Putin ‘made Gordon Brown sit in a small chair’

And other stories from the stranger side of life

Gordon Brown

Gordon Brown believes Vladimir Putin once deliberately belittled him by making him sit on a small chair during a visit to Moscow. Remembering a meeting in 2006, when Brown was then Tony Blair’s chancellor, the politician said: “I was put in a very low seat so that I was looking up at him.” He described Putin as “a relatively small man” who wears “stacked heels”. Brown said Putin read out information about him “as though he wanted to prove he knew more about me than I knew about myself”. Speaking to The Telegraph, Brown added: “I can tell you he was threatening me even then.”

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