For once Trump is right – these sordid claims stink
( hotels ) and you can take that from a man who knows a lot about seedy stings in Russian
PICTURE this: it is well past midnight in the deeply grim Soviet city of Sverdlovsk. In a squalid communist-era hotel, the bedside phone rings for the fifth time. My friend and colleague Rachel answers wearily. She knows who is on the line. It is the same prostitute who has called her four times before, asking for Mr Hitchens.
‘Look,’ Rachel explains in her perfect Russian. ‘I am not the person you want. He is alone and asleep in room 362. This is room 243. I am alone and awake in it. I do not want your services.’
‘Not possible,’ replies the prostitute in bored tones. ‘Mr Hitchens was allocated room 243. I was ordered to call room 243. So I am calling it.’ Room 243 must have been the one with the camera.
Such, in those days, was Soviet bureaucracy. It was unimaginable that we would defy the plan in this way. The tart was following her orders to the letter. By swapping rooms, Rachel and I had sabotaged weeks of scheming by the Sverdlovsk KGB.
This went on all night, while I slept undisturbed. So far as I know, it was the KGB’s only attempt to lure me into a honey-trap during my years as a correspondent in the USSR. They did send an attractive middleaged woman to travel in a neighbouring sleeper on the Ostendto-Moscow Express, as I made my way to set up home in the Soviet capital. But that wasn’t, I think, about sex. Romance failed to blossom, anyway. They hoped (correctly) that I would hire this brisk but shady lady as my assistant, a job she was very good at.
She disappeared as soon as the KGB worked out, through close observation of my private life, that I could not possibly be a spy. As a parting gift, they rather clumsily installed a microphone in my car, in case they were wrong.
At almost exactly the same moment, the now-famous spymaster Christopher Steele was arriving in Moscow, under diplo- matic cover as a second secretary at the British Embassy, but actually working for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).
I was an icy Cold Warrior, consumed with loathing of the Evil Empire and all in favour of British nuclear weapons, whereas Mr Steele had recently left Cambridge, where he is said to have been ‘an avowedly Left-wing student with CND credentials’, and a ‘confirmed socialist’. Isn’t MI6 an odd organisation?
But in any case, I think I can claim to have some knowledge of the strange world of bugged rooms, naughty ladies and blackmail of
ALTHOUGH he didn’t see or hear her deliver it, Oxford professor Joshua Silver got hold of a draft of Home Secretary Amber Rudd’s Tory conference speech, presumably so that he could be properly offended by it. She had made a typically empty Tory pledge to make it harder for British companies to employ migrants and to ensure foreign workers ‘were not taking
which we have heard so much this week. I’ve also kept in touch with Moscow and Russia, places utterly transformed since the 1990s, whereas, it is said, Mr Steele hasn’t been back for 20 years.
AND I must say I am deeply unimpressed with the document in which extraordinary, sordid claims are made against Donald Trump. Nameless sources, said without evidence to be reliable (‘a trusted compatriot’), repeatedly make vague, untestable
jobs British workers could do’. Nothing, of course, actually happened. But Prof Silver, right, complained to the police, who have recorded it as a ‘non-crime hate incident’. Laugh or fume as much as you like, this is now the law of England. And it will get worse. A few years hence, anyone who says any such thing will face arrest and prosecution. Wait and see.
claims. It is padded with general political statements to make it look grander than it is.
The most convincing bits in it are the blacked-out sections. These at least cannot be shown to be wrong – unlike the claim that Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, met Kremlin officials in Prague in August 2016. Mr Cohen says he has never even been to Prague.
I loathe and mistrust Donald Trump. I think he is an oaf and a yahoo who has gravely damaged the standards of public life. I fear what he may do. But that does not mean I lose all sense of proportion.
Like it or not, he has been duly and lawfully elected as the head of state and government of the USA. If we believe in either democracy or law, or both at once, we must respect this fact. We cannot approve of, or help, attempts to topple him by scandal and smear, before he has even sworn the oath of office. We should also stop being so pious. Far better men than Mr Trump, such as Jimmy Carter, have been disasters in office. John F. Kennedy, now revered as a sort of saint, had a private life which in this age would have brought him down in weeks.
And maybe the Russians did try to influence the American elections. I think it likely but unproven. But President Obama openly sought to influence our EU referendum, and it is now proven that the CIA tried to get us to join the Common Market at the start in the 1950s.
Around the same time, the CIA was (quite rightly in my view) spending a fortune defeating the communists in Italian elections. And we and the USA engineered and paid for a violent putsch against the elected government in Iran, for which we are still bitterly resented there.
Once you slip beyond the curtain of public relations into the real, cold world, as I have been lucky enough to do, life turns out to be a good deal more incredible than you thought it was. But there are still some things that it’s wiser not to believe.