MI5 briefing (non-members)

Once a year a small group of journalists are invited into MI5 headquarters at Thames House to hear the head of the Security Service outline threats facing the UK. After Sir Ken McCallum, Director General of MI5, finished this year’s overview – with AI clearly a growing worry – he turned to questions from those of us in the room. The first was about hostile states interfering in politics. And questions on that theme kept coming up thanks to the Prime Minister’s interview with Alastair and Rory in which he said there had been interference in the Brexit referendum.

“I asked the question coming into Downing Street, well, was there interference in the 2016 referendum from Russia? And I've had the clear answer that yes, there was,” Burnham said on The Rest Is Politics: Leading.

Contrary to some reports suggesting he criticised the Prime Minister, the MI5 chief, as you would expect, walked a fine line. “There is a really important difference between interference attempted and outcome swayed,” he said.  In other words, Russia did interfere but only in the sense of trying rather than having been shown to succeed.

McCallum also reminded us that I had asked him the same question all the way back in 2020 in his first briefing. And there is a reason the question has not gone away.

One of the reasons is that it is hard to answer the question of what Russia got up to if you haven’t really looked.

Here, a bit of context is important. Back in the run-up to the 2016 Brexit referendum, the risk of Russian political interference barely registered. The result was at the time, almost no one was looking – including British intelligence. Social media was still pretty new and spies tended to think their job was stealing secrets rather than watching Twitter or Facebook.

It was only after the vote took place that the subject became red-hot and that was because of what happened in America’s presidential election that year. A few weeks after Brexit came the release of Democratic party emails that had been hacked by Russian intelligence. There was also a sustained campaign on social media by Russian trolls, primarily run out of St Petersburg by the late Yevgeny Prigozhin (we talked about how we got involved in this series). The West was slow to pick up on how Russian intelligence had evolved, something I wrote about in my book Russians Among Us. When Trump shocked the world by winning that election, the issue of how far Russia had aided that victory suddenly rose to the top of the agenda and also became intensely political. That then turned the spotlight back to Brexit.

But strangely, the Intelligence and Security Committee’s Russia report, belatedly published after a long delay in 2020, found that not only had there been not much concern about interference ahead of the referendum but not much investigation by the security services afterwards. Why? One part of the answer is that MI5 does not like getting involved in domestic politics. It still bears the scars of the 1980s when its leaders were pressed by the Thatcher government to investigate left-wing individuals – trade unions, civil liberties activists and peace campaigners – because of the allegations they were backed by Moscow and communists.

In hindsight, too many files were opened, Stella Rimington, a later head of MI5 said to me, acknowledging that though some did push back on demands, they had still gone too far. The legacy of that time led to a reluctance to wade into contentious debate. And the experience of watching the FBI and US intelligence community carry out an assessment of what happened in 2016 and then get drawn into a bitter, damaging conflict with Donald Trump about Russian interference will also have left its mark (a subject we delved into in this series).

Of course, a British government could have directed the intelligence community to investigate Russian interference. But here you had successive Conservative governments struggling to hold their party together and get a Brexit deal over the line. Why would they ask the spies to dig into things which might only make that even harder by de-legitimising the vote? 

Studies have pointed to Russia trying to interfere through biased coverage in news outlets close to the state like RT and Sputnik and through some social media trolls trying to heighten division. But answering the question of whether it made a difference to the result is also genuinely hard.

The volume of accounts directed at Brexit was small compared to those targeting the US election in 2016 because for Moscow the latter was a much bigger priority. And even in the US, studies have struggled to be able to assess how much difference all those Facebook posts actually made to the way people voted.

MI5 and the UK security community has since woken up to the threat, creating ‘defending democracy’ task forces to co-ordinate across government and watch for hostile action as well as put in place protective measures like briefing politicians. In 2019, there was a much analysed leak of documents which was seen as Russian trying to interfere in the election but with little effect.

“These trolls aren’t geniuses,” MI5’s Sir Ken McCallum said this week. “There are times when, if I’m honest, some of the commentary in our own public discourse is a bit quick to make some of these trolls look ten feet tall and ascribe superhuman powers to them. Our experience is that the trolls tend to be opportunistic so when things happen in the real world they pile in to exacerbate friction.” His worry is that we play into the hands of a Russia which seeks to divide us. 

But while much of the attention has been on social media campaigns, more murky questions about Russian money and influence in British politics over the longer term are harder to assess and have never been fully investigated. The lesson from the last few days is perhaps that it is better to ask and try and answer questions at the time rather than leave them hanging in the air.