GERHARD SCHRÖDER has got off lightly so far for a breathtakingly disreputable choice of employer. Perhaps not for much longer, though, given the heat rising in Poland, the US and Germany’s own media.

The former German Chancellor surely hoped that in taking up the post of chairman of an arm of Gazprom he could make the most of his friendship with Russia’s President Putin and indulge his warm pursuit of a German-Russian alliance, all in a low-key way.

He won’t escape the spotlight now, for the worst of reasons.

Less than a month after he took the job, the state-owned Gazprom (and Putin too) have become intercontinental villains, threatening to turn off lights across Europe.

As supervisory chairman of the German-Russian consortium building the North European Gas Pipeline, Schröder will be leading a project which was always controversial but is ten times so now after Russia’s threats to cut off Ukraine’s gas.

The speed with which he took the post, just weeks after losing the Chancellorship, has reopened uneasy questions about why he was so eager to court Russia when in office.

The plan to run a pipeline to Germany (and perhaps on to Britain) through the Baltic Sea, bypassing Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, was always contentious.

The sea route deliberately bypassed the former Soviet countries, even though it was more expensive. Russia, annoyed at their courtship of the European Union and the US, at their wariness of Moscow and delight in their independence, did not want to be beholden on them for transit. Germany conspired in the plan, to Poland’s fury. Poland was right to argue that the pipeline made its own gas supplies from Russia vulnerable, and made it susceptible to pressure from Moscow.

Russia would no longer be restrained in its dealings with Warsaw by its need for Poland to carry gas through to Western Europe.

In the past few years since the pipeline was agreed, Poland’s fears might have seemed abstract. Since Russia’s threats to Ukraine, they can’t.

You might say that Tony Blair, in angling for the pipeline to continue to Britain, was complicit too. But that would be a little harsh.

His courtship of Putin (rushing to be the first European leader to visit the President-elect) has never been one of the most admirable parts of his foreign policy. He has often seemed to glide too blithely over the signs of Putin’s authoritarianism.

But the route of the pipeline after it had arrived in Germany — whether it continued to Nordic countries, or Britain, or both — was always secondary.

The US press has been scathing of Schröder’s move. The Washington Post asked whether the Gazprom job was his reward for having “thwarted attempts to put unified Western pressure on Russia” over Chechnya. Now the German press is catching up in vitriol.

The mass circulation Bild newspaper reckons that Herr Schröder will be earning €1 million a year. The opposition says that the money won’t make him happy and is calling for him to step down.

A fortnight ago he could have ignored them with ease. But that was before his new sponsor made itself Europe’s most unpopular company.