When I first heard that the Russians had blown up the Kakhovka dam, I assumed that this was an effective tactic to frustrate the Ukrainian counteroffensive. It will surely slow it. But a Ukrainian friend raises an additional possibility – that these are the scorched-earth tactics the Germans used in much the same places 80 years ago. Writing from Kyiv, she quotes a letter from Himmler to the SS commander in Ukraine in September 1943: ‘It is necessary to make sure that when retreating from Ukraine, not a single person, not a single animal, not a single gram of grain, not a single metre of railway track is there, so that not a single house survives… The enemy must be a totally burned and devastated country.’ She thinks Putin’s only tactic is to ‘make Ukraine unliveable in order to force an end to resistance’. This is a shockingly believable thought. The cold comfort in it is that, if the fate of the Nazis is anything to go by, this is the policy of a power facing defeat.

It is a cliché, but true, that the public prefer small charities because they can stay closer to their mission than big ones. A related point is that donors, volunteers etc can get closer too. In Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine recently, I arrived in a SUV driven (not by or with me) from England and repurposed by the small charity Mission Ukraine as a field ambulance for the wounded at the front. As I got out, I looked closely at the vehicle for the first time. The whole body was painted in battlefield matt-green, and near the right wheel in white was written the name ‘T. Gaisman’. Gosh, I thought, I knew her. Tessa Gaisman was a delightful woman, a former diary secretary for Margaret Thatcher. With Amanda Ponsonby, she saved the notes for the leader’s party conference speech scattered in the drama of the IRA bomb in the Grand Hotel, Brighton, in October 1984. Mrs Thatcher said she was ‘Peace at the heart of the whirlwind.’ Tessa died prematurely last year. It was inspiring and fitting to see her name thus commemorated by her husband Jonathan and now about to go into the whirlwind of war to rescue the wounded.

Proximate peoples often make fiercer enemies than those at a great distance. Anything shared can become a source of contention – a shared language, for example, because one lot pronounces it differently from the other. In Ukraine, I discovered, Russians speaking Ukrainian are always identifiable by their inability to distinguish in their pronunciation between the word for white bread, ‘palyanitsa’, and the word for strawberries, ‘polunytsya’. In the early days of the war, this was used as a way of detecting Russians at checkpoints. I wonder if President Zelensky, originally a Russian speaker, gets that one right. I am told he has continued with Ukrainian lessons, and with English ones, while in office, greatly improving in both tongues.

In leaving the board of the ENO, Lord Sumption correctly states that what the Arts Council peremptorily demanded of it last year will make it ‘become a mere brand-name for a fringe offering’. If anything, he understates the wrong done. The introduction to the Arts Council’s strategy, ‘Let’s Create’, is written by its chairman, Sir Nicholas Serota. He makes no mention of independent cultural institutions. All he wants is agencies to execute his council’s purposes. These are ‘confronting the challenges’ of modern life, which he identifies as ‘inequality of wealth and of opportunity, social isolation and mental ill-health, and above all of these, the accelerating climate emergency’. If you think that way, you will see nothing odd about ordering the ENO, with 24 hours’ notice, to go north and spread cultural revolution or lose its entire £12.6 million a year. Instead of the Arts Council attempting to foster the cultural diversity of a free society by a judicious distribution of public money, it seeks to control our culture. Art or performance not remedying mental health, social isolation, inequality and the accelerating climate emergency need not apply. I am glad Lord Sumption draws attention to this idiocy and arrogance. But I feel a little more optimistic than he. The Arts Council has already failed to force the ENO out of the London Coliseum as a condition for future grants. I sense that the political wind is dropping from woke’s sails. If the ENO can continue its skilful playing of a long game, it will survive this milk-and-water Maoism.

Despite having been professionally engaged with news for more than 40 years, I have never quite got the hang of why something important is sometimes not seen as a story. My current example is the state of South Africa. Several acquaintances who have gone there recently say they have never known it in a worse condition. On top of ever-increasing lawlessness are prolonged power blackouts across virtually all the country. Yet it gets hardly any mention in the mainstream media. Why?

This week, a friend told me he has just gone into tax exile in Italy. Italy! It may be the most wonderful place on Earth, but has it ever before been fiscally advantageous to live there? Despite the EU’s ideological dislike of tax competition, it seems to tolerate it in practice, possibly inspired by the thought that this might make things difficult for Brexit Britain. If you are a high-earner, you can now live extremely lightly taxed in Italy, Greece or Portugal. I hope Jeremy Hunt addresses this threat.

To David Young’s memorial meeting. In a well-judged tribute, David Cameron recalled how Young, coordinating the 1987 election campaign, ordered that, for the first time ever, all cabinet ministers must carry mobile phones. A great leap forward, or the beginning of the end of proper politics? Discuss. Cameron added that as late as the 2015 campaign, Kenneth Clarke still did not know how to turn his phone on.