Live lobsters, smiles and missiles: the ludicrous leaders strut their stuff

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un’s train trip to Russia, to pose with embattled leader Vladimir Putin, was a spectacular triumph – in self-satirising theatre, writes Tom Peck

A scene from 'Team America: World Police' the 2004 puppet satire that lampooned Kim Jong-il, father of North Korea’s current leader (Paramount Pictures)

When, in 1677, John Milton somehow got his hands on previously unseen, 600-year-old footage of King Canute ordering the sea to come no further upon the land, writing it up in Paradise Lost he reckoned that Canute had given the instruction “with all the state that royalty could put into his countenance”.

A thousand years ago, stateliness was a state of being. That if you wanted to do important things, you had to dress importantly. Some things most definitely never change.

Kim Jong-un’s father could hardly have been made to look more ridiculous in the puppet satire Team America: World Police, made by the creators of South Park, singing about being lonely and threatening enemies with his giant fish tank full of harmless nurse sharks.

But even they didn’t dream up anything quite so spectacularly self-satirising as the full state welcome offered to his son by Vladimir Putin, which took place on a railway station platform, because despite being brave enough to order executions of political opponents by mortar round, he is too fearful for his own personal safety to travel by plane.

Said train is understood to have had more than 90 carriages, including one that transports live lobster in tanks, should the Dear Leader suddenly decide he fancies one. But its main purpose, as its principal passenger knows, is to project an image of power, to supplant the state into his countenance.

So it will be especially disappointing for both him and his old friend Vlad that the opposite is true.

Putin, for his part, has spent much of his time since his invasion of Ukraine performing ostentatious tests of ever more deadly nuclear missile systems, one of which he reckons has the power to fly over the North Pole and launch enough nuclear warheads to destroy every major US city.

Such threats are dutifully typed up, but he knows they don’t tip the balance in his favour. Mutually assured destruction remains mutually assured, whatever the methods.

Kim Jong-un is, by some margin, the world’s most isolated leader, and this mutual display of machismo could hardly have been a grander advert for the growing isolation of the man who had him come to meet him. Kim wants Russian technology to help him launch spy satellites; Putin wants something altogether simpler: ammunition for his collapsing war effort. In February of last year, this was hardly where he imagined himself to be.

The outward choreography of power does nothing to conceal the inward reality, but it is infectious. Brutal dictators have always been narcissistic posers. That democratically elected leaders seem ever more willing to copy them is a more recent development.

It was Margaret Thatcher who realised, in the early Eighties, that if you wanted to get your message on to the Six O’Clock News, you had to provide the Six O’Clock News with some interesting pictures to go with them. And so the hard-hat, hi-viz era was born.

These days, politicians who want to be Thatcher dress up like her, chiefly for the benefit of their own Instagram accounts, not realising that the only person they need to convince are themselves. Nigel Farage could scarcely pass a tank without leaping on it. While she was international trade secretary, Liz Truss mainly saw her role through the prism of her own Instagram account, with taxpayer-funded vanity photographers to go with it. Her 2019 trip to Australia was mainly spent having her picture taken holding a Union Flag umbrella beneath the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

She was made foreign secretary soon after, and felt she could not possibly walk through Moscow’s Red Square without wearing a fur hat, despite it being 18 degrees Celsius on the day in question. Nor could she visit Estonia without climbing on a tank for the benefit of her own cameraman.

When the going got tough for Emmanuel Macron last summer, he decided his clearest path to re-election would be to dress up like Zelensky and pose in a windowless “bunker” in the Elysee Palace in Paris, a city that was not obviously under attack. He was later spotted zipping about on a jet ski.

It is surprising, certainly in democracies, that these people have not worked out that a photo is just a meme in waiting. That you don’t get to put your best face out there anymore, because the internet will simply tear you to pieces. Anything constructed will not merely be very quickly deconstructed, but blown apart.

There is, in short, nothing more boring than political machismo, and nothing more obvious than the desperation it shows. It didn’t work for King Canute in the end, and it’s not going to work for anyone else either.