Deploying the military against migrants and attacking the BBC are distractions to buy a beleaguered prime minister time
When all else fails, send in the big guns. Or rather, pretend to. In the 1997 American satire Wag the Dog, a devious president invents a fictional war with Albania to distract voters from an embarrassing sex scandal. And by shamelessly whipping up a patriotic storm, he almost gets away with it.
While Boris Johnson has thankfully stopped short of declaring a war, he appears to be offering wobbling Conservative voters the next best thing: Operation Red Meat, involving threats to deploy the RAF and the navy against migrant boats in the Channel, plus some ritual BBC-bashing and assorted other wheezes designed to buy a beleaguered prime minister time. Presumably, he wants Daily Express readers to be under the vague impression that Britain is ready, if not quite to bomb refugees back to France, then at the very least to up the ante. Like the rest of Operation Red Meat, however, this one whiffs of something long past its sell-by date.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
