I thought I had dealt with everything investigative journalism could throw at me: death threats, surveillance, social media abuse, a High Court libel trial (judgment pending). But a week into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and I experience a new low: one of my arch-nemeses, Andrew Neil, has made a shock discovery—the existence of Russian oligarchs.
I can take many things. But late-period Andrew “Woke” Neil, in which the chairman of the Spectator and ex-BBC presenter turns himself into the avenging scourge of the Kremlin and its influence on British politics, might be what finally breaks me. The Sunday Times has published a story about how the security services had warned against the appointment of Evgeny Lebedev, the owner of the Evening Standard and the Independent, to the House of Lords. And Neil is tweeting in shock at this revelation.
It is, of course, absolutely right to ask serious questions about Russian oligarchs and specifically Boris Johnson’s relationship with Lebedev, the son of a KGB colonel who was posted to the London station at the same time as a fellow KGB man, Vladimir Putin, served in Dresden.
These are questions that we should have been asking for years. As, indeed, a small number of journalists and MPs have, among them writers Anne Applebaum and Oliver Bullough, MPs Chris Bryant and Ben Bradshaw, campaigners such as Bill Browder, and journalists like Catherine Belton, Luke Harding and myself, the “mad cat woman”—as Neil called me in a tweet in 2018, when he was still the BBC’s senior politics presenter.
Neil faced no consequences for doing so. He has continued his inevitable slide upwards. Far from facing ramifications for hitching his wagon to GB News and crashing and burning in public view, he has been offered new gigs by everyone from Channel 4 to Tortoise Media.
But now, after years spent attacking my work for the Observer, and specifically my investigations into potential links between Russia and Brexit-backer Arron Banks, he has discovered—shock!—that the Kremlin may have some sort of hidden agenda.
There’s a lesson here, of course. And I’ve learned it. In my next life, I’ve decided I’d like to come back as a man.
To Global Radio for a recording of Rachel Johnson’s podcast, Difficult Women. How could I resist? Two months on from my libel trial with Arron Banks over what I said about him in a TED talk and on Twitter, the only journalist who wants to talk to me about it is the prime minister’s sister. Two years ago, by complete coincidence, I sat next to Rachel on an easyJet flight and asked her what really goes on at Lebedev’s parties. She skilfully diverted me from this, though I did slip in my reporting of Boris’s meeting with Alexander Lebedev, the ex-KGB colonel, immediately after he attended a Nato summit in the wake of the nerve agent attack in Salisbury. She once told me that, as a child, she and Boris were sent by train from Brussels to England alone. Although Boris was the older brother, she was always the one who looked after the train tickets.
Arguably, the moral of this story is that one shouldn’t make prime minister a man who can’t look after his own train ticket or avoid an ex-KGB spy in the middle of a chemical attack.
The intelligence services were asleep at the wheel—a tiny handful of journalists have been the true line of defence
Ping! There’s a new lawyer in my life. Jonathan Coad of Coad Law has been instructed by the co-owner of GB News, Christopher Chandler, in response to a tweet of mine. Coad writes me a 14-page letter. If you thought London’s libel lawyers had been brought to heel by Johnson’s recent announcement that the government would legislate to prevent oligarchs targeting journalists, think again. I can confirm, though, that the co-owner of GB News, a station that employs Nigel Farage and broadcasts his views on the Russian invasion of Ukraine (our fault for “poking the Russian bear”), is very sensitive about the whole Russian thing.
I can’t decide what the correct emotional response is to meeting the ex-head of MI6, John Sawers. I listen to him at a panel on disinformation as a security threat and almost burst into tears. We know from the Intelligence and Security Committee’s Russia report that the intelligence services were asleep at the wheel and that a tiny handful of journalists have been the true line of defence. I make my excuses and leave before my next panel: “The news media as reporters, and targets, of disinformation.” Sawers’ panel was conducted under an agreement that no one could report what he said or which names he mentioned. But I don’t need to. Prospect readers are intelligent people and the information is out there. We know who the Kremlin’s men are because they tell us. This information isn’t hiding in plain sight, it’s just in plain sight. Unless your name is Andrew Neil.
