Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov slammed the West for ‘imposing democracy’ on Moscow
Tory MP recalls furious spat at the UN with Putin's top man
RUSSIA'S powerful Foreign Minister accused the West of “imposing democracy” on them during a furious row with Boris Johnson.
Lifting the lid on the extraordinary allegation made by Sergei Lavrov, the Foreign Secretary told the Conservative Party Conference that he was “startled by this.”
The revelation raises the prospect that Mr Lavrov – one of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s closest allies – would rather rule the former Soviet state by dictatorship.
Recalling “tense exchanges” at a meeting during last month’s UN General Assembly in New York, Boris used his speech in Birmingham to claim Mr Lavrov had told him: “It was you guys who imposed democracy on us in 1990.”
Mr Johnson told party delegates: “I was a bit startled by this, and I decided I couldn’t let it go unchallenged, and I said ‘hang on, Sergei, aren’t you in favour of democracy’?”
“And I asked for a show of hands in the room: ‘All those in favour of democracy please show’.
“But much to my amazement our opposite numbers just kept their hands on the table and gave us what we diplomats call the hairy eyeball.”
Mr Johnson added: “And of course in a sense it was a bit of fun, I was winding them up.”
But he warned: “The exchange was also deeply serious.”
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Mr Johnson said it was “revealing about the way the world has changed – or perhaps the way in which it has failed to change – since that moment of exhilaration in 1990 when the Berlin Wall had come down, and the Soviet Union was coming to an end.”
He added: "We genuinely thought that after all that misery and slaughter we were seeing the final triumph of that conglomerate of western liberal values and ideals."
He also said that the horrors of Communism had been “conveniently forgotten by the Dave and Deirdre Sparts who were still singing about Lenin’s red flag last week at the Labour party conference.”
In his doom-laden address Boris warned that the world is becoming "less safe, more dangerous and more worrying" than a decade ago - partly because of a "lack of western self-confidence"