Paul Johnson

Paul Johnson’s diary: Boris would make a great PM – but he must strike now

Plus: The terror of my grandchildren’s history exams, and the greatest artistic loss of the second world war

[Getty Images] 
issue 10 May 2014

I feel an intense antipathy for Vladimir Putin. No one on the international scene has aroused in me such dislike since Stalin died. Though not a mass killer on the Stalin scale, he has the same indifference to human life. There is a Stalinist streak of gangsterism too: his ‘loyalists’ wear masks as well as carry guns.

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