Improving Vladimir

Daveybloke, the Cuddly Conservative, is being urged to exert Britain's famous moral authority and wag the finger at Vladimir Putin over the fairly accidental death in police custody of a lawyer who blew the whistle on the biggest tax fraud in Russian history. The Americans have imposed a travel ban and frozen the assets of those implicated; but the Daveybloke administration, purified as it is, has so far not even bothered to belch forth the usual token eructations of moral indigestion. Possibly Daveybloke is concerned about the profits of his chums in the oil and gas industry; or perhaps, given the Murdoch affair, George the Progressively Osborne's helping hand for tax dodgers, the Foreign Secretary's beautiful friendship with the Conservative Party's owner in Belize and the continuing blamelessness of the Metropolitan Firearms and Headbangers' Club, it was thought that the British Government's attitude to corruption and police brutality was sufficiently clear already.