No Tea and Sympathy for Fans in Moscow

On the one hand, my heart goes out to the 50,000 poor saps who have decided to follow Manchester United and Chelsea to the Champions League final in Moscow at an estimated £1,200 each in travel alone, even if it does raise certain questions, such as credit crisis, what credit crisis? And, exactly how is gifting the Moscow economy £50m or so going to increase pressure on the authorities to give up Alexander Litvinenko's alleged killer, Andrei Lugovoi, now a deputy in the Duma?

Mostly, though, I feel the fans' pain. Not just because half of them are going to spend thousands of pounds watching their team lose, but because, in my bitter experience, even £1,000 in the Russian capital is just about enough to buy you a couple of taxi rides, a chicken sandwich and a hot beverage.

Admittedly, when I went before Christmas, my chances of negotiating cheap cab fares were stymied by the fact that I was traveling to and from something called the Millionaire Fair, where the only means of exiting the car park was to pay a thickset man in a leather jacket in the region of 60 quid in order to sit in a traffic jam for the next three hours.

What you don't expect is to bleed from both ears when you're presented with a bill for a cup of tea. I went to meet a local journalist who told me his phone was bugged and his email monitored, then found myself faced with a bill so outrageous it posed a quasi-philosophical proposition, which I shall raise again here: what is the very maximum price anyone could ever possibly charge for two mugs of hot water and a spoonful of tea? Around 2,400 roubles, as it turns out, £50. Whoever wins on 21 May, it won't be the fans.

What will happen, for example, when a disoriented supporter stumbles into the Most, a nightclub owned by Roman Abramovich, where sitting at a table within sniffing distance of a bottle of vodka costs the price of a new car? Will this be something to discuss, perhaps, with the Omon - the Special Purpose Police Squad - being brought in to police the event. Motto: 'We know no mercy and do not ask for any.'

Still, while there's a question mark over whether what's really needed at this juncture in Russian-British diplomatic relations is the arrival of 50,000 possibly slightly inebriated football fans, there's a certain poetic justice to it all. The £50m the fans will bring is a mere drop in the ocean compared with the £587m of Russian oil wealth that Abramovich has extracted from the country to squander - sorry, lavish - on Chelsea FC. It's a shame that Russia's pensioners, the greatest casualties of the 'privatization' of its national industries, don't drive taxis or run nightclubs, but in one form or another, it looks like 21 May may be payback time.

Mayoral chain link

Will London's new mayor be at the game? Boris Johnson should surely not miss an opportunity to pick up a few tips from Yuri Luzhkov, another populist right-winger keen on law and order. Boris's views on gay marriage - 'a ludicrous parody of the real thing' - are likely to find a sympathetic audience in Moscow, where Luzhkov has just banned a gay pride march on the grounds that it's 'satanic'.

But when it comes to phrase-making, political correctness and commitment to truth, Boris is a stripling compared with Luzhkov. During his reign, his wife, Yelena Baturina, has become the 279th richest person in the world. Could this be due to her high-level political contacts? Not so, says Mr Luzhkov, it's because 'she has a square head. She was born with the brain of a man'.

Footnote: her first major contract was to make the 85,000 plastic seats that fill Luzhniki Stadium, where the match will be held. It's all about bums on seats, Boris.