BORIS OPEN

“CHAGRIN” MAY NOT BE THE SUITED TERM for describing how much I feel upset, or, perhaps, disappointed, that the good leader of Russia, Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, was not afforded greater power than his meted amount, given that he may have been able to almost single-handedly return relations among our nations to the days when decent chaps smuggled sparkling eggs back and forth and giggled about it in our underground dug-outs while wearing our extra-thick pyjamas.

SO MUCH WAS BORIS INTO this retro view of life experienced between the two great powers that when socially en pantoufles as a guest in the USA he got so drunk during a 1995 visit to Washington that his own Secret Service agents found him late at night a few hundred feet from the White House wearing only Soviet briefs and trying to call a taxi in search of a “pizza”, which, for those of my readers unfamiliar with the term, is an American foodstuff that involves eating with one’s hands without offending waiters.

WHENEVER ONE GOES ON INTERNATIONAL encounters and congresses without the company of one’s loved ones and personal cooking staff, as I sometimes have to do, it is easy to slip into less than sensible behaviour, and I will not stand up here and state that I am without transgression; but discipline, however difficult, must surely stand paramount: never have I felt like a “pizza”, and I will not eat with my hands unless someone is pointing a gun at my temple.

YELTSIN, ON THE OTHER HAND, apparently felt like one, and then managed to “give the slip” to the Russian agents looking after him in Blair House, which is where foreign guests of the US President stay when in Washington. Our own Gordon Brown, on his next trip to Blair House, might be fair advised to “do a Yeltsin” late at night, slipping off into the back alleys of Pennsylvania Avenue, never again to be seen (because our Secret Service agents will surely not look for him for long). Whether he goes in search of pizza, of peace or is just doing his countrymen a favour, a nation will gratefully mourn.