Peter Rhodes on bile in politics, false-flag warfare and Putin's place in history

Sarah Smith, the BBC’s former Scotland editor, says she's relieved to have left the country having endured years of misogynistic “bile and hatred” while covering Scottish politics. She says the torrent of “gendered abuse” made her feel she was a target.

Smith described people shouting questions at her in the street on the lines of: “What ****ing lies are you going to be telling on TV tonight, you ****ing lying b****?” No-one should have to put up with that sort of abuse and I'm sure we all wish her well in her new job as BBC North America editor. But her new posting is hardly heaven on earth. Smith is swapping a country with thousands of bigots but very few guns for one with millions of bigots and millions of guns.

In the summer of 1939 everyone knew that Poland would soon be attacked by Nazi Germany. Hitler ordered Operation Himmler in which a series of attacks were made on German border posts and “evidence” was fabricated of atrocities committed by Poles on German minorities. Bodies of “attackers” in Polish uniforms were presented to the media, later proved to be concentration-camp prisoners murdered by the Nazis. Today's use of so-called “false flag” incidents by Russia to make Ukraine look like the aggressor is straight out of the Adolf Hitler Guide to Invading Your Neighbours. Nobody outside Germany was fooled in 1939 and nobody outside Russia is fooled today.

And yet does anyone believe that Putin wants to go down in history as the man who turned the European clock back 80 years and turned the Red Army into the 21st century equivalent of the SS? Hope is still on the agenda.

A reader takes me to task for starting a sentence with “So” which he says is an Americanism. In fact, the first known written use of “so” as a sentence opener dates to the mid-1380s in Troilus and Criseyde by that well-known American writer Geoffrey Chaucer. So fancy that.