Sam Leith

It’s House of Lords reform, Jim, but not as we know it. Matilda Simon has applied to contest the next by-election for hereditary peers, in the hope of taking her hereditary seat as Baron Simon of Wythenshawe. Matilda, Lord Simon? Here, in one story, is a positively combustible mix of the 21st and 11th centuries. Matilda began life as Matthew Simon – becoming on the death of her (then his) father the second Baron Simon of Wythenshawe. But she has since transitioned and become Matilda Simon. And the Lord Chancellor last week approved her claim to the peerage and therefore gave her permission to stand the next time a seat becomes vacant among the hereditaries in the Lords.

It looks on the face of things as if Sir Keir Starmer is coming unstuck over that blurry photograph of him with beer in hand after a day campaigning in Durham during lockdown. His claim that no rules were breached on that occasion – like the earlier claims that Angela Rayner wasn’t there and that the curry was a spontaneous, ambushed-by-a-curry type of curry rather than a planned, party type of curry – is looking shakier than Shakin’ Stevens with the DTs. Beergate, thanks to new revelations in the Mail On Sunday, seems to have legs. But where do those legs, I wonder, take us? Let's suppose that everything that Sir Keir’s detractors say is true. Let’s not minimise the offence.

It really is quite easy to click on internet pornography by accident. There’s a persuasive argument that the whole of the modern world, as shaped by the internet, is an accidental by-product of the insatiable global market for new, easier, cheaper, faster and more private ways of looking at bare boobies. The clean and useful bit of the web is, in this account of it, but an apologetic cluster of barnacles hitching a ride on a great grizzled baleen whale of filth. I look back on partygate (‘BJ punishment’) and the Libor scandal (‘rate pegging’) with a shudder. Far and away the most plausible thing about Neil Parish’s account of himself, then, was his claim that he’d arrived on a pornographic website by mistake.

Perhaps you’re of the opinion that Ukrainian refugees aren’t our problem, that the world has always been full of foreigners doing ghastly things to each-other, and we can’t be expected to change the settled migration policy of our country just because of a war. Perhaps you wonder why, if we've been talking about using gunboats to repel boatloads of Libyans or Syrians and were forced to be 'realistic' about the number of people we could accept from Afghanistan, we’re now getting sentimental about Ukrainians.

I think Putin will have been surprised. I mean: I was surprised. Weren’t you? Not, necessarily, that Ukraine should have been resisting as valiantly as it is; nor even that Russia’s supposedly unstoppable war machine should have found itself out of petrol on a chilly highway from which the road signs have been removed. But surprised by the sheer force and volume and unanimity of the international cry of: no, this will not stand. That is one thing, even amid the unspeakable human cost of the war in Ukraine, to feel encouraged by. If this invasion does, as many have said, mark the beginning of a new order in European security and great power politics, isn’t it a sign that it could be a stronger, better, less complacent one?