24 The Sunday Times April 24, 2022COMMENT
V
ladimir Putin throwing oppo-
nents on a judo mat; Vladimir
Putin riding on horseback
topless; Vladimir Putin taking a
dip in icy waters. Most of us
have rolled our eyes at macho
propaganda shots of the Russian
dictator in the face of the most
sinister nationalist imagery of the 20th
century.
And for years, democratically elected
leaders made the same mistake of under-
estimating the man who has become the
biggest threat to freedom since Adolf
Hitler. Vladimir Putin razing the Chechen
capital of Grozny in 1999 and 2000;
Vladimir Putin invading Georgia in 2008;
Vladimir Putin annexing Crimea in 2014.
Britain, the European Union and America
gave muted responses to each outrage
then tried to reset relations with the
Kremlin. Germany gave the go-ahead to
the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline with Russia
the year after Crimea. Now mothballed, it
is emblematic of the West’s misguided
collective bet that engaging with Russia
would eventually bring it closer to the
liberal fold. It served only to embolden its
tyrannical ruler.
Two months after Putin invaded
Ukraine, it is time to take stock. Boris
Johnson’s government has led the way in
supplying arms to President Zelensky’s
troops, the most recent idea being to send
Challenger 2 tanks to Poland to “backfill”
Warsaw’s armoury as it supplies Ukraine
with Soviet-era T-72s. Finland and Sweden
may join Nato, and the mutual defence
alliance so hated by Putin has said it will
deploy new battle groups in Bulgaria,
Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. The
West has rediscovered its shared sense of
purpose — although Germany continues
to stall on the immediate halting of
Russian gas imports, the hard-right
candidate Marine Le Pen is challenging
Emmanuel Macron in the second round of
the French presidential election today
and the Hungarian nationalist Viktor
Orban attacked Zelensky after winning a
fourth term this month.
But we must also reflect on the sleepy
decades that led to the watershed morn-
ing of February 24. Margaret Thatcher’s
declaration in 1984, after meeting Mikhail
Gorbachev, that “we can do business
together” ushered in a period of
confidence that Russia would in time join
the international mainstream. Three years
after the atrocities in Grozny ended, TonyBlair welcomed Putin to London, where
he stayed at Buckingham Palace. The
following week, Putin’s now-sanctioned
ally Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea
Football Club, opening up a new era when
oligarchs became well-known — even
popular — figures in British public life.
As our Insight investigation lays out
today, successive governments failed to
grasp the danger posed by Putin, and Rus-
sian money. The few voices who called for
a more hawkish approach were sidelined
in favour of a policy amounting to
appeasement. Sir Michael Fallon, the
former defence secretary, claims that he
and the Ministry of Defence were “sty-
mied and we were blocked in cabinet from
sending the Ukrainians the arms they
needed” after the invasion of Crimea.
David Cameron, then prime minister,
publicly insisted the crisis could be solved
only through diplomacy.
The poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his
daughter Yulia on British soil in 2018
prompted Theresa May to expel 23
Russian diplomats. Business as usual was
quickly resumed and by 2019, the year of
Johnson’s election victory, the Conserva-
tive Party had received a total of £1.5 mil-
lion from Russian-linked donors.
This approach was by no means
unique to Britain. The former German
chancellor Gerhard Schröder remains
chairman of the Russian oil giant Rosneft
and Nord Stream, testament to a decades-
long rapprochement with Russia which
has left the country importing almost 60
per cent of its gas from Putin.
Flexibility and open-mindedness are
strengths, not weaknesses, of western
democracies. But confused thinking
towards Russia blinded us to the threat
posed by Putin. As Liam Fox, the former
defence secretary, told a Commons
debate in 2015, failing to stand up to Putin
amounted to “a bully’s charter that is
already discredited by history”.
Having belatedly woken up, the West
must now stay alert. Putin is a massive
challenge to global energy supplies, the
world’s ability to feed itself, and the
prospect of nuclear proliferation. At a
time of great instability the West needs to
be clear-headed about what it stands for
and who its friends are. That means
addressing the longer-term — but possibly
more serious — problem of President Xi’s
increasingly belligerent China. The western
alliance must hold together in the face of a
menacing new world order.Being able to turn the lights on is like being
able to buy food or knowing the money in
your bank is safe. It is an essential, not a
luxury. Yet while banks have been tightly
controlled since the financial crisis,
energy companies have been the subject
of a regulatory experiment.
To inject vitality into the market and
break the grip of the big six energy provid-
ers, Ofgem allowed an army of poorly cap-
italised suppliers to take on customers.
The number of energy suppliers in Britain
swelled from 12 in 2010 to 70 in 2018.
Volatile gas prices, and the price cap
that stops suppliers passing on increases
immediately to consumers, have led
almost 30 to go bust. The biggest and most
prominent is Bulb, whose failure has left
1.7 million customers in limbo and could
cost taxpayers more than £2.2 billion.
Jonathan Brearley, Ofgem’s chief exec-
utive, admitted last year that regulationswere “not ready to weather a global shock
on this scale”. That is not good enough.
Energy is a market where resilience mat-
ters as much as competitiveness. The
authorities have lost sight of the former.
Tougher regulation overnight could
start another wave of collapses. Ofgem
and the government must carefully for-
mulate a new regime to prevent a wipeout
on this scale happening again, then phase
it in gradually. They should consider a
role for the Bank of England’s Prudential
Regulatory Authority in assessing sup-
pliers’ balance sheets. They should also
follow through with a plan for mandatory
ring-fencing of customer deposits.
Competition is a good thing as a rule.
But competition should not come at the
expense of stable energy supplies — and
taxpayers should never again be left pick-
ing up the bill as a result of risks taken by
private-sector entrepreneurs.Encourage competition
but don’t blow the bulbs
Britain needs more sex. As we report
today, a swelling range of gummies, pills
and potions is flooding the UK market,
promising to enhance the “sexual well-
ness” of a nation that, since lockdown,
just hasn’t been in the mood.
The treatments contain such erotic-
sounding ingredients as French maritime
pine bark, fenugreek and broccoli. We
find it hard to think of anything less sexy
than broccoli but whatever lights yourcandle, as Gwyneth Paltrow might say.
The makers claim the pills will turbo-
charge your libido. We wonder if they can
stand that up. “Wellness” is often a cover
for expensive hokum.
Here’s an alternative: turn down the
lights, open some decent wine and put on
that Ibiza chillout mix (or Barry White, if
you must).
It works for most people, we’re told,
and there’s no hard sell required.Business time
ESTABLISHED 1822Asleep on the job for years,
the West must now stay alert
Dominic Lawson
the areas in which the public has the least
confidence in the government. But when asked
why, the most cited factor is the failure to stop
vessels travelling illegally across the Channel
from France. This would become multiply
more dangerous to the government if one
accepts the view of the UK’s former Border
Force chief, Tony Smith, who last week told the
Policy Exchange think tank that, unchecked,
there would be about a fourfold increase in
such arrivals. “That’s going to be over 100,000
this year by migrant boats alone,” he warned.
You certainly can’t claim to be “taking back
control” of immigration if that happens — just
as David Cameron was made to look ridiculous
after making the ludicrous pledge to cut annual
net migration to the “tens of thousands”, while
remaining in the EU’s freedom-of-movement
treaties. Not only was that impossible, but the
resultant policies made the obstacle to high-
achieving Commonwealth citizens coming here
even more palpably unfair.
Indeed, while we were in the EU, it was UK
opposition to opening up visas for Indians that
stood in the way of Brussels’ attempts to get a
trade deal with Delhi. But now Johnson is
there, offering yet more liberalisation of visas
to get a UK-India trade deal. This will further
enrage Lord Green. But as Julian Jessop (that
rare bird, a pro-Brexit economist) put it to me:
“If we were going to see a backlash in, for
example, the red-wall constituencies, surely it
would have happened by now?”
One reason we haven’t may be that high-
skilled Indians or Hongkongers are not rocking
up in large numbers in “red wall” seats, to be
accused of “taking our jobs”. And the political
salience of immigration has fallen. That may in
part be precisely because of the end of free
movement and its replacement with a system
that, however tailored to the demands of
employers (it gives them pretty much all they
asked for), is autonomously “controlled” by the
government, answerable to the electorate.
Polling by British Future backs this up. Its
director, Sunder Katwala, responding to the
visa approval figures, said that the research
provided “very strong evidence” for the
proposition that the public are more
concerned about “control” than about overall
numbers. Which is why the government, for
purely political reasons, as well as the desire to
deter dangerous and illicit human trafficking, is
staking so much on its Rwanda scheme.
Even if the Archbishop of Canterbury says
God would vote against it.
[email protected]B
oris Johnson, we are told, is furious
with the Archbishop of Canterbury,
whose Easter sermon was an
anathema (“The principle must stand
the judgment of God and it cannot”)
upon the government’s plans to
redirect to Rwanda those smuggled
here across the Channel. I’m more
inclined to think the prime minister might be
pleased that Justin Welby’s characteristically
political intervention kept the scheme, a
centrepiece of the Conservative’s campaign in
the local elections, at the top of the news
agenda at the start of the week.
The result was that another story about
immigration, which emerged on Easter
Monday, was almost completely ignored. This
was the publication of Home Office figures for
the numbers legally entering this country on
work visas in the first year of its new post-
Brexit immigration policy. They showed that
239,987 visas were granted, 25 per cent higher
than in 2019 (before the figures were distorted
by Covid). And the number of students granted
visas rocketed by more than 50 per cent over
2019 — to a record of 432,279.
The work visas were, to an overwhelming
extent, granted to skilled workers from outside
the EU, with Indians very high on the list
(Nigerians were top). This, actually, fulfilled
one of the promises of the Brexit campaign:
although public concern about high
immigration figures fuelled the leave vote, the
promise in the leaflets was to replace “free
movement” of Europeans with a system that
did not favour EU citizens over those from the
Commonwealth — a bespoke British one
specifically to attract skilled labour.
In fact Theresa May, while not a Brexit
supporter, was, as PM (and before, as home
secretary), fixated on the idea of reducing
overall immigration figures in a way Johnson
has never been; at times it seemed she thought
of nothing else. This, and the resulting change
in approach, was best summed up in a paper,
Immigration and the UK Economy, by
Professor Jonathan Portes. Contrasting “the
notably restrictionist” May with the “relatively
liberal” Johnson, Portes wrote: “The new
system is therefore less about reducing
migration, and more about making it more
diverse (in a geographic sense) and more
selective (in relation to the skill level of
workers)”. He observed that the consequence
could be seen in the shift towards “non-EU
migrants who... work in occupations that are
generally higher skilled than the UK average”and away from “those from [such EU countries
as Bulgaria and Romania] — much more likely
to work in low-skilled occupations”.
This strikes me as a demonstration in
practice of the frequently derided post-Brexit
“Global Britain” preached by Johnson (though
not in a cathedral). Portes was no supporter of
Brexit but he gives credit where credit is due.
Then there was the government’s decision,
following China’s trashing of the “one country,
two systems” commitment at the time of our
handing back of Hong Kong, to grant visas to all
those in the former colony with British
National (Overseas) passports.
Lord Adonis, the former Labour minister
and possibly the most anti-Brexit figure in the
Palace of Westminster, acclaimed this initiative
of two Tories who had been on the opposite
end of the debate: Dominic Raab and Priti
Patel. Adonis said: “The Hongkongers have the
lot: money, English, ambition — even British
patriotism from the get-go. It is one of the
bigger ironies of modern British politics that
the party that took us out of the EU because of
xenophobia is welcoming hundreds of
thousands of Hongkongers after barely any
public or parliamentary debate.”
Simultaneously, the open-ended offer to
rescue Hong Kong BNO passport holders from
enveloping communist tyranny was the subject
of an angry article on the Conservative Home
website by Lord Green of Deddington, the
president of Migration Watch: “It is no
exaggeration to say that the government’s
extraordinarily ill-conceived policy on Hong
Kong could cost them the next election.”
Summing up Johnson’s migration policies in
general, Green thundered: “The outcome is the
very opposite of ‘taking back control’ of
immigration. It is a betrayal... a particular
betrayal of many working-class voters,
especially in the ‘red wall’ constituencies.”
But is it? And do they see it that way? True,
recent polls suggest that immigration is amongE
lon Musk, the richest man in the world,
said in an interview last week that he
doesn’t own a house, let alone the
second, third and fourth houses that
one might expect from a squillionaire,
plus perhaps a yacht or two and, in his
case, maybe some planets. Musk, who
is worth about $270 billion, according
to Forbes magazine, tweeted in 2020, “I am
selling almost all physical possessions. Will
own no house.” Last summer he said that he
was renting a modest $50,000 property near
his SpaceX HQ in Texas, and that there was also
an “events house” near San Francisco. Now,
though, he sleeps in friends’ spare rooms, or
on their sofas. “If I travel to the Bay Area, which
is where most of Tesla’s engineering is, I
basically rotate through friends’ spare
bedrooms,” he said.
Musk seems an eccentric person and I find it
highly likeable that his definition of living well
doesn’t include the usual accessories of wealth,
such as the greedy acquisition of more
property than anyone could possibly know
what to do with; there to sit, empty and
unlived-in, gathering dust until the owner
deigns to pay it a visit. I am down on second
homers generally, let alone third and fourth
homers, because they often kill the spirit of the
places they purport to love by turning them
into ghost towns “out of season” (the nerve of
this — it’s always the season if you live there
full-time), and because the price inflation they
create makes it impossible for locals to afford
property.
But I’m not sure about the endless spare
room hopping scenario either. There is
something terribly entitled about refusing to be
self-reliant when you have all the resources in
the world: be a free spirit, by all means, but
then don’t expect people to give you beds.
Musk’s poor friends! I imagine him gaily ringing
the doorbell and standing there with his
backpack going, “Only me! I’ve come to stay for
a while! Fun, right? F-U-N”, and his hosts
smiling super-politely while wishing they’d had
the foresight to turn off the lights and hide.Does Musk tidy up? Does he do his own
laundry? Would you come back from work to
find he’d made a delicious dinner and whizzed
the hoover around? Because otherwise, no.
Not fun. If I was the richest man in the world
and insisted on staying in people’s spare rooms
for indefinite periods of time, I would arrive
with a housekeeper and maybe a chef and put
them up nearby. That would suggest that
guests know they’re imposing, though, and
they never do. It does not occur to them.
The fact is, spontaneously offering yourself
as a house guest is not the giant treat people
imagine it to be, whether you’re Elon Musk or
not. Does anyone like having people to stay for
more than a night or two (three, according to
Benjamin Franklin, who said guests were like
fish and went off after that)? The idea is nice,
but the reality is more akin to running a B&B,
except with lunch and dinner thrown in.
Unless the guests are your children or close
friends who don’t mind unappealing tasks —
“Could you slice this enormous pile of onions
and then just check the path for dog poo?” —
the process is deeply unrelaxing. It only gets
worse at this time of year, when the weather
perks up and the city dweller’s thoughts turn to
friends who live in the country. “Shall we comefor the weekend?” they ask gaily. “We’ll bring
the whole brood.” All you want to do is lounge
about pottering, but no. It’s time to put your
chambermaid/cook/tourist guide skills to the
test, remembering to save some energy for the
clean-up and laundry operation that’s required
after the guests have gone.
Mind you, living in an exciting, famous city
has its perils, too. You barrage your way
through the working week in keen anticipation
of the weekend, only to find that the casually
extended, not-really-meaning-it invitation to
come and stay has been taken up by people
you barely know. Once, when I lived in
London, the guests in question spent most of
their time moaning that they didn’t think the
city was at all what it was cracked up to be and
that there were an awful lot of foreigners
(including their hostess, which I didn’t point
out but felt, roilingly, for the full 48 hours).
Even the nicest guests imaginable cramp
your style after a while. You can’t say “I’m
bored with talking now, I want to read my
book” without seeming rude. You can’t chat
inanely about the ploddy, quotidian but
interesting-to-you things you’d normally talk
about because it would involve filling the
guests in at length and bore them to death.
The fact of having someone in your personal
space for too long shifts the shape of the day,
no matter how amenable and easy-going they
are, and makes you feel faintly
discombobulated. This is because someone’s
home, regardless of how big or small it is, is the
one place in the world where they can relax
and be absolutely themselves. They are able to
do this because nobody else is occupying their
space. It follows that if Elon Musk raps at the
kitchen window and does a cheery thumbs up
before pointing to the front door, something is
lost — and it can’t be regained until Elon Musk
leaves, no matter how charming he is. Still,
perhaps he has glorious manners, turns up
with a generous gift and never outstays his
welcome. Such paragons do exist, but they are
rare beasts.
@IndiaKnightIndia Knight
Be honest, having guests to stay is a pain — even if they are billionaires
Oh no, it’s Elon and his
suitcase. Kill the lights
As long as they’re perceived to be in control, ministers can let numbers rise
You want to relax but
instead must act as a
cook and tour guideImmigration as a
cause of public
concern has fallenHere’s a secret: the PM is
relaxed about migration