A little over 20 years ago, says Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times, I spent an “interminable journey” in the back of an expensive 4×4, being driven across Uganda with Boris Johnson. On one leg of the trip, up towards the then Sudanese border, “where various bands of psychopathic maniacs were murdering one another”, Johnson spent the entire time singing to himself the Dire Straits song Money for Nothing. Perhaps it was a “subconscious comment” on the hopeless state of British aid spending in its former colonies. As we learned yet again from African countries’ failure to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in a UN vote, the more aid we send to Africa, “the more it hates us”.

“France does not feel like it is entering a season of political turbulence,” says François Valentin in UnHerd. In fact, it barely feels like it’s going through an election at all. As first-round results rolled in on April 10, Paris’s Trocadéro Square was occupied not by “enthusiastic political activists” but by “tired partygoers” and the odd “trampled campaign flier”. Marine Le Pen’s strong showing so far has sparked alarmist headlines across the West, but it “did not worry the locals”. France’s most popular TV channel ran a comedy film, Les Visiteurs, just two hours after official results were announced, “the earliest the channel had ever cut away from its election debrief”.