His name is not Pootie-poot, however affectionately President Bush meant it when they last met in Crawford, Texas. It’s Putin. Vladimir Putin. He skis. He tells extra-dry one-liners. He throws people twice his weight in judo. He has extensive training as a secret agent, likes wearing black and has spent the past two days swooshing between high-level London meetings in a bulletproof Mercedes.

For all his diminutive stature (and thinning hair and slackening jowls), there is more than a whiff of James Bond about the Russian President, and for his first four years in power his people loved him for it.

Not any more. The ex-KGB staffer who surfed from obscurity to 70 per cent approval ratings on the strength of his ruthless reinvasion of Chechnya in 1999 (Yeltsin tried this first in 1994) is now in trouble at home and mistrusted abroad. He has been relying on high oil prices to do for his second term what his tough-guy image did for his first.

It hasn’t worked. Barely 40 per cent of Russians would vote for him tomorrow if there were a snap election, despite his remorseless tightening of state control over the media, regional governors and opposition parties. Why? Partly because he has left the poor poor and the middle class small by channelling too much of the Kremlin’s vast oil-based tax revenues into paying off foreign debt, and not enough into diversifying a primitive economy. But mainly because he has failed to tackle corruption. Five years after he promised a “dictatorship of the law”, public employees at all levels, including university professors and the entire judiciary, are still on the take to supplement their token wages.

Putin is married with two teenage daughters. Unlike Yeltsin, he hardly drinks. He remains as disciplined as the day he took office — and as wedded to the idea of strengthening the Russian state at all costs. He never fails to impress fellow heads of government in the West with his judicious mix of humour, platitude and rapier detail.

Thus, on Tuesday, he spoke soothingly of revising the “strategic framework” for Russia-EU relations in the light of recent EU expansion. And when Tony Blair mentioned Chechnya and human rights, he hardly flinched. Behind the mask is the man who presided over the jailing of his first rival for power, the tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and who this year called the Soviet collapse “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the (twentieth) century”. Go figure, as they say in Crawford.