Sam Leith

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?

Quite the constitutional twist, yesterday. Just as what Walter Bagehot called the efficient side of our ruling set-up was merrily announcing a final bonfire of the Covid regulations, the dignified side (aka her Majesty the Queen) was letting it be known that she has contracted Covid. Not what you’d call perfect timing. Taking the wide view, she’s just one elderly lady. Policy shouldn't hinge on the susceptibility of any single elderly lady to a disease, be she never so dignified. Still, if her Maj is carted off to hospital it’ll be bad PR for Number 10s ballsy new Living With Covid policy. She's a visible reminder that, yes, it’s still out there, burning through the population like a peat fire.

Rudy Giuliani has had quite the trajectory in public life. Those of us who remember the days after 9/11 will still have a picture of a man who emerged from that disaster as a credit to his city and a credit to his office. If you only picked up the Rudy Show midway through season three, however, you’d have met the wild-eyed oddbod with hair dye running down his temples, spouting conspiracy theories outside a porn shop in a down-at-heel strip mall and — who even knew this was possible? - being suspended as a lawyer in Washington for dishonesty. His story arc was a mash-up of Breaking Bad and My Cousin Vinnie. The latest plot twist came last week when he was unmasked as a departing contestant at the taping of a forthcoming episode of The Masked Singer.

'When parents give Maus…to their little kids, I think it's child abuse. I wanna protect my kids!' Who do you imagine this quote is from? Some plaid-clad member of the moral majority at a town hall meeting in Tennessee – where the local board of education in McMinn County recently caused an outcry by removing Art Spiegelman's graphic novel about the Holocaust from the eighth-grade curriculum? Nope. It's a quote from, well, Art Spiegelman – in a 1997 comic he drew depicting a conversation he had with Maurice Sendak. This week he took a rather different view. Interviewed by CNN, he said that in contemplating the school board ruling he had 'moved past total bafflement to trying to be tolerant of people who may possibly not be Nazis… maybe?

In Sebastian Junger’s book The Perfect Storm, there’s a near-matchless description of how big boats go to the bottom. 'The crisis curve starts out gradually and quickly becomes exponential,' Junger writes of a boat wallowing and taking on water in a big sea: The more trouble she’s in, the more trouble she’s likely to get in, and the less capable she is of getting out of it, which is an acceleration of catastrophe that is almost impossible to reverse... If there’s enough damage, flooding may overwhelm the pumps and short out the engine or gag its air intakes. With the engine gone, the boat has no steerageway at all and turns broadside to the seas.