It had only been intended as a glorified photo opportunity. A chance for Boris Johnson to look statesmanlike back home as he went on a day trip to Poland and Estonia. A quick in-out tour of eastern Europe where he got to rub shoulders with two prime ministers on the frontline and the secretary general of Nato.
Nothing too tricky, nothing too newsy. Nothing that couldn’t just as easily have been done in a two-minute phone call. Diplomacy 101. Just a bog-standard show of solidarity as Ukraine endured its sixth day of Russian invasion.
And that’s the way it had looked to be panning out. The Suspect had arrived in Warsaw in the morning for talks with Mateusz Morawiecki, the Polish prime minister, in which the two men had done little more than reiterate their support of Ukraine and their condemnation of Russia.
And the same had gone for Johnson’s mini speech in which he basically reiterated the same points. After all, what more could usefully be said without a huge strategic rethink from Nato countries? Boris may like to think of himself as a disruptor who makes things up as he goes along, but this is one crisis he has played strictly by the book.
Then the choreography went awry. After Johnson had announced the UK would be taking at least twice as many refugees as the government had first promised – a move that was inevitable given the cross-party expressions of horror at the lack of compassion – came the press conference.
And step forward Ukrainian journalist Daria Kaleniuk, the executive director of the Anti-Corruption Action Centre, whose two and a half minute intervention was less a question and more a howl of pain. People were dying, friends were terrified, she said.
The reason Johnson was in Warsaw was because it was safe. There was no way he or any of his family would set foot in Kyiv but the people of Ukraine had no choice. They had been left to fight the Russians single-handedly while western leaders did little more than offer expressions of solidarity.
As for sanctions, were they really working? Were any oligarchs or their children feeling the squeeze? So could Nato put its mind to protecting Ukrainian airspace with a no-fly zone? By the end, Kaleniuk was in tears. As were others in the room. It had been a moving and powerful reminder of the suffering taking place on our doorstep.
Johnson was visibly disturbed by Kaleniuk. He squirmed and on occasions tried to avoid catching her eye. He did however make no effort to interrupt her or cut her short and – maybe it was the rawness of her pain that got to him – for once in his life gave her a straight answer. Normally the last thing he would ever think of doing.
Much as he might have liked to have promised her more, he stuck to the script. The UK and the west could do little more than they were already doing without risking an all-out war with Russia. And that was something Nato just could not contemplate. If the price of that decision was Ukraine’s destruction, then so be it. Though he hoped it would not come to that.
There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in. And in that exchange the limitations of the Nato response had been laid bare. Boris might have been enjoying the opportunity to do his Churchill tribute act on a world stage – at the very least it was a distraction from his troubles at home – but for all his muscular rhetoric, the expressions of solidarity and calling out of Putin’s war crimes, he was essentially operating with two arms tied behind his back.
By the time that sanctions really hit, Kyiv could be rubble. The bottom line was that, stripped of his front and grandiosity, The Suspect is as much an onlooker to The Horror as the rest of us.
If that was an all too brief moment of epiphany for Johnson – his denial and self-regard soon kicked back in – then Priti Patel would later have hers in the Commons. At least, she would have done if she wasn’t too dim to realise that she had been hopelessly exposed as a dangerously out of touch and inadequate home secretary.
Because on Monday Priti Vacant had announced her new visa requirements for Ukrainian refugees and less than 24 hours later she was having to admit she had misjudged the mood of the country – it’s a problem when you’re naturally far more vicious than everyone else – and was now proposing a completely different, more open set of rules.
Though this wasn’t quite how she put it. For Vacant, yesterday had been Phase 1 and today was Phase 2. It’s quite possible we’ll get Phase 3 tomorrow, when she remembers that most people also count their cousins as family.
Though it’s equally possible that Patel would pride herself on keeping as many of her own family as possible out of the country. Especially if they were fleeing a war zone. “The Ukraine”, as she again insisted on calling it. So it was government policy to make itself look incompetent and out of touch by introducing a Phase 1 that even its own MPs couldn’t stomach.
Understandably, Yvette Cooper, Labour’s shadow home secretary, was a little confused by the change of heart and tried to work out just who could and couldn’t come to the UK. It was way beyond Vacant’s intellectual pay grade to come up with any answers so she did what she always does when she feels challenged.
She got stroppy and picked fights with whoever she could. She had a go at Cooper for not being supportive enough and then at the SNP for being a security risk who couldn’t be trusted with sensitive information. This from a minister who was sacked for moonlighting with her own foreign policy agenda.
“The British government is the first government to outline practical measures for bringing Ukrainian refugees to the UK,” she said. To everyone’s surprise. It would be a turn up if the Poles had determined UK refugee policy. Though they couldn’t do any worse. It turned out that what Vacant had meant to say was that the UK had been the first to come up with a refugee policy. Which was just delusional.
While opposition MPs tried to pin down the details, most Tories were just relieved their government had finally done more for refugees.
Though not Edward Leigh. He wondered if we had done far too much already and thought his constituents had had enough of Ukraine. So sweet. Patel breathed a sigh of recognition. At last. She was back among her people once more.
