Liz Truss should aspire to emulate Thatcher in Russia

The Russian political and media establishment have got Liz Truss in their sights once again. As well as analyst Igor Korotchenko’s crude declaration that Truss ‘doesn’t belong in politics, but in the kitchen’, a clip currently doing the rounds on Russian TV shows her shocked reaction in July when presenter Kate McCann fainted and keeled over in a TV debate. Vladimir Solovyov, a key Kremlin propagandist, has argued that the same stunned helplessness would be Truss’s reaction ‘when Britain falls’ and accused her of ‘delusions of grandeur’. The Kremlin, it’s clear, doesn’t hold our likely soon-to-be Prime Minister in very high esteem, though whether this reflects a sharp decline in British secretaries of state or in Russian standards of gallantry is a moot point.

Truss cannot be said to have got off to a good start with the Kremlin. In her diplomatic visit to Moscow as Foreign Secretary in the days leading up to Putin’s February invasion, she showed, it seemed, complete ignorance of the fact that Voronezh and Rostov oblasts were Russian, not Ukrainian, regions (as Rostov-on-Don is the country’s tenth largest city, this was something of a gaffe).