Andy McSmith’s Diary: How Tory right wing makes Britain an unlikely bedfellow of Putin’s party

The Independent

David Cameron heads off to Russia on Thursday for the G20 summit of world leaders, promising that he is not going to shy away from tackling Vladimir Putin, pictured, about a couple of very serious differences between Russia’s regime and ours.

While Syria is the bigger and more urgent, the Foreign Office has said that the Prime Minister will also raise the question of the law that the Russian parliament passed in June, banning the “promotion of non-traditional sexual relations”.

What with that and the suspicious deaths of the Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, and the defector, Alexander Litvinenko, you might think that the British Conservatives are not exactly soulmates with Putin’s United Russia party.

But here is a strange thing: whenever the parliamentarians who make up the Council or Europe meet, almost all the leading European centre-right parties – including Germany’s Christian Democrats, whose leader is Angela Merkel, and France’s Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, founded in 2002 by Jacques Chirac – go into one room, while the Tories walk wistfully by and into another room, to commune with the delegates from United Russia.

The reason is that when Mr Cameron was running for the Tory leadership, back in 2005, he promised to pull the party out of the grouping called the European People’s Party, to which other conservative parties belong, because it is too enthusiastically pro-EU. There are disadvantages to belonging to no political group in Europe, so the Conservatives landed themselves with their strange bedfellows in the European Democrat Group.

It was reported that Mr Cameron was going to pull the Tories out five years ago, when Russia was behaving aggressively towards Georgia, but they are still there, because of an election promise he made eight years ago, as a sop to his restive and generally ungrateful right wing. hairy woman онлайн займы https://zp-pdl.com/online-payday-loans-in-america.php https://zp-pdl.com/fast-and-easy-payday-loans-online.php срочный займ на карту