Putin

What a nice host Vladimir Putin is. Shortly after world leaders gathered in his country for the G20 summit in St Petersburg, a briefing from the President’s official spokesman that Britain is ‘just a small island no-one pays any attention to’ made its way into the media. Nothing like rubbing the nose of one of your guests in the dirt as politicians in this country work out where Britain now stands in the world after rejecting intervention in Syria (more on this in James’s column this week). A Downing Street source has responded in the brittle manner of a slighted guest at a tense dinner party (think an international version of

To Kensington last night, to celebrate Russia Day at the glorious mansion of the noble, kind and august ambassador. There was patriotic music, oratory of great distinction and the crowd rejoiced; or so the propagandists will have it. Tongues loosened as the Russian Standard flowed. John Whittingdale, Commissar of the Culture Media and Sport Select Committee, was ripe for gossip: ‘If half of what I hear is true it will be quite a show trial,’ he told me. ‘There is all sorts to come out yet.’ Whatever was he talking about? Guests were reluctant to discuss the forthcoming G8 summit in Northern Ireland. I hear that the Russian delegation’s travel plans

Late on Friday my editor at the Observer called and asked me to dash off a few words on what was wrong with the Mail and some Conservative MPs demanding that the BBC ban ‘Ding, dong the witch is dead’, a Munchkin chorus, from The Wizard of Oz. I was stuck on a train to Glasgow, but how could I resist? The partially successful attempt to stop the BBC playing a clip from a 1939 children’s film is one of the most surreal cases of censorship I have seen. Right wingers were not demanding that the BBC blacklist the song because it was pornographic or libellous. The lyrics the merry

Part 1 “Russian Justice” A judge at Moscow’s Tverskoi District Court stopped the trial of Sergei Magnitsky (above) yesterday – but not because the defendant was dead. Magnitsky’s demise was of no concern to the judge. It did not bother him in the slightest. The court merely postponed proceedings until 4 March when the world will see something rarely seen since the Middle Ages: a prosecutor arraigning a corpse. The Putin regime – that mixture of autocracy and gangsterism – is desperate to discredit the late Mr Magnitsky and his employer, Bill Browder of Hermitage Capital. If you don’t know the story, I’ll explain why. Browder exposed corruption in Russian

A surprisingly large turn-out last night for the launch of the Conservative Friends of Russia, given the recent ‘Pussy Riot’ trial mess. A notable absence from the Kremlin ambassador’s garden was Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the group’s Hon. President. There was also a distinct absence of parliamentarians. Lumbering up to the plate was John Wittingdale, whose proclaimed love of the motherland goes beyond his Russian girlfriend. The Chairman of the Culture Select Committee has been known to be close to the country for years and extolled his love of Russian literature to the two hundred strong crowd. He mentioned the latest Putin controversy and did indeed declare himself a music fan.

One of the happiest things about writing for the Spectator is that there is no editorial line. Indeed the editor is always pleased by an intra-mural rammy. So there’s this: Dennis Sewell’s argument that Pussy Riot, the only all-girl Russian punk band you’re likely to have heard of, have been asking for trouble and deserve some of the trouble they’re receiving is the lamest sort of counter-intuitive, concern-trolling journalism. It helps pay the bills, mind you, so there’s that too. Having typed the obligatory “Of course Putin is ghastly” paragraph (or, as Sewell puts it, the Russian president is “a nasty, unscrupulous weasel” which, perhaps unwittingly, makes Putin seem a

If you enjoy scoring tiny but likely returns on your wagers, then how about putting some money down on Vladimir Putin to win today’s presidential election in Russia? William Hill are currently offering odds of 1/100, if you’re interested. Like John Simpson, writing for this week’s Spectator, they regard this as ‘Russia’s Coronation Day’. A near cert. The rest of Simpson’s article is worth reading, but it’s his conclusion that we’ll pull out here. Putin, he says, will ‘walk it in the first round’ today, but his medium-term future looks far less secure: ‘Russia is changing. It can’t simply be told to shut up any more. Soon — not within