How will the ukraine crisis play out in british politics? | thearticle

Today had been billed as the day of reckoning in Ukraine. At the time of writing, reports of a Russian withdrawal have defused tensions slightly, but Western leaders rightly remain

sceptical. It was Boris Johnson who set the tone, casting doubt on the Kremlin’s claims, while threatening to cut off Russia from London’s capital markets and expose property and company

ownership here if Ukrainian sovereignty is infringed. The signal sent was unambiguous. President Biden followed suit and today NATO defence ministers are meeting in Brussels. The West is

still on a war footing. Intelligence can only take us so far: we are up against a former KGB man who knows exactly how to use lies and disinformation. We saw a textbook example of such

tactics this week. At his joint press conference with the German Chancellor after four hours of talks, Putin accused NATO of having launched a military attack on Serbia in 1999. When Olaf

Scholz countered that this had been in order to prevent genocide in Kosovo by the Milosevic regime, Putin replied that Ukraine had already committed genocide against Russian citizens in the

Donbas region. Later, at a solo meeting with journalists, Scholz pointed out that this was completely untrue. But the Russian media will not have reported the denial; Russian viewers will

only see their own President accusing NATO of aggression and genocide. Everything about this crisis is governed by the impossibility of reading Putin’s mind. Nobody knows what he will do, or

whether he will do anything — and that’s the way he likes to play it. The unpredictability is part of his psychological arsenal. What this means is that Western leaders have an uphill task

persuading their own domestic audiences that we must remain vigilant, continue to apply diplomatic pressure and reinforce our defences. The public has just been given a stark reminder of why

we still need deterrence. Yet a lot of people — especially the generations who have no memory or perhaps even knowledge of the Cold War — struggle with the difficult choices that are

imposed by the need to deter a pitiless adversary. They see Putin as a force of nature, against whose authoritarian system we are powerless to push back. They see Ukraine not as the vanguard

of democracy but as a corrupt, nationalist Ruritania with which the West has little in common and certainly no need to get involved. Why we don’t we just give Putin what he wants, they

reason — anything to make the nightmarish threat of a European conflagration go away. In every Western country, there are both Left- and Right-wing iterations of this attitude, obliging

elected leaders to justify themselves and enabling Putin to exploit our differences. Against the British version of this defeatist mentality stands the Prime Minister. He has never wavered

from his refusal to be bullied by brute force or bamboozled by Putin’s mind games. He has sent Liz Truss and Ben Wallace to Moscow to leave no doubt about British resolve, but thus far has

held back from following in the footsteps of Macron and Scholz. He has kept his own diplomatic capital in reserve, biding his time while stiffening the resolve of the Ukrainians and

reminding the Poles that we are staunch allies. There may come a moment for Boris to confront Putin in person, but that moment is not now. As a bare minimum, the hundred or more Russian

battalion tactical groups must be moved back from the border and Belarus cease to be an springboard for invasion. The Prime Minister, in short, has handled the most dangerous East-West

crisis for decades calmly and skilfully. During his tenure at the Foreign Office, he made a blunder for which he has not been forgiven and of which he is constantly reminded: Nazanin

Zaghari-Ratcliffe is still an Iranian hostage. This time there have been no mistakes, no pyrotechnics, no bumbling. This is the Boris Johnson who was elected by a landslide to get Brexit

done, who survived Covid, put a rocket under the vaccination programme and got the economy growing faster than the rest of the G7. A Prime Minister who is cool under fire and competent when

it really matters. Where has this serious-minded statesman been hiding over the last three months, ever since the Owen Paterson affair, followed by Partygate, knocked the Government off

course? For there is no doubt that Boris Johnson’s reputation has suffered during his time of troubles. Matthew Goodwin, the leading academic analyst of UK polling data, wrote an important

Twitter thread this week that charts the decline in the PM’s popularity. Among Conservative voters, 64 per cent now consider him incompetent, compared to 31 per cent two years ago. Then,

about 90 per cent of those who voted Tory in 2019 supported him as leader; now more than 50 per cent want him gone. Goodwin drills down into the detail, and finds a clear pattern of

disillusionment among the former Labour loyalists who “lent” Boris their votes in the last election. Conservative support has crashed by about 20 points, meaning that these voters are no

longer on side. Relatively few have switched back to Labour, but on the key issues of the economy, immigration and health, there is a consistent pattern of alienation from the Government,

which has accelerated in the past three months. These voters were overwhelmingly Leavers, but they are not persuaded that the Tories are delivering the Brexit they thought they had voted

for. Significantly, a plurality of voters now thinks that the Government is spending too much and taxing too heavily. And even those who know what “levelling up” means don’t believe that the

Conservatives are “close to the North”. How will the Ukraine crisis play out in British politics? It is too soon to say that it has saved Boris Johnson’s premiership, but I sense that the

public has grudging respect for his statesmanlike handling of a predicament that has finally cut through to the public, albeit belatedly. At the very least, his display of competence on the

world stage has bought him more time. His own party will wait until the May local elections before deciding whether to risk holding a vote of confidence and perhaps a leadership contest more

than halfway through a Parliament. The Conservative Party would be wide open to the charge of self-indulgence and even self-harm. Even if they ended up with a leader who was seen as more

competent, he or she would be unlikely to win back the lost Leavers who returned Boris to No 10. They voted for him, not for the Tories. Professor Goodwin’s data suggests that many who had

stopped voting altogether are now apathetic again about politics. If so, who better to woo them than the man who originally wowed them? Boris Johnson, it turns out, is still the only person

who can reach the parts that other politicians cannot. The public has been exasperated by his economy with the truth and his apparently amateurish attitude has at times invited doubts about

whether he is up to the job. But the shock of Putin’s daemonic conduct towards Ukraine has provided a sudden reminder that the PM can also be the very best man for the job. The answer to

Putinesque brinkmanship has been Johnsonian statesmanship. Like Hamlet, Boris can put an antic disposition on; also like Hamlet, though, under the right circumstances he is likely to prove

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