On Saturday, Boris Johnson compared Ukraine’s war of resistance against Russia to Britain’s vote to leave the EU. Yesterday, though, he let it be known that he regrets this. “It sounded better written down than it did when spoken,” an insider told The Times. So obviously the matter is closed.
Yeah, come on. Are you kidding? You don’t just shake this one off, Taylor Swift. I simply don’t believe it sounded any different written down at all, not least because we seem to be in the territory of people who can’t read without moving their lips. What was he thinking? Most Johnson gaffes — letterboxes, tank-topped bum-boys, pangas hacking human flesh etc — were at least meant as jokes. This one was cold sincerity, and as mad as a horse in a duvet cover.
As an analogy, it fails on so many levels that you feel preposterous pointing them out. But let’s. For starters, it elides the way that the EU is something Ukraine specifically wants to join, as do Georgia and Moldova, precisely because it is the alternative to the Kremlin’s jackboot. Moving on, you might struggle to remember that time Brussels murderously bombed our hospitals. Or, observed from the other end, you might wonder if Ukrainians are split on being slaughtered almost down the middle, with half of them actively in favour of it. Because I don’t think they are. Horrendous. And if today EU leaders are not openly looking at Johnson askance, that’s probably just because most already were, and there’s only so askance you can get before you literally turn your back.
Only in the deepest reaches of Johnson’s mind — beyond the lust and Latin, and into an echoing cavern where, perhaps as with Homer Simpson, we would find a monkey playing cymbals — can it be known why he had to say such a thing. I wonder, though, if it sprang from a dim awareness that Brexit has a Russia problem. It also — I should say, before anyone gets cross — has a Russia opportunity, too. Although let’s tackle the problem first.
Memories are short, but the same David Cameron who is now a gurning delivery driver was once prime minister. During the referendum debate he and Johnson clashed over whether Brexit would make precisely this sort of war more or less likely. Cameron reckoned it would. Johnson countered — pre-echoing the language we now hear from Putin — that the real risk was EU muscularity itself. “Look at what has happened in Ukraine,” he said, of the 2014 invasion.
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You might think he didn’t really mean that, either, but lots of people on his side of the debate felt the same. Nigel Farage is a long-term Putin fanboy, not only agreeing with Johnson in blaming the EU, but also speaking often of his admiration for Putin “as an operator, not a human being”. The Leave.EU funder Arron Banks sued the journalist Carole Cadwalladr for defamation over allegations about his Russian links, but his Twitter page remains a trove of remarks such as “Ukraine is to Russia as the Isle of Wight is to the UK. It’s Russian”. His own ghostwriter Isabel Oakeshott wrote in The Sunday Times in 2018 that the courtship of Banks by the Russian embassy “was part of a much wider Russian hybrid warfare campaign against the UK, America and our allies”.
We can argue the toss about how much of a role Russia played in Brexit happening, and my view has always been “probably a bit”. We could also speculate as to whether the lure of Putinism in these quarters is geopolitical at all, or to do with cultural Conservativism, or just frankly homoerotic. You do not, though, need to be a bitter Remainer (like me) to regard Brexit as having served Russian interests. You might just be from the Baltic states. “David Cameron played Russian roulette and shot his brains out,” was the view of one Estonian cabinet minister the day after our vote. Or you could do as Putin himself, who in 2018 hit out at the idea of a second Brexit referendum, calling it “undemocratic”. (Unlike, say, an invasion.)
The flipside, of course, is that things really could have been very different. Back before the vote, remember, the idea of a President Trump one day meeting a Prime Minister Johnson was the sort of joke people told on Radio Four comedy shows. At that point, it was perfectly credible to believe that a Brexit future would force a British PM who was still David Cameron to cleave hard to a newly-elected President Hillary Clinton, with Britain’s commitment to our eastern European Nato allies becoming ever more firm now we were unshackled from all those cheese-eating surrender monkeys who lacked our backbone. I know plenty of very smart people who were confident this would happen, so it’s hard to believe the Kremlin was entirely confident it wouldn’t. Or, to put that another way post-invasion, perhaps we shouldn’t genuflect quite so much to the long-term strategic genius of a regime that doesn’t grasp that massive trucks will get stuck when their wheels fall off.
The challenge for Johnson now is to absolutely refute the idea that Brexit made the West weaker. Our allies think it and our enemies do, too, so this is not a small challenge. And yet, in some respects he’s actually not doing badly, and it is possible to be struck already by the disparity between how his domestic opponents perceive our role in this conflict (shameful, useless, irrelevant) and how, say, Ukrainians do (best friends, thanks for the guns, God save the Queen). His most important task, though, is to resist doing exactly what he did this week, fracturing solidarity, enraging allies and embarrassing his countrymen, and all to make a cheap, jingoistic point. And yes, I know that means abandoning the habit of a lifetime but, well, we live in hope.
