Michael Dobbs

Olena Zelenska, Ukraine’s First Lady, is a remarkable woman. I listened to her in a packed meeting room in Westminster as she talked of repeated rape and sexual torture. This is what ‘liberation’ means in Russian. She spelled out how Vladimir Putin is using the desecration of women on an industrial scale. Women as old as 84 have been raped by his troops. Their youngest victim was just four. ‘We will not surrender,’ Madame Zelenska said, ‘but victory is not the only thing we need. We need justice.’ This demure, neat figure seemed so slight in the historic surroundings of Committee Room 14, yet her words beat down upon us. Women as defiant as Olena Zelenska will never forget or forgive. Even if Putin occupied every inch of Ukrainian territory, he could never achieve victory.

I’m a lucky man. My novel House of Cards transformed my life, yet I wrote it almost by accident nearly 30 years ago. It wasn’t intended to be anything other than a hobby but thanks to the limitless skills of Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright, backed by the reach of Netflix, it now spans the globe. We’re into our fourth season, preparing the fifth, but it never ceases to surprise. A little while ago during his official visit to Britain I was invited to meet President Xi of China. In order to mark the occasion I decided to give him an original and now rather rare hardback copy of the book. He looked at it perplexed. ‘What,’ he said, ‘you have House of Cards in this country, too?’ I played dirty the other night after dinner.