Iain Macwhirter: Like him or loathe him, Boris Johnson stands for Britain in these dark hours

It was, of course, naïve of Mr Ross to call so adamantly and unequivocally for his UK leader’s resignation in the first place. There was never any guarantee that Mr Johnson was going to depart the scene – he is the great survivor after all, the “greased pig” as David Cameron styled him. Mr Ross might well have faced calls for his own resignation, come election time, had he found himself calling on people to vote for a party led by someone he believed to be a lying reprobate.

This is not just a Tory problem. Labour have been calling for Boris’s head. When the Metropolitan Police finally hand out their fixed penalty notices, perhaps this week, it will be interesting to see whether Keir Starmer still thinks the Prime Minister should resign if he gets one. One suspects he might just let it go.

Bang to rights

The Left cannot abide Boris Johnson’s luck. They thought they had him bang to rights over lockdown parties, done up like a kipper, condemned out of his own mouth, caught lying to Parliament.

Then Vladimir Putin invades Ukraine and gets him off the hook. Why should this shabby man be allowed to parade as a “great war leader”, they growl on Twitter?

Isn’t he a “right-wing racist misogynist”, according to Nicola Sturgeon?

Well, time and chance is the simple answer. It has happened many times before.

The left were equally furious when Margaret Thatcher suddenly became a war leader in 1982. She had been immensely unpopular, not least because of her devastating economic recessions. Most of her MPs, like her predecessor Edward Heath, believed that she was past recovery and would have to go. Then General Galtieri stepped in and altered the course of British history.

The Falklands War made Thatcher’s reputation as the Iron Lady, a resolute and determined stateswoman, and propelled her to two landslide election victories. Britain might never have gone down the privatisation route had it not been for the Falklands.

We might have remained a manufacturing nation. The Scottish Parliament might never have happened.

Many on the left thought the Falklands task force was at best a jingoistic stunt, at worst a revival of British Imperialism. Why were we occupying the Malvinas in the first place, 8,000 miles away? It was really our fault, said many on the left, just as Jeremy Corbyn and Stop the War seek to blame Nato expansion for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

United front

BUT in 1982, the then-Labour leader Michael Foot, a lifelong advocate of nuclear disarmament, did not take a pacifist line or cavil about neocolonialism. He supported the Falklands War and voted consistently for it in Parliament. There needed to be national solidarity and a united front until the war was over.

Today the situation is much graver. This is not a limited conflict, like the Falklands. We are at war with Russia, even though we aren’t shooting down Russian planes. Unprecedented economic sanctions, like freezing the assets of Russia’s central bank, have been declared an act of war by Putin himself. Europe is finally moving, albeit too slowly, towards ending its dependence on Russian oil and gas.

Every British citizen is going to pay the cost of this war for many years, even if British forces never engage with Putin’s soldiers.

There has to be national solidarity at a time like this. But this alone is not a reason for saying that Boris Johnson deserves our support.

He was elected leader of this country in a free and fair election: the very democracy that Ukrainians are dying to defend. This is an important fact often overlooked in our corrosive media culture of perpetual oppositionism.

Justified criticism, and “holding truth to power” too easily, curdles into disrespect, not just to the man or woman in Number 10 but to the institution of democracy itself.

Putin revels in this because he regards democracy as decadent. There ought to be a way to detach the role of prime minister, as the embodiment of the people’s will, from the personality

who happens to occupy it at any one time.

This Prime Minister has at the very least made the right noises on our behalf. He was right to say at the start of this conflict that Putin had to fail “and had to be seen to fail”. This set the tenor of the West’s response, and defined the Ukrainian invasion as not a local conflict, but an affront to the entire civilised world.

A global affront

Britain has received praise from Volodymyr Zelenskyy for this, and for the 3,000 anti-tank weapons and thousands of anti-aircraft missiles supplied by Britain.

We helped him lead a spirited defence against Russian aggression. Ukrainian soldiers standing on the ruins of Russian tanks have been recording themselves singing “God Save The Queen”. It’s a joke, but deadly serious.

Britain played a leading role too in beefing up the sanctions regime. It was Johnson who first called for Russian banks to be denied access to the Swift bank payments system.

Britain led Europe and America in the seizure of Russian bank assets and we have played a leading role in banning Russian oil and gas. This is making life very difficult for Vladimir Putin, who doesn’t care tuppence about oligarchs like Chelsea’s Abramovich.

The rouble has been decimated and the country is on the verge of defaulting on its financial obligations.

China has stepped in to help Putin, but that may not be enough to save the Russian economy.

When President Zelenskyy thanked “Boris” during his televised address to Parliament, he was thanking Britain. This country has put itself on the frontline in the drive to crush the economic life out of Russia.

Threat to UK

WE are very much on Putin’s radar. He has already launched at least two chemical attacks on UK soil – the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 by polonium, and the Skripals in 2018 by novichok. He may strike again soon.

Russian agents are almost certainly in Britain right now.

There are fears that Putin is planning to use chemical weapons in Ukraine, perhaps the chlorine gas barrel bombs used to devastating effect in Syria.

Mr Johnson has rightly rejected the idea that the west should take on the Russian air force and establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine. That would be a declaration of war with Russia and would lead to massive, probably nuclear retaliation.

But there will have to be something in the arsenal should Putin use weapons of mass destruction. We can only hope that Boris Johnson makes the right call. Partygate can wait.