10 Sep 2011

Putin, Blair and the deep freeze that won’t thaw

Off to Moscow tomorrow. The PM has two dozen CEOs with him for the trip. But it’s a very short one. A kind of testing the water to see if Russo-British relations should come out of the deep freeze or not. The Russian Ambassador to the UK compared it to a one-day cricket game – still worth a watch … but it’s not the two-day/two-city summit David Cameron once, perhaps naively, considered.

In the run-up, we’ve learnt more about the full extent of the diplomatic chill that’s been in place since the death of Alexander Litvinenko on British soil. Tony Blair met Vladimir Putin one last time after that at the  Heiligendamm G7 summit in June 2007. It was a bi-lateral Tony Blair described that day as “frank”.

That can sometimes be diplomatic speak for “a shouting match”. I’m told it wasn’t actually quite like that though. The tempers in the room stayed under control. Voices were not raised. But Tony Blair, who had reached out to Putin for some time, told him in direct language rarely used in high level talks of this kind that he, Putin, was steering his country into being a dictatorship and away from the Western democratic model he was supposed to be striving to follow.

Putin, I understand, didn’t budge. Tony Blair rejected FCO advice to throw out some Russian diplomats and decided instead to put Russo-British relations in the deep freeze. We now know that part of that process included MI6. They can have a reasonably high threshold of tolerance about sister intelligence agencies as Libya is reminding us.

But when a sister agency actually ends up jeopardising the lives of your own citizens it crosses a line. So we’ve been refusing contact and cooperation with the Russians, which had been growing post 1989 and they, in the form of the mighty Prime Minister and once and future President, Vladimir Putin, have been refusing to talk to us.

I hear, by the way, that Tony Blair was taken aback by how little support any other country – the US, Germany or anyone else – wanted to give us when we were first piling pressure on the Russians over Litvenenko. In his memoirs, which are often pretty candid, this whole episode is skirted over. Tony Blair says he’s still trying to understand Putin, and doesn’t condemn him outright. His former colleagues remember Putin making a friendly call to Blair back when the US Presidential “hanging chad” election was tied.

He asked Blair’s advice – should he call Gore to congratulate him or not? Blair said hold your fire. More significantly, when Putin had been attacking Chechnya Tony Blair told aides to “cut him some slack” because of his Muslim extremist elements. But the relationship foundered, the westernising Peter the Great character that Blair thought he could help bring in from the cold is now truly lost. But better to have his phone number at least, a channel of communication, given Russia is on the UN as one of the Permanent Five.

FCO hands say they’ll never let a British leader get so optimistic again about Russia. One old FCO Russia hand said to me: “They think we’re fundamentally a declining power living in the past – and that’s what we think of them.” One former Foreign Secretary said much the same to me.

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