The penny finally drops for Boris Johnson - Trump is no friend of Ukraine

Has the penny finally dropped for Boris Johnson – months if not years after everybody else on the planet – that his hero Donald Trump might not be a passionate supporter of Ukraine’s right to exist after all?

Even prior to Trump’s return to office, the former prime minister has used public events, social media and his well-remunerated Daily Mail column to continually insist that Trump had Ukraine’s back despite all available evidence, and pouring scorn on anybody who claimed otherwise.

Last July, while visiting Trump at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Johnson wrote, “I am more convinced than ever that Trump has the strength and bravery to save Ukraine and end this appalling war”.

In February he was sure “the United States is committed to a sovereign Ukraine”. Four days later, when Trump absurdly claimed that Ukraine started the war, Volodymyr Zelensky’s approval ratings were 4% and the country should stage an election Johnson was forlornly arguing that “Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action”. And he implored: “When are we Europeans going to stop being scandalised by Donald Trump and start helping him to end this war?”

Later that month he was enthusiastically backing Trump’s claim to Ukraine’s rare minerals. And as recently as March he was treating his Mail readers to his view that “I trust and believe that Trump will hit Putin with every shot in his locker – he can’t let the world think he’s lost to a cowardly mass murderer”.

And what now the details of Trump’s “peace plan” – a plan which hands Putin pretty much everything he wants without putting a single obligation on him – have emerged?

“As for Ukraine – what do they get after three years of heroic resistance against a brutal and unprovoked invasion?,” he wrote on X on Friday. “What is their reward for the appalling sacrifices they have made – for the sake, as they have endlessly been told, of freedom and democracy around the world?

“Apart from the right to share their natural resources with the United States they get nothing. What is there in this deal that can realistically stop a third Russian invasion? Nothing.” If only there had been some clues this was what Trump was heading for!

This weekend, incidentally, marks 18 months since Johnson announced with some fanfare he was joining GB News, saying: “I’m going to be giving this remarkable new TV channel my unvarnished views on everything from Russia, China, the war in Ukraine, how we meet all those challenges, to the huge opportunities that lie ahead for us.” He has, however, still to clock in for his first shift.

One theory is that some of the staff’s views on Ukraine made even Johnson too queasy to take their cash. Views range from scepticism on aiding the country’s defence to one presenter, Bev Turner, openly using the phrase “special military operation” – the Kremlin’s preferred euphemism for its unprovoked invasion.