Britain Confirms It Is Standing Directly Behind Ukraine

At about four o'clock on Wednesday afternoon, on the black and white tiles inside the front door of Number Ten, Andy Burnham told Volodymyr Zelensky that Britain is behind him and that this will not change. Everyone present agreed it was the right thing to say. Nobody present moved forward.

Behind is now understood to be Britain's settled strategic posture. It is a good spot. You can see everything from behind. You can nod from behind, you can hug from behind, you can promise retrofitted capability for equipment somebody else paid for, all from behind, and the weather is milder there, and nothing lands on you.

The geometry has been formalised. Officials describe a national alignment in which the United Kingdom is positioned at a constant distance to the rear of the person actually being shot at, maintaining that distance with small adjusting steps, like a man following a bus he has decided not to catch. Whitehall calls this solidarity. A pedant would call it hiding, but a pedant is not carrying the heaviest of weights, and neither, it turns out, are we.

Money, we are told, is tight. It is tight for electricity, it is tight for warm rooms, it is tight for the dull unphotogenic business of keeping a city lit. It is never tight for anything with a trigger on it. There is always more money for things with a trigger. A thing with a trigger gets signed off before lunch by a man who has spent six weeks refusing to fund a bus. Put a trigger on a hospital and the cheque clears.

"We have never been more behind anybody," an official said on Wednesday, in a corridor, having first checked that the corridor had a corridor behind it.

The country's defensive doctrine was updated accordingly. Britain's main deterrent is now a Ukrainian citizen standing in a dark flat in Kharkiv, and our contribution is to stand admiringly in the shadow this casts and describe it as a partnership. We announced faster delivery of small missiles. We did not announce faster delivery of ourselves.

This newspaper would like to state that it is also behind Ukraine, which we mention because it costs us nothing and makes us look tremendous. Everyone is behind somebody. Somewhere at the very front of the queue is one man with no electricity, and the rest of the free world arranged neatly down the road from him in order of how far they can stand back while still being photographed.