HARD-pressed Volodymyr Zelensky can hardly be expected to factor in that the British prime minister is up to his ears in scandals, with threatening by-elections on Thursday.
But hideous war is mere backdrop for poses with the Ukrainian leader by Boris Johnson, his third visit of the year last week.
Disgusting, and brazen. If the Johnson government was outside western Europe, the right-wing British media would be making cracks about banana republics.
Yet Ukrainian forays by both Johnson and his foreign minister Liz Truss, building her own profile as possible next party leader, get favourable domestic coverage because the home audience wants Britain to look good abroad.
The current Tory leadership is most coherent about bashing the EU, media-critics and those who see the rule of law under attack. Culture wars fill the air with poison, the stuff they feed the hardest Brexiteers in the country and their most extreme troops in Westminster, the MPs of the European Research Group (ERG).
Hence last Monday’s presentation by Truss of that bill to ‘disapply’ an unquantified chunk of the Northern Ireland Protocol, hated by the ERG (when they focus on it), and the DUP who use it to stall a Sinn Féin First Minister.
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday; daily shockers. Some observers think Johnson clowning is verging on frantic.
The truly frantic legal effort to stop that Tuesday night flight pointed up the cost of Tory political posturing. People already scarred by slavery, trafficking, desperate cross-channel voyages, thought to the last minute that they were about to be deported to Rwanda, some still unsure where that is. One man was loaded on to the plane in a wheelchair, having collapsed.
Whereas live footage as a cabinet meeting began had those nearest the prime minister laughing uproariously – at a Johnson moan about courts stalling Priti Patel’s cunning deportation plan. Not that he had anything against lawyers, Johnson guffawed, so many around the cabinet table har har. Nearest colleague Rishi Sunak, one of the non-lawyers, roared open-mouthed with apparent delight.
But the European Court of Human Rights intervention roused genuine, chilling spite and anger. ‘Will it be necessary to change some laws to help us as we go along? It may very well be.’
On Wednesday a chap described hitherto as a courtier of ‘silken’ diplomatic skills said the prime minister’s behaviour put him in ‘an impossible and odious position’.
So he had to walk away from supposedly invigilating government standards. Others wondered how he stayed so long and struggled to identify what finally flipped him. At least initially, nobody seemed to think the heedless treatment of the Northern Ireland Protocol had played on Lord Geidt’s mind.
How much does all of this, as communications jargon has it, ‘cut through’ to the general public? Too many blink in weariness while Johnson and co reinstate the ERG zealots and revive anti-EU jingoism – as distraction from the economy tanking, cost of living, NHS imploding, seedy Downing Street.
Readers with friends and relatives in England know how many pick their way through mainstream media coverage, write off swathes of the BBC, cling to Channel Four News. The Guardian does its best, witty writers and light columns a blessing, but commitment to the Ukraine and the environment as well as Tory lies make much of it a punishing read.
One supposed insider has suggested that Johnson himself might now stalk off, ahead of any change of rules to allow another vote against him this year rather than next. All that money to be made on the lecture circuit! Those whopping fees from the Daily Telegraph! Being king of the world may have run its course. The ‘clinging on by his fingernails’ scenario is also hotly tipped.
This week’s transport strikes, and Thursday’s by-elections, put it up to a Labour leadership too mild for the times. Unite’s Sharon Graham could inspire a shy Keir Starmer. If not now, when?
