QUENTIN LETTS: Zelensky pretty much as good as grabbed our gutless dullards and shook arduous
What a speech from Ukraine’s President Zelensky. He came to Westminster midafternoon to address MPs and peers. His rawness, urgency, the dynamism of his delivery, the directness of analysis: these shamed our conniving political class.
The man from war-ravaged Kiev as good as grabbed our gutless dullards by their blubbery cheeks and shook hard, shouting at the British establishment to damn well wake up to the dangers of Iran and Russia. Putin and the Ayatollahs? ‘Brothers in hatred,’ he cried. Yet in the Commons in recent days plenty of Left-wing MPs have placed those brothers in hatred on the same moral level as the Americans.
Zelensky’s voice rasped, so guttural that it was not always easy to comprehend. There was, however, no mistaking the message. This short, froggy-throated figure in a dark tunic spoke with arresting fervour. For four years he and his people have been fighting the murderous invasion of that sly psychopath in the Kremlin. They live in bomb shelters and under air shelter nets. They are exhausted and damaged. Death haunts their dreams. Yet now, chasteningly, it was Zelensky who was offering us their help.
He explained the technological leaps Ukraine has had to make to survive Moscow and Tehran’s attacks. He offered to export 1,000 Ukrainian drones a day to the Persian Gulf. ‘We focus on speed,’ he told this room of ineffectual dawdlers. ‘Our strength is not by chance. This is the result of work. We can do it. Our solutions work.’
In front of him sat the thumb-twiddlers of our parliamentary herd: ox-eyed procrastinators, hand-wringing appeasers, safety-first cud-chewers who would rather hand billions of pounds to welfare spongers than rebuild our armed forces. Barbarity is beating at the eastern gates of Europe but Westminster indulges its modish distaste for Donald Trump.
Zelensky’s rawness, urgency, the dynamism of his delivery, the directness of analysis: these shamed our conniving political class
W.E. Henley’s poem Invictus, quoted by Lord Forsyth, praises an ‘unconquerable soul’. It ends: ‘I am the captain of my soul’. Volodymyr Zelensky is that. But we? We drift. We are lost
‘Brothers in hatred.’ Why does our Prime Minister never speak with such limpid instancy? Why are our leaders not able to join the hostile dots and communicate the threat
I have been here so long in this rotten parliament, my senses bludgeoned by the mediocrity of our politics, that I had almost forgotten the potency of statesmanship. Not, ladies and gentlemen, that I was permitted to experience it in the room on your behalf. An official jobsworth forbade us sketch writers from attending. And so I can not tell you – because I had to watch it on a one-dimensional screen – which members of our Cabinet, if any, were present in committee room 14. There was no way to see what effect Mr Zelensky’s remarkable call to defences had on our ruling caste.
Yes, Sir Keir Starmer was there, but out of shot for most of the time. So was Mark Rutte, the secretary general of Nato. So, too, Kemi Badenoch. But that is about all I am able to report, because an official took it into her mulish head to say no.
Lord Forsyth, Speaker of the Upper House, acknowledged that it was an ‘inspiring’ speech. He clearly meant it, too, and quoted from W.E. Henley’s poem Invictus.
But the same word, ‘inspiring’, had been used earlier in the day after Rachel Reeves gave a rankly sub-standard Mais Lecture that signalled surrender to Brussels on regulation. A drippy moderator crept forward and after calling the Chancellor’s flaccid effort ‘inspiring’, added: ‘I have really enjoyed the enthusiasm.’ God help us.
The day had also brought, to a select committee, the new mandarin in charge of the Ministry of Defence. He was not a reassuring presence. Alongside him sat an air marshal who was addressed repeatedly as ‘Tim’ rather than by his surname. The committee heard that the MoD employs 55,000 civil servants. Perhaps they’re all called Tim, too.
While the superb Zelensky was speaking, the Commons chamber busied itself with rubber-stamping the creation of 11 more salaried ministerial berths.
Invictus praises an ‘unconquerable soul’. It ends with the line ‘I am the captain of my soul’. Volodymyr Zelensky is that. But we? We drift. We are lost.
