When UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said Europe’s cowardly response to Putin’s aggression gave off “a whiff of Munich”, he didn’t know how right he was, says Robert Tombs in The Sunday Telegraph. Wallace was, of course, referring to failed diplomatic efforts to stop Hitler invading Czechoslovakia before the Second World War. As is the case with Ukraine today, nobody wanted war over “a faraway country of which we know nothing”. But the similarities don’t end there. We often hear today that liberal democracy is in crisis. “So it was in the 1930s – but hugely worse.”

The American football guru Bill Belichick has always argued it’s a good plan to target the opposition’s best player. That’s why it makes sense that Labour is going after Rishi Sunak, says Dominic Lawson in The Sunday Times. When the Chancellor put together the furlough scheme “with remarkable speed and decisiveness”, he had lefties like the trade union boss Frances O’Grady cooing that he was “smart” and “energetic”. Last month, a poll of crucial “red wall” voters found that Sunak was the only leading politician from any party with a positive approval rating, at plus 22%.