When Dave Was Tapped Up By The KGB

Here's one for Robert Harris's next plotline: David Cameron has claimed that the KGB sought to sign him up as a double agent.


















Double agent: David Cameron (with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev).

Regaling students at Moscow State University this morning, the Prime Minister recalled his first visit to Russia as a student on his gap year between school and university in 1985.

'I took the Trans-Siberian Railway from Nakhodka to Moscow and went on to the Black Sea coast,' he said.

'There two Russians - speaking perfect English - turned up on a beach mostly used by foreigners.

'They took me out to lunch and dinner and asked me about life in England and what I thought about politics.

'When I got back I told my tutor at university and he asked me whether it was an interview.

'If it was, it seems I didn’t get the job.'

Quite how the KGB gags, if that's what they were, will go down with Mr Cameron's already prickly hosts remains to be seen.

Over breakfast (served with large quantities of alcohol, perhaps explaining Russian male life expectancy of 59), the PM and his policy advisers discussed how to approach the first visit by a British leader to Russia for six years.

The Prime Minister will not have been pleased by the headline on page one of this morning's Moscow Times: 'Kremlin Sees No "Reset" in UK Visit'.
The message from Sergei Prikhodko, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev's chief foreign policy adviser, could not have been clearer.



















Now and then: The Prime Minister on his visit to Moscow, left, and in an undated photograph, right, as he may have looked in 1985.

'No-one is expecting any breakthroughs, and in fact they are not needed,' he declares. 'Why fight? It is not necessary for us to have a "reset" with Britain. We will continue to work the way that we have been working in the past.'

Which, if he means what he says, means not terribly well, if at all. Officials admit Britain has had no formal contact at all with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin since 2007, when he made a cursory phone call to Downing Street to mark Gordon Brown's arrival as Prime Minister.

Mr Cameron acknowledges he is walking a tightrope on the visit, which, in what is becoming a trademark for his foreign visits, comes with a planeload of business leaders anxious to sign contracts in tow.

The PM does intend to make at least a passing public reference to the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London - the only hostile nuclear incident ever to take place on British soil - which plunged Anglo-Russian relations to their lowest point since the end of the Cold War.












Poisoned: Alexander Litvinenko died in 2006, but Russia has steadfastly refused to extradite the prime suspect in the case, Andrei Lugovoy.

Russian dissident Litvinenko was poisoned with radioactive polonium-210 in London five years ago in what is alleged to have been a state-sponsored assassination.

But demands to extradite Andrei Lugovoy, the former KGB officer who is the chief suspect in the murder, will fall on deaf ears. Lugovoy, now a member of Russia's parliament, also had a message for Mr Cameron this morning.

'It's impossible to say who left the polonium,' he boasted from the comfort of a fishing trip in the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia's Far East.

But Mr Lugovoy does have a theory, which he is anxious to share. Litvinenko, he suggests, was involved in the trade of polonium and was killed not by the Russian secret service... but by MI6.

Back to Robert Harris!

Mikhail Khodorkovsky Urges David Cameron To Confront Kremlin On Human Rights

Russia's most famous prisoner of conscience has spoken out from behind bars to urge David Cameron to confront the Kremlin on human rights issues when the Prime Minister visits Russia next week.












Mikhail Khodorkovsy, the former head of the Yukos oil company.

In written comments passed to The Daily Telegraph from his prison in northern Russia, Mikhail Khodorkovsky said Mr Cameron should use the fact that top Russian politicians bank, own property, and educate their children in the UK to pressure the Kremlin into becoming "a modern European state."

"I would hope that the British Prime Minister will directly raise questions of corruption and the judicial system in Russia with President (Dmitry) Medvedev," the 48-year-old oligarch-turned-political prisoner wrote.

"The UK could let Russia understand that a country with such widespread corruption, the only G8 country where there are political prisoners, cannot be a fully-fledged and all-round partner."

His mother, Marina Khodorkovskaya, went even further. In an interview, she urged Mr Cameron to deny entry to Russian officials involved in her son's case and to freeze their UK bank accounts.

Mr Cameron is due to make a flying visit to Moscow on Monday during which he is expected to meet Mr Medvedev and Vladimir Putin, the prime minister.

He will be the first British leader to visit Russia since Tony Blair five years ago, and the first since the 2006 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy and Kremlin critic, in central London.

The Prime Minister is aware of Mr Khodorkovsky's fate which has become emblematic of Russia's heavily politicised and selective justice system.

Designated as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, the former oil tycoon was Russia's richest man before he had a spectacular falling out with Mr Putin in 2003 over business and politics.

Arrested by masked men on an icy Siberian runway in his private jet that same year, he was later found guilty of fraud and given an eight year jail term after a trial that was widely viewed in the West as politically-motivated.

He spent much of that time in a grim Soviet-style labour camp 3,000 miles east of Moscow near China.

Yukos, his oil company, was swallowed up by the Kremlin while he languished behind bars, and in a second trial last year he was sentenced to a further six years in jail after being found guilty of the surreal charge of stealing oil from own company.

In his written comments from his jail in northern Russia, Mr Khodorkovsky said he wanted his own case to be a warning to British companies considering investing in Russia.

"It will be difficult for anyone to expect British companies to do serious business in Russia whilst entrepreneurs are factually subjected to a bureaucratic racket," he wrote.

Although Russia and the UK do in fact enjoy strong business links, political relations have stalled over differences on key foreign policy, security, business and rights issues.

Companies in the West are keen to tap into Russia's status as the world's biggest energy exporter but Russia's liberal opposition argues that Western politicians such as Mr Cameron need to keep reminding the Kremlin it must enact real democratic reforms if it wants large-scale investment.

Mr Khodorkovsky said he thought the UK could start by withholding the transfer of technology necessary for Russia's modernisation until the Kremlin changed course politically. He claimed that the UK had real clout with Russia.

"There is no question that such leverage does exist," he wrote. "The most influential people in Russia, those who in large measure determine the image and the fate of the country today, have vast business and personal interests in the UK. This applies also to a series of significant representatives of Vladimir Putin's team."

Speaking at a school outside Moscow that Mr Khodorkovsky originally set up for orphans, his mother Marina, 77, said she wanted Mr Cameron to raise her son's case with the Kremlin.

But she said she was looking for more that just rhetoric. "Words need to be backed with action," she said, urging the UK to impose visa and financial sanctions on Russian officials such as judges and prosecutors involved in her son's case.

"It is realistic and it would have an effect," she argued. "If the people in the second echelon of power beneath Putin understand that the higher-ups cannot protect them they will soon forget their loyalty to the system."

Clear-eyed despite her advanced years, she said that she feared that her son would not be released for as long as Mr Putin wielded influence in Russia. The Russian prime minister bore her son a personal grudge for publicly cutting across his political and business interests, she insisted.

"My aim is to live long enough to see my son freed," she said as tears formed in her eyes. "But I understand that the chances are getting less and less as I get older and older."