Ignore the sniping – our war effort for Ukraine is something to be proud of

What an extraordinarily moving moment, unprecedented on two counts. It was the first time the chamber of the House of Commons had been addressed live by video link – and the first time by a wartime leader.

Not just any wartime leader. Yesterday afternoon, as Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke to MPS, and the British people, in his gravelly, staccato Slavic baritone, we knew this was a man who might be living on borrowed time. Two attempts on his life by Russian assassins have been foiled. To do a live broadcast was surely to risk detection and death, but he has to play every card he has left now.

The former comedian and actor, who got elected in a move that was halfway between an outrageous dare and a silly joke, recited a diary of the shattering events of the past 13 days, beginning when the first cruise missiles hit Ukraine. “The war we didn’t start and didn’t want… just as you didn’t want to lose your country when the Nazis start fighting Britain.”

The parallel with our own history was painful and designed to hit home. We too once stood alone against overwhelming odds, praying for help to come, as Ukraine does now.

“Since then, we have not been sleeping, we have been fighting,” he said. It showed. The 44-year-old’s once irrepressibly cheeky face was drawn, ghostly, with a subterranean pallor. He recited a litany of horrors – attacks on children, hospitals – “but that didn’t break us. That gave us feeling of big truth”.

The BBC’S simultaneous translator was clearly struggling to find the equivalent English words at such speed, poor fellow, but his awkward, simplistic version of the President’s sentiments carried an added poignancy. You knew exactly what “feeling of big truth” meant.

“The question,” Zelensky continued, “is to be or not to be?” – a Shakespearean quote, he pointed out. “Now, I can definitely give you an answer. Yes, to BE!”

And then came the unforgettable, the unbearably beautiful, heartcleavingly stirring, almost too-muchto-bear moment. Adapting Winston Churchill’s great speech, Zelensky delivered that immortal ode of British defiance and made it Ukraine’s. “We will fight in the sea and in the air, we will fight in forests, fields and on shores, we will fight on the land and in the streets. We will fight on the banks of the different rivers, of Dnieper.”

That was me finished. I was in tears. On the government frontbench, Ben Wallace, our battle-hardened Defence Secretary, was fighting hard to contain his. He swallowed hard and looked down. Next to him, the Prime Minister’s face had collapsed onto his chest, bloodhound-eyes sunken and red, contemplating the sorrow and danger his fellow leader was going through. Hard to believe any of this was real.

President Zelensky ended by thanking the British people for our help. “We are grateful to you, to Boris…”

Ouch – that personal tribute to the PM will have stung all those who are exploiting the crisis to point up the Government’s, and the UK’S, failings.

In the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, the British public raised £120million for Ukraine in just five days. Across the country, small platoons collect medicines, canned goods, baby formula, warm clothes. (There is a touching national belief that, if we send enough woollies, Vladimir Putin will put a sock in it.) Army veterans make ration packs for their brethren while the British Government sends unprecedented quantities of what our Defence Secretary calls “lethal aid”.

But it’s still not enough for the Boris Bashers, the perennially whingeing Opposition, embittered Remainers and those who supported John Bercow against charges of bullying (often all the same people): they unfavourably compare the United Kingdom’s efforts with those of their marvellous EU.

How, they sneer, can the Prime Minister claim we are “leading the world” in support for the Ukrainian resistance when Poland has taken in almost a million refugees, Hungary 170,000, Slovakia 114,000 and the rest of the EU 157,000 set against the UK’S grand total of 500?

Well, funnily enough, leading the world is exactly what we are doing, as grateful Ukrainians such as President Zelensky are quick to acknowledge. Not that the BBC (the Britain always Bad Corporation…) will acknowledge it, and nor will Channel 4 News. How thrilled and relieved was the latter to find examples of “racism” on the Ukraine-poland border, where white women and children were given priority over students from Africa and India. Shocking, eh?

No. Not to anyone sensible or feeling. Just for once, white Christians could not be treated by our diversityobsessed media as the least deserving life-form.

You may have missed this, so modestly did she mention it, but Penny Mordaunt, the former Armed Forces minister, hinted on last week’s Question Time about the extraordinary commitment this country has shown to Ukraine. In 2015, Mordaunt personally visited the country when Operation Orbital, the training of Ukraine’s armed forces by UK personnel, began after Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea. The following year, she extended the operation to include further defensive training – capacity building in medical care, counter IEDS (“a favourite Russian means of terrorising the population”, she notes drily), counter sniping and mortar planting – all skills which the Ukrainians are now using to devastating effect.

“Their AF [armed forces] are hard as nails,” Mordaunt (a Royal Navy reservist herself) says admiringly.

British military advisers, who went on to train over 20,000 Ukrainian soldiers for a further two years, will tell you, off the record, that, confronted with overwhelming Russian firepower, their protegees are “holding up well”.

As one veteran puts it: “They’re doing a bang-up job in hell.”

When there is exciting news of a Ukrainian sniper taking out another Russian general (two of the b------down so far!), chances are it was a British hand that taught them how to pull the trigger. Think of that.

What funds did the EU contribute to Operation Orbital? Rien. Niente. Nichts. For years, Germany couldn’t even be bothered to pay its full Nato subs, one of many European nations leaving the heavy lifting to the United States and the UK. Far more indebted than the Germans, our country never failed to meet the 2 per cent of GDP commitment to protect the free world against Russian aggression.

So don’t go telling me that the British contribution to Ukraine lacks compassion when, almost alone, for years we have put our money (and our men and weapons) where the need was.

Right now, there is other amazing support going on of which you may never hear. Over the weekend, I was made aware of one company which has been working 24/7 to provide a piece of dazzling, state-of-the art equipment for Ukraine. The Russians have nothing like it. “We’re talking about stuff that James Bond would use,” my source says. Fast-tracked by the British Government, paid for by the British people, this extraordinary bit of kit has been shipped out as fast as possible, all export barriers lifted, in the hope it will give Ukrainian troops a unique, tactical advantage.

How proud we should feel that fleet-of-foot British ingenuity could help Ukrainian forces run rings around the blundering Russian bear. If our soldiers cannot stand by their side, then let our technology be their eyes and ears.

British-provided anti-tank missiles have been a huge hit (in every sense) with Ukrainian soldiers. We literally could not be making a more valuable contribution to the battle on the ground. Even the Russians acknowledged our pivotal role, with the state media saying: “Russia will not forget Britain’s desire to co-operate with ultra-nationalist forces in Ukraine and the supply of British weapons to the Kyiv regime. The sanctions hysteria in which London plays one of the leading, if not the main, roles, leaves us no choice but to take proportionately tough retaliatory measures. London has made a final choice of open confrontation with Russia.”

Yet all the Labour Party can do is complain about the failure to provide refugee visas fast enough, exploiting this brutal war to advance their open-borders obsession.

But, whatever you may hear in the media, every hour of every fearful day and night in Ukraine, British weapons, British technology, British training and British morale and practical support are helping to keep the dream of a free Ukraine alive.

After watching the valiant Volodymyr Zelensky address Parliament yesterday, supporting his beloved homeland feels, more than ever, like our solemn duty.

Churchill would have recognised the spirit of that joker turned tragic hero as his nation battles against extinction. Ukraine – to be or not to be?

Are you kidding? “Yes, to BE!”

Parents of today are no longer allowed to be even a tip-toey-bit censorious, let alone the bitch mother from hell, a succulent role I could really get my teeth into.

Instead of monstrous Mommie Dearest Joan Crawford, we have to be Wendy Craig in Butterflies. And nowadays, even dear, sweet Wend would probably be pulled up by her boys for unconscious white privilege and sexist subservience to the patriarchy because she wears a pinny.

“Mind your Ps and Qs!” our parents warned us. “Mind your LGBTQS!” our kids warn us. God, it’s exhausting.

And then, just the other day, my daughter was home and she casually told me the story behind her tattoo.

“Ellie’s mum had just died of cancer and she asked if I would come get a tattoo with her.” “Why?” “Because Ellie said that her mother would really really hate her having a tattoo. So Ellie reckoned if she got a tattoo, it was the only thing that would make her mum angry enough to come back from heaven to Earth to tell her off.”

Even as I laughed, I had tears in my eyes thinking of poor Ellie deprived so young of her most irritating, but most remorselessly loving, critic. You know, I reckon we should start to be a little braver when our kids say: “Mum, you can’t say that any more!” Like the little black dress, maternal disapproval never goes out of fashion.

Fast forward 20 years. My daughter’s daughter says to my daughter: “Mum, how could you have got that tattoo? Eeuw! They’re, like, so common.”

Zelensky’s tribute to the PM will have stung all those trying to point up the UK’S failings