Britain stole fish and chips from Russia and is more evil than the US, says state TV show

The new channel hinges on Piers Morgan, and many viewers won’t enjoy him winding them up

A RUSSIAN MP has labelled Great Britain “more evil” than the United States in an impassioned tirade on state television, during a programme that also accused the UK of stealing the idea of fish and chips from Russia.

The stereotype-laden rant by Andrei Isayev at the weekend – which included angry references to porridge, the Queen and rainy weather – comes amid wider anti-british rhetoric in Russia that has already seen the Kremlin label Boris Johnson its number one enemy.

London has been a major supplier of military equipment to Kyiv since the start of the conflict, and Ukrainian soldiers are reportedly shouting “God save the Queen”, as they fire Uk-supplied weapons at Russian forces.

Mr Isayev, a pro-kremlin politician, said that the UK has, “of course, historically” been “more hardcore anti-russian” than the US, to the nodding agreement of other guests.

He said: “They’re basically Siamese twins, or two heads of a dragon, but Britain has historically been the more evil head of the dragon because in that couple it has responsibility for Europe.”

The “mad” UK and Poland were “seriously discussing the possibility of a direct military clash” with Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, he said. “Clear off back to your island! Eat your porridge! Catch your chip and fish [sic] from your foggy marshes!”

In a bizarre turn, Yevgeny Popov, host of state TV programme Special Edition, then claimed the British culinary dish was in fact a Russian innovation.

“It turns out that white fish and chips is Russian,” he said, without elaboration. Mr Isayev agreed, adding: “And pray for your moss-covered Queen!”

The comments came after Vladimir Solovyev, another state television host and a chief Kremlin propagandist, threatened a nuclear strike on the UK.

Discussing Russia’s new Sarmat 2 missile, which will be one of the world’s largest and longest-range nuclear missiles, he warned that one such strike would be equivalent to “minus one Great Britain”. London had become “completely boorish” since Vladimir Putin launched the invasion, Mr Solovyev said in a broadcast last week.

Britain has long been the subject of the Kremlin’s ire, following sanctions over the annexation of Crimea in 2014, as well as the Salisbury poisoning in 2018 and the death of defector Alexander Litvinenko in 2006. A month into the Ukraine conflict, Dmitry Peskov, Mr Putin’s spokesman, said that Mr Johnson was “the most active participant in the race to be anti-russian”.

The Prime Minister denied the charge but said he was “deeply hostile to the decisions of Vladimir Putin”.

Maria Zakharova, spokesman for Moscow’s foreign ministry, has claimed that the BBC is playing a “determined role in undermining the stability and security of Russia”. Last month, she said that Britain was “the world’s worst perpetrator of genocides” during its colonial era.

Volodomyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, has meanwhile heaped praise on Britain for its unequivocal support for his country. Mr Zelensky urged other allies to follow Britain’s lead and intensify pressure on Moscow.

Ihave a feeling GB News will outlast Talktv. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. Received wisdom said that GBN started before it was ready – too amateur, too Right wing, too cheap – and that when Talktv launched last week, it would blow the competition out of the water. Well, ratings were competitive, but not a walk over.

One flaw is that it looks so expensive: very Fox News, not terribly British. Another is that most of the scheduling is Talkradio on TV, and while I love listening to all that jazz in my car, televised radio is dull; the presenters are static, the guests disembodied.

Things liven up in the evening, but aside from the names being bigger, I’m not sure what the edge is on GBN. On launch night, Sharon Osbourne and Jeremy Kyle discussed plastic surgery and Botox, their own faces so frozen by a miracle of science that the segment resembled a conversation among Thunderbird puppets. A few nights earlier, GBN’S Mark Dolan had debated Covid-19 with the Krankies. I prefer that somehow.

But the biggest problem is Piers Morgan. Everywhere I go there’s an advert of Piers as a devil or pointing to an address to which to send complaints. It’s an odd hook: “Watch this, you’ll hate it,” but that’s the direction my business is going in. There’s a lot of money to be made from moaning about how free speech is dying, yet all us pundits seem to do is talk and talk and talk...

Piers is a Marmite figure, and it’s a big gamble to assume he’ll attract more viewers than he’ll alienate, for the track record is spotty. He departed from Good Morning Britain after he was rude about Meghan Markle and was cancelled as editor of the Mirror following a dodgy story about British soldiers abusing an Iraqi. In 2014, he left CNN because he got what Donald Trump would call “horrible ratings”.

Back then his target wasn’t the woke, it was guns, an obsession that he pushed to the fury of conservatives and the delight of elite liberals – indeed I can’t actually think of a single truly heretical opinion that Piers holds. He is neither very Left nor particularly Right, just a gifted editor with an eye for a good headline, and will wind-up either side for cash. When Trump was on the up, he filmed a soapy interview on-board Air Force One, in 2018. Now Trump is in exile in Miami, like Napoleon at Elba, Piers gave him a proper grilling for his debut show, which was cut for advertising to give the impression the former president had stormed off. He didn’t. He was grumpy; he did call Piers dishonest. But his chief complaint was that the recording had gone on too long.

GBN has patiently built a conservative fan base by taking that demographic seriously and loyally, establishing a sense that for all its faults, this is where those who can’t stand the BBC belong. The Right has been sewn up. And the possibility that Farage might accidentally put his foot through the set, or Rustie Lee could fall from the ceiling wrapped in bunting, only adds to the sense of danger that GBN enjoys and Talktv either constitutionally can never have or will take a long time to manufacture. Tortoise might beat hare after all.

Russians have pundits, too. On a  Russia 1 chat show last week, MP Andrei Isayev blamed Britain for Nato’s defence of Ukraine, telling us to “clear off back to your island” and “catch your chip and fish from your foggy marshes!” He concluded: “Pray for your moss-covered Queen!”

Smart dictatorships know not to stifle emotion but direct it. In the book Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, journalist Peter Pomerantsev illustrates how Putin’s Kremlin imported Russian analogues of American TV; current affairs shows that exposed corruption and vented anger at officials. By permitting criticism of the middle-ranks of the bureaucracy, the state thus gave the impression that dissent was possible – so long as the most powerful man, and thus the system itself, remained unchallenged.

In a sense, what you’re watching on Russia 1 is real. These talking heads are debating the issues, albeit within parameters, and Isayev probably shocked and amused as many Russians as much as he does us. (He has form: in 2013 he lost his job as deputy leader of the ruling party after a drunken row on a plane). But by encouraging him to say mad things, which some audience members might feel, the regime can give voice to dark thoughts while playing the more sober part. Another guest said Moscow could use nukes against Britain; the hosts reminded him that this would end in disaster for Russia, too.

One permits a blast of extreme punditry in order to reassert the party line, which, if we’re being honest, is what happens in the West, too. The real problem, in various regimes, isn’t a lack of free speech but of free thought, the bandwidth of opinion narrowing so far that it becomes impossible to imagine an alternative to a certain way of life that might well be insane, but which the powers that be reinforce as normal. Thus the Russian dictatorship creates a theatre of “debate” that always concludes in the need to kill more Ukrainians.

That said, I’d quite like to live in the Britain of the Kremlin’s imagination, with its foggy marshes and mossy monarchs. After tea, Mary Poppins will take us flying with her umbrella, to hunt Russian bears.