The central mystery of the Russia report is why Boris Johnson refused to publish it until now. Kevan Jones, the leading Labour member of the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), devoted his opening remarks at today’s launch of the report to explaining why each of the government’s excuses for the delay was “untrue”.
The report itself seems fairly harmless to the prime minister. Its main conclusion is that the government under his predecessor Theresa May had no interest in finding out whether there was Russian interference in the 2016 EU referendum.
This is a remarkably weak conclusion. The committee refers to “widespread public allegations” that Russia sought to influence the Brexit vote, namely that Russian state outlets RT (the Russia Today TV channel) and the Sputnik news agency had a pro-Brexit bias, and that some bots and trolls on social media may have been inspired by the Russian state to promote the Leave cause.
Neither of those seems a plausible route to significantly influencing the outcome of the referendum.
The report then complains that, when the committee asked about intelligence on interference in the referendum, “MI5 initially provided just six lines of text”. The report claims that the government didn’t know if Russia secretly interfered because it “didn’t want to know”, as Stewart Hosie, the Scottish National Party member of the committee put it.
The government’s response to the report said: “We have seen no evidence of successful interference in the EU referendum.” This becomes a circular argument: the implication of the report is that the government turned a blind eye to Russian interference in the Brexit referendum because it is run by the winning side – although both Jones and Hosie refused to make that claim explicitly today.
But the government’s response also says: “The intelligence and security agencies produce and contribute to regular assessments of the threat posed by hostile state activity, including around potential interference in UK democratic processes.” In other words, if anything really bad had happened, our spies would have told us about it.
This is an indirect reply to paragraph 40 of the report which suggests that the UK intelligence services are reluctant to “have any role in relation to the UK’s democratic processes, and particularly one as contentious as the EU referendum”, an attitude that it describes as “illogical”. The committee says it is the job of the agencies to protect democracy from hostile state interference. But unless the ISC can point to any evidence of interference that the agencies ignored or were told to ignore, this seems a waste of time.
To take a step back, it has to be asked whether Russian interference could plausibly have swayed significant numbers of votes in the EU referendum. That vote is different from the 2016 US presidential election, in which the leak of emails from the Democratic National Committee, and the media coverage of them, could have had some effect in suppressing Hillary Clinton’s support. The ISC report frequently refers to likely Russian involvement in that leak as an argument for looking more closely at the EU referendum, but what, specifically, should the spies have been looking for?
The lack of evidence is held up by the report as evidence that the government refused to look for it. But without a possible mechanism to change a referendum decided by a margin of 1.3 million votes, allegations of interference are in danger of sounding like a complaint that the electorate produced the “wrong” result.
That brings us back to the question of why the government seemed so reluctant to allow the report to be published – and why it felt the need to try to muffle its impact by releasing last week’s claim of Russian interference in the 2019 election. That claim was just as thin as anything in the ISC report, amounting to the suggestion that Russian interests tried to “amplify” the leaked minutes of US-UK trade talks that were publicly available on the internet. This implies that Jeremy Corbyn, who waved a copy of the document at an election news conference, was a useful idiot manipulated by the Russian state. You do not need to be as resolutely fair-minded towards the former Labour leader as I am to think Corbyn’s office was capable of looking up Reddit without being told to do so by the Kremlin.
So why did Boris Johnson not ensure that the report was published before the election in December? It was suggested that he might be embarrassed by references to donations to the Conservative Party from Russians in Britain with close links to Vladimir Putin, but most of the section of the report that discusses Russian expatriates in London is couched in general and nebulous terms.
As ever, the cover-up is worse than the original minor offence. By acting as if he has something to hide, the prime minister has encouraged the worst possible interpretations of a report which seems to interpret an absence of evidence as proof that nefarious secrets are being kept from the public.
