So far as I’m aware, The Russia Report has still not been published in full. It comprised the findings of an inquiry by a British Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee , set up in November 2017, into allegations of Russian involvement in British politics, including alleged Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum, and in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. The Report was completed in March 2019, and sent – substantially redacted – to the then prime minister Boris Johnson in October that year; but only published – even more heavily redacted – in July 2020. Critics of the government claimed that the delays and redactions were part of a cover-up by the government.

This looks likely. The report is supposed to have provided ‘substantial evidence that Russian interference in British politics is commonplace’. The details are kept hidden, but even without them some have surfaced into the public view; most notoriously the Alexander Litvinenko and Salisbury poisonings on British soil. And the huge Russian and possibly Kremlin-linked donations to the Conservative party are pretty well known about; together with the astonishing elevation of one of the donors, Evgeny Lebedev, to the British House of Lords by (again) Boris, in 2020. (Lebedev’s dad was a KGB officer.) We know that one of Putin’s targets, in his crusade to ‘Make Russia Great Again’, is the European Union.  Without descending into ‘conspiracy theory’ territory, there’s surely enough here to justify the suspicion that British politics has been manipulated (at least in part) by those clever chess-playing Ruskies. And to require The Russia Report’s being published now, six years later, in full.

Suspicions of Russia are not of course a novel theme in British political history. They featured in the years before the original Crimean War (1853-56), and may have contributed to that conflict. The best account of these is still John H. Gleason, The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain: A Study of the Interaction of Policy and Opinion (Harvard UP, 1950), which I read as an undergraduate. That – if I remember the book rightly – mainly places them in the ‘mad conspiracy theory’ category. Today’s Russophobes might be on rather firmer ground.