it, and it should not be given away until we can be quite sure we will get something in return.

Meanwhile I think events have so far shown that Mr Trump is pretty much as bad as he looked, but will moderate and restrain his behaviour whenever the issue at stake doesn’t really bother him. Not much to rejoice about but ,hey, this wasn’t my idea.