‘With the tragedy and destruction unfolding so distressingly in Ukraine, we should remember the values and hard won freedoms that distinguish us from Putin, none more than LGBT+ rights. So let’s resume our series of tweets to mark #LGBTHM2022.” Thus tweeted Richard Moore, the head of MI6, the day after Russia invaded Ukraine.

Mr Moore is right that one of Putin’s many repulsive aspects is his persecution of gay people. But it is not true to state that LGBT+ rights stand at the pinnacle of all the freedoms that make us different from Putin’s Russia.

The central point about Western freedom is that it is a condition of all living. It cannot be boiled down to sexuality, sex, race, region, age, religion etc: it is not a list of specific rights granted to designated minorities, but freedom for everyone.

It follows that the most important defences of freedom are general too – the rule of law, habeas corpus, parliamentary democracy, freedom of speech. It is a serious mistake to exalt group rights over the rights of each person.

Mr Moore’s tweet trivialises the evil that Putin embodies – a tyranny attacking all human dignity and all human choice. In this time of extreme crisis, “C” should not be counselling his staff to spend any time at all on LGBT+ “History Month”, or any History Month whatever.

“C”s tweet is unwise for another reason. The head of MI6, even now that he is publicly “avowed”, should not use his position to make moral/political assertions. In our free society, his job should be much more focused than that. His task is to lead the agency that supplies our Government with secret intelligence about threats posed by foreign powers and international terrorist networks, and personally to advise the Prime Minister on such matters.

Vauxhall Cross is the headquarters of Britain’s intelligence professionals, not Mr Moore’s pulpit.

Fighting each other 

My friend and country neighbour, Natasha Poliakov, is a very Russian Russian. She fulfils the caricature of what we like about Russians. She is full of fun, life and passion, and is brave to the point of lunacy. Although she has lived in Britain for many years, and has always detested the regime of Vladimir Putin, and although her ancestors were quickly murdered by the Bolsheviks in the revolution, she has a deep faith in her country.

A couple of weeks ago, we had an argument. I was saying how worried I was by Putin’s belligerence. She declared that, despite his threats, Putin would not attack Ukraine: “I am absolutely sure that we Russians will never fight our own people.”

I saw her again last Saturday. She was distraught: “I had thought we were part of civilised society.” She had been particularly struck by the news story of Vitaly Shakun, a Ukrainian soldier who had deliberately encompassed his own death by blowing up a bridge to stop the advance of Russian tanks in the Kherson region last week.

It reminded her, she told me, of the heroic tale of Alexander Matrosov, on which she had been brought up in the Soviet era. In 1942, Matrosov, a 19-year-old Ukrainian private in the Red Army, helped attack a German heavy machine-gun emplaced in a concrete pillbox to block entry to a village.

When other methods failed, Matrosov climbed up the face of the pillbox and forced his body into the slot from which the machine gun was firing, thus blocking it. He died, of course, but his action allowed his comrades to rush forward and capture the position. For this heroism, Stalin renamed his regiment after him.

“I thought such a thing would never be repeated,” said Natasha, “but now our president has forced a situation in which, to liberate one, you have to kill the other.” He had made the peoples who fought Hitler together fight each other. She has decided, she told me, to go to the Russian embassy and resign her citizenship.

The trouble with modern landlines

In the wake of the lengthy power cuts caused by Storm Eunice (see last Tuesday’s column), readers are writing in to lament the loss of landlines. For 20 years, a project called BT 21 has been removing copper wire phone lines to homes and replacing them with fibre-optic cables. The change greatly improves broadband capacity, but there is a side effect.

Unless you have the good fortune, as we do, to live in a backward rural area, you will have found, during the power cuts, that none of your phone lines worked. The old copper wire meant that landline phones (unless on portable extensions) were unaffected by power cuts. All new phones rely on electricity. By 2026 or so, even if you still have copper wire, BT will have migrated calls to Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP), so no call can be made without electricity.

A power cut therefore becomes much more serious. Someone working from home can be completely cut off, with no Wi-Fi. A person who is too old, too cold or injured, and is out of mobile phone power, cannot even make an emergency call. BT has always been coy about this.

Is there a solution? Only a car-charger, a spare, charged battery for your mobile, or your own generator. Most of us will be completely vulnerable to a national grid which, in the age of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, could be disrupted by cyber-attack. Such are the paradoxes of progress.