The cohorts of Hamas have invaded my neighbourhood. I was walking my dog, Maxi, in the afterglow of a shower that had lit the pavements with a pearlescence you normally see only in the piazzas of Syracuse, when I paused to look at the posters of kidnapped Israelis that someone had hung opposite Gail’s. I was thinking that I should have brought flowers, when they were upon us. Two women, their faces slack with the stupidity of hate, started tearing at the sad tributes with their carmine fingernails, screaming obscenities about Israel and the Jews. I didn’t know what the etiquette was on occasions like these, so I picked up Maxi, whose ears were back, and shouted obscenities at the women as they disappeared into the night like monstrous beetles. Then I wept for London in great, stupid sobs.

People used to say that St John’s Wood, where I live, was the only place in this town where Arabs and Jews coalesced. We have our Jewish deli, Panzer’s, which has been open since 1944 and is the cynosure of our national celebrations. The last party the owner gave was for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, and girls with eyes the colour of verveine served oysters on platters and steaming dumplings aux truffes. The Wood was a little corner of Stefan Zweig’s Vienna, with its Konditorei, the clip-clop and jangle of the horses from the old Wellington Barracks and the Christmas fairs with their miniature Prater carousels.

But the idyll is over. The pretty flower shop on the corner of my street was broken into the same night. The door was smashed through and great splinters of wood were lying on the street. England is finished as far as I’m concerned, and so is western Europe. For all we know, western civilisation may be a self-limiting disease. There are thumping paradoxes in its philosophy and some of them, particularly liberalism, have a suicidal smack. Democratic homo sapiens has become quite unable of thinking of himself as a free individual and declines even to make the effort. Nothing today is as prestigious as pain and victimhood.

Feminists, in particular, have boxed themselves into a corner over this. The travails and suffering of the suffragettes and the first workplace pioneers were genuine and noteworthy. The travails of most western women now are as valid as a six pound note. I remember when the blessed Shirley Conran addressed us pupils at St Paul’s Girls’ School with the rallying cry ‘Paulinas don’t cook. They think’. This was in the late 1980s and it was a moronic thing to say, or damn near, as one of my classmates went on to compete on Masterchef. But as a female talent agent who lived through the real sexism of the 1960s asked me last week: ‘What are women today complaining of? They don’t know what discrimination is.’ Democracy is always inventing new gender distinctions, despite its stated abhorrence of them. The no-conscience sexist who felt you up by the water cooler has departed, but in his place stands the hobgoblin of the toxic male.

We were discussing this at a party to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Hilton hotel in Park Lane. The first Hilton in the capital, its height greatly aggravated the late Queen, who complained that hotel guests would be able to see into the gardens of Buck House. Conrad Hilton, according to his second wife, Zsa Zsa Gabor, was as tight as a miser’s fist, but his descendants have rectified his parsimony. Buglers in bearskin hats lined the entrance, and go-go dancers, fringes flying, adorned rooms palely alive with ice sculptures and silver buckets sweating champagne.

The royal family still bears a grudge against the Hilton; the Palace has refused permission to name any of the rooms after senior members, dead or alive. I don’t like to say it, but I have thought, recently, that there are no proper royals left any more. I knew the Queen Mother, who was the last Empress of India and acted like it. She was the apotheosis of royalty and a catcher of human souls; as well as an enamelled coquette. The current lot aren’t even an approximation of her; they have Freon in their blood streams.

Charles takes his own bedding when he stays with friends, like something in ‘The Princess and the Pea’. William is arrogant and woke. As for the pair over the water, I hear that every time Harry opens his mouth, Meghan puts her hand in front of his face. There is thick and then there is Harry thick. It’s a poor lookout. On the other hand, the girls who run my flower shop, having waited six hours for the cops to arrive, have reopened, splinters notwithstanding. Perhaps we’re not finished after all.