The man sat to my right in Westminster Hall was undoubtedly a spy. Since he arrived, halfway through the debate, he had done everything possible to prevent my reporting of this important democratic event: endless sniffing and dropping of tissues, shuffling of positions and smacking of lips. Ten minutes in, he began rummaging for something – it took a good two minutes – before producing a lemon sherbert, which he unwrapped with elaborate care and then sucked noisily while breathing through a nose that sounded like a snorkel full of glue. It was utterly maddening, clearly tradecraft of the highest order; psychological interference to accompany the talk of undersea cables, “cognitive operations”, exploding packages and treason.
Outside the Palace of Westminster, the placards had warned me. They showed Putin as puppetmaster, slogans in mock-Cyrillic script. These were Europhiles, Rejoiners, the blue-and-yellow brigade, and one of the tenets of their movement, as one lady explained it to me, is that the Brexit vote was bought by the Kremlin. They waved their banners and flags towards the mottled stone of Westminster Hall, where MPs were gathering to discuss what hand Putin might have in our politics.
The debate was a response to the conviction of the former leader of Reform in Wales, Nathan Gill (who appeared on the placards, pictured with Nigel Farage), for having taken bribes to promote views favourable of Putin while he was an MEP. After Gill was sentenced to ten years and six months in prison last November, an online petition for a public inquiry into “Russian influence campaigns” gathered more than 100,000 signatures, and was this week debated by MPs in Westminster Hall.
The interesting thing about Gill is that he was a nobody. A tiny percentage of British voters, even in his native Wales, would have been able to identify him during his brief tenure as leader of Reform in Wales in 2021. He is now well known, because going to prison for taking bribes from agents of Putin is certainly a profile-raiser. But the opinions Gill was paid by the Kremlin to express might as well have been spoken in a remote bothy, or at the bottom of a mine, or on BBC Three; the audience was effectively nil. The Russian security services can’t have imagined Gill would have had any real influence on the UK’s position on Ukraine. So why did they think he was worth bribing?
The most likely answer is that they expected him to get caught. That is how Russian influence works: not, as the Greens’ Ellie Chowns described it in the hall, as a means to “grab power”, but by removing certainty. The Russian chess grandmaster and political activist Garry Kasparov once described Putin to me as a “merchant of doubt”. The exiled oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky told me why oligarchs linked to Putin would bid openly for, say, a tennis match with Boris Johnson. There was no microfilm exchanged over the net; the point is to sow mistrust, to give both the British and the Russians the impression that Britain’s democracy is overrated, that our politicians are just as corrupt as theirs.
This is a problem the UK has confronted many times before. In 2017 the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) began compiling a report on Russian influence in the UK, which it completed in 2019, but which the new prime minister, Boris Johnson, declined to publish until after the December 2019 general election. The ISC was disbanded and a new committee was elected; among its membership was Johnson’s loyal acolyte, Chris Grayling, in a vanishingly rare conjunction of Grayling’s name and the word “intelligence”. As Labour and Lib Dem MPs bemoaned Johnson’s “suppression” of the report at the debate in Westminster Hall, the only Conservative present, Lincoln Jopp, seemed to be absorbed by something on his phone. “He’s texting him now,” I heard someone mutter.
Reform’s MPs were unable to attend the debate, because they were all in Birmingham, watching Nigel Farage tell the city that it was a rat-infested shithole, and that it must therefore vote for him. “I can’t be bought,” Farage declared from his podium. (He just sees the good in cryptocurrency, OK?) But in Westminster Hall, every contribution mentioned the Honourable Member for Clacton (the “for” is arguably a stretch), who was once “knighted” on the Putin propaganda television channel Russia Today, and who denied meeting the Russian ambassador in 2013 until a photograph surfaced of the two men shaking hands. Labour’s Phil Brickell, who before becoming an MP worked in anti-money laundering for a bank, spoke bluntly about “the repeated red flags linking Reform UK, or individuals closely associated with it, to Russian money”.
Joe Powell, the Labour MP for Kensington and Bayswater, represents a constituency that has been hollowed out by the kleptocrats that use its expensive property as a savings account, most notably the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, whose enormous house on Kensington Palace Gardens stands empty, part of a £5.3bn pile of frozen assets currently being disputed in a Jersey court. As Powell pointed out, the lawyer making the case for Abramovich to get his billions back is the shadow attorney general, Lord Wolfson. While Powell spoke, Jopp studied his phone intently, lips pursed, nodding; perhaps he’d found a nice Airbnb in Suffolk. Perhaps he’d won a Lucky Dip.
No political party is entirely free of links to Russia; hours before the debate, the latest resignation from Downing Street was Tim Allan, who was, as a PR guru in the Noughties, not allergic to Putin’s money. Jeremy Corbyn, who competed with Farage for Russia Today appearances, famously asked Theresa May if she had sent a sample of the nerve agent Russian agents had taken into a British city to perform an assassination – risking thousands of British lives – to Moscow so they could check if it belonged to them.
At times it felt as if two debates were being held at once. On the one hand, MPs with professional anti-corruption experience talked about the real problems of illicit finance and lawfare. On the other, Chowns and the SNP’s Graham Leadbitter talked about the fictitious problem that “Russia interfered in Brexit”. This is a Remainer fantasy that should have stayed on the flags waving outside. The British public was not hypnotised into voting for Brexit. They were lied to by British politicians, who told them it would give them control of immigration, and who then promptly increased immigration to the highest level in recorded history. The same is true of the argument made by Labour’s Nia Griffith that “mass psychological attack” by Russia is the source of “anti-gender and anti-LGBT+ narratives” in the UK. The British are perfectly capable of intolerance without outside help.
If voters disagree with Chowns, it is not because Putin has reprogrammed them. They are not going to be unhypnotised into rejoining the EU, embracing net zero and welcoming migrants with open arms, and it is illiberal to argue that they could. If there is a risk, as the Lib Dems’ Claire Young put it, that “citizens will stop believing that their vote matters”, it will not be Russian bots that are to blame. It will be because a number of votes for change, of one sort or another, have produced a succession of governments, each of which has been as chaotic and ineffectual as the one before.
[Further reading: Nigel Farage’s amateur hour]
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This article appears in the 11 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Labour in free fall
Join the debate
Subscribe here to commentWales is not Gill’s native country. He was born in Yorkshire, moved to Wales as a schoolboy, went back to Yorkshire after education to run unsuccessfully the family care home business, employing migrant workers at poor wages, housing them in hostels and charging them for the privilege. He still has a Yorkshire accent.
He returned to Wales and entered politics here on behalf of UKIP
Whether he considers himself Welsh, Yorkshire, English, British or none of the above I have no idea