I've said quite a lot of disobliging things about Andy Burnham over the past few months, but it is much to his credit that he is continuing the uncompromising support for Ukraine shown by every Prime Minister since (to
his credit) Boris Johnson:
External Link/Members OnlyThat supporting Ukraine carries risks to us is neither here nor there. In the past the United Kingdom has often done the right thing with respect to European countries threatened by evil men (Napoleon and most of Europe two and a bit centuries ago; the Kaiser and Belgium in 1914; Hitler and Poland in 1939), and we are correctly doing the same again.
Incidentally i am not taking this "brave" position from a personal safe distance, since if Vlad the Impaler starts chucking drones in the direction of Britain's defence installations, Portsmouth will probably be one of his first targets!
Meanwhile, yesterday there were two interviews on TV that gave cause for, well, alarm is not too strong a word.
On
Channel 4 News, Sir Richard Shirreff, NATO’s former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, stressed once again how vital is it that we and the rest of Europe put enough resources into the Ukraine war to defeat Russia – much more than we are currently doing. It is our war too. Russia poses us an existential threat.
And on
Newsnight, the deeply sinister Andrei Fedorov, a former Russian deputy foreign minister who advises the Kremlin, was keen to talk about some of the very unpleasant things that Putin could do to Britain. (Incidentally the
Newsnight interviewer, Adam Fleming – someone who turns up now and then and always seems OK without his being someone I’ve particularly noticed before – was pitch-perfect, with a few brief, firm, telling interruptions without breaking the rhythm. It was a model of good, incisive interviewing.)