Lord William Hague has recounted the time when, as Foreign Secretary, Russian Federation president Vladimir Putin drew a map on a napkin.
The former Conservative leader, who later served as the UK’s chief diplomat under Prime Minister David Cameron, was addressing delegates at the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Assocation annual investment conference in Edinburgh this week. He said: “Some of the people I dealt with when I was foreign secretary are still around, such as Putin who I had many meetings with.”
Hague said: “The only time I really got on with him [Putin] was when I took him to the judo at the London Olympics.”
He remembers a different meeting in 2011 when he went with Cameron to see Putin at the Kremlin.
“It just underlined what a different world it was then that first of all, that we were going to have a meeting with Putin, also that he sat at a small table he where he was near enough to breathe on and then it was not like five meters long.”
Hague said: “He was well briefed, and he sat there with all his briefing cards.
“We talked for an hour and a quarter about gas, and he wanted to build a pipeline from Russia to Britain, just like the Germans were at that time.”
Hague said Putin got a napkin and then drew on it. He said: “He drew a pipeline so it was going to come down the Baltic, and it had a little squiggle where it came under Denmark then across the channel and then he said, it can come up in Yorkshire.”
Hague, whose constituency Richmond was in Yorkshire said: “David and I looked at each other and said it might be an idea.” “We were in a different world. We were still trying to improve relations with Russia. We still really thought the Russians would end up having to be like us, because liberal democracy was all triumphant.
“We weren’t quite so stupid as to let him get leverage over us, but we were learning that his version of friendship only counted if he got leverage over us.”
Hague, who is last month was admitted as Oxford University 160th Chancellor believes that because Putin could started the conflict in Ukraine because he could not get leverage over the government there.
“That was still a very different world, if you think, with my historian hat on, if I was writing a history book in 100 years time about these times, that was sort of chapter two we were living through in the post (World War 2) war world.
“Chapter one of the post-war world 1945 to 1990 was the Cold War, a dangerous time, but a stable time in many ways. And that, as you know, came to an end with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, and we entered the period in which most of us spent most of our professional lives, depending on how old you are, 1990 to about 2015 which was a very lucky quarter of a century to be around.
And we still had 9/11, we still had the political crises. It wasn’t completely trouble free, but we thought liberal democracy was prior to globalization would continue, even the Chinese would have to become like us.”
Hague said the world was now in ‘chapter three’, a dangerous and risky time but potentially “packed with opportunity”.