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Vladimir Putin and Boris Johnson
Vladimir Putin and Boris Johnson: ‘Imagine the indignation in the UK if the Kremlin appealed to Russians to protest at the British embassy in Moscow.’ Composite: Barcroft Media/EPA
Vladimir Putin and Boris Johnson: ‘Imagine the indignation in the UK if the Kremlin appealed to Russians to protest at the British embassy in Moscow.’ Composite: Barcroft Media/EPA

Protests outside the Russian embassy – what is Boris Johnson up to now?

This article is more than 7 years old
Mary Dejevsky
Facetious or in earnest, the foreign secretary’s call in the Commons shows just how hard it was for him to defend the government’s line of inaction on Syria

You never quite know what Boris Johnson is up to. Was he mischief-making, articulating a new official policy or demonstrating his inexperience when he asked why Britons were not flocking to the Russian embassy to protest against its actions in Syria?

Where, the foreign secretary mused, echoing the campaigning Labour MP Ann Clywd, was the Stop the War Coalition when you needed them? (Both politicians were speaking at the Commons debate on Syria yesterday).

Now, it is not quite true that there have been no protests outside the Russian embassy: there have been sporadic mini-protests. Whether a rallying cry from the foreign secretary is the most effective way to generate more, however, is another matter. Protesters – whatever the cause, whatever the country – are not temperamentally programmed to follow government orders.

What is more, as the deputy head of the Stop the War Coalition was able to tell the BBC Today programme – during an unusually hectoring interview – the movement was set up to protest against British military action, because the group was in Britain, and so this was where could exert pressure. A protest outside the Russian embassy in London would have little point.

In appearing to encourage popular protest at a foreign embassy, however, Johnson also gave a serious hostage to fortune. If that was unwitting, it suggests a less than serious or informed approach to his new portfolio.

Deliberate or not it flew in the face of diplomatic convention that exists for a very good reason. Unleashing your own crowds on someone else’s embassy, for whatever reason, is tantamount to an invitation to that someone else to unleash their crowds on yours.

Very unusual call from the Foreign Secretary to hold demonstrations in front of the Russian embassy. New form of British diplomacy? pic.twitter.com/rzxUkGyyrQ

— Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) October 11, 2016

Just imagine the indignation in the UK if the Kremlin appealed to Russians to protest at the British embassy in Moscow. We have seen officially sponsored protests in recent years against the UK embassy in Tehran. It was not a pretty sight and – more to the point – it poisoned relations for a long time. Fortunately, it appears that the Russian embassy in London last night took Johnson’s words with as little gravitas as he sometimes seems to take himself. In the cold, hard light of day, however, the Kremlin appears to be taking a different view.

Johnson’s task in the Commons debate, it should probably be conceded, was not as easy as he might have made it look. He had essentially to hold the government line against a barrage of highly emotive appeals for action – action that was rejected by MPs three years ago in a decision that arguably opened the way for the desperate situation in which eastern Aleppo finds itself today.

Essentially rejecting the proposal for a no-fly zone as too risky, given the Nato-Russia air clashes it could precipitate, he was left with the threat to take Russia to the international criminal court (ICC) for war crimes. That was a threat made earlier by US diplomats including the secretary of state, John Kerry, at the UN, and by the French President, François Hollande, in a move that led President Putin to cancel a planned visit to Paris.

Here again, though, the UK faces difficulties. The actual crime Johnson cited was the attack on the aid convoy that effectively ended the latest US/Russia-brokered ceasefire, and it is still not at all clear where the blame for this lies.

Talk of the ICC and war crimes also places the UK on somewhat insecure terrain. At a time when the prime minister has undertaken to exempt UK military personnel from the provisions of European convention on human rights as it applies to the battlefield, the foreign secretary’s threats suggested a government speaking with forked tongue, and a minister overcompensating with rhetoric for an inability, or unwillingness, to act.

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