UK, Russia and Monty Python

There are occasions when people in powerful positions make fools of themselves. They just can't help making stupid, alarmist comments. And for once I'm not talking about Donald Trump. The UK Defence Secretary, Gavin Williamson, very new in the job and exceptionally young for such a cabinet post after no previous ministerial experience, told a newspaper in a recent interview that "thousands and thousands and thousands" of Britons could be killed by a Russian cyber attack on Britain's electricity and other energy supplies. I cannot imagine what encouraged him to say such a thing. Is there intelligence that this is what Russia is planning to do in the next few weeks? Are we about to go to war with Russia? Or was he just hypothesising? If so, what on earth for? Was he making a bid for more money for the defence budget or did he just want a nice huge headline for himself? Well he got that, in the Daily Telegraph first, and then in every other newspaper. It seems to me to be staggeringly alarmist. Moscow responded by saying that such a remark was right out of a Monty Python sketch. I assume/hope Williamson was seriously embarrassed and severely upbraided by Number 10. I'm not downgrading the potential threat Putin's Russia poses. Putin is a pretty cold fish and maybe he does have dreams about crippling the West with cyber attacks. But he now knows that if he did such a thing to the US to destroy America's economy, Trump could respond with nuclear weapons. That's what is implied in his Nuclear Posture Review to be published next month. So Putin is not going to do any such thing and why would he pick out Britain for cyber annihilation. It's all nonsense. Williamson might just as well have warned in his interview with the Daily Telegraph: "If the Martians land in Britain we could face total oblivion." Alarmist and unfounded talk like this should be beneath a minister holding one of the most important jobs in government. He could easily have confined his remarks to saying that countries such as Russia were developing highly sophisticated cyber warfare technology and that this posed a serious threat in the future. OK, it doesn't make such good headlines but at least it would have been sensible and responsible. Moscow couldn't have responded then with the Monty Python jibe.