DAILY DRONE BUGS KREMLIN SHOCK
Putin reveals compromising pictures of Pumpkin Trump
The President of Russia reaches out a hand and absently presses a button on his phone console. Moments later comes a tap at the door.
Vladimir Putin calls: “Da (yes)” and his chief of staff enters the office. He waits at a respectful distance, no closer than 20 feet, as Putin goes on reading and signing papers.
Putin looks up. “How are the arrangements for The Pumpkin coming along?”
The aide, Yevgeny, cannot hide his confusion. “Esteemed Vladimir Vladimirovich, I’m not sure I…” he stumbles.
“Trump, you idiot.”
“Why…”
“I call him that because he’s round and orange and likes to play trick or treat, even when it’s not Halloween.”
Yevgeny laughs unconvincingly. “Haha, yes. That’s a good one, Sir.”
Putin’s eyes narrow until they look like machine-gun slits in a pillbox on the Ukrainian front.
“So, are we ready?”
“All bar a few loose ends, dear Vladimir Vladimirovich.”
“You know how I hate loose ends, Yevgeny. Are the photos dealt with?”
“Yes, Sir. A3 size, as you instructed. They are in an envelope marked Top Secret, For The Donald's Eyes Only. We’ll pass them to his chief of staff.”
“Which ones did you choose?”
“Mostly the girl from St Petersburg, the blonde one. She gave him a good time and we got some candid shots of Little Don.”
“Very little!” They both laugh.
“We also threw in a few of him with the babushka. God only knows what that was all about.”
“He told me that sometimes he needs to be the good-looking one.”
“Oh, well, no accounting for such peccadillos, dear Vladimir Vladimirovich.”
“No, indeed. The pictures are a bit old, 2013, but they will serve as a warning. Do we have any other kompromat?”
“We are working on one of their Secret Service agents, Sir. He has a drink problem, so we are putting some 100 proof vodka in his minibar along with some beer from Scotland. It’s called Brewmeister Snake Venom – 67.5 per cent alcohol.”
“Christ! If he lives, Yevgeny, he’s ours. Well done. And Scotland’s a nice touch, that’s where Trump’s mother is from.”
Yevgeny positively glows. “They say she drank it herself, Sir. Very fond of a couple of pints of Snake Venom.”
“Now, what else? Has anyone brought up the matter of Zelensky being at the talks?”
They both break into laughter as they each form a thumb and forefinger into an L shape and hold it against their foreheads.
“Not yet, Sir. And if they do, we will say we don’t want negotiations between two old friends spoiled by the inclusion of outsiders.”
“Very good, Yevgeny, you’re learning.”
“From a master, dear Vladimir Vladimirovich.”
“Shame it’s in Alaska. If it was here at the Kremlin, I would make him wait in the Georgievsky Hall, take away all the chairs. Then I swagger through those enormous fuck-off golden doors with the goose-stepping flunkies on either side. I stride down the hall and all the time he’s waiting… and waiting… with a fixed smile. Who’s in charge? I am.”
“Talking of Alaska, Sir, we used to own it, of course. It was part of our great Russian empire.”
“Yes, Yevgeny, and we let the Yanks have it in 1867 for, what, $7.2 million? Not exactly the art of the deal, is it? We won’t be making that mistake again, trust me.”
“I don’t suppose, Vladimir Vladimirovich, that we could get Trump to take a Covid test on the pretext that you are ill?”
“For his DNA, you mean?”
“You’re ahead of me again, Sir.”
“No, the Secret Service wouldn’t wear it.”
“What about interpreters, Vladimir Vladimirovich?”
“Boris will be mine. He’s reliable, even pissed, and doesn’t translate too literally. Just as well, really.”
“Yes, Sir, but Trump will have one too, an American.”
“Don’t worry about that. We know who he is and our friends in the SVR are paying his son’s way through Harvard Law School. The kid wants to be a big-shot lawyer. I’m hoping we can get him appointed Attorney General one day. In the meantime, his dad will say what I want him to say, not what I actually say.
“That reminds me. The idiot envoy that Trump sent…”
“Witkoff, Sir.”
“Half-Witkoff, more like.”
“Oh, very good!”
“Well, he had no interpreter and went home thinking we were going to withdraw troops from Ukraine. What? When we’re winning? Seriously?”
“That’s kind of the point of the meeting, Sir. To negotiate on who keeps what land.”
“Yevgeny, you’re having a giraffe, as that so-called columnist Helena Handcart would say. Ukraine is Russia. All of it. I didn’t send countless thousands of men to their deaths there only to give back the land they won to the fascist aggressor.
“Incidentally, while I think of it, make sure Lavrov is sitting next to me at the talks. He’s an ugly bastard but he has some good ideas.”
“What has our esteemed foreign minister Sergey Viktorovich come up with this time, Sir?”
“For Trump, this is all about the Nobel Peace Prize – right, Yevgeny?”
“Yes, dear Vladimir Vladimirovich.”
“Well, Lavrov suggests that once we agree a ceasefire in Ukraine, we invade one of the Baltic states, probably Estonia to start with…”
“And?”
“And Trump steps in to play peacemaker! We withdraw our troops, he gets his prize. After that, he doesn’t give a toss and we take the rest of Ukraine. It’s genius, Yevgeny.”
“Yes, Sir. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
“Wise counsel, Yevgeny. When do you expect the Alaska meeting to end?”
“Saturday, Sunday at the latest, Sir.”
“Okay, you may go. By the way, when you get back to your office, call General Gerasimov. Tell him he’s invading Alaska on Monday.”
*****
Media mogul Rupert Murdoch gave a rare interview last month on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the first newspaper he launched, The Australian.
Murdoch, 94, predicted that printed newspapers might last another 15 years – “with a lot of luck”.
Which makes it all the more remarkable that the wily old Fox News boss is starting a new one. Does he know something we don’t? Oh, come on, doesn’t he always?
The new paper is the California Post, a spin-off of America’s oldest newspaper, the New York Post (Est. 1801). It comes complete with all the hoopla of an irreverent tabloid – “Headless Body in Topless Bar”, one fabled headline announced – and its infamous Page 6 gossip column.
It will print seven days a week and have its own website, social media accounts and video and audio material.
The move follows a decision by the Los Angeles Times to sack one in five of its journalists – at least 115 people – in the biggest cull of its 142-year history. It aimed to stem losses of more than $100 million.
The Post already has a foot in California. Ninety per cent of its digital audience is outside New York, with the Los Angeles readership second only to New York. So it makes financial sense, especially when it is up against the ailing LA Times, a dull, worthy, liberal competitor.
Robert Thomson, a former editor of The Times and the Wall Street Journal, both Murdoch papers, and now chief executive of News Corp, promised “an antidote to the jaundiced, jaded journalism that has sadly proliferated [in California].”
He added ominously: “Soon, all will not be quiet on the Western Front.”
It sounds like a good, old-fashioned newspaper ding-dong is afoot.
I wish the California Post 15 years of good luck.
*****
Harriet Cullen (née Berry), daughter of Michael Berry, who founded the Sunday Telegraph and in 1968 was made Lord Hartwell by a doubtless grateful Harold Wilson, has written a charming piece in this week’s Speccie.
She first subtly bemoans the fact that, in the absence of other buyers, the Telegraph is slowly falling into the hands of Arabs.
Then she tells the princesses of the Emirates of the “gilded and protected lives” the Berry women led as they grew up in the 1940s and 1950s.
“As young girls or women,” she writes, “with or without our parents, my sister and I would invariably be met wherever we went abroad by a Telegraph correspondent.
“There was even a Heathrow correspondent, whose main job was to look out for celebrities. He once dashed on to a bus taking passengers to board the plane to Paris to make sure I was safely on it, aged 15.”
It was, Cullen writes, “like having your own private embassy network – except the journalists were far more fun than smooth diplomats.”
She tells how the teleprinter installed in their house would chatter away with news and columns to forewarn her father of angry calls to come.
He would answer like this: “I assure you this has been very carefully researched” (news); or “I assure you it will be written in the most sensitive way” (gossip).
In the end, of course, he lost the paper to Conrad Black, who installed Max Hastings as editor.
Harriet Cullen has a new book out about her mother: Lady Pamela Berry: Passion, politics and Power.
*****
Ever since his school broke up for the summer holidays, my five-year-old grandson has been impatient to leave behind his reception class and move on to bigger and better things.
“Mummy,” he asked one evening, “when I wake up will I be in Year One?”
Well, the answer now is No, because someone has moved the goalposts. All the classes at his lovely junior school have been rebranded with names such Clover, Meadow and Dragonfly.
Oliver will be in Newt class. No doubt certain of his grandfather’s friends think that is very apt.
Perhaps we’ll make it a family tradition, like Eton and Oxford, or the Guards.
“I’ve put him down for Newt.”
“Oh, well done, old boy.”
*****
I am indebted to Richard Godwin in the Sunday Times magazine for explaining the origin of the word cocktails.
“If you were an 18th Century horse trader and wanted to zhuzh up a tired nag on market day, you’d shove a bit of ginger up its bum.
“It would duly cock its tail and behave in a frisky manner. Which is precisely the effect the first (orally ingested) ‘cock-tails’ had on human drinkers.”
Blimey, glad we’ve got that cleared up. Martini, anyone?
RICHARD DISMORE
13 August 2025
