Regime change is bloody and hideous

Men watch from a hillside as a plume of smoke rises after an explosion in Tehran, Iran. Photo by Majid Saeedi/Getty Images

To the Russian ambassador’s residence in Kensington Park Gardens to talk to Andrei Kelin about the war in Ukraine and nuclear weapons and whether there is a Russian component to the Epstein scandal. (He says “no” and “not my cup of tea”.) I love this neo-gothic building, with its palm court, grand mahogany staircases and Russian paintings: it drips and smoulders with history.

Here is the study where the wartime Soviet ambassador Ivan Maisky had to kip on a sofa overnight because it contained the only telephone line to Moscow, and you couldn’t afford to be asleep upstairs if Stalin rang. The ottoman on which Maisky rested is still there. So, it seems, is the telephone. We know about Maisky because he kept a diary – a dangerous thing for a Soviet diplomat to do at the time.

A friend of Churchill’s, Maisky was summoned back to Moscow in 1943 and eventually accused of being a British spy, at which point any chance of his diaries being seen apparently vanished. But Maisky, saved in the nick of time by Stalin’s death, survived.

In the 1990s, my friend, the Israeli historian Gabriel Gorodetsky, was rootling about in the Russian archives on another project when an assistant handed over one of the diaries – probably the last great unpublished source of the war years. Gabriel got them published. In the residence today you can almost smell the cigar smoke and vodka fumes from the days when British socialists (Maisky was a great friend of the Webbs and of George Bernard Shaw), generals and politicians plotted the defeat of Nazi Germany. Outside in the garden, partly hidden under the foliage, is the bomb shelter gifted to the Russian mission by the British government during the Blitz. “We won’t be needing it quite yet,” one of the staff there assured me with only the shadow of a smile.

Plus ça shah

Meanwhile, over on the south side of Hyde Park, the Iranians were trying to work out what Donald Trump really wanted from them: a better nuclear deal than the one Barack Obama got? Or regime change?

Well, they know the answer now. Perhaps oddly, I think that assassination is more a moral policy than invasion – although “regime change” is a bland phrase for what is usually a bloody, even hideous process.

Still haunted by the invasion of Iraq, I remember travelling between Washington and London with the Blair entourage as that deadline to war ticked down. Urgent pleas came sotto voce from people inside the State Department and the Foreign Office to not believe that, once Saddam Hussein was removed, Iraq would become a peaceful democratic “Minnesota with palm trees”.

If only the leaders had listened. In this case too, it’s unclear what regime Washington would like to replace the current one with. What is the plan? Before the bombing started, I was talking to a member of Trump’s transition team and asked whether he wanted the return of the monarchy. No, the US just wanted a regime that would not export terror. Democracy would be difficult: “You say the shah, I just say a strongman.”

Bygone by-elections

I don’t look back on the early years of my reporting life with unadulterated nostalgia, but I always did love a by-election. As a wet-behind-the-ears parliamentary correspondent for the Scotsman, I was shown the ropes at the Brecon and Radnor contest, where amid sunshine, glorious countryside and fine pubs in 1985 the Liberals beat the Tories. My mentor was a revered hack, the Evening Standard’s Bob Carvel. He had been tutored in by-election coverage by an elderly reporter who remembered Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign of 1880. Only two handshakes? It’s just about possible.

But my first one was Glasgow Hillhead three years earlier, returning Roy Jenkins to parliament for the SDP. It features in an excellent account of by-elections edited by Iain Dale. Jenkins is remembered as excessively grand but he was a master of self-deprecation. In Glasgow he told us he was buoyed by the many examples of the SDP-Liberal Alliance logo, an orange lozenge, in the windows of so many cars – until his wife gently pointed out to him that if you looked closely, they all read “Child on board”.

An unfortunate pronouncement

It was Dennis Skinner, Jenkins’s lifelong enemy, who famously took advantage of Woy’s inability to pronounce the letter “r”. At a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party, Jenkins had made his farewell speech before departing for Brussels to become president of the commission. His adviser was David Marquand, a man deeply suspected by the Labour left during those bruising weeks. Jenkins announced, slightly condescendingly: “I leave without wancour.” Skinner instantly shot back: “We thought you were taking Marquand with you.”

[Further reading: David Miliband: We cannot afford another failed government]