In a statement, the Prince of Wales says he ‘refuses to give up’ on ‘a brighter future for the Middle East’. Nobody thought he had given up, so why did he feel the need to say it? His Churchillian reference to ‘the darkest hour’ does not work. In 1940 the darkest hour was for Britain against Nazi Germany. Now it is for Israel, attacked by fanatical anti-Semites. Churchill did not call for ‘permanent peace’ but to fight back. Although Prince William mentions the plight of the hostages as well as Gazans’ need for aid, the objective effect of his intervention (if any) is to make life harder for Israel. Israel, not Hamas will attract more pursed lips of western disapproval. The Prince gives no consideration to the idea that what he calls ‘the terrible human cost’ of the war will increase if Israel is baulked from pursuing victory, in the straightforward sense of eliminating all serious military presence of Hamas in Gaza. The Prince’s statement does not address the problem that so much of the ‘humanitarian’ work is inextricably muddled up with agencies’ hostility to Israel, and sometimes even with Hamas’s military operations. It reads to me like lines coming from the Foreign Office (the phrase ‘Too many have been killed’ has often been on the lips of David Cameron in recent weeks). William is being weaponised politically. If you extrapolate Israel’s losses onto Britain’s eight-times-greater population, you get nearly 10,000 murdered and well over 2,000 kidnapped. If that happened to us, would the heir to the throne be urging ‘permanent peace’ with the perpetrators?

The Prince did at least apply the word ‘terrorist’ to Hamas. The BBC is charier. Have you noticed how, after it agreed to refer to Hamas on air as being ‘proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the British government’, it has now quietly dropped this clause?

Last week, I spent a few days in the West Country. My mission was to address a gathering in aid of three local hunts, and my good fortune was to go hunting with two of them. The hunts were the mighty Cattistock and Blackmore Vale and the small but perfectly formed Cotley (which I think is the oldest hunt in continuous family ownership in England, having been the property of the Eameses since the late 18th century). This part of England has retained, despite everything, the cultural coherence of hunting. The commitment is inspiring, and comes from young and old, rich and poor, locals and new arrivals including, on my Cattistock Saturday, four helmeted Americans from North Carolina who took the 40-plus hedges and fences with joyous courage. Back home, I counted and found that I have hunted with 37 packs (including the pack to which I subscribe) in my life, visiting most parts of England – never a day without something better understood as a result. If only Labour MPs would make such travels, they could not sustain their party’s hostility. Instead, they this week redoubled it, promising to ban drag and trail hunting, even though neither sport follows live quarry. Hunting has the ‘community buy-in’ which, in other spheres, politicians praise to the skies. My hosts gave me two charming mugs, with hounds on the outside and a fox nestling at the bottom so you see him when you finish your tea. He is dear to hunting people. We mourn the fact that now foxes cannot be chased, they often face extermination, rather than the kinder management of the past.

The Rectory Society’s recent AGM was a roaring success. Emma Bridgewater gave a moving account of pilgrimage in the modern world, including her own, to a packed Chelsea Old Church. In my chairman’s report, I told the story of the society’s bank account. On 6 September last year, we were debanked, without warning, by Barclays. The reason given was that we had not answered various emails it had sent us. In fact, our conscientious treasurer had answered most of them, but not those sent without a name appended: he had suspected a scam. Our calls to the Barclays helpline went unanswered. For six weeks, we could not pay our invoices or process subscriptions. The society, I should add, has never been overdrawn in its nearly 20 years’ existence. A weaker organisation might have collapsed under such treatment. Eventually, Barclays admitted it was entirely at fault and paid us a measly £300 in apology. Anecdotage tells me that this behaviour is part of a wider pattern, and not only at Barclays. Small charitable or voluntary organisations are not welcomed as part of banks’ services to the community but seen as pesky and refused or jettisoned. Perhaps banks think that such groups do not, to employ the phrase Coutts used internally when debanking Nigel Farage, ‘align with our values’. By the way, Barclays’ anonymous emails which caused all the trouble came from its ‘Know Your Customer’ programme.

Everyone is criticising Sadiq Khan for his exciting new names for six London Overground lines. They are said to be woke. Could there be a misunderstanding? One of the six is ‘Windrush’. What is wrong with celebrating that lovely tributary to Sadiq’s great Thames? Another is ‘Mildmay’. The second Baron Mildmay was ‘the last of the Corinthians’, the plucky amateur jockey who would have won the Grand National on Davy Jones if his rein had not broken at the second to last. It was he who first persuaded Queen Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother, to own, with her daughter, the future Elizabeth II, her first National Hunt horse. He tragically drowned aged only 41, and much deserves this belated recognition. Thank you, Mr Mayor. Etonian lives matter!

On the second anniversary of the war this week, we replaced the battered Ukrainian flag in our garden with a smart new one. The same flag still flies on British government buildings, but it begins to feel more like a self-reproach than robust support for an ally.