Like the EdStone before it, many, many jokes have been made about Putin’s overcompensatory fitment already. Badminton rackets, cats, megaphones and Alan Partridge have been photoshopped in. One tweeter called it the “mother-in-law” table. And several pointed out various films – from The Spy Who Loved Me to Citizen Kane to Dune – it calls to mind.
“Table Space”, as the cliché is officially known by screen buffs, actually has its own page on tvtropes.org. “Often just a visual gag,” the entry reads, “in more serious uses the distance between the two is used to illustrate the emotional distance between them, especially if this is a result of their opulent but hollow lifestyle.” It’s often paired, we are told, with “Formal Full Array of Cutlery”.
Even if he didn’t necessarily read it on tvtropes, Vladimir Putin knows about Table Space – the politics of tables is one of the few non-lethal ways a world leader can assert their authority. Bear in mind that this is a man who allegedly keeps his international guests waiting for as much time as he feels he wants to inflict on them (his maximum has been Angela Merkel, at over four hours; his minimum the Queen, at 14 minutes), so it’s likely he’s aware of table-based froideur. There is a time and a place for soft power, but hard, high-gloss, elegant maple, triple-arched, 14-seater power is even more effective.
The shape, the size, the colour, the backdrop, the seating plan, the settings – they might look basic compared with a personal desk, but every element of a conference table can be manipulated to the advantage, or disadvantage, of those sitting around it. Think of it as the political equivalent of 20th-century magnates commissioning taller and taller skyscrapers to try and outdo one another, or 21st-century billionaire tech entrepreneurs building ever-bigger rockets to gain the upper hand.
Aside from their basic function of holding up all the papers and glasses of water and elbows, tables are the foundation of not only international diplomatic meetings with photo opportunities, as at the Kremlin on Monday, but in day-to-day cabinet government.
In the latter, there seems to be a basic rule: the more authoritarian the leader, the more likely it is they’ll sit at the head of the table. This might be obvious, but it holds pretty much everywhere. The UK prime minister and the US president, for instance, sit in the middle of one side of their oval cabinet room tables, part of a collaborative effort. Others – Putin, Narendra Modi, Kim Jong-un, and before them Saddam Hussein or Idi Amin – preferred to make clear who was overseeing things. I can find no nation which uses a transparent table, despite the visual metaphor that could offer.
