What Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is teaching the world about leadership and language – Jayne Dowle

Stand with Ukraine and turn the screw even tighter against Putin’s Russia amid nuclear spectre – Andrew Vine

I was slightly taken aback. And then I remembered Mr Johnson has benefitted from the best kind of education money can buy. After Eton, he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with a degree in Classics.

However, there’s family history and experience here too; his paternal great-grandfather, Ali Kemal, a journalist and politician lynched by a mob in the 1920s, was Turkish.

And his father, Stanley Johnson, worked in the USA and in Brussels for the European Commission, where his children attended the European School and learned to speak French. With that kind of background, it’s no wonder the Prime Minister has an instinctive bent.

He sounded more masterful speaking those few brief words in Russian than he has in a barrel-load of recent speeches, when he’s come across as flustered and out of his depth. It’s probably kindest, for example, to draw a veil over the infamous ‘Peppa Pig’ address to business leaders at the CBI in November.

Different times require a different approach however, and nothing sharpens the political mind like the unauthorised invasion of a sovereign country by a bullying autocrat presiding over blitzkrieg and forcing up to seven million people to flee their homes in Ukraine.

I hope that he has been emboldened – or perhaps embarrassed by – multi-lingual Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who speaks a number of languages, including English and Russian. And perhaps, too, he has been humbled by the ordinary Ukrainian people who have been telling news reporters their stories in English, allowing us all to understand their plight.

And I hope that our own Prime Minister’s brief few public words in something other than English pricks the conscience of those who question or even decry the teaching of foreign languages in our schools.

At the academy attended by both my children, I’ve watched the provision of ‘modern foreign languages’ – French, Spanish and German in this case – literally wither away. When my son, Jack, arrived there in 2013, all three of these languages could be studied at GCSE. By the time my daughter, Lizzie, started GCSEs in 2020, only French and Spanish were available.

I’ve queried this, obviously, but which of the two languages students pursue appears to be largely down to pot-luck and which group they are assigned to in Year Seven. My daughter, to my chagrin, is doing Spanish.

I’d far rather she studied French, because she’s keen to learn about linguistics as part of her planned English Language A-level and I bang on about how many French and Latin-based words we have assimilated into our own vocabulary.

As she points out however, at least she is studying one language to GCSE. And for that, I suppose we must be grateful, although when I speak with friends whose children go to, ahem, different kinds of schools and I hear that they are studying Arabic and Mandarin, I do despair.

I know I’m talking about just one school, and in a deprived area with a lot of problems far bigger than imparting knowledge of how to conjugate French verbs, but we ought to be ashamed of this slipshod attitude.

If we learn languages we don’t just learn words, we begin to build bridges, to open up lines of communication and unlock a deeper understanding about what makes people in other countries tick.

I have been in countries myself where I have had little or no understanding of the language – China and Croatia, for instance. It’s unnerving. When I worked in Shanghai, China, I had to write down my hotel address for the taxi driver because I had no other way of explaining it. Imagine, for a moment, if you were a new arrival in the UK in the same position?

Mr Johnson’s linguistic olive branch was significant, but to be fair, something of a ‘blink and you’ll miss it” moment. Far more impressive are the ongoing broadcasts of Zelenskyy in fluent English and those of the former world champion boxer Vitali Klitschko.

If you haven’t seen Klitschko’s recent televised interview, I recommend watching it on YouTube. Dressed in khaki, standing in front of a map of his country, and looking the world in the eye with unwavering conviction, he spoke eloquently in English. So clearly, and so poignantly, it brought tears to my own eyes. His message was simple and to the point: “Russians, please go home”. In any language, I think we would all agree.

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