Replace the damsel in distress with Marine Le Pen, the knight errant with Vlad Putin, and the picture becomes complete.
Even though Marine refuses to cater to bondage fantasies, at least in public, there’s no doubt she’s in distress. Her party is trussed hand and foot by lack of funds, that filthy lucre she pledges to redistribute fairly across France’s population.
The poor girl is trying to ride the global populist wave that has washed the Donald into the White House, May into Downing Street and Renzi into retirement – only to see her hopes being frustrated by the same moneybags she promises to dispossess.
You see, talk may be cheap but this particular hope isn’t. It takes money to run a campaign, not as much as in America, but still. And money is to be found in banks.
This simple truth was definitively established in the 1930s by the American robber Willie Sutton. After he was arrested yet again, Sutton was asked why he kept robbing banks. “Because that’s where the money is,” he replied with the sound common sense so characteristic of Americans.
Yes, but getting money out of banks isn’t always easy for those who eschew armed robbery. Marine has certainly discovered that.
She has appealed, hand outstretched, to French, European, British and American banks, only to be turned down. Somehow today’s plutocrats are less willing to finance extremists than were their predecessors in Russia, circa 1910, or Germany, circa 1930.
At least that’s one lesson they’ve learned well. Savva Morozov, the Russian industrialist, was suicided by the same Bolsheviks he had bankrolled, while Fritz Thyssen, who performed a similar service for the Nazis, got off easy: he was merely sent off to a concentration camp.
Such historical parallels leave Marine in the lurch, seemingly with nowhere to go – this at a time when she’s running close second to the Gaullist leader François Fillon. Since Marine thinks she has a good chance of overtaking Fillon, you can understand her rage at being thwarted by a shortage of funds.
Yet, just as this fair maiden is about to be ravaged, there arrives Vlad, his steed galloping, his armour gleaming in the winter sun, his sword raised high, the same weapon that has slain all those Ukrainians and Syrians.
Vlad has ridden to Marine’s rescue before. Back in 2014, he released her from bondage by generously offering a €9-million ‘loan’. So chivalry isn’t dead. It lives on in the KGB’s good offices.
Marine’s plight is less dire this time: she only needs a paltry €6 million. To be fair, rescuing her wouldn’t constitute undue hardship for Vlad. He could obtain such pocket change with one phone call to some housetrained oligarch, say the football-loving Abramovich, who probably tips as much every year.
My neighbour Roman knows the perils of recalcitrance. As Berezovsky’s example shows, Morozov’s fate may still befall those who play hard to get.
Having saved the damsel in distress, the knight errant would obtain her hand in marriage. Such is the tradition, and Vlad, seen by so many Western conservatives as one of them, is the last man to buck it.
He too wants to marry Marine, though possibly not in the conjugal sense. For, unlike his medieval predecessors, this cavalier is trained in KGB seduction techniques.
Hence Vlad needs a quid pro his quo. He could demand, and possibly get, Marine’s body, but that’s not what he wants. He wants her soul, and Marine is willing to put out.
In fact, she’s positively gagging for Vlad to knead her soul to his heart’s content. By way of a foretaste, she has already endorsed the annexation of Crimea:
“I absolutely do not believe that it was an illegal annexation,” she has declared. “There was a referendum. The inhabitants of Crimea wanted to join Russia. I don’t see that there is any reason to call the referendum into question.”
She’d possibly see a reason or two if less overcome with passion for Vlad’s rouble.
That referendum, for example, was conducted not before but after the annexation, meaning at gun point. The large Tartar community boycotted it, remembering the murderous deportation their grandparents suffered at the hands of Vlad’s role models. And armed theft of territory belonging to a sovereign state is still seen as illegal in some quarters.
What’s amazing is that Western governments are nonchalant about Vlad’s KGB junta recruiting leading politicians, using the tricks honed by the First Chief Directorate to run them like two-bit snitches.
While it’s not clear that Vlad affected the outcome of the US election, it’s beyond doubt that he tried to do so.
In addition to Marine, he’s also cultivating every ‘populist’ (in fact, typically neo-fascist) European group. Bulgaria’s Ataka, Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, Greece’s Golden Dawn, Hungary’s Jobbik, Italy’s Forza Italia, Austria’s Freedom Party are all locked in passionate embrace with Putin.
They’re easy marks for KGB recruiters, as easy as those Oxbridge intellectuals were 80 years ago. ‘Populists’ tropistically reach for the fascist sun shining out of Vlad’s rectum, and the slightest of pushes will draw them all the way in.
Since Putin’s fan will become US president on 20 January, and Fillon admires Vlad as passionately (if more disinterestedly) as Marine does, it’s conceivable that soon every Western nation with the possible exception of Britain, will be run by KGB agents of influence.
Some will act in that capacity consciously, most will be recruited ‘in the dark’, to use KGB terminology. That’s a distinction without a difference: Vlad will feel free to remedy what he calls ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century’ by putting the USSR back together.
Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, the Ukraine, Belarus – brace yourselves. Poland, prepare to do so. Meanwhile, bonne chance to Marine, even though one wonders how French law feels about foreign countries buying French politics.
Strewth.