‘Kremlin says Boris Johnson is a threat – we just don’t know who’s in charge of him’ – Fleet Street Fox

In the intervening years, Johnson has given a peerage to the son of an ex-KGB colonel, ignored security service advice on just about everything up to and including his own phone, denied Russian interference in elections of exactly the sort he had previously said there was, and partied with Russian Tory donors on the same night that he knew the Z-heads were about to start bombarding Ukraine.

He even managed to keep British citizens locked up in Iran, a feat beyond most Foreign Secretaries who aren’t Russian.

Throw in the fact he holidayed, according to fellow travellers without family, luggage, or police protection, in the Italian villa of Evgeny Lebedev, now Baron Siberia, and it would seem that Putin has good reason to feel a little bit peeved.

In a Western world that was reliably inactive, Johnson was the most publicly-vocal, yet secretly-slothful in terms of stopping Putin. But now the pet politician has turned, and bit the hand that fed him caviar at oligarch parties.

He’s issued statements in Ukrainian, suggested hosting the Euros be given to Volodomyr Zelensky, and claimed Russia has all but lost the war already. In the past few days, UK sanctions have caught up with those of other countries, even to the point of freezing the assets of the London-based stepdaughter of Putin’s crony Sergei Lavrov.

Today it’s reported Johnson will send anti-missile systems to Ukraine, and co-operate with the US in stopping Putin spending all that gold.

And all this from a man whose Brexit schemes, according to the former UK defence attache at the Moscow embassy, Carl Scott, “greatly emboldened those in Moscow”. He told the FT that he now despaired “at the prospect of finding credible leadership at home in the UK among those who have compromised so long with his regime and the wealth it offered”.

There is only one thing that could make Establishment diplomats and murderous tyrants both tear out their hair, and that’s Boris Johnson: an agent of chaos whose principles, ethics, and next actions can neither be defined or predicted.

As Zelensky has proved, a war is not politics. It is survival. And someone who can say the right things at the right time, and in the right way, can do more damage than a whole battalion of tanks.

Johnson has been unpredictable, chaotic, and inaccurate his entire life. From journalism to marriage by way of love-children and technology lessons, no-one knew what or who he would do next. He detonated his party, he blew up Brexit, he even exploded his own family. He’s a man-grenade, an unstable element, and he doesn’t fit in any job, category or suit.

Putin may have considered Johnson a spineless dilettante with all the personal fibre of a wet jelly in a high wind, but he failed to note the one quality the man who is now Prime Minister has always reliably displayed: self-preservation.

And if the Kremlin has finally woken up to the fact that nobody is in charge of this weapon, then that is probably because he is doing something right for once, and has just taken off one of its limbs. Welcome to our world, Vlad – Britain is glad that you’re finally feeling our pain.