Events in Gaza and in Ukraine are unravelling long-standing political power control structures in the EU, in Europe and in the US.

A leading Establishment newspaper in Europe says that “what is driving European politics at present - is fear”. The headlines ring out with apprehension: “Germany’s élites run scared, as Putin rains down death on Ukraine”. The British Prime Minister calls an emergency press conference to warns of ‘democracy at risk’ from ‘extremism’ on the eve of a by-election win by George Galloway, an articulate, if somewhat unruly, ‘thorn’ in the side of conventional politics (but hardly any ‘extremist’).

The EU has heavily over-invested in its Ukraine project, and now sees it fast crumbling. Hence President Macron’s hasty summons of EU states (at 24 hours’ notice) to the Elysée Palace...What Macron in fact proposed however, shocked the gathered leaders...detachments of European special forces to Ukraine...to act as vulnerable strategic ‘tripwire’ deterrents to Russia – which, were they attacked, would ‘trip’ a full-throated NATO retaliation down onto the head of Russia.

His colleagues, horrified, demurred; they saw the emplaced tripwires as the conveyor belt leading to WWIII: ‘Madness’, and ‘no thank you’.

The ‘other leg’ to European desperation was given away by PM Sunak’s rush to the microphone in the wake of the Rochdale by-election outcome to warn that democracy is in peril from extremism.

[Janet Daley in the Telegraph]: “To bring this right up to date, we now have an entity called the Workers Party – a name that summons up traditional Left-wing dedication to the interests of working class people – winning a by-election in Rochdale by somehow conflating the Palestinian cause in Gaza with local working class needs”.

Ouch! That is what hurts. Echoes here from the Michigan primary in the US...Message sent -- and as the electoral desperation in Democratic circles, indicates, ‘message received’.