Rhodes on blocked drains, chemical warfare and rethinking Ironbridge's place in history

Isn't there a certain irony in Ironbridge, Shropshire's birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, being again ravaged by floods blamed on man-made climate change which was triggered by the Industrial Revolution?

How long before instead of celebrating Ironbridge's part in history, we lament what it stands for and promote it not as a tourist attraction but a place of national guilt and repentance? One day, will climate-change zealots topple the old bridge into the River Severn? I wouldn't bet on it. But then I wouldn't have bet on a statue in Bristol being chucked in the harbour.

The drain-unblocking man came to call. Chatting idly as the jet-hose did its work, he reported on a highly profitable couple of years. Apparently it began with the first pandemic lockdown. “It was the shortage of toilet paper,” he explained. “People were working from home and using anything, newspaper, kitchen roll, you name it.” Drains duly blocked, and he did very nicely.

Why did Russia invade Ukraine? Because it's what Russia does. When East Germans rebelled in 1953, when Hungarians staged their uprising in 1956 and when Czech people dared to enjoy their Prague Spring in 1968, the Russian tanks roared over the borders to machine-gun the citizens and restore the Kremlin's vision of order.

"Whoever tries to impede us . . . must know that the Russian response will be immediate and lead to the consequences you have never seen in history." When Vladimir Putin issued that chilling ultimatum on the eve of his invasion of Ukraine, everyone seemed to assume he was threatening nuclear war. But was he?

While a 20-kiloton airburst somewhere in Western Europe or the US may appeal to his megalomaniac fantasies, Putin knows it would bring retaliation on a biblical scale. And why unleash the nukes when he has already seen how a tiny amount of Novichok, spread by a couple of agents, can bring panic to an English city? The Kremlin's deeply unconvincing Salisbury Cathedral Fan Club offered a foretaste of what Putin's next move might be. Not a thermonuclear bang but merely the whisper of a bottle being unscrewed, turning thriving cities into no-go areas.

That excellent BBC spy series Spooks, of blessed memory, devoted one episode to the morality of assassinating one man in order to save thousands of lives. I wonder if Putin ever imagines himself as that man.