Lend A Hand

In response to Boris Johnson's remarks about the Second World War, Russia should announce that it was cancelling all visas for the England football team and its associated staff. Johnson would be out of office within an hour. Sergei Lavrov, over to you.

If the EU can have an Ambassador to Moscow, then why not any other body whatever? Ask your local Brownie Pack to name an Ambassador to Moscow, and then self-importantly to recall her while the Ambassadors of every state remained unrecalled.

More seriously, ask your local Trades Council and Chamber of Commerce to pitch in to supporting a Shadow Consul General in St Petersburg until there was an official one again, as there will be once there is a Foreign Secretary again, and once there is a Prime Minister again. Under Boris Johnson and Theresa May, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has none of the diplomatic gravitas of the Brownies.

But then, when did it ever? Some character from the same PG Wodehouse novel that gave the world the Cambridge Five and the men who enabled them to escape has been put onto the dear old BBC to claim that there were no chemical weapons at Porton Down. The Drones Club, indeed. There is something almost admirable about the ability of upper-class twits to take themselves with absolute seriousness. Almost.

Bringing us to Toby Young. It is still only March, yet he has already been sacked twice this year from unadvertised jobs that had been invented for him. If you want to run your private company like that, then that is your funeral. But we are talking about public money here. Public money that has been lavished on a eugenicist, a sexual assailant, a supplier of Class A drugs, and an associate of an advocate of the rape of drugged children.

Serious questions need to be asked of the Secretary of State for Education. Whoever that may be. Is there a Secretary of State for Education? So little impact has the current occupant, if any, made, that there is no reason to suppose that the position still exists. Would that we could say the same about the position of Foreign Secretary.