Secret letter uncovers a Russian link to British ministers’ Brexit ‘coup’

A RUSSIAN link to Boris Johnson and Michael Gove’s successful plot to persuade Theresa May to take a tougher stance on Brexit has been uncovered.

The MoS has established that a secret letter sent by the British MPs to the prime minister was co-ordinated by a senior figure in a freemarket UK think-tank, cofounded by a tycoon who made a fortune following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The hedge fund manager who helped set up that think-tank, the Legatum Institute Foundation, also helped President Vladimir Putin’s associates to take control of Russia’s state energy giant Gazprom. The Institute’s economics director, Shanker Singham, was the ‘third man’ in drawing up Johnson and Gove’s Brexit ultimatum.

The organisation, which operates from a townhouse in London was set up using some of the fortune that secretive New Zealand-born tycoon Christopher Chandler made with brother Richard from a string of investments, some of which were made during the ‘wild capitalism’ of the postSoviet economy.

Last night one leading British MP called for an investigation by the British Parliament’s intelligence and security committee into the Legatum Institute and its influence on the government.

But an Institute spokesman defended the charity’s influence in the Brexit letter, and denied that Mr Chandler had played any role.

Mr Singham and Mr Gove were both at a behind-closeddoors Commons seminar on Brexit on Friday, which was also attended by No10 and officials from the US Embassy. All guests were sworn to secrecy.

Asked about his links with the Legatum Institute, Mr Gove said he had met one of the Chandler brothers on one occasion. But he declined to comment on Friday’s meeting with Mr Singham, or Mr Singham’s role in the letter, saying: ‘The blessed sponge of amnesia wipes the memory slate clean.’

Johnson and Gove’s Legatum-backed letter made three key demands to Mrs May: to force Chancellor Philip Hammond to do more to plan for a ‘hard Brexit’; to use our withdrawal from the EU to scrap swathes of rules and regulations; and to appoint a new ‘Brexit Tsar’ to head up an task force to head up a task force within Whitehall.

All three demands seem to have been met.

PERSUADE the Brits to leave the EU; tempt Scots to break up the United Kingdom; back Catalans who want to split from Spain; and fix who occupies the White House. The charge sheet against the Kremlin grows longer every day and gets ever more startling. No wonder Britain’s prime minister has labelled Russia a ‘hostile state’.

Theresa May has accused Vladimir Putin of trying to ‘weaponise information’ to undermine democracies and warned the EU that Moscow is trying to ‘tear our collective strength apart’.

If she is right – there are many signs she is – it is a warning that we all need to pay heed to. This is not a threat which can be left to the politicians to deal with. It is something the all-powerful and often unaccountable social media companies need to address.

What’s more we, the public, must ask questions about where our news and information comes from – and what we should trust.

I’ve spoken about this threat to those who have headed intelligence agencies in the UK and US and to former national security advisers on both sides of the Atlantic. They couldn’t be clearer. Russia is deploying information in the way it once deployed tanks and missiles. Its aim is to weaken its enemies and old alliances – Nato, the US, the EU and the UK.

All this, they claim, fits with the ‘Gerasimov doctrine’ of ‘hybrid war’, named after the chief of the general staff of Russia’s armed forces, General Valery Gerasimov.

In an essay a few years ago, he wrote of ‘blurring the lines between the states of war and peace’ and using ‘long-distance, contactless actions against the enemy’, including ‘informational actions, devices, and means that are constantly being perfected’.

Why should Russia do this? One answer is her leaders believe they are under assault from the West.

ANOTHER is because with an economy less than a tenth of the size of America, China or the EU, Moscow calculates it is the most efficient and effective way to flex its muscles. This is not about pushing particular brands of ideology, it’s about affecting your everyday life. The aim is to spread division – which is why Russian Twitter accounts kept tweeting about Brexit long after the result was in.

It explains why accounts run from a Kremlin-linked operation tried to stir up anti-Islamic feeling during the Westminster Bridge terror attack in March in a bogus post claiming a Muslim woman ignored victims.

Now, I’ve learned, there are concerns that Russia is even fuelling antivaccine campaigns on social media. What, you may wonder, would be the propaganda value of spreading concern about giving your child a measles jab? The answer, according to those I’ve spoken to, is to encourage the view that the authorities cannot be trusted. It’s an attempt to undermine faith in the institutions that we used to trust.

So let’s be clear: this isn’t about politics or global power-plays, it’s something that can affect us all, even if news and politics bore us rigid. It can affect the way we live our lives day to day. To this end, it spreads ‘fake news’ via fake social media accounts and using fake ‘amplifiers’ – cyber systems that repeat and effectively turn up the volume of those messages.

There is now irrefutable evidence Russia interfered in the US presidential election – unless, like Donald Trump, you are prepared to take Putin’s word he did no such thing.

Facebook, which initially derided the suggestion it had carried Russian paid-for propaganda, has since admitted that 126 million users in the US were exposed to Russian-created political content.

The company is now creating a system so users can check whether posts should come with a ‘Made in Russia’ health warning. Too little. Too late.

There is proof Emmanuel Macron’s emails were hacked and leaked in the run-up to the French election. Spain’s prime minister has claimed half of the Twitter accounts that fuelled the debate about Catalan independence were registered in Russia.

There is also proof that Russian ‘bots’ – automated Twitter and Facebook accounts – and ‘troll factories’ posted thousands of messages in the run-up to the Brexit vote.

Furthermore, the UK’s Electoral Commission has opened an inquiry into whether the Leave.EU campaign may have been bankrolled with the help of Russian roubles – an allegation its co-founder and financier Arron Banks has firmly denied.

So far, there is no firm evidence the Kremlin tried to, let alone succeeded, in bringing about Brexit. However, we do need to ask why so many tweets and posts about the things which divide people in the UK seem to come from Russia.

In the Black Sea town of Gelendzhik, why did Svetlana Lukyanchenko sign up to Twitter a month before our EU referendum and post or retweet almost 100 messages mentioning ‘#Brexit’? Why was it that after the Scottish referendum Russian accounts spread rumours of ballot boxes being stuffed with No votes?

I am not arguing that those who backed Brexit or Scottish independence fell for a foreign plot. But we need to understand why the Kremlin might want to set up its own TV news network in London called RT, or Russia Today, and a news agency in Edinburgh called Sputnik.

RT may only have a few hundred thousand viewers in the UK, but that number may be boosted by their new talkshow host, Scotland’s former First Minister Alex Salmond, who has lent his credibility to a network paid for, run by and operating in the interests of the Kremlin. RT is Russian propaganda which, unlike those bots and troll factories, operates in plain sight.

Nigel Farage was also offered a slot on RT before he got his own show on Fox News. The link between these two unlikely bedfellows is that the most ardent supporters of Ukip and the SNP are inclined to believe that what they call the ‘MSM’ – mainstream media – is biased against them. Through RT, the Kremlin is pleased to encourage that view.

The visible and invisible arms of Kremlin propaganda often work together. Soon after Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down over Eastern Ukraine, a fake tweet from a non-existent Spanish air traffic controller claimed it had been downed by a Ukrainian fighter jet. The post was retweeted by others and picked up by and promoted by RT.

We now live in an age where a large proportion of people get their news from social media – and share what they read. News is increasingly being reduced to a three-letter word – OMG or LOL or WTF. If you can game the algorithms it is easy to manipulate the emotions of a large part of the population.

That’s why we all need to wise up to what is going on: a state-sponsored effort to hack into national conversations. It’s why politicians, social media companies and citizens should do more to protect democracy and freedoms.

Moscow reckons it’s now the best way to flex its muscles