QUENTIN LETTS: If Andy Burnham's frightened of the Commons, how WILL he cope if he ever meets President Putin?
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Odd sort of day at Parliament. In the Commons there was a tetchy discussion about China snooping on backbench MPs and commissioning dossiers of ‘kompromat’ on the sainted Sir Iain Duncan Smith and others. The worst thing IDS has done in recent years is probably testing the speed limit in his Morgan sports car.
At the foreign affairs select committee earlier an exiled critic of the Kremlin described how he recently spent two years in a penal camp in Siberia before being released on a prisoner exchange swap.
The Putin regime was an ‘Orwellian dystopia’ where you could be sentenced to years in prison simply for calling the Ukraine war, er, a war. Apparently, it still had to be called a ‘special military operation’. Saying ‘war’ sent chum Putin into a bate.
All this happened on a day when Andy Burnham declined to come to the Commons to report on his wildly successful trip to the Commonwealth summit (the one when he dropped the King in the soup over slavery reparations).
Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza spoke at the foreign affairs select committee
Downing Street instead sent a Foreign Office underling, Chris Elmore, who was so nervous before making the Commons statement that he mopped his neck with a handkerchief. His neck!
If Mr Burnham is frightened of the Commons, you wonder how he will ever cope with meeting Mr Putin, whose descent into ‘personalistic dictatorship’ was described with raw intensity at the foreign affairs committee by Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza. He proved an electrifying figure, sitting alone at the witness table and talking with a husky urgency.
The committee’s Labour chairman, Dame Emily Thornberry, was absent because she is on a freebie (sorry, an important international trip) to the COP climate conference in sun- kissed Antalya. The meeting was therefore chaired by her Conservative deputy, Sir John Whittingdale, who merely had to ask one short question for Mr Kara-Murza to unleash a torrent of horrors.
I had made the mistake, when taking my place at the Press table, to make a bit of a clattering with my ballpoint pen. Mr Kara-Murza jumped in his seat and shot me a hunted look.
If he was edgy, this was hardly surprising. He said Putin’s thugs had made two attempts to poison him. He had been told by US intelligence that there was an ‘active assassination order’ on him. ‘I survived,’ said Mr Kara-Murza, 45. ‘Here I am in front of you.’
He was lucky. The poison attacks sent him into a coma and doctors told his wife they did not give him much more than a 5 per cent chance of living. He wanted Western governments to prepare for the ‘window of opportunity’ that could arise when, possibly quite soon, Mr Putin was toppled.
We should not go soft on members of the Putin regime, as the French and Canadians have done. Nor should we write off all Russians as wicked.
Mr Kara-Murza claimed there were currently more political prisoners in Putin’s Russia than there were in the whole of the old Soviet Union. And there was ‘very clear linkage between repression at home and aggression abroad’.
If Mr Burnham is frightened of the Commons, you wonder how he will ever cope with meeting Mr Putin, writes Quentin Letts
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Given the tendency, as Sir John put it, of Putin’s critics to fall out of high windows, the MPs boggled a bit at Mr Kara-Murza’s courage. The Commons rumpus over China, provoked by a recent Daily Mail expose of Chinese espionage on parliamentarians, was somewhat muddier. Security minister Dan Jarvis refused to give any more information.
Sir Iain, angry that the London authorities did not tell him about China’s latest misbehaviour, said the Burnham government was treating parliament with ‘utter contempt’. Speaker Lindsay Hoyle disclosed that even he had not been told what was going on.
Mr Jarvis, becoming unusually scratchy, snapped that he had to take ‘a much more nuanced’ approach to dealing with the Chinese. That sounds like code for ‘Downing Street security adviser Jonathan Powell has said we mustn’t upset Beijing’.
Perhaps Mr Burnham can clear all this up at PMQs on Wednesday. If he turns up.
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