Reading an article recently, my eye was caught by this sentence about the government’s mounting economic travails: “Inflation could peak at 8.4 per cent in the spring, the highest since 1982.” Well, that was the year of the Falklands, which transformed Margaret Thatcher’s fortunes—even as the economy tanked in the face of mass unemployment and deindustrialisation—and helped give her more than a decade in No 10. Is Ukraine Boris Johnson’s Falklands?
In the short term, the Battle of Kyiv has totally eclipsed “partygate,” and rightly so. We only have one government at a time, and it would be unconscionable for the Tories to start a leadership contest during a military invasion of democratic Europe when—unlike May 1940—the issue at stake isn’t the policy and credibility of the government itself in its conduct of the war.
Yes, we ought this week to be sanctioning hundreds, not dozens, of Putin-friendly oligarchs. We should be admitting thousands, not hundreds, of Ukrainian refugees. We should move as fast and close as possible to a complete suspension of purchases of Russian gas and oil. We should be at summits with Macron and Scholz, not playing silly Brexit games on the foreign secretary’s Instagram account. Big questions need to be asked about Russian funding of the Tory Party.
But the essential policy of the government has been correct in this crisis, and Johnson deserves particular credit for his decision some weeks ago—in conjunction with Biden and the US—to provide significant quantities of defensive arms to President Zelensky’s heroic resistance. When the history of this war is written, I suspect the rapid supply of weaponry may turn out to have been the west’s critical act, akin to Truman and Attlee launching an immediate and continuing mass airlift of supplies into Berlin in the face of Stalin’s 1948/9 siege of the city. Kyiv is obviously likely to fall, but it is incredible that it hasn’t already done so. Each day longer that Zelensky’s heroic survival lasts is a stab at the heart of Putin, sowing the seeds of a resistance which will ultimately expel the Russian fascistic dictator or his heir from Ukraine, whatever happens in the coming days and weeks.
It isn’t just an accident that Johnson acted in this way. Although he doesn’t do conventional morality and his political judgments are largely narcissistic, his trait of going “all in,” once he has made a strategic call, helped to ensure the correct response in supporting Zelensky’s resistance to Putin. Short of direct military conflict with Russia, this needs to be our continuing policy.
Having said all that, in terms of its political impact at home, I suspect that beyond the crucible of the immediate crisis, the principal positive effect of the Ukraine war for Boris will be in making it easier for him to weather partygate.
The thing about the Falklands is not only that it was a rapid, complete and uniquely personal victory for Thatcher—Ukraine is unlikely to be any of those for Johnson—but that it came just a year before an election (1983) in which the opposition was totally split and the economy was reviving. Roy Jenkins’s centre-left SDP had been formed a year before the Falklands and was laying waste to Michael Foot’s unelectable Labour Party.
Meanwhile, although unemployment continued rising above three million, inflation—the bugbear of the 1970s—started coming down sharply, giving Thatcher an economic narrative that “there is no alternative.”
By contrast, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is moving towards the centre, not away from it, and the economy looks set to get steadily worse. The increase in energy prices could run into thousands of pounds for a typical household by autumn, and the continuing impact of Brexit on the cost of living is rising, not falling.
“It’s the economy, stupid,” said Bill Clinton’s strategists as he unseated George HW Bush after just one term in 1992, despite Bush’s sky-high ratings only a year before when he won the first Gulf War. When Thatcher tried to use the imminence of that war as a way to deflect the leadership challenge which felled her in late 1990, Tory MPs were having none of it. They could see the damage that the Iron Lady’s imbecilic poll tax was doing to their chances of re-election, and they thought that Heseltine or Major would do far better in an election which couldn’t be delayed beyond another 18 months.
Oh, and we all know what happened to Winston Churchill in 1945, once that war had been won. Not that Johnson is a Churchill. That accolade belongs to Zelensky, whose performance is among the most dramatic, heroic and inspirational of any democratic leader in modern times. Everything that blood, toil, tears and sweat can offer he is giving to the cause of his country and the civilisation of Europe.
