Complacent Britain is a soft touch for Russia

The establishment seems content to live on past glories and turn a blind eye to foreign meddling and dirty money

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson claims that when it comes to Russia ‘there is no country that is more vigilant in the Western world’. Picture: Getty Images

THE face staring back at us out of the finally published Russia report is not Vladimir Putin’s, it’s ours. We knew, after all, that Russia had become a semi-authoritarian kleptocracy with a significant interest in undermining Western institutions. But what we discover in the saga of the report’s production and in its contents, is what we’ve become. We are Dorian Gray and this is our portrait.

Let’s start with the publication. The report of the intelligence and security committee was ready last October. That it was held over until this week, nine months later, was entirely the choice of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. When asked about the delay, No 10 said there was “no set timetable” for publication and that the British government had taken “an appropriate amount of time to consider it”. In other words, had Johnson so chosen, we could have seen it last autumn.

In the US, where the implications of the Mueller report into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election were much more serious, the report was delivered in March last year and published less than four weeks later. Four weeks versus nine months. Consider that when Johnson next tells the House, as he did on Wednesday, that when it comes to Russia, “there is no country that is more vigilant in the Western world ... It is the UK that leads the way”.

And even then publication only happened after the government had failed to get its placeman, Chris Grayling, elected as chairman of the committee. A reverse it responded to by petulantly withdrawing the whip from the man who was chosen by his peers, Julian Lewis.

Then let’s consider what is not in the report. US intelligence helped Mueller to uncover a network of Russian agents, directed from Moscow and often using social media to intervene against Hillary Clinton in 2016. When the original ISC requested to understand from British intelligence whether anything similar had happened in British votes, such as the referendums of 2014 and 2016, they were essentially told that these services hadn’t looked and therefore didn’t know.

MI5 supplied six lines of text on the subject, most of it from academic sources. This absence was parlayed by Johnson in Prime Minister’s Questions — the equivalent of the Australian parliament’s Question Time — into the fraudulent suggestion that British intelligence had looked and had found nothing. Well, it worked for his backbenchers.

So it has taken nine months to discover that we don’t know something that our allies, the Americans, certainly thought they needed to know. And we didn’t know it because we didn’t ask. Explanations for this lack of curiosity have varied from pleading lack of resources to the allegation of political interference. Neither convinces me, for reasons I’ll come on to.

There was quite a lot of other stuff in the report. We allow foreign agents free rein to go around spying as long as they don’t do anything actually illegal. And it turns out that the Official Secrets Act is “not fit for purpose” and hasn’t been for well over a decade. And guess what? Countries like the US and Australia already had systems in place to deal with some of this. But not the most vigilant country in the world.

Russian President Vladimir Putin. Picture: AFP

And then there is the question of Russian financial influence. We’ve known for years that dodgy Russian money was pouring into London, and that it was the city du choix for any oligarch to wash their money in. In 2008, under Labour, we thanked such people for their confidence in our banking and legal systems by creating the Tier 1 investor visa for rich individuals. If you invested £1m or more in qualifying UK investments — a figure that’s risen to £2m ($3.56m) — you could sail over the queue and live in Britain. After five years you can apply for indefinite leave to remain and then citizenship. Or, if you invest £5m, that can be just three years, and if it’s £10m, just two years. And maybe a bench named after you in the House of Commons. Bring me your plundering plutocrats, yearning to be tax-free.

So in they came. And our politicians and establishment figures were happy to visit them on their yachts, moored off Corfu or Monte Carlo. Doubtless believing that they were not just living the good life but also establishing useful back channels to Vladimir P. Do any of us imagine they would have spent the time to talk to the same person if they were on an average wage and lived in a semi in Solihull?

Maybe it was these oligarchs who persuaded them the Russian President was a man with whom business could be done. In 2013, seven years after the Litvinenko murder, I was told by a very senior Labour figure that intervention in Syria was risky, but that Putin would pressure Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to stop the use of chemical weapons.

A quiet rapacity runs through British society. Our universities build Saudi libraries and are dependent on Chinese fees. Show an English football fan an oligarch or a sheik who will buy them success and — unlike say, German fans — the English will fall at their feet. A recent poll of Newcastle United supporters by a big fanzine recently showed that nearly 60 per cent favoured a Saudi takeover of the club, agreeing that “I don’t care what goes on in Saudi Arabia”. The others, by the way, welcomed the takeover but had “moral concerns”. Which is worse?

Rapacity and a tolerance of bullshit. We head now towards a Brexit without either the European deal that we were told by ministers would be “easy” to achieve and with no real chance at all of a US deal which was promised (albeit anonymously) “by July”. At the same time government propaganda pumps out a cheery message of getting ready for the fabulous future that is just round the corner. Why do we tolerate these ridiculous and insulting billboards?

To finish off this saga of British complacency, there’s the pandemic that we were supposedly so well prepared for that the Prime Minister missed the first five Cobra meetings about it, and advocated the practice of shaking hands even while we could see what was already happening in Italy. If we looked.

But we don’t look. We have nothing to learn. As long as Spitfires can take to the air when wartime sweethearts go to their makers, we will be OK. A class has taken over government that has never made anything and never mastered anything except the phrase and the attitude. Take back control. Just get it done. The UK leads the way.

So please, leave that picture of the raddled roue in the attic so we can go on pretending that we are still young and beautiful and our paths are strewn with poppies.

The Times