War Propaganda or Political Opportunism? How British Prime Ministers Have Used the War in Ukraine for Political Gain

Abstract

The United Kingdom reacted very quickly to the war in Ukraine and showed determination to stand by the side of President Zelensky. Over the past 15 months, the succeeding Conservative Prime Ministers have all adopted a defiant – and popular – attitude towards Vladimir Putin. Some people, however, have criticized the warlike rhetoric used by Tory leaders and described it as a distraction from the many socio-economic problems at home. Through a corpus-based approach using Critical Discourse Analysis, this paper proposes to study how recent Conservative leaders have used the war in Ukraine for their own political interests and somewhat manipulated public opinion in order to win “the battles for hearts and minds”. This article posits that warlike rhetoric was mainly used for personal gain or to create a distraction in an attempt to build a positive ethos or promote a domestic agenda.

Keywords

• propaganda
• metaphor
• boris johnson
• liz truss
• rishi sunak
• ukrainian war