I might be sounding like a broken record here on Centre Right, but I was amazed to read in Der Spiegel today that President Obama is to spend TEN hours in bilateral talks with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev today and tomorrow, and 90 minutes with Prime Minister Putin.
What have been Gordon Brown's scores since he became our unelected Prime Minister in 2007? Zero and zero. As I have blogged before, he has never met Vladimir Putin in that time, and has only met Medvedev as part of multilateral meetings like the 2008 NATO summit and the 2009 G20 meeting.
This is a bizarre state of affairs. If the shunning of Russia is deliberate and, let's face it, there might be good reasons for a boycott, given Russia' s appalling behaviour over Aleksandr Litvinenko, Georgia and the expulsion of British diplomats in 2007, then our PM is making a ham fist of it - a silent boycott does nobody any favours. If it is just that Brown, unlike Obama, has simply not bothered to give relations with Russia the time they need, then that is a shocking indictment of our Prime Minister's approach to international relations, and we can surely do better than this.
