Adam Dyster has gone to work for the shadow Defra secretary Steve Reed. I admit this is not an appointment which would normally trouble the political scorers, but it is a straw in the wind. Mr Dyster was, until recently, the adviser to both the chairman and the director-general of the National Trust. As Zewditu Gebreyohanes points out in her new pamphlet, ‘National Distrust: the end of democracy in the National Trust’, it was against the interest of the Trust that Mr Dyster advised both, since it blurred the necessary governance difference between the trustees and the management. Mr Dyster was previously, in the Jeremy Corbyn era, the national organiser of Labour’s environment campaign, influencing, he says, the party’s general 2017 election manifesto. His NT advice may help explain why its management reacted so harshly to criticism by the members’ pressure group Restore Trust. The Trust’s management seems determined to be close to Labour. Last month, Hilary McGrady, its director-general, wrote excitedly on LinkedIn about her meeting with Keir Starmer and Reed to discuss ‘the alarming state of nature in the UK’. Starmer also obliged by saying in a speech how appalling it was that the Tories had started attacking the National Trust. Essentially, the current management is trying to turn the NT into a green pressure group dominated by the left rather than a natural and built heritage charity dominated by people who care about natural and built heritage. The power of Ms Gebreyohanes’s pamphlet, publicly endorsed by Sir William Proby, a former NT chairman, is that it sets out how the management has been able to do this by stripping out the governance safeguards and member democracy. The key weapon is Quick Vote, a system which enables management to direct members to vote the way it wants. It reminds me of the block votes of the Labour party conferences of yore.

I gather from legal sources that Keir Starmer was known at the Bar as someone who was ‘good in front of judges; bad in front of juries’. This is, perhaps, the key to his qualities as a politician. He impresses the administrative/professional classes as one of them, but lacks resonance with the ordinary citizen.

The aftermath of the 7 October massacres has confirmed for many Jews that, in the end, they can rely only upon themselves to survive. I hope they are mistaken, but I cannot blame them. If people in, say, Wales, had rushed in and murdered, raped or kidnapped 1,500 people living in Herefordshire, we would not have spent a few days deploring the crime and then rounded on the victims for hitting back. We would have done everything in our power to catch or, if need be, kill the perpetrators. Jews are therefore rightly, militantly, defending Jews. But surely we Gentiles can and should do better in helping them? Our problem is our inner sense of security. Despite the second world war, the English people (things are a bit different in the Celtic nations) have not been successfully invaded or displaced since 1066. There is an underlying feeling that we are going to be all right. For Jews, there is an underlying feeling that they won’t be. We should widen our human sympathy to understand this. We should also think about our self-preservation. If we abandon the Jews, we’re next. In a more Christian era, oddly, this was better understood, especially among Protestants whose study of the Bible led them to honour the children of Israel. Nowadays we insult ‘Zionists’ without any concept of what Zion means.

When you log on to the Guardian, notices appear asking for your money to help fight the good fight. They list ‘What we are up against’. At the top of the list come ‘Teams of lawyers for the rich and powerful trying to stop us publishing stories they don’t want you to see’. I happened to read it the day after roughly a thousand lawyers wrote an open letter to the Prime Minister defending Israel. Of this letter, so far as I can see, the Guardian reported not a word. What has it got against vast numbers of lawyers who do want something published?

A puzzling feature of internet culture is that some MPs send pictures of their genitals to other people, including those they have never met. It is not clear whether these snaps count as ‘online harms’ and therefore cross a criminal threshold, but they seem to be creating consternation and to invite blackmail. Some may argue that, in an age of transparency, the only real mischief here is caused by secrecy. Until now, it has been customary for parliamentary candidates to send out election addresses containing photographs only of their heads and clothed bodies, but modernisers may claim that the public’s ‘right to know’ should extend to the full monty. My own, more conservative response, however, is to echo Walter Bagehot’s famous warning, in another context, against letting daylight in upon the magic.

There is a campaigning pro-euthanasia group called My Death, My Decision. Its title encapsulates the underlying fallacy of the euthanasia cause. While of course it is true that people can to some extent choose the means of their death, the fact unique to death (unless you also include birth) is that you cannot avoid it. The idea that death itself is a decision is a category error.

A few weeks ago (Notes, 10 February), I described asking a posh London stationer for a blotter and being met with blank looks. Barely a week later, an enormous cylindrical tube arrived, all the way from Australia. It contained several vast sheets of strong, creamy blotting paper, accompanied by a letter beautifully painted in watercolour. Thank you, Mr Christopher Bantock from east Melbourne, for so generously defeating that famous ‘tyranny of distance’ and coming to my rescue.