Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson could clash over the war in Ukraine

Is Rishi Sunak about to get into a scrap with Boris Johnson? There are signs. The rumours from Whitehall, apparently well-sourced, are that Sunak may be going wobbly on Ukraine. He is said to want an assessment of the progress of the war on Ukraine and some idea about whether the war is winnable by some definition; what victory looks like; and what the unpalatable alternatives might be. Britain has much at stake, geopolitically and financially.

Britain is already the second largest military donor to Ukraine, committing £2.3bn in 2022. It has trained 27,000 members of the Ukrainian Armed Forces since 2015, and in the last year have provided hundreds of rockets, five air defence systems, 120 armoured vehicles and over 200,000 pieces of non-lethal military equipment. This, of course, at a time when Britain’s armed forces are being overstretched by what is being asked of them, including a spot of strike-breaking.

In addition, there are the costs of the energy crisis caused by Vladimir Putin’s war that are being imposed on households and businesses; and the effects of economic sanctions on Russia and on Putin’s cronies in London.

So it is not unreasonable for Sunak to undertake a bit of a cost-benefit analysis, even while he says he is with Ukraine “all the way” and is committed to spending as much or more on Ukraine in 2023 as he did in 2022. Nonetheless, it has alarmed some in official circles: “Wars aren’t won [by dashboards]. Wars are won on instinct. At the start of this Boris [Johnson said]: Let’s just go for this.’ So Rishi needs to channel his inner Boris on foreign policy though not of course on anything else.”

Certainly, some think this is no time to give up. Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the chief of the defence staff, said last week that the Russian military “cupboard is bare”. In the annual RUSI lecture, he said: “Extraordinary times call for an extraordinary response. This explains why Russia is losing. And the free world is winning... Providing we maintain our cohesion and resolve, the real victory within our grasp is much more significant.”

Things probably are not helped by Sunak’s Goldman Sachs-dashboard-and-spreadsheet vibe, and the suspicion is that, as a former Treasury chief secretary and chancellor, the prime minister is especially conscious of the pressures on the public finances (and his slim hopes of re-election).

The fact is that the immediate end to the war in Ukraine and the relaxation of sanctions on Russia would greatly ease British energy bills and thus push inflation sharply lower and stop interest rates being hiked much further. You can see the temptation for a prime minister 15 points behind in opinion polls to wind down the war. Others, such as Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron, seem to be edging in the same direction.

Boris Johnson is now free of such pecuniary concerns – if he ever had any – and can allow himself to defend his own policy on Ukraine as well as the right of Ukraine to determine its own destiny. He has not yet attacked Sunak over the issue, but he might if he feels his successor is contemplating something akin to surrender and cowardice. Johnson regards his early and robust support for President Zelensky as one of the “big calls” he got right, and is a large part of his legacy. Hitherto he has enjoyed the grudging support of his political opponents about that initiative; now a man, Sunak, who Johnson regards as a treacherous snake, is about to trash that legacy.

Johnson has been busy making money recently but also making a little trouble. He can’t be happy, for example, about the downgrading of levelling up and the new austerity. Johnson has lent his support to nascent rebellions over onshore wind farms and deporting migrants, but a Johnson-led campaign to back Ukraine and stop the slide into modern-day appeasement of Russia would be a much more noisy and brutal affair. Johnson would enjoy playing Churchill to Sunak’s Chamberlain, snatching victory over Putin from the jaws of defeat. However, it would do nothing for Tory unity.