It used to be so straightforward. Naïve, probably. Simplistic, certainly. But nonetheless so much more straightforward than it is now. From Rocky 4 to the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall to the 2014 invasion of Ukraine, Russia – or the Soviet Union – stood on one side of one of history’s greatest international and ideological divides and we, the UK, stood with our senior ally, the United States, on the other.
And then there was Brexit. It took four years for Boris Johnson to admit that he had partied with the former KGB officer Alexander Lebedev while serving as Foreign Secretary. At the time of the meeting, in April 2018, Johnson was largely insulated from proper scrutiny because most of our media was still suffering from Brexit fever and he was one of its chief champions.
He arrived at the Umbrian palazzo owned by the Russian billionaire’s son, Evgeny, without his security detail or any civil servants. His meeting there with Alexander Lebedev went unreported until November 2019. And, at risk of understatement, he made this visit immediately after attending a Nato summit convened to discuss relations with Russia after the attempt to murder the defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia should have raised rather more eyebrows than it did at the time. It is important, always, to mention here that Dawn Sturgess, an entirely blameless civilian, was killed by the Novichok nerve agent smuggled into Salisbury.
The extraordinary episode did nothing to prevent Johnson’s passage into Downing Street, where he soon elevated Evgeny Lebedev to the House of Lords, despite reportedly being warned of national security risks by MI5 officers. And it was as Prime Minister that, in October 2019, he received the Intelligence and Security Committee’s report into allegations of Russian interference in British politics.
For reasons that have never been made entirely clear, its publication was delayed first until after that year’s general election in December, which Johnson won, and then, for reasons even harder to discern, until July 2020 after a number of legal actions tried to force the Government to publish, including one brought by Marina Litvinenko, the widow of the murdered Russian dissident Alexander. A former chair of the committee, the Conservative Dominic Grieve, described one of the excuses offered by Johnson for the delay as “plainly bogus”.
When the heavily redacted report was finally published, it reported substantial evidence that Russian interference in British politics is commonplace and, crucially, that the UK Government had failed to investigate evidence of interference in our democratic process due to a “lack of curiosity” in Downing Street.
This is why, by his own account, one of the first things Andy Burnham did on entering Downing Street was to ask whether Vladimir Putin’s Russia had meddled in the Brexit vote, and it is why Johnson may not have been the most reliable witness when he accused Burnham of lying about how Russian meddling “clearly” took place.
But Johnson, thankfully, is yesterday’s news. Nigel Farage is very much today’s and, despite his recent setbacks, quite possibly tomorrow’s. So when he, with no known access to either intelligence sources or classified information, loudly insisted on Monday that “the Prime Minister is a liar. There was no Russian interference,” it was hard to know from where he was deriving his confidence.
To be fair to Farage, he may have some relevant contacts. He was a regular contributor to Russia Today, the state-sponsored propaganda network that had its broadcasting licence revoked in the UK after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The MI5 chief Ken McCallum confirmed yesterday that RT was among the platforms through which the Kremlin sought to interfere in the Brexit referendum, though he added it appeared to have had little effect. That would be the same interference that Farage and Johnson have accused Burnham of lying about.
Given that Farage used one of his 17 appearances on RT to claim that Europe was not governed by elected democracies but “by the worst people we have seen in Europe since 1945”, it is worth remembering which politicians he holds in higher esteem.
Asked by Alastair Campbell in 2014 which politician he admired the most, Farage’s answer was unequivocal: “As an operator, but not as a human being, I would say Putin.” He also used the interview to parrot the Kremlin’s bogus justification for the illegal invasion of Crimea weeks previously, saying: “If you poke the Russian bear with a stick, he will respond.” Farage’s close political ally, Nathan Gill, Reform’s former leader in Wales, is currently in prison for accepting bribes from a Kremlin stooge in return for making statements “that would benefit Russia in regards to Ukraine”.
Farage’s other political hero is, of course, Donald Trump. The US President announced last week that he would be lifting sanctions on Russian oil products until April 2027 in order to secure diesel reserves. The amounts concerned are trifling but it allows “the bravest man” Farage has “ever met” to pretend to his voters that the price at their pumps will soon come down while scrupulously avoiding the fact that those prices have soared as a direct consequence of his failing war against Iran.
It also removed any lingering scintillas of doubt about whose side Trump is on in the war between Russia and Ukraine. What has been clear to most of us since at least the shameful attempt to humiliate Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office became irrefutable as Trump effectively invited US motorists to help fund Putin’s war crimes in Ukraine.
It may not be as easy as it used to be to work out who is on what side and why. The binary simplicity of the Cold War is behind us. But Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin now clearly stand together against Ukraine and her Western allies. We can only wonder which side Farage really supports.
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