Palestine

In the musical Allegra, which has just finished its run, I ran around singing, dancing and jumping on tables for a couple of hours. I have a lot of elderly friends – by which I mean my age – who saw the show and they told me they felt exhausted just sitting there watching. ‘Oh,’ I’d say airily, ‘it’s just my job.’ I didn’t mention the mornings: the hollow, aching bones, the ferrety eyes, the corncrake voice and the need to stagger downstairs at 3 a.m. for calming milk and nutmeg. At one point, I tripped over halfway through ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’ and carried on singing on my knees like a restricted-growth version of Al Jolson. My granddaughter, 14, thought it was a brilliant stunt worthy of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

The West’s track record Sir: I read with much sadness Matthew Parris’s reservations about western attempts at regime change in Iran (‘Is this Starmer’s finest hour?’, 7 March). Sadness because he is quite correct, given the West’s track record in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. He rightly alludes to Benjamin Netanyahu’s ‘Greater Israel’ plans amid destabilised, chaotic neighbours. In Syria in late 2010, I spoke with resident Sunni, Shia, Alawi, Christian and even Jewish residents from Homs and Hama to As-Suweida and Aleppo: well over 90 per cent pointed to their freedom of association and of worship, the women to the secondary and tertiary education they could enjoy, and all because the Assads could guarantee these things.

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna We were en route to the junk shop in search of a pair of robust tongs for the fire in the kitchen, which is a vital source of heat in winter, and I was rowing with my family about the Jews. There were seven of us inside the Land Rover Defender: me at the wheel in notional control with my ‘Comandante’ Basque beret on my head to cover my bald patch. Next to me was my wife Carla, who has the best deck this side of Rimini, and five of our six children behind. The language being spoken was Italian as usual, but there were frequent shouted bursts of English from the back such as ‘Just shut the fuck up!’ or ‘Jesus fucking Christ!’, often involving several voices in unison like a chorus.

It was moving to watch Keir Starmer announce this week, from a corridor in Downing Street, that his government has decided to recognise a state of Palestine. Starmer took this bold action at the same time as his French, Canadian and Australian counterparts. But as with Emmanuel Macron, Mark Carney and someone called Anthony Albanese, he seemed to be labouring under a number of misunderstandings. The first was that it makes any difference. Starmer and his counterparts overseas appear to be under the misapprehension that the creation of states still lies in their hands. I had thought that the present generation of leftists looked down on imperialist western powers making their colonialist interventions in foreign regions.