THERE’S a fond belief that the UK’s current generation of principals has found extra elasticity in stretching the truth. That no premier has been more untruthful than Boris Johnson; that no UK home secretary or foreign minister has been more ignorant and callous than Priti Patel and Liz Truss. And that in Sir Keir Starmer the Labour Party has never had a leader who seems so acquiescent and unmoved by the most pernicious deeds of the Tories.

Perhaps, though, it’s always been this way with UK political leaders – that there was never a time when we could accept anything they said at face value. Margaret Thatcher might not have told as many obvious fibs as Johnson, rather her fictions were spun over a generation and allowed to settle by a craven BBC and almost every owner of Britain’s mass circulation press.

This was at a time before social media and online search tools, when lies could travel greater distances unchallenged. Thus, it was easy to convince the ignorant that the miners’ strike was a Stalinist plot to subvert democracy; that the mines themselves were unprofitable; and that the police were innocent victims of violent troublemakers. And it was much easier to suppress or misrepresent the extent of the riches lying on the bed of the North Sea, lest it stoke the fires of Scottish independence.

Less than two decades later, a Labour government was able to spin its own fictions to justify committing the nation to a war in Iraq and thereafter to fight a futile engagement in Afghanistan that arguably made that region more unstable than before.

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The Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan is reported to have said “Events, dear boy, events,” in response to being asked what were the greatest challenges facing politicians (although this has been disputed). The modern statesmen and stateswomen would have a different view. Events are no longer a challenge for political leaders; they’re an opportunity. “What can we conceal when big stuff happens? How can we use it to divert people’s attention?”

As Vladimir Putin moves once more to menace Ukraine and bring it back into an ancient and spiritual Russian empire of his psychotic imagination, the West – having had eight years’ warning of this – will do very little. If it had been serious about this, it would have known that the self-indulgent growth of Nato – now swollen to twice its original size – was always going to act as a serious provocation to a gangster such as Putin. But what did it care? Whenever Putin flexes his muscles assorted Western leaders view it as an opportunity.

Successive US presidents shamelessly stoked the Cold War as a means of maintaining patterns of inequality in the American heartlands. Thus, anyone advocating direct political action against poverty or industrial exploitation risked being exposed as a communist sympathiser. The Cold War was great for the US political elites. It provided the pretext for illegal assassinations and fomenting brutality against regimes they didn’t quite fancy. It also made thousands of industrialists and speculators very rich.

Now Boris Johnson has cause to be thankful for Russian belligerence. As he rushes here and there chairing Cobra meetings and firing his water at a whole THREE Russian oligarchs, the Russian president must have wondered why he didn’t begin his actions a lot sooner than this.

Anyone reasonably asking why it took Putin’s tanks in eastern Ukraine to turn the spotlight on London’s three decades of money-laundering will be dismissed as unpatriotic at a time of national crisis. And don’t expect anyone to ask about the UK supplying illegal arms to the world’s gangster states. Not when you’ve got a Labour leader who unquestioningly joins forces with a Prime Minister who was telling lies about him just the other week.

This is when you begin to realise once more that the British people will be getting only a hazy version of what’s been happening in eastern Europe these last three decades or so. Sir Keir Starmer will milk this one too. His advisers will be telling him to avoid saying anything that could be interpreted as wet or unsound.

His dafter acolytes have already been all over social media making up stories about left-wing types being sympathetic to Putin. Before the end of the week they’ll be suggesting that Jeremy Corbyn was on the Kremlin payroll for daring to oppose Nato’s ruinous self-aggrandisement in the region. Another purge is just around the corner, this one targeting Nato refuseniks in the Labour Party. The fix is in. The Queen’s mild bout of Covid has given us a glimpse of how the UK establishment exploits her absurd and dysfunctional family. But you could sense the febrile activity throughout the newspaper and broadcast media industry. Have the obituary sections been updated? How many colour supplements can we get away with producing? Will we get away with cancelling EastEnders, or maybe even Celebrity MasterChef?

For a month or two after the Queen’s death, the UK will cease being a modern, fully functioning democracy and revert instead to being an 18th-century courtier state. Deference and forelock tugging will replace analysis and inquiry. Such an event hasn’t occurred since the death of George VI in 1952 and when his daughter goes it will seem as though nothing much has changed in Britain.

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There will be vast opportunities for the government of the day to make appeals to bogus patriotism and to tell us all that Britain is never better than when we’re all in it together, united in our grief at the death of our Queen. For reasons that will never adequately be explained, her passing will be accompanied by massive displays of militarism.

When her daughter-in-law Princess Diana died you were considered an unpatriotic scoundrel if you hadn’t queued to sign a book of condolence. After the Queen’s death any political enterprise regarded as weakening this counterfeit sense of national unity will be condemned. You can forget any attempts at a campaign for Scottish independence.

From one human being to another, I wish Her Britannic Majesty a speedy recovery from illness and, as with all those who are frail and elderly, I hope she’s being well looked after in her confinement. I can say this sincerely. But those who claim to be her most loyal subjects have rarely been sincere in their hopes and fears about her health and wellbeing. As always, these are merely opportunities to be exploited.

Similarly, beware of those who, even now, are seeking to hunt down those who insist on asking questions about Nato’s part in these troubling events in eastern Ukraine.