No.162 - 'Active Avoidance' of the Truth about Brexit?

Dear James,

It was during those heady days (for us – not the Russians!) after the fall of the Soviet Union. I was travelling quite a lot to Moscow, helping the new nation find its feet by helping the emerging business class to understand and deal effectively with western corporate culture. One day I got a call from a friend, high up in the Russian elite. Could we (my company) help a small Russian family to prepare for living in the UK? After long discussions we welcomed this family to our premises in the UK and prepared a one-off, two month programme of cultural and linguistic familiarisation for husband, wife and two kids. The husband turned out to be the son of a mayor of a large Soviet city. At the collapse of the USSR in 1991, he just happened to find himself in possession of a fleet of oil tankers. The family were now ‘shipping magnates’ and their lives would never be the same again. And nor would ours. The money he brought into my company for his ‘programme’ was staggering. We were impressed and did all we could to do the best for his family. But three weeks into the programme, things started to go wrong. As only the haughty ‘nouveau riche’ could do, the wife was ‘being difficult’, complaining about the excellent host-family we employed. The boy child was restless and rude. Without going into further detail, we decided to abandon the experiment. I went to the bank with the husband and paid back to him a large portion of the money he had committed. Everyone involved in my company breathed a collective sigh of relief and got back to our normal business. We considered the experience ‘a near miss’. We had learned our lesson.

But it seems that the rest of our country, including your party, did not. What happened to us was just a tiny part of what happened to our establishment. Russian money, ill gained after the collapse of the Soviet Union flooded into the UK and seduced a large section of our professional and London based classes. From estate agents, to lawyers, to accountants, to financiers, the ill-gotten gains flooded into London and seeped into almost every aspect of London life. By 2010 it had even infected the political system itself. London had become an off-shore haven for the Russian elite, owning houses, owning estates, owning media and, it seems, owning politicians. In other words Russia had created a network of influence that reached into the very heart of our democracy. Putin had his own spies implanted into the centre of the British establishment.

Yesterday, after almost a year of Boris sitting on it for reasons unexplained, the Intelligence and Security Committee of the House of Commons released its Report on Russian Interference into Britain. It accused the government of having ‘actively avoided’ searching for Russian meddling during the UK Referendum of 2016.  Despite the clear evidence at that time that the Russians were interfering in the US elections, our government did nothing. This is mind boggling. In the 2016 Referendum there were stories aplenty of Russian money pouring into UKIP and the Vote Leave Campaigns. Aaron Banks, UKIP’s financial backer, was involved and made several trips to Russia during this period. The only scrutiny of the referendum since was by the Electoral Reform Society which described the Vote Leave campaign as "dire", and which left the public seriously lacking proper information. In July 2018, Vote Leave was fined a totally underwhelming £61,000 and referred to the police for breaking electoral spending laws. That was about the sum of our establishment’s response to the waves of Russian ‘dirty money’ that passed through what has become known as the London ‘Laundromat’.

Your party James, seems to have been one of the main beneficiaries of Russian bounty. Russian oligarchs attend plush Tory fund raising dinners. Their wives play tennis with Boris for a fee. Russian faces are frequent visitors to the stately homes of your Tory grandees. One might be forgiven for imagining that the Tory party has become a lucrative offshoot of Putin’s new Russian Empire but let’s not go there. What we can say is that your party is seriously compromised. It doesn’t want to know the truth about its secret funding or to cast any doubt upon the narrow outcome of the 2016 vote. That would undermine everything that has been inflicted on our poor nation since that vote. And we couldn’t have that, could we!

Yesterday Mr Raab said there was ‘no evidence of successful Russian interference in the Brexit vote’. Of course there isn’t, because, ’if you don’t seek, you don’t find’!. The Russians are great hosts, James so, let me finish with a toast that may be useful to you in the future.

‘Here’s to your health!". Or, in the language of your distant friends, `Zazdaróvye!!

Kind regards, 

BH – Your Concerned Constituent