Strongman, The

Chechnya. But Blair’s own advisers in Downing Street argued that he was a new type of leader, someone worth investing with early. ‘In my experience,’ said Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, ‘KGB officers were the more outward looking members of the old Russian nomenklatura . We decided to reach out to him actually during the election campaign rather than wait till after when there would be a long queue of people wishing to see him. It was risky, but we thought it was the right thing to do, and it did work.’ 2
    Powell says Blair scarcely focused on the Chechnya problem until he was on the plane and started reading his briefs. ‘The brief produced by the Foreign Office got him increasingly irritated – because even at that stage Tony was concerned about Islamic terrorism, and he could see the danger of it and thought we were being a bit “double standards” in the way we were dealing with the Russian approach to it. So he decided on the plane to cut Putin some slack on Chechnya when we did the press conference.’
    Putin was delighted, and laid on a full tour of his home town, St Petersburg, for the prime minister and his wife, Cherie: the Hermitage art gallery, talks at the tsar’s glittering summer palace, Peterhof, and evening at Prokofiev’s opera War and Peace at the Mariinsky Theatre. The only sour moment came during the talks at Peterhof, when the British ambassador, Sir Roderic Lyne, sat down heavily on a spindly-legged antique chair and shattered it.
    ‘You’ll be paying compensation for that, I hope,’ quipped Putin – ‘not entirely in jest’, according to one witness.
    The visit achieved everything Blair wanted it to. Powell admits that Britain had felt excluded from the cosy relationship Yeltsin had had with the French and Germans (not to mention Bill Clinton), and now Blair had ‘inserted himself’. As soon as the presidential election was out of the way – a mere formality, which Putin won with 53 per cent of the votes – Blair followed up by bringing him to London. There was an uproar in the press as the ‘Butcher of Grozny’ was invited to meet the Queen at Windsor Castle. 3
    Blair did appear, for a time, to become Putin’s chief Western contact. In November, when the American presidential election hung in the balance as ballot papers were recounted in the state of Florida, Putin called Blair for advice about whether he should call George W. Bush to congratulate him. Powell recalls: ‘Tony suggested he hold off for the moment until things were clear, and he was very grateful and didn’t make the call. It was interesting. It illustrated a sort of relationship you wouldn’t normally have had with the Russian president, and it made us feel our investment had been worth it.’
    Part of the calculation, of course, was that British business would benefit from closer political ties, so during his April visit to London Putin was taken to meet a group of leading industrialists. Lord John Browne, CEO of BP, was impressed: ‘He was a refreshing change.’ The businessmen listened to Putin promising laws that would be stuck to, and a crackdown on corruption – and his cold, impassive demeanour made them feel he meant it. Three years later, watched by Putin and Blair at a ceremony in London, BP and a major Russian oil company, TNK, signed a deal for a 50-50 partnership. At the time, BP’s $6.75 billion outlay represented the biggest ever foreign investment in Russia. Both sides were happy – though there would be a bumpy road ahead, as Putin began to have second thoughts about selling off his nation’s strategic assets to foreigners.
    Seeing Putin’s soul
    As for America, Putin had already decided to sit out the rest of the Clinton term, and started putting out feelers to George W. Bush’s team. The Russians had long expected a Bush victory. They even sent a team to the Republican Party Convention in Philadelphia at the end of July 2000. One of its members, Mikhail Margelov, a Russian senator and PR expert who had worked in Putin’s election team, said it was part of the new United Russia’s outreach to ‘conservative parties all over the world’, designed to create a right-of-centre ‘brand’ for Putin’s party. They met Condoleezza Rice and other members of the Bush team – not for long, but long enough to get invited back to the inauguration in January. 4
    On the day of the inauguration Rice sought out a Russian diplomat to convey a positive message on