Kelly’s Eye

AN ENJOYABLE break abroad last week was enhanced further by discovering I’d swerved Mental Health Awareness Week back here (though how it differs from the other 51 weeks of now lucratively monetised navel-gazing wasn’t clear).The distance lent a similarly welcome detachment to the latest posturing by the posh tw*ts of Just Stop Oil at the Chelsea Flower Show, and what it tells us about modern Britain.

For a rewardingly contrasting perspective about the country, I had to thank a paperback I picked up just before we flew out.An Immigrant’s Love Letter To The West by Russian comedian and writer Konstantin Kisin exposes the guilt trips relentlessly foisted on us – about everything from slavery to gender identity and climate change – for what they invariably are: malevolently divisive contrivances.

Perhaps only someone whose family history is so scarred by living in such a genuinely authoritarian hellhole as the former Soviet Union, and who counts himself so fortunate to have moved to Britain as a child, can see with such clarity.

Kisin writes of our current delusions: “We have forgotten that the prosperity, safety, life expectancy, stability and freedoms we enjoy did not just fall out of the sky. They were built, over centuries, on philosophical and moral foundations that have withstood the test of time.

“It is only by grasping this fully that the West will endure – and too many people here are unwilling or unable to do so.”

Being the wrong sort of comedian ie: funny, and brave enough to depart from his business’s stifling progressive conformity, means Kisin is rarely seen on mainstream TV.

He’d doubtless explain that lack of ubiquity away with some selfdeprecating gag about not being funny enough. But I can disprove that in two words: Judi Love.And if you need further proof, here’s two more, Joe Lycett. I can’t recommend Kisin’s book highly enough.