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Here’s a thought experiment: what if Europe and America had enjoyed bold, far-sighted, first-class leadership in the last few years, rather than the timorous, myopic, mediocre placeholders

who are now so obviously out if their depth? Would Ukraine be facing Putin’s onslaught? Would Europeans be waking up to the nightmarish return of war crimes and genocide to their Continent?

Would the EU have allowed itself to become dependent on Russian energy and Chinese imports? Would the US have let its prestige sink to such a low ebb as to enable authoritarian dictators to

threaten the free world, from Kyiv to Kabul and from Taipei to Tokyo? If the answer to these questions is “obviously not”, then we are duty bound to ask ourselves how it has come to this.

Such a vacuum of leadership right across the board does not arise by accident. So what are we doing wrong? One response, fashionable in the last decade, is “populism”. Certainly some of the

leaders who rose to the top on a wave of popular rage against the elites have contributed to the malaise which has afflicted the West. They have proved to be corrupt, unscrupulous and

gullible. In their dealings with Putin, demagogues such as Berlusconi, Salvini, Marine Le Pen and Trump have all been at best naive, at worst treacherous. Yet populism is a symptom, not the

disease itself. Technocrats such as Macron, Draghi and Scholz have been no better in the present crisis than the populists. Neither have old warhorses such as Biden and Merkel covered

themselves with glory. The problem lies deeper. Consider the case of Britain. Boris Johnson’s leadership has been widely criticised, especially though not only in establishment circles. The

Archbishop of Canterbury invokes “the nature of God” to berate the Government from his pulpit; Lord Hennessy thunders about a “constitutional crisis” on the BBC. The public wonders about

more mundane things. Does the Prime Minister know what it’s like to see the value of your wages or salary, your savings or pension eaten away by inflation? (As I wrote here last week, the

Chancellor and the Governor of the Bank of England evidently don’t.) Next month’s local elections will give voters a chance to express their exasperation at the mixture of incompetence and

insouciance that have allowed “stagflation”, that economic Minotaur of the 1970s, to re-emerge. Yet this country has a reservoir of common sense that the self-appointed guardians of Church

and State sometimes lack. People can see that Boris Johnson has been breaking rules and getting away with it all his life, but they elected him anyway. It is their right to sack him, they

reckon, and nobody else’s. Nothing about the sound and fury, the manipulations and manoeuvres in post-pandemic Westminster will have surprised them. What they have noticed, however, is that

while a truly existential crisis was brewing in Eastern Europe, the British political class took its eye off the ball. That omission is what might warrant an inquiry, not the metaphysical

question of what was going through the Prime Minister’s head when he allegedly misled the Commons. Voters don’t want what Elizabeth I called “windows into men’s souls”, but they would like

to know who in Whitehall was or was not paying attention when our intelligence services started warning that Putin was serious about invading Ukraine. In wartime, the incompetent must be

weeded out fast before they cost too many lives. What we do know is that since the invasion began, Boris Johnson and his War Cabinet have generally been ahead of the game. On sanctions, arms

supplies and other forms of support for Ukraine, the UK has indeed led the world. That’s what President Zelensky says openly. It is also what Putin implies when he singles out British

leaders for sanctions and targets them in Russian propaganda. The latest lie to be propagated is that the British are accusing Putin of genocide to justify a nuclear strike against Russia.

What is really infuriating the Kremlin, however, is that British heavy equipment and military training are helping Ukrainians to win battle after battle. The sight of Boris Johnson with

Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv seems to have dismayed the Russians. They know they are losing the battle for hearts and minds as well. It may be too soon to say that in this war the British are

setting an example of leadership to the rest of the West, but there is a remarkable contrast between the way that people in Europe and the Anglosphere are now portraying the Prime Minister

and the way he is depicted at home. Leadership is an intangible quality, but people know it when they see it. Boris was mocked for trying persuade the Saudis to replace Russian oil supplies.

He will be sneered at for trying to persuade Prime Minister Modi to break India’s long-standing ties with Russia, in order to throw the weight of the world’s greatest democracy behind

Ukraine. But he is right to leave no stone unturned in the fight to save the the Ukrainians, because the survival of the free world is at stake. We can safely leave discerning the mind of

God to Dr Welby, although better theologians than he have concurred that the divine nature is unknowable. Political leadership, however, is less of a mystery. It requires decisiveness and

energy, high intelligence and low cunning, plus two qualities that are rare: charisma and moral courage. Boris Johnson has demonstrated all these qualities in abundance, except perhaps the

last. The jury is still out on whether he is capable of doing the right thing, even at great cost to himself. Now is his chance to prove that helping Zelensky to defeat Putin transcends all

other costs and considerations. Boris understands that it is up to him to do whatever it takes to bring victory to Ukraine and peace to Europe. I wish I could be as confident that the other

leaders of the West have grasped this. A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s

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