He will have believed he had no need to define himself more clearly when his poll ratings were high. So now other people are doing it for him.
Would either or both of them have a strong enough base among Conservative MPs to make it to the membership stage?
Mission creep is even easier when it’s another nation’s soldiers fighting and dying on the front line.
Europe and the US will not repeat mistakes we made the invasion of Crimea. We will stand united, and he would be unwise to test us.
We’ve trained 22,000 members of the Ukrainian armed forces under Operation Orbital since 2015 – and have sent over 2,000 anti-tank missiles.
The Salisbury attack constituted a kind of education in how brutal and shameless Moscow is prepared to be when flouting national sovereignty.
Voters’ reluctance to act may gall the hawks, but it is decades in the making – and an accurate judgment of the UK’s actual military power.
And: surely Johnson wants to know who authorised the Nowzad instruction. Plus: go on – make it all about Brexit.
A Foreign Office civil servant said one thing and Downing Street says another. What happened?
In the public imagination, his vague nuclear threats suggest intercontinental strikes against western cities. But suppose they mean something else.