What would Thatcher have made of Putin?

When Sir Tony Brenton writes a letter to the Times, as he frequently does, it always says at the bottom that he was British ambassador to Moscow. The uninformed reader could be forgiven for thinking the sub-editors have got it back to front and he was actually Russian ambassador to London. Sir Tony’s message in every letter is ‘It’s all Britain’s fault’. In his latest, his particular target was the Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, after her visit to Moscow. He said she ‘might usefully recall Margaret Thatcher’s wise message to Mikhail Gorbachev sent in 1985 as perestroika began to take off: “We know that you have as much right to feel secure as we do”’. It is hard to think of a less apt comparison. In 1985, Mrs Thatcher was offering Gorbachev some trust because she believed — correctly, though she exaggerated his power — that he was trying to reform the Soviet Union and wind down the Cold War. In 2022, Vladimir ‘Inky Poops’ Putin has massed 130,000 troops on the border of an independent democracy and is ready to invade it. It is not perestroika that is beginning to take off, but unprovoked war. If Gorbachev then had been like Putin now, Mrs Thatcher would not have uttered the words Sir Tony quotes. She did not tell the Soviets they had a right to security when they invaded Afghanistan. In 1976, she spoke so strongly against Soviet expansionism and subversion that they christened her ‘the Iron Lady’. They meant it as a mockery, but the name turned out well for her. Can’t Sir Tony see that Putin is taking Russia in the opposite direction from that which she welcomed?

Air Vice-Marshal Sir Erik Bennett, who has just died, was perhaps the last example of what used to be called an imperial loan officer.