The Spectator's Notes

Much attention has been paid to how Vladimir Putin has learnt from western weakness over his earlier invasions, including into parts of Ukraine; less to what he has learnt from Syria. He discovered that the West did not have the stomach for intervention there, and found that his own country did. He re-established Russian power in the region, including the power to influence both sides. He seems also to have learnt from his success in backing Assad that extreme brutality is effective. After much initial outrage, the West forgot about its indignation, handing victory to the Assad regime. Putin probably believes the same will happen over Ukraine. Although western anguish in this case surely runs deeper than it did over Syria, Putin might be right.

We are always cautioned against comparing a modern political event with those that led up to the second world war. One can see the risk of hyperbole and slander. But as Vladimir ‘Inky Poops’ Putin re-invades Ukraine, he will be making such comparisons himself. His long and bitter address on Monday showed his taste, common in tyrants, for historical disquisitions designed to turn grievance into aggression. He lambasted the foolishness of the Soviet leadership in the 1920s and 1930s which had laid ‘a mine to destroy state immunity to the disease of nationalism’.

When Sir Tony Brenton writes a letter to the Times, as he frequently does, it always says at the bottom that he was British ambassador to Moscow. The uninformed reader could be forgiven for thinking the sub-editors have got it back to front and he was actually Russian ambassador to London. Sir Tony’s message in every letter is ‘It’s all Britain’s fault’. In his latest, his particular target was the Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, after her visit to Moscow. He said she ‘might usefully recall Margaret Thatcher’s wise message to Mikhail Gorbachev sent in 1985 as perestroika began to take off: “We know that you have as much right to feel secure as we do”’. It is hard to think of a less apt comparison.

Justin Webb is normally one of the least self-righteous BBC presenters, but he was out-Maitlising rivals on the Today programme on Tuesday. In that special, shocked tone broadcasters usually reserve for stories about racism or paedophilia, Webb contrasted ‘the final goodbyes not said’ by those who followed the rules with the Prime Minister’s birthday party/gathering in the Cabinet Room. He quoted Adam Wagner, ‘the human rights lawyer and Covid rules expert’, that it had been ‘obviously a birthday party’. It was ‘not denied’, Webb gravely intoned, ‘there was birthday cake’. How does he prevent himself bursting out laughing? The longer this story runs, now with added police, the more preposterous the solemnity becomes.

In May 2020, in the wake of the Barnard Castle story, Emily Maitlis delivered her famous Newsnight address to the nation: ‘Dominic Cummings broke the rules. The country can see that, and it’s shocked the government cannot.’ The public felt ‘fury, contempt and anguish’ at what had happened. The Prime Minister was showing ‘blind loyalty’ to a colleague, etc. Now Mr Cummings is chief witness for the prosecution of Boris Johnson of which Ms Maitlis was an early forerunner. It is time for Emily to speak to us via Newsnight once more and, in the interests of the BBC’s Impartiality Action Plan, declare: ‘Dominic Cummings is a brave whistle-blower. Shocked that the Prime Minister has broken Covid rules, he has now spoken out’, etc.

The interregnum between incumbents is a well-known and often elongated process in the Church of England. I have recently witnessed this one because my wife is churchwarden of one of the three churches (we Catholics operate under a different system) in the benefice. Interregnums are arduous for all church volunteers and tend to erode parish life. It is remarkable how much there is for churchwardens to do. Dioceses tend to demand and obstruct rather than ease and encourage. Luckily, we are blessed with an excellent archdeacon who cherishes parish life and has declared there will be no more closures of churches in the district; but the bureaucratic flow of dos and don’ts (mainly don’ts) is considerable.

One midnight last month, Jon Wiltshire, who lives in a cottage just outside our Sussex village, was woken by a loud bang. Sleepily, he wondered if an intruder had slammed the farm gate shut. He peered out, could see and hear nothing, and so went back to bed. The next day, he had to go to London. When he returned, his wife Anja said: ‘Come and look at this.’ The whole of their sitting room was covered with a fine powder of glass and some bigger shards. Inspecting the double-glazed window, they found a 10mm hole in the outer glass and a much wider break in the inner one. Further searching, a couple of days later, uncovered a rifle round lying on the far side of the room. The house is in a dip below a quiet lane.

As this paper has argued since the time of the Tiananmen Square massacres, this country should offer Hong Kong people a way out via immigration. We made the 1984 Hong Kong agreement with China: we owe some protection to the victims when it goes wrong which, thanks to Xi Jinping, it has. He has torn up the famous ‘One Country: Two Systems’ rule upon which the agreement was founded. Our government has now commendably acted on this principle of protection, allowing holders of British National Overseas (BNO) passports a ‘pathway to citizenship’ via a visa scheme. The problem, however, is that the current proposals exclude a small but significant part of those affected. You have BNO status only if you were born by 1997, the year of the handover.

I like to think that Boris Johnson’s rambling performance at the CBI this week was a satire against the organisation which he (rightly) dislikes. But I may well be wrong: it is equally likely to have been a Johnsonian cock-up. Either way, he did well to get memorably on the right side of Peppa Pig, whom he turned into an emblem of unlikely British export success. Peppa and her family speak politely in the traditional English accent which foreigners much prefer to Estuary, and do amiable things like making Daddy Pig bicycle to work to avoid disturbing a spider’s web on his car. Peppa is particularly influential in our own household because she has a younger brother called George whom she forces to play along with her fantasies.

At the National Trust’s annual general meeting last week, the voting was much more unusual than the public will have learnt from media reports. In most resolutions, the numbers voting exceeded 100,000. In past years, the figures have been lower than 40,000. The reason for this high turnout was the controversies of the past 18 months. Motions about the erosion of curatorial expertise and the ill treatment of Trust volunteers would have won easily had not the chairman exercised the right to use the discretionary proxy votes which the Trust’s curious governance permits. Without these, the rebel resolutions would have been more than 15,000 votes ahead.

When I went to Poland not long before Covid, I found a country more bitterly divided by a culture war even than we are. So I would not rule out EU leaders being right that the current government there has intruded on the independence of the judiciary for its own political ends. This is the background to recent Brussels fury that the Polish Constitutional Tribunal (supreme court) asserted the primacy of Polish law over that of the EU earlier this month. The problem never arises in the EU, of course, because there the European Court of Justice has never had an independent judiciary to be tampered with. It has aways been the purpose of the ECJ to make sure that its judges use European law to advance the European Union, which democracy tends not to. In that sense, all its judges are political.

Rarely does a piece of journalism bring a tear to my normally cynical eye, but I did find this happening when I read Tom Woodman’s piece (‘You must be kidding’) in last week’s edition. He and his wife would not have children, he wrote, because climate collapse means that ‘I can’t give them a future’. What made me weepy was his combination of obvious decency and utter mistakenness. How tragic that what he called ‘the facts and figures’ — in reality, contentious projections — have persuaded this couple that no little Woodman must come into the world. ‘Tree,’ I felt like shouting, in reversal of the Green order of priorities, ‘spare that Woodman!

On the one occasion when I spent any time with Angela Rayner, she was funny, direct and friendly. We were both on the BBC’s Any Questions? in Alan Partridge territory and dined together beforehand with Sir Vince Cable. She got through a whole evening without identifying me, either privately or on air, as one of ‘a bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, absolute pile of banana republic, Etonian piece of scum’ (her chosen words at this week’s party conference fringe meeting). True, I am neither a government minister nor a Conservative (in the Lords I sit as ‘non-affiliated’), but she probably felt I was that sort of person. So, now I know how she sometimes talks, I feel grateful for her restraint.

Stephen Toope, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, has begun this academic year by announcing it will be his last in the post. Professor Toope says, no doubt truthfully, that he wants to see more of his Canadian family, dissevered from him by Covid. But I think it reasonable to relate his departure to wider issues. When he arrived in 2017, the ‘Golden Era’ of UK/Chinese relations still, in theory, existed. Cambridge uncritically welcomed Chinese government and business participation. In 2019, speaking in China, Professor Toope hailed the China Development Forum’s ‘Greater Opening Up for Win-Win Cooperation’ and praised President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative.

From time to time, people get worried and ask one another: ‘Is the world falling apart?’ I imagine this is a universal phenomenon, but my experience of it is largely confined to the West (here meant more as a cultural than a geographical expression). It happened in the 1930s, when the broadly correct answer to the question was ‘Yes’, and in the 1970s, of which more later. It happened more recently, after 11 September 2001 and during the financial crash of 2008/09. Some asked the question after Brexit. I have heard it asked again by many highly disparate people in the few days since the American-led Nato scuttle from Afghanistan. What is the answer? My own first encounter with these gloomy discussions was in the 1970s.

This week, the media pressure was on the British government to extend the deadline for the evacuations from Kabul airport. The government had no power to do this unilaterally: it duly asked the United States, and was duly turned down. The issue was almost beside the point. It is doubtful, given the burning desire of so many to leave the country, whether a few more days of rescue flights would have done much to shorten the suffering queue of hopefuls. Each day is dangerous, so more days are more dangerous. Preoccupation with extension deflected attention from the key point, which is that all evacuation planning assumed that Kabul and its airport would be controlled by the (now former) Afghan government, thereby ensuring an orderly exit.

Q. Is a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan now inevitable? The President: No, it is not. Q. Why? The President: Because you — the Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped — as well-equipped as any army in the world — and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable… Q. Do you trust handing over the country to the Taliban? The President: No, I do not trust the Taliban. Q. So why are you handing the country over…? The President: It’s a — it’s a silly question. Do I trust the Taliban? No. But I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more re — more competent in terms of conducting war.