Friends, chums & agents of foreign influence

But how to tell the difference? It's tricky. Just ask Boris Johnson or my future boss, James Harding

Happy Christmas from deepest Wales where I’m writing this among a fold of hills and valleys that shelters one of Britain’s “lost rainforests”, an appropriately Game of Thrones-like backdrop for this week’s newsletter. (This is a brilliant project and map on how to locate other bits of rainforest, fyi).

Some exciting news: a journalistic project I’ve been working on for the last year has finally come to fruition. Sergei & the Westminster Spy Ring is a new investigative podcast I’ve written with Peter Jukes, the founder and executive editor of Byline Times, and Ruth Abrahams, a brilliant freelance audio producer, and we’re launching the trail this week with the first two episodes dropping next week.

It’s the story of how the Kremlin infiltrated the highest echelons of the British establishment told via an amazing character: a Russian-born Conservative party activist turned whistleblower, Sergei Cristo.

Sergei has been trying to expose Russian interference in the UK since 2011 when he was first approached by a diplomat from the embassy who offered to channel funds into the Conservative party.

And his efforts - and the refusal of the British security services to investigate - gave us the spine for a nine-part spy thriller with some frankly unbelievable twists and turns.

To give you a taste of where this goes, these are two of the characters. On the left, Sergei Nalobin, the Russian diplomat whose actions kick this whole story off. He was eventually out booted out of Britain (and later Estonia) and is now back in Moscow with a senior position at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a man whose attempts to burnish his reputation through his support of Ukraine obscures a past of troubling relationships to key Kremlin influencers.

Tinker, tailor, solider…prime minister?

There’s more about the podcast here and if you’re interested please do subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon to receive weekly episodes as they drop.

The reason behind the making of this podcast is a story in itself. If you’ve read the headlines in the last week about the Labour party refusing to strengthen the law to prevent Elon Musk donating $100m to Nigel Farage’s Reform party and you think Britain is sleepwalking into a disaster waiting to happen, you’d be right.

The technological upheavals that have upturned our electoral laws and our ability to protect our elections have been front and centre of my work since November 2016. And, despite everything we now know about how online influence and manipulation works, how bad actors exploit the weaknesses of our laws, how dark money floods our politics and how the tech platforms enable and facilitate this, not a single new law has been passed.

We are completely vulnerable to outside manipulation and interference. That’s the technology bit of this. And Musk who has access to money, a fleet of rockets, a global communications platform - and now to the US government - is a uniquely dangerous phenomenon.

It’s why in 2020, after the publication of the Russia Report, a report Boris Johnson repeatedly tried to block from being published, I helped bring together a cross-party group of six parliamentarians - three MPs and three members of the House of Lords - who launched a legal action against the government for its failure to investigate foreign interference in UK politics as a first step towards protecting our electoral processes.

You can read more about these efforts here. The case is now winding its way through the European Court of Human Rights where it’s been fast-tracked (this is a relative term, it’s an incredibly slow process) because of its significance to other member states. It’s worth pointing out that one of the original complainants - Chris Bryant, the Labour MP for Rhondda - is now the minister of state for data protection and telecoms - and the KC who wrote our (very strong and compelling) submission to the Strasbourg court, Richard Hermer, is now the Attorney General. If it could only finally be heard, he could just agree with himself and give us our inquiry.

A little extra help

The idea behind Sergei & the Westminster Spy Ring is to ignore all that for eight of the nine episodes and to focus on Sergei’s incredible story that starts with him busting open a Russian influence operation with Guardian journalist and ex-Moscow correspondent, Luke Harding, and then sees him taking on some Russian active measures of his own.

It’s been paid for by the public and a huge thank you to everyone who contributed to the original crowdfunder organised by the Citizens, the non-profit I co-founded in 2020. Ruth, the producer, managed to bring it all in on a pretty shoestring budget (special thanks to Phil Channell, our brilliant composer). But, what took us over budget - and delayed the launch - is the cost of our legal cover.

Everything about this story entails some level of risk. I first spoke to Sergei Cristo back in 2017 and wrote about Nalobin’s penetration of the British establishment in 2017, a piece that precipitated a furious response from almost everyone mentioned, including the Russian embassy which wrote repeated letters to the Guardian about the article and me (“a bad journalist”). Another person mentioned in that piece (you can figure it out) launched an abusive video about me days later and would go on to sue me.

That SLAPP case continues to have ramifications including the cost of the legal cover required. If you can afford to chuck a couple of quid into the crowdfunder to help cover the shortfall, we’d be very grateful. This is a story that needs to be told and I’m really proud of what we’ve managed to achieve.

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Another friendly spy

There’s been another cracking spy story that’s been front and centre in Britain in recent weeks. A court finally allowed an alleged Chinese spy who’d befriended Prince Andrew to be named named as Yang Tengbo. And the story of how he cultivated friends and influence across the capital in what the British authorities believe was a Chinese influence operation is an almost carbon copy of what Sergei Nalobin was doing on behalf of Russia.

In fairness to Prince Andrew, he’s what Kreminologists call a “useful idiot”, someone not actively seeking to help a foreign state gain influence but susceptible to manipulation either through naivete or atraction to power, money or influence.

You may remember that last week, I wrote about another person who’d been drawn into Yang Tengbo’s circle of influence: my new boss, the founder and editor of Tortoise Media, James Harding, who’s recently acquired my newspaper, the Observer.

In 2019, Tengbo was the chairman of the 15th World Chinese Entrepreneurs Convention and helped organise it and Harding moderated its plenary panel. Prince Andrew also attended.

In fact, Lord Rothschild, Harding’s close friend and mentor, and the business partner of his wife’s father, had actually been on the steering committee for the conference.

Harding wouldn’t answer any questions about whether he or Tortoise Media had been paid or whether he’d any further dealings with Tengbo but the Telegraph has unearthed another little nugget.

It reported that two years after that conference, the late Lord Rothschild “hosted an alleged Chinese spy’s company at a “climate change event in his 19th century mansion”.

What the Telegraph piece doesn’t mention is that this “climate change event” was actually Tortoise Media’s “Responsible Energy Forum” co-hosted by Lord Rothschild and James Harding.

This is the same annual forum that James Harding was hosting fossil fuel executives at earlier this month while Guardian journalists went on strike in protest at the ‘sale’ of the Observer and 100+ journalists to Harding’s Tortoise Media group. The same day, too, that the Scott Trust, the Guardian and Observer’s owner approved the ‘sale’.

And the same forum that I reported last week that has not but one two former board members of the now-sanctioned Russian oil company, Rosneft on its advisory board and that this year was sponsored by the Brunswick Group, a City PR and public affairs firm.

The invitation of an alleged Chinese spy to a fossil fuel forum organised by a news organisation in partnership with a public affairs firm doesn’t just underscore the misgivings of my colleagues and I about the future the Guardian is sending us into. It also underscores one of the key reforms the UK government urgently needs to implement: a Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Many of the subpoenas, arrests and convictions that flowed from the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s attack on the 2016 presidential election were only possible because of FARA. While the Russia Report revealed our own intelligence services had never even been tasked to look. And our lack of a FARA law is just one gaping hole in our national security at a time in which the head of MI6 has said that he’d never seen the world in a more dangerous place.

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All chums together

This week saw the ex-editor of the BBC’s Today programme, Sarah Sands, coming to her old boss, James Harding’s defence in the pages of the ‘i’.

Sands writes about the Guardian and Observer journalists strike in protest at the ‘sale’ of the Observer to Harding’s Tortoise Media and attributes it to the idea that journalists are “bad at change”. Harding, who as head of news at the BBC appointed Sands to the role, is an exception, in her view, because as a former business journalist he “understands how to build a financial model” and he’s so charming that he once convinced her to to cover the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration:

It’s a great piece for an understanding of how the UK media works and thanks must be given to Sands for laying it out so clearly. Harding gave Sands her job on the BBC’s flagship Today programme and her husband, Kim Fletcher, is a senior partner with the Brunswick Group. That’s the City PR firm that represents Saudi Arabia’s state oil company, Aramco, partners with Tortoise Media on its “responsible energy" activities and is running its media and comms operation with respect to the Observer takeover.

And the Balfour Declaration? You may remember that from your history lessons. That was the epoch-making statement of support that the British government gave for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, then a region of the Ottoman empire. What you may not remember is that declaration was made by then Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, to the second Lord Rothschild. That’s the grandfather of the late fourth Lord Rothschild, James Harding’s great friend, mentor, former business partner of his father-in-law and associate of alleged Chinese spy, Yang Tengbo.

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You can’t make this stuff up

Just to round out the circle, Sarah Sands actually makes an appearance in Sergei & the Westminster Spy Ring. Before she worked for James Harding at the BBC, she edited the London Evening Standard, owned by Evgeny Lebedev. That’s Lord Lebedev to you, the Baron of Hampton and Siberia who was elevated to the Lords, where he gets to make our laws, by his great friend, one Boris Johnson.

Evgeny’s dad, Alexander Lebedev, a former KGB lieutenant colonel who bought the Independent and the Evening Standard, has something of a starring role in the podcast so I’m excited to see what he makes of it.

This post is already far too long so I’ll leave the details of the Guardian’s journalistic bloodletting for next time including the journalist who’s refusing to go to Tortoise on moral grounds (its almost non-existent coverage of Gaza). Suffice it to say I’m one of 100+ journalists the Guardian who were canned this week, many of us on either zero hours or ‘freelance’ contracts.

Thanks for the messages of support. It’s not just that journalists and readers deserve better, it’s that we all do. Britain is hopelessly underserved by independent media.

A final thought: the Guardian is giving Tortoise Media not just a 233-year-old news title but also £5m. Imagine, if instead of investing in a rival, it spent that money building up its own award-winning but under-resourced audio team to make investigative public interest podcasts? Season 2…James & the Chinese spy ring?