In a development that has sent tremors through the fine china cabinets of Whitehall, Ukraine has apparently taken to lobbing explosive admonishments at cargo vessels, thereby threatening the global trade routes that keep our supermarket shelves stocked with avocados and cheap gin. Britain, in its eternal role as the world’s beleaguered nanny, has issued a plea for calm. Calm!
As if the Black Sea were a toddlers’ paddling pool and not a powder keg with a lit fuse. The Foreign Office, in a statement so anodyne it could have been penned by a lobotomised sloth, urged “all sides to exercise restraint and ensure the safety of commercial shipping.” Restraint.
The very word is a rusty spanner in the face of a man like Vladimir Putin, who is presumably at this very moment sharpening his nouns for a televised address that will make Winston Churchill sound like a pacifist poet. The Kremlin’s press office has, with the inevitability of a hangover, announced that Putin will speak tonight. One can only imagine the rhetorical bile that awaits: accusations of NATO aggression, warnings of escalatory consequences, and perhaps a poetic aside about the plight of the Russian bear being poked by Western toothpicks.
All delivered with the dead-eyed sincerity of a man who has confused history with historical fiction. Meanwhile, the cargo ships, those unsung heroes of global capitalism, bob helplessly in the crossfire. It is a farce of operatic proportions, with the entire world as audience.
And Britain, clutching its pearls and its joint communiqués, stands by hoping that nobody sets fire to the curtain. God save the King, and God help the merchant mariners.
