Will Sir Keir Starmer continue to play the pound shop Churchill over Ukraine or fall meekly in line following Donald Trump’s election? - Patrick Mercer

The reason that this catastrophe wasn’t mentioned, I hear you say, was that it’s just scaremongering. Really? Let’s look at the facts.

Most significant is Britain’s level of financial commitment to Ukraine.

If we extrapolate EU figures, last year Josep Borrell, the Union’s vice-president, suggested that cost of helping people cope with the knock-on effects of sanctions against Russia - the assistance to “families and firms to face the high prices of electricity, of food, the subsidies to our people in order to face the consequences of the war” - was about ten times greater than the cost of direct military aid.

Using these figures as a guide, Ukraine could already have cost Britain more than £150bn: so we’re very heavily invested. Add to this an ambition, first by the Tories and now Labour, to lead the way for Europe, demonstrating a new, steely courage to both Russia and the US. I suspect the Conservatives’ jingoism was based not just on hard cash, but also a desire to punch above Britain’s real weight whilst for Labour, victorious wartime leadership might not only recoup the investment but also pave the way for re-entry to the EU.

Whatever their motives, first Lord Cameron and then Keir Starmer unilaterally gave Ukraine permission to fire British missiles onto Russian soil, despite the Kremlin warning that to do so would be a “fatal mistake for the countries that gave the missiles to Ukraine”. Then the White House told both gentlemen to calm down, but in November Mr Biden relented and our weapons flew.

Some damage was certainly done, but nothing compared to the retaliation against Ukrainian targets that followed. The Kremlin riposted with an Oresnik intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM) which contained dozens of separate warheads each of which could have been armed with something like the weapon which destroyed Nagasaki. They weren’t: they were blanks.

Although the kinetic destruction they caused was considerable, the Russians pointed out that any future use of these or similar hypersonic missiles might not be nuclear tipped, but would certainly deliver powerful, conventional warheads which would neither contaminate their targets with radiation nor tilt the world into nuclear war.

And this is the beauty (if such an adjective is in any way appropriate) of such projectiles. They are precise and powerful, they don’t poison the land and the atmosphere (like the accident at a Chernobyl did) and they also suspend the whole theory of Mutually Assured Destruction. At a stroke, the one guarantor against armageddon - the nukes that the West

brandishes - has been made unusable.

Now, IRBM’s might be countered by advanced and extremely expensive anti-missile defences such as the Iron Dome which Israel uses. So, you’d think that a nation which is expecting retaliation to be well defended, but neither the past nor present government has asked the MoD what the truth is. Depressingly, Britain is horribly exposed.

Currently, our only protection against ballistic missiles is an aging fleet of Type 45 destroyers which have recently performed well against Iranian and other groups’ weapons, but there are too few of them. Twelve were commissioned in the 90s, but only six reached the fleet of which two are at sea, two at low readiness and another two in port in maintenance.

As tension rises, more Type 45’s could be pressed into service, but the variety of threats from Russia and her proxies would still leave Britain almost naked. That’s why the Kremlin has hinted that the Houthis might be used to fire at our shipping in the Red Sea, whilst Cyprus or our tiny garrison in Estonia are easy targets. Then, if President Putin were really going for broke, the US airfields in East Anglia might prove irresistible.

But here’s the crunch: all the government’s bellicosity is just fine as long as they can shelter under America’s umbrella - which both Tories and Labour have done more or less successfully. The trouble is, Team Starmer seems hell bent on upsetting President-elect Trump.

All this, of course, has made policy in Ukraine suddenly very difficult for Number 10. There’s no mistaking the President-elect’s disapproval when he said, “It's crazy. I disagree very vehemently with sending missiles hundreds of miles into Russia. Why are we doing that? We're just escalating this war.”

Yet, in the last few days of Mr Biden’s tenure, our government plugs along allowing the Ukrainians to fire Storm Shadow missiles by the bushel. But what will Mr Starmer do once President Trump actually starts to wield power? Will he suddenly curb his instincts and fall meekly in line or will he continue to play the pound shop Churchill?

It’s almost as if Mr Starmer’s trying to create a crisis between us, Russia and America, a crisis that might oh so conveniently distract people from the hash that’s being made by his government.

Patrick Mercer is a former MP for Newark and Army colonel.