My Baltic tour continued today in Riga. This morning I saw the Latvian prime minister, Valdis Dombrovskis – who, irritatingly, is eight years younger than me – he’s 37. It was all charmingly informal. I turned up at the government offices and said “I have come to see the prime minister”, several times very slowly to the security guard on the door. Eventually he understood, pointed at the stairs and waved three fingers at me – which I accurately interpreted as meaning “third floor”. When I got up there, a woman popped out of an office and introduced herself as the PM’s secretary and went to fetch me a cup of coffee. After a while, a man in short sleeves and glasses wandered into the office. I did vaguely wonder whether he was a computer technician, since he had a faintly geeky air. But when he said, “well we might as well get started”, it struck me that that this must – in fact – be the prime minister himself.
Our talk was off-the-record, and I’m saving the serious stuff on the Baltics for my newspaper column on Tuesday. So let me just say it was really interesting, and move swiftly on.
This afternoon I gave a talk on international politics at a wonderful second-hand book-store in Riga, run by my old colleague from the FT and The Economist, Robert Cottrell. It is called appropriately enough, “Robert’s Books” and I would recommend that you drop by, if you are ever in Riga. In those rare moments when Robert is not dealing with customers (one of whom has just charmingly bought Harry Potter and a set of essays by the German Freudian psychologist, Alfred Adler), he runs the excellent web-site The Browser – which I must remember to add to my own blogroll.
PS – Fulham won 3-0.
For views and opinions on the European Union from Peter Spiegel, Joshua Chaffin, Alex Barker and Stanley Pignal, follow the 