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When the Nathan Gill bribery story fist hit the headlines, Keir Starmer and his ministers dodged calls from MPs to launch a full enquiry into Russian interference in British politics. So, when the Government this week ordered an urgent review into foreign financial political interference, it came as a surprise to many.
However, there was one big snag: while aiming to consider “recent cases”, it will not “consider previous allegations over interference in the Brexit referendum”.
Perhaps to ensure that the review does not go anywhere near Brexit, it is being led by Philp Rycroft, one of the handful of senior civil servants who spearheaded “getting Brexit done”, with little regard to questions around its legitimacy.
Needless to say, he does not happen to have any relevant experience in either covert finance operations, nor national security. Having defended his Doctorate of Philosophy (DPhil) on the ever-pressing topic of church and community in XVIII-XIX century Yorkshire, he served as Permanent Secretary at the Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU) between October 2017 and March 2019.
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The excuse which a Labour Government minister used to justify staying away from the Russian covert operation around Brexit, echoed Boris Johnson’s: Russian interference had no material impact on elections. However, that assumption is unproven.
According to US intelligence, the Kremlin spent over USD 300 million since 2014 to influence European politics via front companies and think tanks. For comparison, the total Brexit campaign spending was about £30 million. Carnegie adds that non-state actors may play a predominant role in such campaigns even when a government is ultimately behind them.
Foreign interference has a material impact on elections when the society is divided and voters are split on an issue around 50:50. In cases where the margins of voting counts are wide, it may not alter outcomes but it can still damage democratic integrity.
US intelligence and congressional inquiries showed that Russian interference in 2016 plausibly shifted sentiment in swing states because they were decided by tens of thousands of votes. The Hillary Clinton campaign is adamant that, according to their poll data, it was the Russian operation to disclose emails on 22 July 2016 which was the single factor that moved the election in Trump’s favour.
In Romania and Moldova, courts and authorities explicitly concluded that Russian financial and cyber interference compromised electoral integrity to the point that outcomes were annulled or required extraordinary counter-measures.
Similarly in the UK, the Brexit referendum’s two-point margin combined with unresolved questions of opaque funding, data-driven targeting and disinformation makes material impact plausible but untested because the Government refused to investigate.
For the past 15 years or more, the British electoral system has witnessed what some in the intelligence community called “the most successful Russian active measures operation against the UK”. It comprised sustained and systematic Russian political interference through donations to political parties, via shell companies and foreign-born British passport holders, and other Putin proxies. I myself became an unwitting witness of this when, in 2010, a senior Russian diplomat in London looked for ways to channel funds into the Conservative Party.
In addition, Russian oligarchs based in the UK funded political thinktanks propagating specific narratives, employed relatives of politicians, and influenced influential politicians though their role as owners of British media outlets and football clubs and significant contributors to important charity projects.
If that was not enough, the British authorities allowed the Kremlin to utilise Russian Government-owned media outlets, notably Russia Today (RT), to financially support some of our politicians whose rhetoric helped Putin’s geopolitical agenda, by way of lucrative appearance and presenting fees.
In scale, long-term nature and potential impact, this bears no comparison with what the Government has recently described as “the shocking cases of former MEP Nathan Gill, and Christine Lee, the UK-based lawyer identified as working covertly on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party”, which were just a small tip of the recent history of covert interference that the Government seems determined to keep largely hidden from public exposure.
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Questions about the evidence behind the claim that Russian political interference did not impact electoral outcomes are further compounded by the central conclusion in the Russia Report, which former Prime Minister Boris Johnson tried to suppress but which was finally published by the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) in 2020. The report stated that the Government “had not seen or sought evidence of successful interference in UK democratic processes” and noted that while assessing “impact” is “difficult – if not impossible – to assess,” it remains vital to establish whether a hostile state acted deliberately against a UK democratic process.
Some may justifiably argue that a public enquiry would be too expensive, and may not be ready to report before the next election. However, many similar enquiries in Europe and the US reported in less than two years.
In the United States, the Mueller investigation ran from May 2017 to March 2019 and formally established systematic Russian interference in the 2016 election through cyber operations and information warfare. However, it did not address political finance.
In the EU, the European Parliament’s INGE/ING2 investigations (2020 – 2024) examined Russian covert funding and proxy influence across member states, leading to sanctions and referrals within roughly two years. France’s National Assembly inquiry (Dec 2022 – Jun 2023) treated Russian political finance, including the 2014 loan to Rassemblement National, as a core risk to democracy.
Canada’s independent rapporteur’s findings were published within a year in 2023, prompting a public inquiry in 2024. Italy, Germany, Romania and Moldova investigated Russian-linked funding or interference within a matter of months to two years.
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Political interference is a matter of national security and deterrence as much as it is an electoral issue. To make the Russian political interference around Brexit untouchable was Keir Starmer’s political choice that weakens deterrence, which can only be effective when all the types of foreign interference are promptly exposed and investigated.
Perhaps Starmer was protecting institutional reputations from a public outcry. It was the job of the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service to warn the Government about Russia’s plans. It was the job of the Police to investigate and the Crown and Prosecution Service to prosecute. If there was no adequate legislation to do so – it was the fault of Government and Parliament. Perhaps No 10 also feared that should the culprits be exposed, there was no adequate legislation at the time to ensure successful prosecution.
However, without opening up that painful history of wrongdoing to public scrutiny, including institutional failures and political reputations, this review is unlikely to produce recommendations that can protect our democracy in any meaningful way.
By excluding history, the review treats interference as a forward-looking regulatory problem rather than a systemic national security breach. What a proper, diligent inquiry should have done is to look at both.