The Lords who can’t stop counting their roubles...

Our Westminster columnist who takes no prisoners

FOREIGN SECRETARY Liz Truss is talking tough about halting the deluge of Russian money and influence in Britain.

Last week she announced plans to give the UK ‘the power to sanction a broader range of individuals and businesses’ and ‘target anyone providing strategic support close to Vladimir Putin’. Fearless Liz’s officials have no doubt given a clean bill of health to every rouble donated to the Tory Party and its MPs by Russian donors and their wives. And of course none of her plans apply to the entirely aboveboard links to Moscow enjoyed by some next door in the House of Lords.

Lord (Francis) Maude sits in the Lords while running a consulting firm that has advised the Putin-friendly Kazakh government. It didn’t stop him from being made an adviser to the Cabinet Office and Treasury in 2020. Lord (Greg) Barker, a Minister in the Cameron government, took a leave of absence from the second chamber to trouser £6million a year from a Russian energy giant linked to Putin’s pal Oleg Deripaska. As a result, he cannot vote or sit in the

Lords but keeps his title, use of parSOUTH liamentary stationery and dining facilities for up to five guests, oh, and no longer needs to register outside interests.

I can reveal that Lord (Robert) Skidelsky, who since 2016 sat on the board of Russian oil company Russneft, while keeping his position in our legislature, has seen the light and quit the oil giant’s board last month. The former Tory and now crossbench peer tells me: ‘On reflection, I thought it was not appropriate to serve on the board of a sanctioned entity.’ That didn’t stop him taking Truss to task on Twitter over her decision to make public MI6 intelligence saying Russia is plotting a coup in Ukraine, comparing it to how the security services were accused of ‘sexing up’ Tony Blair’s dodgy Iraq dossier.

But it looks like his fellow peers can keep guzzling their caviar.