The thing about Vladimir Putin is that he doesn’t give a damn

I do love hearing that old anecdote about Andrew Marr rushing through the Kremlin en route to some assignment, and noticing various guards, soldiers and literal apparatchiks leaping up and clicking their heels, under the impression he was Vladimir Putin. Always, though, I find myself wondering whether anybody has ever had the guts to tell it to Putin himself. Shouldn’t have thought so. ‘Gollum?’ he’d say, peering at you with those cold, colourless eyes of his. ‘You are saying, comrade, that I look like Gollum?’ Brrr. You’d never eat sashimi again.

It’s a source of endless fascination to me, the vanity of Vladimir Putin. Because that resemblance is decreasing, isn’t it? Marr is ageing as God intended, sort of like a filleted, deflating Martin Clunes. Putin, though, has gone odd. Smooth, almost bulging, there’s a strange matt sheen to his face suddenly, almost like they’ve already done the old dictator pickle on him, even though he’s still very much walking about.