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.
It’s not normal vanity, this. Two years ago, when rumour had it that his marriage was in trouble, Vlad and the missus, Lyudmila, invited Russian state TV into their home. The pair of them sat on a sofa that was brown in a room that was brown, both wearing clothes, remarkably, that were exactly the same brown as everything else. It wasn’t nice. And yet this is a man who shaves his chest and gets half-naked to be photographed riding a horse or fishing. Think about that. These are insecty pursuits, infamously so. To attempt either one of them without the protection, even, of hair? Proper alpha.
He’s paranoid about his height, too. You wonder why he’s only friends with Silvio Berlusconi, Hugo Chavez and the Chinese? It’s because, unlike the leaders of the free world (Sarkozy excepted) they don’t loom over him as though he was a child.
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