Peter Rhodes on Ukraine's agony, the West's softening and time to put wokeness on the back burner

If we believe some reports, at a time when MI5 and MI6 should have been fully focused on Ukraine, agents were busy studying a woke new briefing paper urging them to avoid words such as “strong” and “grip” which can “reinforce dominant cultural patterns.”

I can believe that. Seventy-seven years of peace in Europe have given us plenty of time to elevate silly, unimportant issues to something approaching holy writ while ignoring really important things, like the irresistible rise and rise of Vladimir Putin.

And here we are paying the price, having become so soft and sensitive that, even as Putin's armoured columns race towards Kiev, the heirs of James Bond are attending classes to study why “Asians” may be an offensive term but “Asian people” is not – and wondering whatever happened to the hundreds of tanks the British Army once possessed.

You might expect, if only for the sake of decency, that the woke brigade would call a halt to its cock-eyed silliness in the face of tragedy in Ukraine. Because at the moment, how many of us genuinely think that preferred pronouns, whether a statue stands or falls or whether a man in a frock is a woman are issues that really matter? In the great scheme of things, is Partygate worth a single extra word?

Vladimir Putin stresses that the states of Donetsk and Luhansk he recognised this week are not part of Russia but fully independent republics. Dare anyone ask the dictator what would happen, at some time in the future, if Donetsk and Luhansk applied to join Nato?

I can never see reports of Russian soldiers on the move without recalling a curious legend from the First World War. In 1914 when things were going badly for the British Army in France, a rumour grew of a Russian Army from the arctic marching to help us, via Scotland. The stories varied but everyone agreed these Russians had “snow still on their boots.”

There never was a snow-booted army from Russia and there was never an explanation of the legend. But I like the tale of a passenger on a railway platform who met some soldiers and asked where they were from. A Scottish soldier replied: “Ross-shire.”

Peter Rhodes will be appearing at Codsall Festival on March 29. See Codsall Festival 2022 (codsallartsfestival.org.uk)