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Western responses to Vladimir Putin’s claim last week that “the liberal idea has become obsolete” have been revealing — mainly by their absence. The Russian leader told the _Financial Times_

that Angela Merkel’s decision to admit a million migrants to Germany in 2015 had been “a cardinal mistake”. Liberalism had thereby “come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming

majority of the population.” Did Mrs Merkel respond to Putin’s jibe? No, not a word. The German Chancellor is too busy playing down speculation about her health, it would seem, to bother

defending her politics. Nor did the other Western leaders at the G20 summit in Osaka pick up Putin’s gauntlet. Instead, Theresa May actually shook his hand — a hand that has British blood on

it. She refused to look him in the eye, but Putin merely grinned, as well he might. The shocking details of what happened at Salisbury last year seem a little hazy to some people now. Putin

himself pretends not to know: he asks Lionel Barber, the FT’s Editor, in their rather too respectful interview, “Did anybody die?” Astonishingly, Barber replies: “The gentleman who had a

drug problem and he died after touching Novichok in the car park.” The person who died was, of course, Dawn Sturgess. But one politician, at least, remembers Salisbury: Boris Johnson. He was

Foreign Secretary at the time of the poisonings, and he misses no opportunity to remind us of how he persuaded other democracies to expel a total of 153 Russian spies in protest. At a

hustings in Exeter on Friday, Boris rejected the Russian’s doom-mongering: “All this stuff Putin comes up with about ‘liberalism is over’ is wrong. He is totally wrong.” In his _Telegraph

_column today, Boris returns to the fray with a more considered counterblast, directed at Putin personally: “I don’t want to put too fine a point on it, Vladimir, but there are some

countries where capitalism is believed to be in the hands of oligarchs and cronies, where journalists are shot, and where ‘liberal values’ are derided…and where real incomes have declined

for each of the past five years.” By contrast, Boris sees Britain as the best example in the world of “the triumph of liberal values”, from democracy to the rule of law. “The country that

possesses these essential building blocks of liberalism will succeed,” he writes, while “the country without them will — eventually — face disaster.” Whether or not Boris realises that he is

wading into a global debate between the advocates of liberalism and those of nationalism, at least he is not afraid to do so. The progress towards democracy that took off after the Berlin

Wall fell thirty years ago has gone into reverse. And China has shown that it is possible to have rapid economic growth without liberalism. Boris himself, despite numerous attempts to paint

him as a Right-wing extremist, is among the most socially liberal Tories of our time. It was he who, as Mayor of London, bounced David Cameron into endorsing same-sex marriage. And on

immigration, the issue that Putin sees as the touchstone of liberalism, Boris has always been relaxed. Doubtless anticipating the fact that the next British Prime Minister’s hand he will

shake is likely to belong to Boris, in his FT interview Putin got in a pre-emptive strike. Unlike Britain, he said, “we are a democratic country. In your country, the leader…is not elected

by a direct vote of the people, but by the ruling party.” In the looking glass world of “illiberal democracy”, Russia is more democratic than the UK. Such a deliberate distortion of

political reality unfortunately resonates with the zeitgeist in the West. Take the Glastonbury Festival. There a musical event has been so politicised that no self-respecting rock star can

afford to miss the opportunity to tell a hundred thousand fans that “we must impeach Donald Trump” (Janelle Monae) or “f*** Boris” (Stormzy). Nobody had a word against Xi Jinping or Putin.

And such defence of liberal values as there was came down to David Attenborough congratulating the throng about not using plastic bottles. At least it wasn’t Jeremy Corbyn: greeted like a

messiah there two years ago, vociferous on Trump — but conspicuously silent on Putin or Xi. Britain is too complex to be summed up by the word “liberalism”: for many of us, history and

tradition, faith and family are just as important. But the rule of law and the freedom of the press, parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy, the abolition of slavery and

religious emancipation all had their origins on these islands. We have no reason to be shy about our past. Boris Johnson has many faults but he is not shy. We need a leader who will not only

defend our way of life but actively celebrate it — even at Glastonbury.