The British Right should put Kent before Kyiv

A tension is emerging across the Western world over how to weigh national interest against involvement in faraway conflicts

Shortly after the local elections, in which the Conservative Party suffered one of its worst electoral defeats in living memory, I addressed a small group of shell-shocked Tories and warned them that the results indicated their party faced an existential challenge unlike any it had faced in its long history.

To my astonishment, the post-speech discussion veered instantly towards the war in Ukraine and the US vice-president’s perceived incivility towards President Zelensky. Momentarily losing my composure, I accused them of suffering from “Ukraine Brain” and argued that polling in the run-up to the elections had made it unambiguously clear that the British people would rather its leaders prioritise “the defence of Kent over the defence of Kiev [sic]”. There followed a stunned silence that was broken eventually by an aggressively whispered “Kyiv.”

The furious intensity with which so many Tories of a particular age follow every twist and turn of the Russia-Ukraine conflict – even when staring in the face of electoral oblivion – can be hard to understand. Perhaps the most plausible explanation is that it is psychological displacement, a way to sidestep the spectre of national decline by chasing the phantom of a geopolitical influence that has long since faded.

The incident returned to my mind when reading Charles Moore’s bracing column last weekend, in which he warned that National Conservatives like the US vice-president and myself were, as the headline theatrically put it, flirting with “a perverted patriotism that may yet lead to neo-fascism”.

In a Gallic modulation of Godwin’s Law, Moore claimed he had detected an echo of the Vichy slogan “Famille, Travail, Patrie” (“Family, Work, Country”) in the title of a speech I had given – “Faith, Family, Flag, Freedom” – in which I argued that the New Right should adopt a version of Augustine’s ordo amoris as the organising principle for a conservative politics of home and belonging.

I did not mention Ukraine or Russia once, but my discussion of the importance of family and nationhood at a major conservative conference was to his mind evidence that I was a Pétainiste and so, by extension, a Putiniste. He then cited my accurate observation that more people face penalties for free speech in Britain than in Russia as proof of my sympathy for the latter, when my point was to underscore the severity of Britain’s free-speech crisis by comparing it to the most notoriously oppressive regime I could think of. (And, in any event, to note that X is worse than Y in respect of Z is not to endorse Y in any respect.)

Baffled though I was by his reasoning, I found it hard to disagree with Moore’s claim that a tension is indeed emerging across the Western world on the Right, on the neuralgic question of how to weigh national interest against risky and costly involvement in faraway conflicts …

Read the full article in The Telegraph.