Look on the bright side. It’s not that hard to be on the right side over the Russian invasion of Ukraine. So the bar is quite low for a politician to be considered to have a good war. Just think what it would take to have a bad one. Which is why – more or less – Boris Johnson has made most of the right calls. If not always all at the right time.
But it’s also quite tempting to indulge in politician envy. The Ukrainians voted for a comedian and got a leader. A man with an unerring moral compass. We in the UK also voted for a comedian and got exactly that. Except his act had long since stopped being funny. It never occurred to us that the world was going to get this serious. First Covid. Then this.
We only signed Johnson for the good times and it’s far too late for buyers’ remorse. For now, unless Partygate and the Conservative party’s conscience catches up with him, we’re stuck with the Suspect. Only a couple of days ago he was all in favour of Ukraine joining the EU. Seriously. After years spent rubbishing it. Even in a war, he can’t resist gaslighting his own country. Again and again.
Not content with breaking his own Covid rules, having piss-ups and trousering Russian donations, the Suspect ups the ante by giving a knighthood to Gavin Williamson. Presumably for services to fireplaces – Gav won salesman of the year in 2007 and 2008 – as it can’t be for anything he did in government.
Williamson was the worst minister, a close-run thing with Chris Grayling, of his generation. Useless at defence – he told the Russians “to shut up and go away”: that worked – and a disaster at education. He was sacked from both gigs. But somehow he’s worth a K. Short of sticking two fingers up to the country, Johnson couldn’t have made his contempt for the UK more plain.
Take sanctions. It would be much easier to believe Johnson when he says he is serious about going after Russian money if he didn’t have a track record as a serial liar. There again, maybe we just haven’t been listening to him carefully enough. And that by going after the money, he means pocketing as much of it as he possibly can. How else to explain why the UK has imposed sanctions on only 11 Russian oligarchs, while the EU has now squeezed 680 individuals and counting? Or why the Suspect is so reluctant to clear the air by donating the £2m the Tory party has received from Lubov Chernukhin to a Ukrainian charity? Or why there has been no attempt to seize any Russian assets? Or, or, or. We all know that Boris can be bought: anyone for tennis? The only question is how much for.
Still, Thursday was a day off for the Suspect so it was left to others to gloss over the mess he had left behind. Damian Hinds, the security minister, was first up on the morning media round and was summarily chewed up and spat out by Radio 4’s Today programme. Then Hinds did have the lost cause of trying to explain the government’s sanctions programme. It was like this. We were definitely a global leader in imposing the toughest penalties, which is why it made sense for us to be always a bit behind everyone else.
In any case, it wasn’t a competition, he went on. And if we were to tell everyone what we were going to do before we did it then they would find ways to get round them. The BBC’s Simon Jack couldn’t believe his ears. He was dealing with a halfwit. Er … But you’ve already told everyone what you’re planning to do anyway, so any oligarch who hasn’t been hit with sanctions yet will be using the time to squirrel the money out of the UK. Hinds couldn’t quite cope with the logic and said nothing.
“What about unexplained wealth orders?” said Jack. What about them, Hinds replied defensively. How many had the government put in place in the last year? The minister didn’t have a clue. Jack helped him out by informing him that the answer was a big fat zero. Hinds was triumphant. That proved how well they were working. There was currently no one in the UK with any unexplained wealth. Everything was totally above board. By now he was just a pool of water on the floor. His driver came along with a mop to take him away.
Meanwhile, in Vilnius, Liz Truss was also talking about sanctions. Though not in a way that indicated she knew that it was her department that was responsible for imposing them. “Sanc-shuns are wor-king. Un-i-ted with U-kraine,” she said over and over again in that slightly robotic voice that suggests there is even less going on in her brain than first appears. Still, on the plus side, no one was there to listen, so it didn’t really matter.
The foreign secretary wasn’t even entirely sure why she was in Lithuania. Other than that she had to be somewhere and she might as well be somewhere Instagrammable as be back in London. Then, the foreign ministers of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia also looked as if they were wondering why she was there. She had come to offer her support to the Baltic states, she explained. Something she could just as easily have done by Zoom. None of the other ministers seemed that interested or grateful for the 200 troops she promised them. Rather, they couldn’t wait for her to go so they could get back to talking among themselves.
Also wondering how to fill her day was Nadine Dorries, and the digital, culture, media and sport minister settled for making a statement about everything people already knew. Though she wisely recused herself from even thinking about sanctions on the grounds they were well above her pay grade. Instead, she listed all the sporting and cultural events that had already prevented Russian participation. Somehow in the retelling, she made it sound as if nothing would have happened but for her intervention.
After also repeating that Russia Today was now blocked from British platforms, something unusual happened. Her voice choked and her eyes welled up as she praised the bravery of BBC journalists who were risking their lives to report from the frontline. This provoked gasps of surprise from MPs on both sides. Nadine had always been the BBC’s sternest critic. Dorries’s Beeb was full of biased, woke lefties churning out anti-Brexit propaganda and deserved to have its funding cut.
Then this was Dorries in her compassionate, caring and conciliatory war mode. She was even polite to the SNP when they suggested it had been down to the EU that RT had been blocked. Unprecedented. She also went on to show the love for Channel 4 – another first – before singling out Chris Bryant as an example to us all in his steadfast opposition to Vladimir Putin.
That’s odd, said Labour’s Kevin Brennan. He could have sworn the Tories had flooded the all-party parliamentary group on Russia in an effort to get Bryant removed as the committee’s chair due to his hostility to Russia. Neither Vlad nor the Tories had found it useful for parliamentarians to be making life difficult for Russian kleptocrats. But that was then, and this was now. Everyone’s a democrat. Even Nad. What’s a war good for, if not a bit of revisionism?
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