Arron Banks: Bad Boy or Russian dupe?

We know he’s a “bad boy”, said The Sunday Times. He styles himself as such. And we know Arron Banks, the millionaire Brexit campaign donor, met Russian officials before the EU referendum: he described a “boozy lunch” at the embassy in 2015 in his buccaneering memoir, The Bad Boys of Brexit. But it seems Banks’s links with the Kremlin were more extensive than previously disclosed. Emails obtained by The Sunday Times show that Banks, and his fellow Leaver Andy Wigmore, met the ambassador, Alexander Yakovenko, three times (with one of those meetings taking place only days after they returned from visiting Donald Trump in New York); that they discussed a business proposal involving gold mines in Siberia; and that they gave the Russians phone numbers for members of Trump’s transition team. Banks denies that he either conspired with the Kremlin or profited from his meetings with the Russians. When a Commons committee asked him this week what he had hoped to gain, he replied: “A good lunch, and that’s what I got.” He also denied reports that he’d visited Moscow in 2016, as the referendum campaign raged. But the news is sure to spark further questions about Russia’s interference in the campaign.

It’s nearly two years since the Brexit vote, said Matthew d’ancona in The Guardian. Many voters may be so weary of the endless and apparently fruitless negotiation, they’re past caring about the minutiae of a campaign fought and won so long ago: they just want the Government to get on with it. But they should care, because this isn’t only about the Brexit vote; it’s also about how a group of right-wing chauvinists allowed themselves – wittingly or otherwise – to be played by a corrosive regime, with barely a thought, it seems, for national security or Britain’s long-term interests.

Russia exploits our greed and complacency, said Edward Lucas in The Sunday Times: states in the former Soviet bloc are familiar with Russian meddling and have got better at dealing with it. In Berlin, Washington and London, we’re still getting used to the idea that the Kremlin is back to its old tricks. Its tactics include spreading propaganda and fake news to sow fear (across the West, anti-americanism plays well on the Left, while “appeals to national sovereignty and to anti-migrant sentiment work on the Right”); covert political donations; sponsoring think tanks; and putting retired politicians on the payroll (an egregious example being Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor, who sits on the board of a Russian gas pipeline). It’s a shape-shifting threat and we need to find a joined-up response to it.