As Russian troops reach Kyiv, state terror is rained on innocent civilians. Peter Jukes and Hardeep Matharu explore why the British Conservative Party has ignored Putin’s violent extremism in the mother of all intelligence failures
It must have seemed like a good idea 20 years ago. The former Soviet Union had broken up. Russian state assets were being chaotically privatised, with millions of coupons handed out to the Russian people being hoovered up by smart young businessmen (and they were nearly all men). A new class of billionaires was born, running a raft of shiny new corporations.
Not only would the City of London act as clearing house for all those lucrative contracts and share issues, it would be a concierge to the Russian super-rich. They would fund our universities and museums. They would buy up our top-tier properties, football teams and politicians. Their children would attend our private schools and elite universities. We would convert the families of former communists into a new class of free-market entrepreneurs and philanthropists.
And so Londongrad was born. So too was the first step of a widespread national kompromat.
We didn’t check inside this gold matryoshka that had been wheeled through the gates of the city. We didn’t inspect the real sources of the wealth – exfiltrated from hijacked natural resources or direct from the public coffers of the Russian state – or do due diligence on the mafia or KGB connections of this new oligarch class who were anything but ‘free market’.
But why would we? As Mayor of London, Boris Johnson wined and dined with these slavic super-rich and welcomed the hike in property prices. He even encouraged them to sue journalists in the London courts. The lawyers, the PR firms, the events managers, the lobbyists and consultants – everyone was making money. But we weren’t only laundering the dirty riches of Russian oligarchs, we were also importing their values.
Even by 2008, as he invaded Georgia, Vladimir Putin was bringing his buccaneering oligarchs to heel, with mysterious deaths or imprisonment awaiting those who didn’t comply.
In 2014, the mood took a darker turn. The Ukrainians had risen up to throw out their Russian proxy kleptocrat, Viktor Yanukovych. The Russian President, having returned to ensure two decades of continued power, had defied the post-war European order by annexing Crimea and invading eastern Ukraine.
By this point, people should have realised there was something suspicious in this golden matryoshka that had landed in our city.
Many did. In 2017, one of this article’s authors attended an All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) hearing chaired by Labour MP Chris Bryant, where he and Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr, along with the writer Peter Pomerantzev, outlined the real nature of Vladimir Putin’s kleptocracy and its long-term agenda to undermine the rule of law, NATO and the European Union.
But the warnings fell on deaf ears.
Instead, the Trojan horse was wheeled into the heart of the citadel, close to Conservative Party headquarters, where a riot of high-net worth dinners, political donations and lucrative job offers resulted.
It started under David Cameron, but continued under Theresa May and accelerated under Boris Johnson.
Donors linked to Russia – some directly tied to Putin – were handed access to senior ministers in exchange for money. The Conservatives have accepted £2 million from Russia’s super-rich alone since Johnson became leader. And this is not to mention the direct intervention of the Russian Embassy, through numerous meetings with Nigel Farage’s Leave.EU campaign group, in the Brexit referendum
After the APPG in Parliament in 2017, a senior Conservative who well understood Putin’s malign intent responded to the question of why the Conservative Party was not making more of Russian interference in British politics with the answer: “You’ll make it about Brexit. Don’t make this a way of derailing Brexit.”
The Second Kompromat
And so the second political kompromat was born.
The role of Russian interference was played down, even by those who opposed Putin, because it might have compromised Britain’s vote to leave the European Union. In terms of the Homeric myth and the siege of Troy, this is akin to the moment the Greeks hidden in the wooden horse were allowed to walk back through the city and open the gates to the invaders.
The influx of Russian cash, access and influence has only increased in the past five years since that session in Parliament.
Valiant attempts to sound the warning, such as the Intelligence a