Johnson threatens to hurt Ukraine the way he has done with Britain

Sir, – Ukraine is in a difficult place. Being attacked by its larger, aggressive neighbour is only one part of it. The destruction of its infrastructure and housing, which will require huge reinvestment to recover over the next 20 years or so, is another future dilemma.

However, the most insidious risk is that they are being courted by our untrustworthy UK prime minister, Mr Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, hoping to get a positive lift from any action he takes to support the Ukrainians.

They do not know it yet, but he has a track record of using people(s) for his own ends – the red wall constituencies in northern England is one of his ruses.

“Levelling up” is the two-word mantra in vogue often tripped out to mask the actual delivery.

The selling story for HS2 was that it would make access quicker to northern England and, by implication, improve times to Scotland.

The HS2 link to Leeds has now been downgraded to a normal link. Scots can whistle for it, it seems. Even the benefit was a dubious 30 minutes’ improvement.

Then there is Brexit – that great unleashing of entrepreneurial global Britain, whatever that global adjective is supposed to mean.

It sounds like another “jam tomorrow”, whereas small-medium enterprises and traders have in the main significantly curtailed exporting due to the high cost of the documentation required. Mr Rees-Mogg is in charge now, so that’s OK.

Further evidence of the self-interest of the Conservative Party is the delays in offering visas to Ukrainians fleeing the conflict.

They have form for these delays, for other migrants, fleeing from war, religious, ethnic and social persecution.

The UK Home Office ministerial team is driven by the same ideology that drove Brexit – “Johnny

Foreigner” is bad and likely to sponge off the honest hard-working taxpayers of the UK.

The Home Office know this not to be true, but must play to their fan base, those voters who are conditioned by the red-top media.

Recent investigations into the Ukrainian visa fiasco have revealed what could be best described as a cattle market which uses Facebook pages to line up older men (typically 40+) seeking single women as house guests, and has all the hallmarks of the sleaze that has recently been unearthed in Club Westminster. This is a risk of enabling people trafficking.

President Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelensky was a comedian but is now a statesman.

Johnson is a selfinterested comedian doing a stand-up gig as a statesman and should be hooked before he hurts the Ukraine as well as the UK.

Alistair Ballantyne. Birkhill,

Angus.