Israel

Just back in London from Israel, I give breakfast to Oleksandra Matviichuk. She, with her Centre for Civil Liberties, is the only Ukrainian ever to have won the Nobel Peace Prize. In Kyiv, now bombed day and night, the winter will soon set in and some of her friends, as last winter, will have to erect a tent inside their flats to preserve all possible warmth. ‘Cold becomes a factor in all your decisions,’ she says, including when to wash her lustrous long hair. Since Donald Trump began his ‘28-point peace plan’, Russian attacks have risen by nearly a third, with havoc wrought by jet drones which cannot be stopped now that American help is withheld.

The need for Mammon Sir: Douglas Murray is right to wince at Sadiq Khan’s gloating over the partnership at St Paul’s with the nightclub Fabric (‘Would Sadiq Khan back a rave in a mosque?’, 12 September). But the decision to host club nights is simply about cash. Since the government scrapped the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme, historic churches now face an extra 20 per cent VAT bill on all maintenance. The National Churches Survey reveals that 39 per cent of them have roofs at risk or in urgent need of repair. Cathedrals cannot fund seven-figure restoration projects through the Sunday collections alone. Cathedrals have always had multiple uses.

Home Ed Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, set out in the Commons new restrictions on buying goods made in Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The government, he said, ‘agrees’ there is ethnic cleansing in areas of the West Bank, carried out by ‘settler terrorists’. France, Canada, Denmark, Spain, Finland, Ireland, Iceland, Norway, Poland, Portugal and Sweden would impose similar sanctions. Israel announced as a ‘counter-measure’ the closure of the British consulate in Jerusalem. Hundreds of protestors, dressed in black and wearing face coverings, blocked roads at Dover on Saturday, some chanting: ‘Stop the boats.

Midway through a podcast appearance, my host became distracted by a flurry of social media posts claiming that he was a paid agent of the Israeli government. The host was Tim Pool; the accuser was Alex Jones, until then Pool’s friend and ally. The dispute began last month, when Pool suggested that Jones’s recent dip in online viewers had more to do with his wavering on Donald Trump than with any covert censorship. The argument quickly escalated, with Jones asking whether Pool was taking “marching orders” from Benjamin Netanyahu. I have no beef with Jones, but I doubt that Pool, who earns a healthy eight figures from his podcast, would torch his credibility for a little extra money.

In the musical Allegra, which has just finished its run, I ran around singing, dancing and jumping on tables for a couple of hours. I have a lot of elderly friends – by which I mean my age – who saw the show and they told me they felt exhausted just sitting there watching. ‘Oh,’ I’d say airily, ‘it’s just my job.’ I didn’t mention the mornings: the hollow, aching bones, the ferrety eyes, the corncrake voice and the need to stagger downstairs at 3 a.m. for calming milk and nutmeg. At one point, I tripped over halfway through ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’ and carried on singing on my knees like a restricted-growth version of Al Jolson. My granddaughter, 14, thought it was a brilliant stunt worthy of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.