"Spend as much as you like, dear," I urge her (though she doesn't need much encouragement).

Usually, I sneak off to the nearest bookstore and spend an hour reading (but not buying) whatever catches my eye while Mrs D compares prices in Next and M & S, unaware that her loving husband has gone AWOL.

Despite being a regular bookshop "freeloader" I must confess I missed the recent displays of Mein Kampf in Waterstones.

I understand that Hitler's antisemitic autobiography was plugged in several northern branches as the "perfect Christmas present". Perfect for whom? I wonder. Members of the BNP?

Perhaps Waterstones assumed that Mein Kampf might be a "must have" for customers who are card-carrying members of Hamas, but this was a mistake for two reasons:

First, Muslims who subscribe to Hamas' philosophy don't celebrate Christmas.

Second, if they already own a copy of the Hamas Charter, they won't need Mein Kampf since the two works are essentially the same (indeed, whoever is receiving the royalties in the latter might be advised to sue Hamas for breach of copyright).

Mein Kampf should be available in specialist bookstores and libraries so that academics can access it for research. But it baffles me that a respectable national bookchain could imagine Hitler's memoirs to be fit and proper Christmas reading for the general public.

The kindest charge that I would level at those Waterstones employees who were responsible for promoting Mein Kampf is that they are ignorant. They didn't know that it was chock-full of antisemitic diatribes until several Jewish customers pointed it out to them.

But if they knew that Hitler's book reflected the author's antisemitic prejudices, why did they promote it?

Waterstones is owned by respectable and responsible people who would not dream of stocking, let alone plugging, books written by leaders of the Ku Klux Klan or other notorious racist groups.

If, as I am sure they would agree, it is wrong for a high street book shop to promote racist literature, why the exception for Mein Kampf? Does antisemitism not count?

To be fair, Waterstones has now ended the promotion and apologised. The national bookchain would undoubtedly join me in deploring racism wherever it manifests itself.

But despite my hatred of racism, I still feel alienated by Britain's anti-racism industry, which has hijacked the debate and distorted the problem.

We were reminded of this recently with the long-overdue conviction of two men for the unspeakably horrific murder of Stephen Lawrence.

The conclusions of the Macpherson Inquiry into that terrible crime were a disgrace, not least the finding that the Metropolitan police were "institutionally racist".

Unless an organisation openly propagates a racist agenda (Hamas or the KKK), how can one justify an accusation of racism against the whole outfit?

Surely it is wrong to castigate all the members of that particular group as racist, irrespective of their individual personal views.

And is that not a neat mirror image of the racist who holds negative opinions about all members of a particular ethnic group for no reason other than that they belong to that group?

Stephen Lawrence's murderers were indeed racists, but the loss of that young man's life would have been no less tragic if he had been killed for his wallet.

Every week in towns around Britain young people are shot, stabbed and assaulted for a variety of reasons. The pain caused to victims and their families is indescribable, but in the absence of a racist motive, such crimes get relatively little publicity.

My fellow Scot, Sir William Macpherson, is the hereditary chief of the Clan Macpherson. If he were ever to invite me to a clan simcha, I would accept his invitation and use the opportunity to urge Sir William to emulate Richard Goldstone and retract his shameful report.

And I would remind him that the phrase "institutionally racist" was dreamed up by Stokely Carmichael, the radical American African activist who left the Black Panthers because he felt they were too moderate.

Carmichael is on record as saying: "The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist. We should take a lesson from Hitler."

I bet Carmichael kept a treasured copy of Mein Kampf by his bedside.

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