Two days before she died, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II told Boris Johnson, who was holding forth on the difficulty of persuading India to take a tougher line with Russia over Ukraine, that Jawaharlal Nehru had told her in the 1950s “that India will always side with Russia, and that some things will never change.” For Indian readers this is another reminder both of Nehru’s gratitude for Soviet help and — more to the point — his tremendous admiration for Moscow’s achievement in transforming a backward eastern autocracy into one of the world’s two industrialised superpowers. India’s first PM hoped that his country, too, would blaze a similar trail.
Taking a very different view of Russians (“Never believe anything Moscow says until it has been officially denied”!) Johnson recounts the Ukraine anecdote only to illustrate the late Queen’s “amazing ability to reassure and to contextualise.” Desperate for a tourist attraction in London’s post-Olympic Park, something “to make you say, cor, Doris, look at that”, he collared Lakshmi Mittal whom he spied washing his hands in the gents in Davos. The two men hadn’t met but knew each other by sight and it took resourceful Boris 45 seconds flat to wheedle a promise out of Mittal to provide the steel for the 376-ft ArcelorMittal Orbit with the world’s longest and tallest tunnel slide.
Since bristles with such triumphs despite the tone of petulant anger, it has been called “self-serving”. The criticism.
