Seven hundred years ago last month, a mighty roar shattered the night’s silence in the small East Anglian town of Ely. The elegantly constructed, but inadequately underpinned, tower of the cathedral had come crashing unexpectedly to earth. Luckily, it being midnight, the building was empty, and no-one was hurt. The cathedral chapter immediately set to work, and just 20 years later the famous octagonal lantern was in its place. It has lasted.

In the last fortnight, the lofty intellectual edifice of Western diplomacy and Western illusions about the world has suffered a similar catastrophe. Sober handling and great statesmanship are now needed if we are to share the good luck of Ely’s clergy in avoiding harm and if we are to rebuild as successfully as they did.

As so often, Boris Johnson has risen to the occasion and expressed the moral outrage we all feel at Vladimir Putin’s unjust and evil war. Our Government has got most things right so far. Britain woke up early to the Russian threat, we have been training and arming the Ukrainians, and we tried to warn as the disaster approached.  

But these actions came after many years of Western unseriousness about foreign and defence policy. Although Britain began to mark a different direction with last year’s foreign policy review, too many Western policy-makers and diplomats had built a world view based on illusions: the fantasy that every country saw things as we did, that diplomacy was best conducted by posturing and virtue-signalling, and that deference to international institutions was the best solution to every problem.

It is this elegant but dysfunctional and feebly underpinned intellectual edifice that has finally come crashing down under the onslaught of Russian tanks.

Admittedly not everyone has got the message yet. The former head of the Foreign Office tweeted this week that the crisis “will severely weaken international capacity and will to take urgent steps needed to address climate change”. Let’s hope he’s right. For now, we need to focus on energy security and cost.  

This Western performative diplomacy has already done too much damage. We let the WHO be taken over by the Chinese but still treated it as neutral on Covid. We let UN human rights bodies be dominated by human rights violators but still behaved as if they were sources of moral authority. We deserted our friends in Afghanistan. No wonder Putin thought he could try it on.

Things now have to change. Last week has been very encouraging. Maybe, just maybe, Western muscle memory is returning and we are getting back to the principles that helped us to win the Cold War. The astonishing renewal of Western purpose in the last week has shown what we often forget – that the West is extremely powerful. When we wish to exert ourselves, few can stand in our way. We can gather much of international society to our fold and draw on the moral strength of democracy and freedom in doing so.  

But equally, we should not flip from weakness to overconfidence. Despite all the confident predictions, no-one knows what will happen next in Ukraine. Painful as it is, we are right not to get involved in this fight ourselves. Dealing with a nuclear power is not the same as taking on Serbia, Libya, or Iraq. We cannot be casual about the UK and Nato getting into a shooting war with a nuclear-armed Russia.

So we should be measured, sober, and predictable in our actions. We are right to work closely with the EU and our Nato allies. We should keep sending defensive weapons, keep up the sanctions squeeze, and make the life of Russia’s elites as painful as possible – but also be open to off-ramps and work to find ways to defuse the crisis.  

We must face facts. We might get lucky and see the Putin regime overthrown. But we would be unwise to bet on it, and it should not be a war aim. More realistically, if the heroic Ukrainians do manage to fight the Russians to a standstill, it is likely that this war will be ended through negotiation. This will create, at best, an unstable and fragile cold peace. If Ukraine is defeated, then Nato will have a border with an aggressive and unpredictable Russia. Either way, we are in a new world, and in it for the long haul.

That will have consequences for us here at home. We are going to face new difficulties and new headwinds. We now need our Government to show seriousness and focus.

We must get serious about energy security and that must now mean we lift the moratorium on shale gas. We are going to have to spend more on defence and that will mean tough choices. We need to reform and liberalise so that investment keeps coming. The tax increases planned for April look ever more risky and should surely now be deferred.  

In short, we need a sense of priorities. Banning “buy one get one free” deals and conversion therapy might have to wait.
The lesson we must take is that the world is dangerous. There are people who want to harm us. We must not pretend the world is something it is not and we must act accordingly.  

Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should.  

We have had no end of a lesson: It will do us no end of good.