UK: Political Class Hypocrites Attack Farage Over Ukraine War Comments

The Labour-Conservative anti-Reform coalition has been desperate for any opportunity to derail Nigel Farage ever since he announced he was taking over as the party’s leader and began to surge in the polls.

Farage’s opponents are using his comments to the BBC on Friday—that the war in Ukraine is “of course” Vladimir Putin’s fault, but that it was also “provoked” by NATO and EU expansion—as that opportunity.

It is not, however, the smoking gun they think it is—not least because some of the most vocal critics of Farage have themselves repeated similar views in the not-so-distant past.

Take British former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, for example. After Farage explained his long-held view that “the ever-Eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union was giving this man [Putin] a reason to his Russian people to say ‘they’re coming for us again’ and to go to war,” Johnson accused the Reform UK leader of trying to “spread the blame” for the war in Ukraine—an act he said was “morally repugnant and parroting Putin’s lies.”

Putting to one side what UnHerd editor-in-chief Freddie Sayers described as the “bizarre” fact that “the only topic which seems to excite Boris Johnson enough to intervene in the general election campaign is *Ukraine*,” it is worth noting that Johnson in 2016 himself blamed the EU for causing “real trouble” in Ukraine by provoking Russia.

It is quite ironic that he, like Farage now, was branded a “Putin apologist” for his remarks. So readers won’t be at all surprised to learn that following Johnson’s intervention, Farage was quick to brand him “a liar and a hypocrite.”

One of the harshest rebukes came from The Mail on Sunday, whose editors decided to lead their latest edition with the headline:

ZELENSKY: FARAGE IS INFECTED WITH “VIRUS OF PUTIN”

For starters, this is completely untrue. The paper later clarified (on page six) that “there has been no official reaction [to Farage’s comments] from Kyiv”—that the shock jock comment had actually come from an undisclosed “source from President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office,” who in fact said rather more vaguely that “the virus of Putinism, unfortunately, infects people” (emphasis added).

The Mail on Sunday really ought to know better than to smear Farage in this way. After all, its editors have spent years approving articles on this very issue by their own star columnist Peter Hitchens.

For example, Hitchens wrote in his column two days before Russia launched its “special military operation” in Ukraine that NATO expansionism “was stupid, and created the very crisis it claimed to be protecting us against.” So the paper’s leading figures know, at the very least, that there is a conversation worth having here—that whoever is right, this is a legitimate topic of debate which should be free from cheap slurs.

Farage has since claimed that the newspaper group is engaging in these tricks in order to “protect their dying Conservative party,” adding that “the British people will see through this act of utter desperation.”

Less interestingly, since it is more predictable, prime minister Rishi Sunak said Farage was engaging in the “kind of appeasement” which “will only embolden Putin further,” and Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer described his comments as “disgraceful.”

Actually, as writer and research Noah Carl has highlighted, the view presented—and, following attacks from the political class, defended—by Farage “is entirely mainstream within the scholarly debate.” Carl pointed to former U.S. diplomat and one-time ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock Jr.’s view that NATO expansion “may well go down in history as the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War.”

Hitchens, who is no fan of Farage, also responded to Johnson’s rhetoric by pointing to the view of Robert Kagan—who he described as “the leading American Russia hawk”; he’s also the husband of former U.S. assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland—that “although it is obscene to blame the United States for Putin’s inhumane attack on Ukraine, to insist that the invasion was entirely unprovoked is misleading” (emphasis added).

The question, then, is whether this smear campaign will impact Reform’s rising position in the polls and turn voters back towards Labour or the Tories. Writing in the latest issue of the Sunday Times politics email newsletter, journalist Tim Shipman said that “some Tories are hopeful that Nigel Farage’s [comments] … might give the Tories a way of winning back the votes of patriotic Reform defectors.”

Shipman’s view? “Maybe, but I wouldn’t bet on it.”