The Daily Star
Thursday, 25 July 2019
BY MICHAEL GLACKIN
Chairman Mao was once asked what he thought would have happened if Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had been assassinated in 1963, rather than U.S. President John F Kennedy. He replied: “I do not think Mr. Onassis would have married Mrs. Khrushchev.”
Similarly, some have wondered what would have happened if the U.K. government had not been distracted by a long running campaign to elect a new prime minister when Iran’s Revolutionary Guard decided to seize a U.K. registered oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz last Saturday.
Well, I doubt it would have made any difference, because huge government cuts to the Royal Navy mean the U.K. doesn’t have enough warships to properly patrol the Strait.
In 1982 when the U.K. retook the Falklands, the Royal Navy had more than 80 warfighting vessels. Today, excluding submarines, it has just 20, and almost half of those are in long term maintenance. Britannia no longer rules the waves. More of that in a moment. First, the U.K. finally elected its prime minister Tuesday. The former foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, comfortably beat his opponent, the current foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt to the job, ending a turgid seven week campaign to replace Theresa May.
The fact that the runoff was between the two worst foreign secretaries in modern British history speaks volumes for the state of U.K. politics right now.
Britain’s 55th prime minister did not need to face a general election, merely win enough support from his party’s parliamentarians and its 120,000, largely white middle-aged and elderly members. A rather strange paradox as Johnson is considered a populist politician along the lines of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Indeed, Trump was quick to welcome Johnson’s election. He said: “Boris is good. They call him Britain Trump.” Warming to
his theme, and with all the oratory we have come to expect, he added: “They like me over there. That’s what they wanted. That’s what they need. He’ll get it done. Boris is good. He’s gonna do a good job.”
Private Eye, a satirical magazine was more succinct. Its front page greeted Johnson’s victory with a picture of him entering No. 10 Downing Street and the headline: “Loon Landing. One small step for a man … one giant leap in the dark for mankind.”
Private Eye’s joke sums up the fears surrounding a Johnson premiership. A man who has been sacked twice in his career for lying, compared Muslim women who wear the burqa to letterboxes or bank robbers, and once compared the European Union to the Third Reich. Oh, and last month, the police were called to a latenight screaming argument at his girlfriend’s apartment when neighbors heard her shouting at him to “get off me” amid the sound of plates smashing.
It is fair to say no one knows what Johnson’s premiership will herald, or what will be left broken in his wake.
Top of the pile in Johnson’s in tray is of course delivering Brexit.
Johnson has insisted the U.K. must leave the European Union on Oct. 31, with or without a trade deal. He has brushed aside dire warnings from businesses and the Bank of England of the damage a so-called “no-deal” Brexit will do to the economy and insisted the U.K. needs to be “more optimistic.” Such optimism was clearly in short supply at the International Monetary Fund this week. It warned that a no deal Brexit is as big a threat to the global economy as the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China.
Political insiders believe the EU, largely due to German prompting, is prepared to amend the current Brexit deal to enable the U.K. to leave with a trade agreement. The deal is unlikely to be markedly different in substance from the one negotiated by Johnson’s ill-fated predecessor, Theresa May, which Parliament rejected three times. But any small concession by the EU could just be enough to enable Johnson, who has more elan with his party’s hardline right-wing Brexiteers than May, to push the deal through Parliament.
If that fails, Johnson has threatened to suspend Parliament in order to ensure the U.K. leaves the EU in October without further delay. Politicians have reacted by voting to block any attempt to suspend parliament. Sometimes you have to pinch yourself to remember you’re still living in the U.K. and not some banana republic.
The likely result of all this is another general election in the coming months – the third in the U.K. in four years – to allow Johnson to seek a mandate from the public for a no deal Brexit.
In the event of an election it’s extremely unlikely that any one party could win a majority to form a government, opening the door to further political paralysis.
With this in mind, the issue of the U.K.’s rapidly deteriorating relationship with Iran will not be all that high on Johnson’s agenda. The seizure of the Stena Impero was headline news the day after it happened. Since then it has hardly been mentioned in the U.K. media. The 23 man crew aren’t U.K. nationals – most are Indian, Filipino, Russian and Latvian – a factor that will ease the pressure on Johnson to act at a time when there is an increasingly worrying upswell of white nationalists in the U.K. and whose discontent the new prime minister has unashamedly tapped into.
Hunt, who may no longer be foreign secretary by the time you read this, is seeking to broker a Europe-led maritime operation to safeguard shipping in the Strait. But many are wondering why Hunt failed to put extra-protection in place sooner, especially after the U.K. seized an Iranian tanker suspected of carrying oil to Syria near Gibraltar on July 4.
The nearest Royal Navy frigate to the Stena Impero, HMS Montrose, haplessly tried to prevent the Iranians from seizing the tanker with a series of radio warnings, but only arrived on the scene an hour after the vessel had been forced into Iranian waters.
Hunt laughably warned Iran that it would face “serious consequences.” This from a man who when asked whether the “Send her back” chants at the recent Trump rally in North Carolina were racist, responded: “I’m not going to use the ‘R’ word because I do have to be responsible for that relationship between the U.K. and the USA, and I think it would be damaging to that if I used it.”
If Hunt lacks the courage to offer a few words to call out racism he is hardly the type to order a navy gunboat to the port of Bandar Abbas to resolve the issue.
The same is true of Johnson, who earlier this month refused to support Sir Kim Darroch, the then U.K. ambassador to Washington, after he came under fire from Trump over leaked diplomatic communiques in which he was scathingly critical of the President. Darroch resigned the next day.
Both incidents underline the myriad humiliations and ethical compromises that Brexit has pushed the U.K. into. It is desperate to curry favor with Trump in the hope it can secure a free trade deal with the world’s largest economy and offset the economic damage caused by leaving the EU.
With Johnson at the helm, there will doubtless be many more.
Watch this space.
Michael Glackin, a former managing editor of The Daily Star. A version of this article appeared on page 6 of The Daily Star on July 25 2019.
