David Cameron

Why I drove a lorry to Poland

[Instagram @David_Cameron]

‘Why the hell did you hire a lorry without a spare tyre?’ asked Rizvana. Fair question. Luckily we had just pulled into a service station near Leipzig when the front tyre blew. The bang was so loud that the cashier rushed outside fearing an explosion. We waited for five hours in the biting wind. German technical prowess came to our rescue. The mechanic arrived with hydraulic lifts, the correct replacement tyre and near-perfect English. Some onlookers gathered as three of us jumped on his torque wrench to loosen the nuts. Our mission was not going to plan.

Rizvana Poole is a Labour councillor in my town of Chipping Norton and she’s the reason we drove to Warsaw in a lorry filled with supplies for Ukrainian refugees. Two years ago she started the ‘Chippy Larder’, a community project which provides surplus supermarket food for low-income families and cuts food waste. My then 16-year-old daughter Nancy and I were two of her first box-packers. In December, I looked on proudly at a local awards ceremony when Nancy was nominated as a ‘Chipping Norton Covid superhero’. After Putin’s invasion, Rizvana asked for contributions to help refugees. The response was huge, and hours were spent sorting through the donations and packing what was needed on to my (clearly substandard) lorry.

From the times I’ve dealt with Putin, what I remember most about him is his barefaced lying. He could lie without flinching about the presence of Russian troops in the Donbas in 2012 or the fate of the Malaysian airliner shot down by Russian-backed separatists. I went to Tbilisi when he invaded Georgia in 2008 and warned that an inadequate western response would mean he would take more territory, including possibly in Ukraine.

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