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). Sergei Lavrov – in a case of the pot calling the samovar metallic – said dealing with the Foreign Secretary was like ‘speaking to a deaf person who listens but does not hear’. A Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman blogged afterwards that ‘If anyone needs saving from anything, it’s the world, from the stupidity and ignorance of British politicians.’
Geography aside, Truss had clearly put thought into her visit to Moscow, sporting a Russian-style fur hat much as her heroine Margaret Thatcher had done on her Soviet visit in 1987. Yet here again the Russian media jumped on her. Seizing on the stereotype, the anchor of Russia’s 60 Minutes thanked God she had not brought ‘a balalaika and a samovar with her’. Few people in Russia wear such hats anymore, apart from old men and tourists – and one doesn’t much want to look like either.
For more than half an hour Thatcher ran ideological rings round her three hapless hosts
It’s not the first time Truss has apparently sought to emulate Thatcher. Indeed, whether being photographed like her role-model driving a tank, disporting herself with livestock or cheerily handling a pint-glass, it seems the Foreign Secretary has been cosplaying the former Prime Minister for some time. In the Telegraph this weekend, free market sage Professor Patrick Minford said Truss was ‘the nearest thing we’ve got to Mrs Thatcher’. If similar things were said about Theresa May on her 2016 accession, it’s perhaps churlish to recall them.
Yet the Russian media focus on Truss’s tremulous pallor at the McCann-collapse – something that actually humanised her in the UK – is in stark contrast to its treatment of Thatcher nearly 50 years ago. It will be remembered that the very label ‘Iron Lady’ – which Thatcher clung to as doggedly as it clung to her – was awarded to the Conservative leader in 1976 by the Soviet newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (‘Red Star’) who broke the new nickname in the headline ‘Zheleznaya Dama Ugrozhaet’ (‘The Iron Lady makes threats’). This followed a fiercely anti-Soviet speech Thatcher had made at the Chelsea Conservatives Association. Right from the beginning, long before the UK opened its eyes, it seemed the Soviets had got the measure of Margaret Hilda Thatcher.
But it was on her visit to Moscow in 1987 for talks with Premier Mikhail Gorbachev – who died on Tuesday, aged 91 – that Soviet regard for the PM seemed to go off-the-scale. It was not only the photo opportunities, though Thatcher certainly benefitted from them, whether being mobbed by city locals, visiting a Russian Orthodox church, or snapped against the background of Soviet housing blocks in her famous camel-and-sable coat and fox-fur hat (as fashionable in the SU back then as big hair or shoulder pads in the West). It was also a visit of substance and statesmanship. Thatcher, knowing she would be supping with the West’s most formidable ideological opponents, said she had never ‘prepared in so much detail and thought so carefully of what [she] wanted to do’, consulting in advance a range of Soviet experts including defector and former KGB-colonel Oleg Gordievsky. In Russia she entertained, at her insistence, the regime’s leading dissidents (headed by physicist Andrei Sakharov) and took part in an uncut TV interview on Soviet television, where for more than half an hour she ran ideological rings round her three hapless hosts. In the process she alerted the Soviet public to Kremlin decisions and policies previously unknown to them. As Gorbachev later said, ‘Our three journalists lost out – totally. She won almost every point that was raised.’ The Maggie hairstyle was suddenly in vogue in Moscow salons. Comparisons were made, locally, to Catherine the Great.
What hit hardest for the Kremlin were her talks with Gorbachev himself, which overran by several hours and were frank and unfettered. The conversation took in arms control, Soviet human rights, economic reforms and the Kremlin occupation of Afghanistan. As Baron Powell, Thatcher’s Private Secretary, described it, ‘The talks were frank with no quarter asked or given. The Duke of Wellington would have recognised it as hard pounding.’ Gorbachev echoed him to the Politburo: ‘She is an audacious woman. She acted as if she were in her own parliament. You couldn’t see this in any theatre.’
Thatcher left Russia with Britain’s image enhanced and the Cold War’s end accelerated, and it’s a tribute to both her and Gorbachev that the ‘hard pounding’ (as it were) brought them closer together. Later, in response to Mugabe’s comment that Thatcher was a ‘difficult woman’, Gorbachev replied: ‘On the other hand… she is straightforward. She says what she thinks. She does not mince her words. She has a dislike for diplomatic fog.’ Sometimes the back and forth between them crackled. At their dinner that night, pointing to a landscape painting in the dining room, Gorbachev said it was just like the talks between them, ‘tempestuous but with great clarity.’ Yes, agreed Thatcher drily, and had he noticed that in the painting the light was coming from the West?
There’s no need, perhaps, to stress further differences between Liz Truss and Margaret Thatcher: the comparison makes itself and is, just conceivably, misguided. Thatcher too was barracked for feebleness in the early years of opposition. ‘She never risks anything,’ muttered MP Barbara Castle, calling Thatcher (with comic lack of foresight) a ‘tame bird’. Labour Chancellor Denis Healey said she delivered her ‘disconnected little homilies… with all the moral passion and intellectual distinction of a railway timetable.’ In 11 years of power she’d make blini of them both.
If Truss is a shoo-in for next PM, she may yet pull something out of that Russian hat of hers. Hopes for another Iron Lady may be unrealistic, as her flight from a BBC interview this week brought home. But as she faces this autumn the massed HIMARs of recession, inflation, housing-fuel shortages and a drawn-out Ukrainian war, we will certainly discover of what metal Liz Truss herself is made. Perhaps we’d all better steel ourselves.
Comments