Rhodes on Putin's future, instant victimhood and a campaign calculated to cause misery

After the war, expect the dirty war. Just supposing Putin signed a peace agreement with Ukraine. How long before Ukraine's inspirational president Volodymyr Zelensky would die of some mysterious poisoning?

But then how long can Vladimir Putin survive? He already lives in bunker-like seclusion. Having turned himself into the Most Hated Man in the World, foreign holidays (except to Belarus, North Korea and China) will be off the agenda and even within Russia he will live in ever-present fear of cyanide in his caviar or, if he ventures into the fresh air, a bullet.

I referred last week to Putin's personal wealth, assessed at anything up to £160 billion. According to one online source, the secret of Putin's success is his negotiating patter which goes on the lines of: “You give me 50 per cent of your wealth and I’ll let you keep the other 50 per cent.”

Whatever happens, Putin's legacy will live on every time a villain or a despised organisation whines that, far from being the bad guys, they are actually the victims. Tyre Extinguishers, for example, is a movement dedicated to saving the planet by deflating the tyres of SUVs and thus making a damn nuisance of themselves. In a line straight out of the Vladimir Putin School of Instant Victimhood, their website whinges: “We are defending ourselves.”

Their “defence” is to immobilise “these massive, unnecessary vehicles” by letting down their tyres using a technique which the Guardian has helpfully described. It would be poetic justice if some Guardian executive found his SUV tyres deflated in “self-defence”. Incidentally, I'm no expert but it strikes me that Tyre Extinguishers' sneaky method of letting down tyres could be defeated simply by removing the dust caps from your tyre valves.

I am no fan of SUVs. They guzzle fuel. They take up too much road space and far too much parking space, crammed between the white lines of the average supermarket car park. But don't we all detest the self-righteous spouting of groups like Tyre Extinguishers, Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain who never consider the consequences of their actions and bring inconvenience, grief and tragedy to those they nominate as offenders?

Peter Rhodes will be appearing at Codsall Festival next Tuesday, March 29. See Codsall Festival 2022 (codsallartsfestival.org.uk)