A note on what I’m doing and why. I’m an investigative journalist who worked for the Guardian for 20 years latterly investigating the intersection of politics and technology that included 2018’s exposé of the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal. The opaque and unaccountable Silicon Valley companies that facilitated both Brexit and Trump are now key players in an accelerating global axis of autocracy. I believe this is a new form and type of power that I’m committed to keep on exposing: Broligarchy.
There’s always a new low. I thought I’d already plumbed the depths of the British political and media establishment’s ignorance and wilful denial of Russia’s hybrid warfare against the West. But, there’s always a new low. And this week, Britain hit it.
There are details below about how Russia’s campaign is playing out in the US. There, President Trump has almost entirely dismantled all the traditional defences against hostile state interference and is determinedly hunting down the career intelligence officers who investigated Russia’s attacks on the 2016 and 2020 elections.
And across Europe, there is no escaping the intent. Russia flew drones into Poland and Romania and sent fighter jets into Estonian airspace. In London, three British men, recruited over Telegram, were convicted of carrying out acts of sabotage on behalf of the Wagner Group, burning a warehouse in east London. Another three men were arrested on suspicion of helping Russian intelligence this week.
And yet, there’s an uncanny silence about another extraordinary story. One that involves a high-level Kremlin spy ring targeting UK politicians.
Because if there’s one thing I thought one could reliably depend on, it’s that no British newspaper could possibly turn down a political scandal involving a young blonde woman and a series of revealing cleavage shots. Throw in a Russian spy ring and this story should be Anna Chapman #2.
Remember her? Both the US and UK press went wild for that story back in 2010. Chapman was a Russian spy who generated wall-to-wall coverage largely because of an inexhaustible supply of miniskirt and bikini shots.
This is a country in which the best-selling newspaper featured a topless ‘lovely’ on page three right up to 2015. MailOnline continues the tradition with its “sidebar of shame”. And if you’re murdered and want anyone to pay attention, my top tip is to be young, pretty and female.
And it’s not just the tabloid press. An editor who’d better remain nameless once got me to write about sexism in advertising so that – in his words – ‘we can run a big photo of those fat birds in their underwear’ (a body-positive ad for Dove, as it happens). I interviewed a load of women who told me that advertising is a toxic industry to work in and pretty much all ads are written and designed by men and the editor got his ‘fat birds’ across two broadsheet pages of a leading liberal newspaper. (The ad was, you’ve guessed it, written by an all-male creative team and this is what passed as ‘fat’ in the early 2000s.)
All of which to say is that I thought the historic resistance of the UK media establishment to cover Russian interference in UK politics would finally be busted by the story that we ran in the Nerve last week. (That’s the new publication I’ve set up with four former colleagues from the Guardian & Observer and that some of you have been kind enough to subscribe to: thank you!)
That story featured a pro-Kremlin influencer, married to a Russian agent, who claimed to be a “good friend” of Nigel Farage (a claim she now denies). And pretty sensationally, I thought, I’d also found her open Instagram account – to which we linked – and which featured any number of cleavage and bikini shots.
It was the second part of an investigation into Nathan Gill, a British politician who’s pleaded guilty to eight counts of bribery. Gill, a close friend and ally of Nigel Farage, was paid to spread Kremlin propaganda points in the European Parliament.
I came up in journalism through news and I thought this was a slam dunk. We – and my friend at Byline Times, Peter Jukes (with whom I did the Sergei & the Westminster Spy Ring) podcast had the story entirely to ourselves for a good two weeks but that obviously couldn’t go on.
Not now that I’d found a ton of new evidence including documents that revealed the Russian agent who recruited Gill – one Oleh Voloshyn – hadn’t worked alone but as a team with his wife, Nadia Sass. Together, they’d targeted politicians across Europe. And as well as photos of her with Nigel Farage and leading figures in Germany’s far-right AfD party, I’d also uncovered a treasure trove of photos of the kind that would make a Daily Mail picture editor weep.
How on earth could the Mailonline or Sunday Times resist that? It was inevitable they’d rip off our story and most likely claim the credit but as I said to Peter, that is actually for the good, because it would make it unignorable.
That they haven’t is an eye-opening insight into the state of the UK media system. The Chapman story had no party political overtones. She was a sexy Russian spy, end of. Whereas this story is intimately entwined with current politics and the recent past, the seeping wound that refuses to heal, Brexit.
The one outlet that followed up on the story was James O’Brien on LBC. He invited me on to explain the latest stage in a long-running legal case against the UK government that I’ve been part of since 2020 (more details below). But he also asked me why there was such a baffling silence in the rest of the media. I gave him my response but I’d love to hear what you think in the comments below.
The 15-minute segment includes a really great scene setter to the legal case and then a precis of the latest story and why it matters.
(I know some of you like a transcript so I’ve created one here.)
The Grand Chamber
This sounds like something out of Harry Potter but it’s actually Europe’s ‘Supreme Court’. It hears only cases of “exceptional importance and complexity” which test the legal principles of the European Convention on Human Rights.
That convention safeguards our rights as citizens to free and fair elections. And this week, three former MPs – Caroline Lucas, Alyn Smith and Ben Bradshaw – with the non-profit I set up, the Citizens, have lodged a claim with the Grand Chamber. It states that UK government is failing in its duty to protect elections from foreign interference and its “clear, positive duties to investigate and safeguard against foreign influence”.
Even though all three MPs have now left parliament, they have persevered with the claim and the latest filing is a big deal. As James O’Brien explains in the clip above, it all came about because of a report by the UK parliament’s security and intelligence committee which discovered the UK intelligence agencies had “turned a blind eye” to “credible evidence” of Russian interference in UK elections, including the Brexit vote.
In July, I wrote in the newsletter that we were expecting the judgment from the European court. On the day, I scanned the document to the end, read the words “not upheld” and resigned myself, again, to failure. But then I got on a call with our lawyers at Leigh Day solicitors. Tessa Gregory and Tom Short have put years into this case, mostly pro bono, and instead of downcast, they were suprisingly cock-a-hoop.
What was remarkable about the judgment, they said, is that it acknowledged pretty much every single one of our points. Yes, it said, foreign influence campaigns could seriously mislead voters. And yes, it said, there was indeed evidence of foreign interference in UK elections.
It even said the current evidence proved elections held in the UK may be neither free nor fair.
“In the present case, it would accept that there was evidence of interference in the United Kingdom’s democratic processes of sufficient intensity to be capable of impairing the very essence of the right to benefit from elections held under conditions which ensure the free expression of the opinion of the people”.
The only thing that it stopped short of was agreeing that member states have a duty to investigate such interference. That “investigatory principle” is in the statute but it’s never been tested. That’s a novel point of law. And that’s why we’re going to the Grand Chamber.
Leigh Day has something like 600 lawyers and is one of the leading human rights’ firms in the country and they’ve never taken a case to the Grand Chamber before. If we succeed, it would have ramifications for every country in Europe. And, we would finally – finally – get some answers to questions that the British state has refused to even ask.
If it’s not too late.
Why it matters
I had lunch with the friend-of-the-newsletter Mark Bergman this week. He’s a Washington DC lawyer who’s one of a network of determined and tireless individuals in the US who are trying to track all the many ways in which Trump is tearing up the American republic and do what he can to uphold it.
Mark is a model of respectability, a former partner in a white-shoe law firm whose synopsis of where America is at right now is that “the USA is a failed democracy and a police state.”
But when I asked him to pick out what concerned him most about what is happening, he thought about it and then said: “It all comes back to Russia.” He pointed to the indictment of James Comey, the former head of the FBI, who was sacked for initiating the investigation into Russia’s attack on the 2016 election.
But he also said he was profoundly disturbed by the the targeting of 37 present and former intelligence officers who’ve been stripped of their security clearances. What some people may have missed, he said, (and I include myself in that number) is what it reveals Trump’s obsession with the 2016 election and the so-called Russia Hoax”.
That language has been deliberately picked up and echoed in the UK, by the far-right leader, Nigel Farage and according to Mark Bergman, Trump’s obsession has led him on a witch-hunt that has now seen him weaponize the Department of Justice and remove “all national security defences against foreign interference.”
In short, in America, it’s increasingly looking like Putin has won.
Most of Britain is still asleep at the wheel
I just don’t have that luxury.
Farage has singled me out by name as a key perpetrator of “the Russia hoax”. He ties that explicitly to the “campaign” against Trump. He says there will be consequences.
The USA is approximately four years ahead of our timeline. But this is the trajectory we are on.
He’s back
Like the founders of the Nerve, reporter John Sweeney used to work for the Guardian & Observer. Later he went to the BBC where he became a well-known correspondent, making films on everything from Putin to Scientology. In 2017-18, he tried to make a series of reports into Russian interference in Brexit and eventually turned whistleblower writing to the regulator, Ofcom, that he believed his journalism had been deliberately suppressed.
“In his letter, seen by Press Gazette, Sweeney said his concerns centred on seven reports across Newsnight, Panorama and BBC News that were not broadcast, a number of which he said were investigating alleged ties to Russia among figures working within British politics.
He also listed a Newsnight investigation into a firm who “sought to silence” Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia before her 2017 murder, and a BBC News investigation into Leave.EU co-founder Arron Banks.
Furthermore, Sweeney told Ofcom that BBC management had “enfeebled” broadcast reports on Banks, Nigel Farage and Vladimir Putin.”
It felt entirely appropriate that John has joined our ranks and this week went to cover the Caerphilly by-election in Wales and another entirely under-reported aspect of that election, the Reform candidate’s relationship with….the man who took the bribes, his friend and former employer, Nathan Gill.
You can read more about that here. (And huge kudos to Caerphilly where the locals who what can be done when people come out to vote: a record turnout saw them rejecting the Reform candidate.)
What I know now (that I didn’t know then)
I was sued by the funder of Nigel Farage’s campaign over remarks about his relationship with the Russian government and stood trial in the High Court.
What I realised this week is that when I did the UK counter-terrorism police and government already knew that one of Nigel Farage’s MEPs and a close personal friend and ally had taken bribes from a Russian agent.
The police sat on that evidence for three years. There is no connection between the cases but I’ve sat with that thought all week. The police knew. The government knew. The public didn’t know. Still barely knows a thing.
The links between Trump, Brexit and Russia aren’t a hoax. And the failure of the British establishment to investigate these links and the British press to report on them is a critical infrastructure failure that feels to me like concrete cancer.
We’re riddled with it. We don’t even have a constitution to defend. We are sitting ducks.
The US had the entire FBI and DOJ on the case. The Washington Post and New York Times won Pulitzers for their reporting. And still the republic is falling and it’s falling fast.
Here not even a woman in a low cut bikini will wake the political and media establishment from their slumber. If Farage does come to power, I’m fucked. I know that. But what you need to realise is that if you are a UK citizen, you are too.
And it’s already later than we think.
This post has been syndicated from How to Survive the Broligarchy, where it was published under this address.