Donald Macleod: My encounter with Russian billionaire Boris…and why the Bear must be caged

AS the spy poisoning fall-out between Westminster and the Kremlin gathers pace, it all takes me back to my encounter with billionaire Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky 12 years ago.

I had been asked by a friend if I would look after Berezovsky when he visited Glasgow.

This visit was top secret as the tycoon was regarded by Russian President Vladimir Putin as an enemy of the state.

I agreed to help him out, assured in my naivety that he and his “armed” entourage would spend plenty of cash in my new Russian-themed bar Stavka and nightclubs.

Money, you see, was no problem to billionaire Boris.

Well, he was looked after and he did spend lots of his roubles – just not in my bar or clubs, where I ended up footing the bill!

Fast-forward a few weeks and I received a call from customs and excise at Glasgow Airport asking if I could pop down and sign for a large box which had just arrived from Moscow.

A box that only had my name on it. No sender’s name. No address. No description of its contents.

I was very keen to open this box, hoping for some reward for my warm welcome to Boris.

But I was strongly advised not to touch it unless a deal with the authorities could be reached which would exonerate me from prosecution if it contained illegal contraband.

Well, a deal was eventually done and the box was opened.

It contained, wait for it… 100 large, red T-shirts emblazoned with a T34 tank and a list of all the countries the former Soviet Union had conquered under Joseph Stalin.

I was pig sick! This was not what I expected. No Faberge egg, no large cheque, not even a case of vodka.

All I got for my trouble was a cardboard box of ill-fitting, inappropriate Red Army T-shirts, which I had to pay a lawyer to open.

Years later, Berezovsky, like so many of Putin’s enemies based here in the UK, was found dead.

He was discovered on the bathroom floor of his Ascot home in 2013 with a ligature around his neck.

A coroner returned an open verdict.

And so we arrive at the nerve agent attack on Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia Skripal at the start of this month.

There have been expulsions of diplomats and threats of further reprisals from both the UK and Russia, all pushing the world into a new and frighteningly possible Cold War.

I say the Russian Bear must be put back in its cage – the UK simply cannot back down now.

In the meantime, I will leave the last word on the current crisis to Dick Van Dyke’s Bert from Mary Poppins:

Winds in the east, mist blowin’ in,

Like something is brewin’, about to begin,

Can’t put my finger on what lies in store,

But I feel what has happened all happened before.