Missed chance to put 'old St German's' on the Russian tourist trail

Libya was hairy enough but I’m glad I gave Moscow a miss!

I mentioned the Libya trip back in the 1990s when I was into my raving on about ‘Anglo American hegemony’ period. It was quite daunting just to get into the country because at the time there was an air travel embargo by the UN. You had to travel across southern Tunisia find ‘a man’ who you then realised spoke very little English but smiled a lot. Then of course you didn’t know what you would find when you got to Tripoli. Would the Libyan version of Mossad try to recruit you etc? I mean the first thing they did was take me to a darkened room and photograph me. Just as I was waiting outside and getting apprehensive ‘another smiling man’ appeared and gave me my conference pass complete with pic. I still have the pass - I look so young!

Anyway all went well as with various League and Trade Union conference jaunts around Europe and the Near East I undertook in my heyday..

By 2015 my conference days were long over and with Barack Obama in the Whitehouse I had recovered from thoughts of ‘Anglo American hegemony' so I was surprised when as DOI of the Celtic League I got a nice invitation from someone called Alexander Viktorovitch Ionov to attend a conference in Moscow. The General Council of the League mulled it over and we said ‘thanks but no thanks’. The conference organisers seemed quite miffed and I remember a terse exchange of emails so I eventually dropped Alexander a letter text in the release below:

https://www.celticleague.net/news/league-declines-moscow-conference-invite/

I’ve still followed Alexander’s career however and he seems to get about or it appears so. After all I suppose there is more than one Alexander with the same surname in a country like Russia. Up to now I’ve spotted the name in a delegation to Syria and in a article furiously rebutting claims about a Russian hacker in his role as vice president of the Russian International Human Rights Committee.

I’m sure all that Alexander does is above board but what with all the talk of Russians running around ‘Olde England’ with chemical weapons it kind of puts you off building bridges.

Still let's assume that the two guys fingered by MI5 were simply Russian tourists visiting Salisbury - after all it wouldn’t be the first time the British intelligence services had told porkies - who knows I could have built bridges to the Kremlin back in 2015 that would have resulted in bus loads of Russians rolling up to see St German’s Cathedral in Peel and the House of Mannanan.

Another missed opportunity!

Image: St Germans Cathedral and Alexander I would have enjoyed showing him round.

Bernard Moffatt