Poland

What is the limit of Ukrainian civilians’ endurance? In nearly four years of relentless war, Ukraine’s people have faced summary executions, ‘drone safaris’ where unmanned aerial vehicles hunt people down city streets and constant bombardment of cities by swarms of drones and missiles. This winter their remarkable resilience faces its severest test yet as Russian forces reach a tipping point in their systematic attempt to knock out the country’s energy infrastructure. In each of the past three winters, Vladimir Putin has attempted to render Ukraine’s cities uninhabitable by plunging them into darkness and cold, without success. But this time it looks like the Kremlin’s campaign to weaponise winter may be succeeding.

“Sack of garbage,” “common thief,” “shameful jerk” – but a few of the choice words tennis fans had for the man who swiped an autographed hat from a child at the US Open over the weekend. Sure, the alleged thief is no saint. But now that he’s reportedly been identified as a self-made millionaire, I’d rather just call him a shark. The video of the courtside incident quickly went viral, showing a grown man snatch the hat away as Polish tennis star Kamil Majchrzak passed it up to a boy who pleaded in vain. The internet did as it wont, and identified the alleged thief as pavement plutocrat and fellow Pole, Piotr Szczerek. What is this world coming to? A man can’t even steal from a child anymore without having his whole life dissected by an internet mob.

The Polish constitution delineates no role for the foreign minister’s wife. In fact, the foreign minister’s wife is not mentioned in Polish state documents of any kind. Nevertheless, there are times when, as the Polish foreign minister’s wife, I find that I have no choice but to bear witness to great historical events. On the Friday following the British election, the Polish foreign minister – better known as an occasional Spectator diarist – was informed that the new British Foreign Secretary planned to visit Poland on his first trip abroad. Because we had planned to spend that weekend at our country house, north-west of Warsaw, and because there is a nearby airport, it was suggested that the official talks be organised there.

True conservatism Sir: Douglas Murray claims that the Conservative party ‘will need to have some people who are actually right-wing’ (‘The Tories only have themselves to blame’, 6 July). Why? Its name isn’t ‘the right-wing party’. It has no foundational obligation to be right-wing for the sake of it. Rather its mission is to be conservative, and the people who now identify as ‘right-wing’ seem to have no interest in conserving anything, whether it’s our countryside, rivers, values, place on the international stage, parliamentary system, cultural institutions, national life expectancy, economic stability – or anything other than their own positions and status, which many have lost regardless.

There was hardly an election poster to be seen on the roadside during a two-hour drive from London to the country. The British do not appreciate this miracle. In Poland five days before an election, every other fence would be disfigured with photoshopped faces. Our lovely lunch hosts seemed resigned to the coming Red Terror: a purge of the remaining hereditary peers in the House of Lords, a new relationship with the European Union, inheritance taxes. I tried to cheer them up with a piece of Central European wisdom: there is always time for a magnum of champagne between the revolution and the firing squad.