Sir Keir Starmer’s piece in the Times on Monday was presumably constructed round the front-page headline Labour wanted – ‘Just Stop Oil tactics are contemptible, says Starmer’. Behind the headline, and therefore unnoticed, was his argument that the Tories are wrong to allow new drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea, and Labour is right to allow only old drilling. This wedge between the two main parties is relatively trivial, since both are still committed to getting rid of all new petrol and diesel cars by 2030 and therefore on course to create what Sir Keir, speaking of Just Stop Oil, calls ‘chaos for working people’. 

Will Sir Keir also condemn Greenpeace’s invasion of Rishi Sunak’s house in Yorkshire last week? The ex-BBC Green zealot, Roger Harrabin, whose outpourings I follow with fascination, tweeted as follows: ‘Even if you hate @GreenpeaceUK, you might give them credit for a really smart stunt, draping @RishiSunak house in black. No one hurt or delayed. Over quickly. No huge police presence. Unmissable image for media.’ Why is it all right to assail the private house of the Prime Minister? Such an intrusion is a threat, and is meant to be. Lord Carlile, the former independent reviewer of counterterrorism legislation, says he is astonished the police allowed the trespass. He rebukes the Greenpeace Environmental Trust, a charity, for paying out £2.4 million a year to Greenpeace Ltd, the perpetrator of this action. The fact that Mr Sunak’s family was absent does not make it better. How will his two young daughters have felt hearing the news while abroad? How will they feel returning to a house thus violated? What encouragement might this ‘peaceful’ protest, so weakly policed, give to even more extreme people who contemplate violence? How would Mr Harrabin feel if I sought out his family yurt (or whatever planet-saving dwelling he inhabits) and draped it with posters calling for ten-lane motorways through every national park? I shan’t, I promise. But praising the attack on the Sunaks’ privacy as an ‘unmissable image for media’ shows the triumph of self-righteousness over human feeling. 

If, like mine, your work sometimes takes you to private dinners to discuss public affairs on Chatham House rules, you always hope Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles will be there. As the wine circulates, you can rely on him to launch into a passionate denunciation of something or other. Obviously, I cannot reveal anything I have heard him say on these occasions, but I know from other sources on other occasions that he rails against being ‘lashed to the wheel of the American chariot’ and the American Jewish lobby’s alleged ability to block peace in the Middle East. He also loves Xi Jinping’s China. At a recent private dinner, Sir Sherard now admits, he denounced Britain for being ‘weak’ against American demands and therefore excluding Chinese business from Britain. He is paid to say such things, since he works for HSBC which, though headquartered in London, is in thrall to Chinese power. But his undiplomatic frankness in expressing the bank’s thoughts means that it now disowns him. He has to kowtow further by agreeing that the views he expressed were only his ‘personal’ ones. The British institution weak in the face of foreign power is not our government, but HSBC.  

Andrew Malkinson spent 17 years in jail for a rape he did not commit. Everyone agrees this is appalling. At the same time, it is repeatedly said in the media that the rate of rape conviction must be increased, and quite often that ‘The victim must be believed’. The origin of Mr Malkinson’s conviction was that he was mistakenly picked out by the victim in an identity parade. The police believed her, and the system trundled on without proper evidence being found. There are bad reasons why rape convictions are hard to attain – prejudice against certain types of victim, for example. But unless it is admitted that the evidential problems with rape prosecutions can be very severe, there will be more Malkinsons. 

A country neighbour of ours recently went to her local vet and bought anti-flea drops for her cats. She paid cash, but remembered the price because it was so expensive – £85. Soon she started to receive emails and phone messages from the vet demanding payment. She explained she had paid. She is a long-standing customer of the practice and so expected to be believed. She was not. When she protested, she was put through to the accounts manager, who appeared to work at some head office. Her point that she had paid already was still not accepted. She refused to pay again. She was told, in chilly tones, that she would be hearing from management. Eventually she was informed that, on this occasion, the company would ‘let it pass’, but in future she must pay by card. This tale raises two points. The first is that veterinary practices are changing. I had already heard complaints that many have been taken over by private equity, which has made the service more rapacious and unfriendly. Checking online, I discover, sure enough, that our neighbour’s vets are now under the control of BC Partners, ‘one of the first truly pan-European buy-out firms’. The second is that this is yet another example of how customers who pay cash are being squeezed out.

In an interview before last week’s World Youth Day in Lisbon, Pope Francis declared: ‘I speak badly of any empire of whatever sort.’ Empires were bad because people should be ‘the protagonists of their own destiny’, he added. Although history shows that some empires are worse than others, no one should quarrel with this Christian critique of empire as an inevitable corrupter of power. That being so, however, why is the Pope so evasive about what Russia is doing in Ukraine, and so pliant about China’s attempt to control his Church within its imperial borders?