Reading only slightly between the lines of US foreign policy on Israel/Gaza, I detect that its most urgent aim is to get rid of Benjamin Netanyahu. The same goes for the Foreign Office and Lord Cameron. The shocking killing of the World Central Kitchen workers is being pressed into the service of this cause by London and Washington. Obviously there are lots of reasons – corruption accusations, alleged divisiveness, Anno Domini – why it might soon be time for the Israeli Prime Minister to depart, but why is that a decision for Israel’s western allies? Don’t we normally allow fellow democracies to make up their own minds who leads them, especially in a war? Undermining Netanyahu is a displacement activity, damaging our aim of upholding Israel’s right to defend itself. If Joe Biden prevents Israel moving against Rafah, he stymies victory. Israel is fighting a war which we say we want it to win, yet we are interfering in a way which suggests we want it to lose. As we have seen in other situations – Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria – the West weakens its global standing by supporting X or Y and then shying off when things get tougher. Its enemies therefore win by playing a long game. If Biden eases out Netanyahu, how long before he makes comparable moves against President Zelensky?

Can one commit an offence under the new Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act in England? Probably the answer is: ‘No, but tread carefully.’ An email sent from England is ‘outwith’, as Scots say, the Scottish jurisdiction. Nevertheless, something done in England can contribute evidentially to a prosecution in the Scottish courts. There was a case, for example, where a man was charged with a series of sexual offences perpetrated on an overnight coach travelling from Bristol to Inverness. The man’s behaviour on the M6 could not be tried in Scotland but was allowed to build up a picture indicating what he got up to once on the M74. Encouragingly, however, a Scottish recipient of one’s English hate message cannot respond in kind without committing an offence, so one has the advantage of him. Perhaps Scots wanting to exercise free-speech rights against their fellow residents in Scotland could create a sort of reverse Gretna Green, setting up internet cafés in, say, Longtown, from which they could lob abusive emails north of the border.

My sister reminds me that, about 40 years ago, workmen replaced the leads on the roof of my family’s house. Decades later, we discovered the following scratched into the new lead: ‘Remember Culloden, you English loons.’

The forms of expressed hatred now rendered illegal in Scotland concern sex, gender, sexuality, race, religion, age and disability. They do not concern class hatred, which is positively encouraged. Thus Humza Yousaf, the First Minister, can openly incite people to make Scotland ‘Tory-free’ and has now started doing so top-down by bringing forward a Land Reform Bill which will mean that if you are selling more than 1,000 hectares (just under 2,500 acres), ministers can order it to be broken up into parcels. And the new law requiring the licensing of grouse moors is but a small step to refusing them licences. The motive must be class hatred, because it certainly won’t help the grouse.

The council tax bill for my flat in Westminster arrives. Its accompanying guide carries photographs of 25 people. Ten are of women and 13 are of children. Seven of the women and ten of the children are non-white. There are no men of colour and only two white men, one of whom is the lovable Labour leader, Cllr Adam Hug. This sex and age imbalance is rather pointed, since the majority of those paying the council tax will surely be adult men.

I feel a slightly similar sense of exclusion on receiving unsolicited emails from the London Library. I have been a member for 40 years, which means that, at current values, I have sent roughly £20,000 its way (current annual subscription being £565). I strongly prefer only functional emails – renewals, ‘Another member has requested this book’ etc. Now that is changing. My last three emails have been, first, a member survey ‘Have your Say’; then, the day after I had answered and returned it, the same email again; then, the library’s latest newsletter. The last’s main offerings concerned International Women’s Day, Women’s History Month, including This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America and ‘a very special Ramadan evening of poetry, music and communal spirit… a poetry night which celebrates and elevates Muslim voices’, ‘with a break for Itfar’. I bet there are many more Christians than Muslims in the London Library, but I also bet we shall not be offered ‘a very special Lent evening… which celebrates and elevates Christian voices’. Nor should we be. This is a library with a paying membership. It should not convey views. It should be scrupulously neutral about what we read, not ‘elevating’ one set of voices, let alone depressing another. It should simply be what it was founded to be – the greatest, biggest lending library in Britain. Its sacred duty is to leave you in peace with its books.

The story about a startlingly ugly statue, allegedly of Prince Philip, in Cambridge was puzzling. Why is it 13ft high? Why was it sited outside an estate agent’s? Why was it called ‘The Don’, when HRH, though Chancellor of the University, was never a don in his life? Why was it erected without planning permission? Why does its author appear to disown it? All very odd. For one thing, however, I am grateful. In his ghost story, ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, M.R. James famously describes the climactic apparition as ‘a horrible, an intensely horrible, face of crumpled linen’. Now I know what he meant.