After the emotionally harrowing commemorations of 9/11, the British prime minister, David Cameron, will be in Moscow today to face an extremely tricky diplomatic challenge.
Relations between Russia and the UK have been in a state of virtual deep freeze for the past five years, following the murder of a KGB agent in London. The most important political leader in Moscow, Vladimir Putin, has not talked to a British government minister or diplomat for the past four years.
Four former foreign secretaries, three Labour and one Conservative, signed a joint statement at the weekend urging Cameron to tackle such sensitive issues as corruption and state-sponsored illegality in Russia. They claimed that ‘hundreds of thousands’ of businessmen are wrongly held in prison.
But Cameron can hardly be expected to transform the political climate in Russia in the space of a few hours and he is far too canny a politician to engage in public lectures to his hosts about how they should run their country.
He is uneasily aware that, as he admitted himself last week, the UK has lost some ‘moral authority’ in the way it responded to the war on terror after 9/11. If Medvedev or Putin want to wrongfoot him over human rights they have only to remind him of the devastating findings of the latest official enquiry into the torture and murder of an innocent Iraqi hotel clerk by British soldiers.
While Cameron tries to make headway in Russia, almost 100 of his MPs will be meeting tonight at Westminster to create an influential new group aimed at transforming the UK’s relationship with Europe.
Cameron has categorically ruled out a referendum on getting out of the EU but he and his foreign secretary, William Hague, are keen to find a way gradually to distance the UK from the concept of ‘ever-closer’ union within Europe.
His numerous Eurosceptic critics think he should take advantage of the crisis in the eurozone to negotiate a completely new deal with Brussels. The former chancellor, Nigel Lawson, believes the Lisbon treaty should be torn up.
Cameron is convinced that if the eurozone does manage to survive its current traumas, it will only do so by accepting a far greater degree of centralised financial control over its members.
The Conservative MPs at the meeting tonight are keen to form a cross-party organisation linked with eurosceptics in the Labour party. If they do manage to get their act together on this, the combined grouping would be in a strong position in the Commons.
All of this is very bad news for the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, whose Liberal Democrat party is far more enthusiastic about the EU than the Conservatives or Labour.
Ironically, while Clegg’s own MPs think he has conceded far too much to Cameron in order to gain a little bit of power, the view among Conservatives is very different. They think that Clegg has far too much clout in Downing Street.
One of them, a famously feisty backbencher called Nadine Dorries, last week told Cameron in the Commons: ‘The Liberal Democrats make up 8.7% of this Parliament and yet they seem to be influencing our free school policy, health and many issues including immigration and abortion. Does the prime minister think it is about time he told the deputy prime minister who is the boss?’
This led to what was undoubtedly the most embarrassing moment that Cameron has ever experienced at Westminster because he foolishly triggered the sniggering schoolboy instincts that lurk inside a great many male MPs by saying that he knew ‘the honourable lady is extremely frustrated’.
As Dorries herself explained in a media article yesterday, he was then unable to say any more because of the gales of sexist laughter that rocked the chamber. ‘I waited anxiously for him to continue but the laughter increased. He tried again, feebly, and then sat down, announcing: ‘I am just going to give up.’ A voice inside my head screamed: ‘You can’t leave it at that. You can’t just give up.’ But he had. The chamber grew hotter and the noise more thunderous as all around me people laughed.’
You do not often see Cameron at a loss for words. He used to work in public relations for a commercial TV company and he owes his political career as much to his suave fluency as his intellectual ability.
Turning one of his own backbenchers into an object of derision in the Commons was a mortifying experience for him and as soon as the session was over, he borrowed a mobile phone and sent her an apologetic text message. ‘I am genuinely, desperately sorry, it was an entirely innocent mistake. I got into a mess and couldn’t get out’.