Why Putin is even less of a human than Stalin was

LBC likes to tell us it’s ‘Leading Britain’s Conversation’, though in the case of weekday pre-lunch presenter James O’Brien you’ll have to sit through a series of bombastic monologues from the host before any punters get a word in edgeways. O’Brien knows everything, and he doesn’t mind telling you. Still, I understand that running a talk show is no job for timid introverts who might burst into tears if callers start giving them a hard time. The trick is pretending to listen sympathetically while being ready to drop the guillotine without compunction (after all, these people aren’t your friends, they’re just statistics for the business plan). Anyway, after last Thursday’s programme I could forgive O’Brien a lot, even the number of times he says ‘if you will’, though largely because he’d brought a guest into the studio.

It was Bill Browder, the American turbo-capitalist who set up the vastly lucrative Hermitage fund in Moscow in the mid-1990s. Browder invested cannily in the Russian stock market and eventually amassed $4.5 billion in assets, despite the fact that he was operating in an environment that made the Wild West look like Trumpton. However, after a honeymoon period in which he managed to convince himself that Vladimir Putin was a Good Thing for Russia and was trying to curb the powers of the oligarchs who had bought control of everything from the oilfields to the interior ministry, it all went to hell. Browder had been publicly exposing the depredations of the oligarchs (his ‘stealing analysis’ revealed that the management of Gazprom had pilfered oil and gas equivalent to the output of Kuwait), but when he turned the spotlight on Putin the going abruptly got rough. Browder had to flee the country, but his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was imprisoned and beaten to death with rubber batons.

Browder tells all this in his new book Red Notice, but hearing him recount it in person made for enthralling listening (listeners were pelting O’Brien with texts telling him he needs more guests like this).