The throne behind the power: from Putin’s toilet brush to Trump’s golden bowl

By Matthew Sweet

We know how Vladimir Putin would like us to think of him: President Eternal, shirtless in khaki combat pants, galloping over the Urals in search of a bear to wrestle. We also know the areas of his life he would prefer to remain in a blur of unknowing – his wealth, his relationship status, his tally of children. We can be fairly sure, I think, that he takes little pleasure in the image dumped into the Russian imagination by Alexei Navalny, the Novichok-proof and now-jailed leader of the Anti-Corruption Foundation. Vladimir Vladimirovich, trousers gathered at his ankles, piping a whorl of excrement into a toilet bowl, flanked by a symbol of cartoonish decadence – an $850 lavatory brush.

In Portugal in 1974, pro-democracy activists planted carnations in soldiers’ gun barrels. Czechoslovakia’s Velvet revolutionaries carried candles. Russians protesting against Navalny’s imprisonment are raising gold-painted plastic toilet brushes aloft, like torches of liberty. The reason? One of Navalny’s last acts before being arrested was to drop a feature-length video offering a “Through the Keyhole” style account of the secret palace Putin is alleged to have built near Gelendzhik on the Black Sea with a dirty $1.3bn. The toilet brush was the star exhibit.