BoJo beats the drum

Today’s Daily Mail splashes with a front page article by the former Prime Minister, calling for arms for Ukraine. Most of that page in the print edition - why not online? - is a sombre, heart-wringing photograph of a woman and child walking through a battle-shattered landscape.

The accompanying text is full of grossly emotional, fustian rhetoric and dangerous assertions, such as that Putin would not dare use a battlefield nuclear weapon. This is Boris at his bullish, bullshitting worst.

Johnson is clever, charming, good-looking in a raffish, well-upholstered way - and amoral. Like many psychopaths he likes himself so much that you are almost forced to like him - he even had the priggish Ian Hislop and the rest of the HIGNFY team laughing when he chaired an episode in 2003. Beware the would-be World King: we had a few of them in the last century.

Like Macduff in ‘Macbeth’, we can tolerate BoJo’s lust and avarice - the scattering of genes like a lawn sprinkler, the need and greed for money to support his louche and intemperate lifestyle - but when Malcolm threatens to

Pour the sweet milk of concord into hell, 

Uproar the universal peace, confound 

All unity on earth 

- Macduff cries out in despair for his country; and we should now, for ours, and for Europe. 

Boris' unscrupulous essay is referenced in another piece dated the same day (23 January) by Marc Nicol, the Mail's 'Defence Editor.' Why the determination to hammer this home? 

 It's because Germany is hesitant to send its tanks to Ukraine. Chancellor Scholz was dubbed a 'cowardly leader' for it by the Mail yesterday, and at the same time Simon Jenkins in The Guardian added his paper's voice to the war-fever chorus. So much for diversity in news reporting. 

Remember that it was Johnson who flew to Zelensky last April to tell him not to strike a deal with Russia; that in 2014 the French and German premiers used the Minsk peace negotations to buy time to arm Ukraine - as Merkel admitted in an interview last December.

Boris believes nothing (I think); he pushed Brexit forward because he could feel which way the wind was blowing and saw the opportunity to seize the Conservative leadership. If he does the right thing, it's for the wrong, selfish reasons. 

Now he rushes in where angels fear to tread, presumably at the bidding of Washington, whose strategists must be convinced either that nuclear war is impossible, or that it will be confined to a geographical area that doesn't matter: ours.