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UK Relations with Russia

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. He has devoted considerable time to these issues. I read his very interesting article about UK-Russia relations last month. He is right to say that whatever one's views about Russia and whether one likes the current Government or not, one must engage with Russia, because nothing will be gained by what is happening at the moment, which is a policy of complete non-engagement. As I was saying, our Government take neither approach in terms of how they deal with Russia. They have simply allowed relations to ossify. There is almost no engagement whatever. I was about to contrast the approaches of our Prime Minister with the approaches made by Barack Obama and Angela Merkel, but in fact no approach has been made by our Prime Minister. Incredibly, to the best of anyone's knowledge—this seems to be confirmed in parliamentary questions—our Prime Minister has never met Vladimir Putin since the right hon. Gentleman became Prime Minister two and a half years ago. The last time that we can be sure that the two men met was in 2006, at a meeting of the G8 Economic Ministers in St. Petersburg. We cannot be entirely sure on this, because 10 Downing street seems to have had a policy in recent times, under the current incumbent, of not answering parliamentary questions about visits or meetings.