UK’s ‘Russian report’ blasts political leadership and the intelligence services

“We have the finest secret service operating in this country. It belongs to the Russians,” a spoofed-up British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan solemnly tells Parliament in a skit by Peter Sellers about the Profumo affair of the early 1960s.

In that scandal, John Profumo, MacMillan’s Secretary of War, was caught having an affair with 19-year-old callgirl Christine Keeler who in turn was involved with Soviet naval attache Yevgeny Ivanov – thereby suggesting a security breach.

One was somehow reminded of the Profumo imbroglio while listening to the House of Commons intelligence and security committee announcing the outcome of its highly anticipated “Russia Report” on Tuesday 21 July.

The result of a seven-month-long investigation was widely billed to be a damning expose of Moscow’s meddling in the 2016 Brexit referendum. But, instead, the committee turned its biggest guns on its own government, blasting the political leadership and the intelligence services for having “actively avoided” looking into obvious suspicions of interference by Vladimir Putin’s government.



And so, as a result of that failure, the committee said it had been unable to establish the truth or otherwise of those allegations because it had no evidence from the intelligence agencies on which to base any conclusion. And it had been even less able therefore to determine whether alleged Russian interference could have influenced the outcome of the referendum – in which Britons unexpectedly decided, by a narrow margin, to leave the EU – which Britain eventually did in 2020. 

The committee said it should have been obvious to the government and its intelligence agencies that they should investigate such meddling in the Brexit referendum because of “open source” evidence of interference in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum – and also in elections elsewhere, such as in France and the US in 2016. 

The committee identified a lack of coordination among several government ministers and a “complex wiring diagram” of entanglement and overlap among intelligence agencies responsible for detecting and countering the Russian cyber-attacks which are suspected to have been directed at the referendum. 

As a result of these organisational problems, an exaggerated fear by the intelligence agencies of interfering in domestic politics and the government’s deliberate decision to ignore the problem, “no one defended the democratic process,” said MP Kevan Jones. MP Stewart Hosie said the committee demanded “immediate action” by the government to order the intelligence agencies to investigate these allegations now as well as an overhaul of the intelligence systems and legislation. 

The government’s failure to conduct a probe at the time or since – and therefore the committee’s inability to conclude whether or not Russia had  meddled in the referendum –  has created something of a diplomatic embarrassment for Britain.

The absence of the widely-expected smoking Russian gun targeting the Brexit referendum in the report has rather let Moscow off the hook, giving its foreign ministry more space to dismiss the report as just more “Russophobia”.

And the aggressive Brexiteer Nigel Farage tweeted: “So, no evidence of Russian interference in the referendum. Some serious apologies are due,” referring to the allegations of some “remainers” that the Russians had helped to secure a pro-Brexit vote. 

The committee’s report also accuses the British government of allowing many Russian oligarchs, including some living in Britain, to use the UK to whitewash illicit finances through what it called the “London laundromat”.