Forgive the mordant tone, but this article was written in a desolate post-industrial nightmare girdled by diversionary roads going nowhere aside from away from places. It is somewhere in middle England, where the West Country merges into the Midlands and the north into the south: it is essentially delocated, it is nowhere. There are 15 or so deserted light industrial units, vast metal hangars for storing stuff, acres of car-parking spaces and a few trees suffering from rickets or polio. There are also huge and very bright lamps shining in through my hotel window, betraying no evidence of their purpose other than to keep me awake, and in the foreground a continual mechanical hum, the source of which remains a mystery.
On the television right now the former foreign secretary James Cleverly is explaining to Victoria Derbyshire, with the calm assurance of a village idiot, how the commanders of our nuclear submarines will be able to dig into some safe in order to obtain post-humous permission to release those missiles, in the event that the United Kingdom has been evaporated and the Prime Minister killed.
This begs a number of questions. First, why bother opening the safe when we know exactly what is in it, i.e. an order to fill your boots, lads? Second, how will they know Sir Keir is dead? How would they be able to tell? He might be out on the lash with Lammy and not checking his phone. Or in the midst of a lengthy and very difficult bowel movement, his eyes screwed shut, gurning, concentrating for all he is worth.
It seems to me a bit of a haphazard manner of shepherding in Armageddon. It used to be said that our subs would fire their nukes only if they tried to tune into BBC Radio 4 and heard nothing playing but white noise. That would mean the country had already been destroyed, apparently.
This bothered me greatly for two reasons. I worked at Radio 4 for a while and on my first occasion producing PM I managed to produce just such a radio silence, under the mistaken impression that the programme was 30 minutes long, whereas in fact it was an hour. We got to 5.30 and I smiled and said ‘Good show, team’, picked up my stuff – and was struck by the collective looks of horror around the studio. Oh, we bunged a few tapes on willy-nilly, but there was still no sound at all for three minutes or so.
I imagined those missiles arcing out of the ocean en route for Ufa, Kazan, Smolensk – all my fault. Or an even greater worry in this following scenario. The sub commander has lost contact with base, so he turns on Radio 4. And there it is, blaring out the same as usual. But it is an edition of Weekend Woman’s Hour and the commander, with some justification, takes an executive decision, calculating that it is probably for the best if mankind comes to an abrupt end, if only to stop those bloody women moaning about everything.
The US President’s dismissal of Ukraine is a consequence of his absolute lack of morality
Before we get to those disparate and at times appealing scenarios, however, there is Donald Trump to deal with. Much like the majority of you, I would guess, I was greatly cheered by the Trump ’n’ Vance assault on European liberal sensitivities, as well as the great rollback of asinine progressive programmes in the USA. Yes, well done, etc. But why has this delight so impaired the critical facilities of so many on the right that they have schooled themselves into believing that henceforth Trump is right about everything and can do no wrong?
Is it a function of the increasingly polarised politics of our time, or simply that these people are stupid or amoral? A friend of mine suggested it was a second manifestation of ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’, except in precisely the opposite direction to its first occurrence – which was all those lefties shrieking and pulling their hair out and refusing to sleep with men ever again because of Trump. It may well be that the President’s brutal and thuggish disparagement of Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukraine has met with approval from the US public, but please do not let us suppose that public opinion is always correct.
Nor should you be gulled by the notion that Trump was correct in his odious behaviour towards Zelensky simply because the latter has now grovelled an apology, presumably after some arm twisting from the British. Trump gets his way because Trump is holding the cards. He and Putin are the powerful ones in this denouement and they call the shots – but let us not pretend that this is how it should be.
The Trumpistas who sign up to all this because Trump – and Putin – have it right on a bunch of woke stuff and because they are simply for ‘My Trump Right or Wrong’ are not merely deluded but morally bereft. I have no doubt that whatever happens with Ukraine in the end will please neither Zelensky nor its people. But the dismissal of Ukraine by Trump is not a consequence of Trump’s moral rectitude, but his absolute lack of morality. Ukraine does not matter because it is weak. The weak never matter.
I am, of course, familiar with the what-aboutery put up by those who can see no wrong in whatever their latest hero gets up to. I do not think that the EU played a commendable role during the time of the Maidan Uprising: it should have played no role at all. I am familiar with Russia’s perpetual state of paranoia regarding the West (which dates back to before the time of Peter the Great), some of it justified. I am not ‘anti-Russian’.
But the invasion of Ukraine three years ago was criminal and barbaric and Trump’s attempts to suggest otherwise are simply lies. And they are lies which engender a particular odium in the Baltic states and Poland and Moldova. Trump is not showing his strength in disparaging Ukraine – he is instead displaying a rather craven weakness.
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