2006 really put the skids under Anglo-Russian relations.

To be honest, the year didn’t start well. Last January saw the outing of the British spies in Moscow and the fabled transmitter under the rock incident. Crawling out from under the same rock was some British Embassy funding for NG0s which were not entirely apolitical.

At least the Sun newspaper tried to inject a little levity by taking some fake rocks and sniffer dogs round to the Russian Embassy in London. Certainly it amused everyone queuing up for a visa. Maybe Britain’s Ambassador in Moscow, Anthony Brenton, could have tried some damage limitation too. It’s his job isn’t it? Apparently not.

Brenton’s big chance to be diplomatic came with the G8 summit in July - only he blew it. Anthony went off to the ‘Other Russia’s‘ alternative summit and promised funding for groups brandishing slogans such as, ‘Russia Without Putin’. He’s said to have promised a million in campaign funds. Whatever, there was no finer way to play hump the host.

Cherie Blair rained on Putin’s parade too. She soured proceedings further by touring local NGOs, offering to help them take Russia to the European court.

Exposing her own double-standards, Cherie said the help in prosecuting Russia would come from the very same London offices that were keeping Russia’s arch criminals - Berezovsky and Zakayev - from any justice at all.

There’s never much moral high ground around politicans, but there could at least be manners. The Conservative’s David Davies was fairly gobsmacked and called the crassness, ‘needless’. But it appears that Ambassador Brenton’s advice to Cherie was more along the lines of, ‘you go girl’.

Well, the Nashi aren’t going to let Brenton forget it and he now spends his days in Moscow getting kicked by kids. And so the needless begets needle.

In November, British press coverage of the Litvinenko affair plumbed new depths in Russian bear baiting. Even though it wasn’t a totally all-British effort. Few people are aware that Rupert Murdoch and Boris Berezovsky go back a very long way: they formed LogoVaz - News Corporation in the late nineties, amidst some sharedealing and infighting that left the usual complement of dead bodies in Moscow doorways. Sheltering Berezovsky in London is a gift that goes on giving.

So now we’re in January 2007 and the latest casualty is the British Council in Moscow, which has had to close its library and language classes. Seems here that the British Council’s only crime is being British, though other speculation here from Moscow expats.

Notable, yet again, that the British Ambassador has failed to mediate.