When Tory MPs accused Angela Rayner of goading Boris Johnson by crossing and uncrossing her legs in a short skirt, I was hardly surprised, says Alice Thomson in The Times. As a reporter in the 1990s, I interviewed Gulf War pilots by a swimming pool in Kuwait, visited a nudist camp and went to an S&M party, “but I never encountered as much sexism as I did when I arrived at the House of Commons”. The MPs treated me and other female journalists appallingly. One assumed we used our “female wiles” to trick innocent men into spilling their secrets. At one lunch a male MP put his hand between my legs; others used to joke about their vibrating pagers. “It soon became clear whom to avoid.”

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine “has become a holy war for Russia”, says Janine di Giovanni in Foreign Policy. And he’s enlisted Bishop Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church since 2009, as his “wingman”. Kirill justifies the war through homophobia: in a March sermon, he claimed that the West was trying to exterminate the people of Ukraine’s Donbas region because the locals refused to hold gay pride parades. Kirill, a long-time Putin ally, has praised his president’s wars before: he described Russia’s involvement in the Syrian civil war as a “holy battle”. Then, as now, photos circulated of Orthodox priests “blessing missiles and planes that would destroy people’s homes and crush lives”.