Paul Staines

A few weeks ago, I received an invitation from Tim Davie, the BBC’s Director-General, to listen to Rutger Bregman deliver this year’s BBC Reith Lecture. Rutger Bregman is the Dutch version of Owen Jones, famously going viral worldwide on TikTok after mocking the Davos elite to their faces. Bregman is the public intellectual du jour and darling of the Guardian reading classes. He is, you might think, an odd choice to follow in the heavyweight footsteps of the likes of previous Reith lecturers such as the philosopher Bertrand Russell or the physicists Robert Oppenheimer and Stephen Hawking. The invitation included dinner afterwards (venison carpaccio, herb-crusted lamb rump followed by tarta de Santiago if you are interested).

Mumbai is my kind of town, a party town. In my first weeks living here, I was out most nights with new friends half my age, inevitably resulting in many unproductive mornings. This culminated with me waking from my slumber as the sun rose, contorted uncomfortably on the back seat of an auto-rickshaw parked on the edge of a slum under the hostile gaze of an unimpressed cheroot-smoking driver. I was so inexplicably far north of my south Bombay apartment that it took me two hours to get home, which in itself was no mean achievement given my wallet was empty of cash and my phone battery dead. Still, in many Asian cities both items would have been gone rather than just depleted, and their owner likely to be the one who was dead.

I first met Sergey Nalobin in 2012 at Soho House. He introduced himself, in accented English, as from the Russian embassy. ‘On the Ministry of Foreign Affairs orientation course before coming to London, I was told to read Guido Fawkes blog and Private Eye. I enjoy yours more,’ he said flatteringly (I publish Guido Fawkes). A PR company had offered me an irresistibly large fee to give ‘a masterclass’ to corporate marketing types in how to use social media. So it was that I found myself presenting Power-Point slides in front of a boardroom of suits — with one short, heavy-set, cropped-haired Russian from central casting sitting right next to me. Later, over burgers, we exchanged banter. I immediately suggested he was a spy.