Quentin Letts
WHEN a Foreign Secretary – any Foreign Secretary, no matter how unironed his shirt – accuses another country of ‘acts of war’ against us, it is alarming.
Boris Johnson’s language yesterday went beyond normal Foreign Office speak. He was giving MPs an update on our relations with Russia in the light of the incident in Salisbury, Wiltshire, where Russian defector Sergei Skripal was found in a bad way.
Boris began by reading a Whitehall script which described the events in Salisbury as ‘disturbing’. We had ‘profound differences’ with Russia.
So far, so unremarkable. But once he was off that departmental script and speaking extempore, he accused Russia of ‘malign activities that stretch from the abuse and murder of journalists to the mysterious assassination of politicians. It is clear that Russia is in many respects now a malign and disruptive force. We are in the lead across the world in trying to counteract that activity.’
Asked by Jack Lopresti (Con, Filton & Bradley Stoke) how we should regard Russian cyberattacks, Boris replied: ‘I increasingly think we have to categorise them as acts of war, which means we need to elaborate a new doctrine of deterrence.’ Acts of war. That is quite a phrase. A phrase to make civil servants shudder. But a phrase to make members of the public take notice.
Repeatedly Mr Johnson thumped his folder which was sitting on top of the despatch box. His blond hair was even more askew than normal. His shirt was untidy. He had arrived a minute or so late (Speaker Bercow tried to give him grief about this but it bounced off Boris’s hide).
HM Secretary of State for Foreign & Commonwealth Affairs had the air of a bear who had been provoked and did not mind if we saw he was furious.
Some, particularly those breastfed in the ways of the Establishment, will consider that irregular and unstatesmanlike. They are more used to Foreign Secretaries who wear Savile Row suits and speak seamless ambiguities and understatements while brushing the lint off their cuffs and admiring their reflection in the toecaps of their Crockett & Jones brogues.
Others will commend Mr Johnson for his open, unfiltered disgust at the antics of President Putin.
His performance yesterday certainly had something raw and honest about it, even if he may have gone some way beyond the official line. The official line: what does that mean, exactly? A policy shorn of human emotions? Toby Perkins (Lab, Chesterfield) wondered if ‘we should continue to sit on the UN Security Council’ with Russia. Boris replied that we needed ‘a serious conversation about our engagement with Russia’.
THEN came his reference to the coming football World Cup in Russia. ‘For my own part,’ said Boris, ‘it is very difficult to imagine how UK representation at that event could go ahead in the normal way and we will certainly have to consider that.’
The Press gallery immediately (mis)construed this as a threat to pull England’s footballers out of this summer’s tournament. We were hurriedly told by slightly pop-eyed officials that Boris had been referring only to the blazered Berties who toddle off to such jollies to sit in the VIP box.
The SNP’s Stewart McDonald (Glasgow South), despite looking like a hair-salon trainee (you expect him at any minute to coo ‘Will it be the usual curlers for you, Bridie?’), had a fair point: we should take care to ‘protect human assets like Mr Skripal’.
Keith Simpson (Con, Broadland) said murdering people was in ‘the finest traditions of the KGB’.
Andrew Bridgen (Con, NW Leics) said that in the West we said ‘pride before a fall’, but in Russia it is rather different and they said ‘if you have no pride you will surely fall’.
Sir Desmond Swayne (Con, New Forest W) honked that we should never have reduced our forces after the Cold War. Dame Barry Sheerman (Lab, Huddersfield) compared Putin’s Russia to Hitler’s Germany. ‘The Russians will listen only to force.’
Pass the tin helmet.