It could be argued that he has done for Kazakhstan what Barry Humphries and his Dame Edna Everage did for Australia. The difference is that Australia was big enough, brash enough and on the global map enough to take it. President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s regime may have emerged only slowly from its Soviet communist past. It may have bought into the US agenda for Central Asia over Iraq. And its human rights record may leave something to be desired.

But nothing – I repeat, nothing – that Kazakhstan has done in the past couple of years has warranted the treatment it has received at the hands of the British comedian, Sacha Baron Cohen, better known in Britain as Ali G.In his pseudo-Kazakh persona of Borat Sagdiyev – the “star” of a new film that has wowed the United States – Baron Cohen presents a completely fictional state that is backward, corrupt, and worthy of ridicule. And Israel’s notorious disregard for its foreign image has had a cost in terms of international support. It is not only Israel’s deeds, but its tough and high-handed words that have counted against it.The power of global communications to forge a national image is also why the Central Asian state of Kazakhstan has my immense sympathy. And while a constituency in Russia might not have mourned her passing, her murder showed Putin’s Russia in an appallingly negative light, as a place where such atrocities could happen.
A national leader in today’s age of instant global communications has to appreciate the likely impact of an event at home on opinion around the world, even if he cannot appreciate its wider significance. How a country reacts at home projects a certain image around the world.

President Bush has learnt the value of global presentation to his cost. The US lost foreign sympathy within six to nine months of 11 September 2001, chiefly through his gung-ho words about taking Osama bin Laden “dead or alive” and his high-handed disdain of the United Nations He tends to be more careful with his words these days. Especially, he very rarely speaks about God.At least some of the panic Mahmoud Ahmedinejad prompted in his early days as President of Iran can be explained by his failure to appreciate the world outside. He had been elected as a national demagogue, who cared nothing for the non-Iranian world. At home, that was part of his appeal; he was a primitive, who would not pander to the West Notice how quiet he has been recently. Both began by accusing the other with accusations that should rightfully be applied to themselves. I couldn’t follow it, actually, not there and then.

More from Simon Carr.

Forty-eight hours after Russia’s star campaigning journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, was viciously murdered in the hallway of the block of flats where she lived, I was still waiting. Not for the gunman to be apprehended, though that would have been a welcome, if unlikely, development. But for a public expression of regret on the part of someone in a position of authority in Russia, preferably from President Putin himself. It might well have been that Ms Politkovskaya, as Mr Putin subsequently said in a needlessly off-hand way, had little influence in Russia In a way, this was true. She embraced a cause – Chechnya – that was unpopular in Russia But she did enjoy enormous influence and sympathy abroad. The first PMQs of the parliamentary year opened in glorious confusion.