My trip to Kyiv with Boris Johnson

Last week, en route to Oxford, I dropped in on Boris Johnson at his rural retreat, where he is writing his ‘not exactly memoirs’. Unlike Cincinnatus, he has no plough, but he does possess one of those squat, computer-driven lawnmowers which move silently about the lawn, grazing. Boris is impulsive. At lunch, he suddenly said: ‘Let’s play tennis.’ So we did. At another point, he said: ‘Why don’t you come to Ukraine on Friday?’ So I thought I would. The journey involved 24 hours of train against 19 hours in Kyiv, but there is something romantic about reaching a foreign country by train. Besides, Ukrainian trains are more efficient than British ones even though (or because?) there’s a war on.

The formal purpose was a conference about how the West can maintain Ukraine’s fight against Russia two years in, but before that, we were shown round Babyn Yar. There, in September 1941, Nazis murdered nearly 34,000 people, overwhelmingly Jews.