I’ve been meaning to write a diary for some time now, but in between typing copy for the Chronicle and scribbling notes on my novel, it’s been hard to find the time, and whenever I open my diary in the office, Spofforth, the Chronicle’s cat, pads over it as though to say: ‘not on work time, Mr Rhodes’.

I certainly plan to write something more substantial in my diary next week, but for now I think it’s an opportunity to write something inspirational in it, not from me but from someone else. Mr Churchill’s words from June 18 seem the most appropriate for this week. They were first given in a speech by the Prime Minister to the House of Commons and later in the day broadcast to the nation.

‘Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the War. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.’”

Stirring stuff indeed, even if the other MPs didn’t greet it as warmly as they might, but good rhetoric won’t be enough to keep the Germans out of Britain.

I’ll write more in my diary next week, I promise (assuming we haven’t been invaded by then).