Andy Burnham has caused outrage among Brexit supporters by revealing that Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 referendum. Nigel Farage called him a liar, Boris Johnson insisted that the allegations were untrue, and the Daily Mail accused the Prime Minister of trying to undermine the legitimacy of the referendum.
I find all this a bit daft. Not because I doubt that Russia attempted to interfere in the referendum, but because we have known about these allegations, and much of the evidence supporting them, for years. Parliament published a report on the subject in July 2020, and I have written about Russian interference in British politics at least six times since 2022.
So why is something that has been in the public domain for six years suddenly being treated as a sensational revelation?
The investigation that never happened
In July 2020 Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee published its long-awaited report into Russian interference in British politics. The committee had examined evidence from the intelligence services and identified serious weaknesses in Britain’s response to Russian attempts to influence our democratic processes. There was already evidence of Russian state-controlled broadcasters RT and Sputnik promoting anti-EU stories during the referendum campaign, alongside social media accounts spreading similar messages. The report also examined the wider influence of Russian money and the relationships between wealthy Russians and Britain’s political establishment.
But perhaps its most remarkable finding was that the British government had failed to investigate the extent of Russian interference in the referendum. When the committee initially asked MI5 for evidence, it received just six lines of text. The intelligence services had not been asked to undertake a comprehensive assessment, and the committee was highly critical of their reluctance to become involved in matters they regarded as political. The government repeatedly insisted that there was no evidence of successful Russian interference. But there is a rather obvious problem with claiming there is no evidence of something when you haven’t bothered to look for it.
The committee recommended that the intelligence services undertake an assessment of Russian interference in the referendum. Boris Johnson’s government refused, arguing that a retrospective investigation was unnecessary.
There is an important distinction here. We have evidence that Russia attempted to influence the referendum, but we do not have evidence that those attempts changed the result. The committee was quite explicit about the difference, and acknowledged that establishing the effect of interference would be extremely difficult.
The question was whether a hostile foreign government had attempted to interfere in British democracy, regardless of whether it had succeeded.
How to make a story disappear without ignoring it
What happened when the report was published is almost as interesting as its contents.
On the morning of 21 July 2020, the Daily Telegraph reported that the intelligence committee had found no direct evidence of Russian interference in the referendum. Nigel Farage promptly announced that apologies were due to those who had been accused of Russian connections. But the committee had not concluded that Russia hadn’t interfered. It had concluded that the government hadn’t properly investigated whether it had.
Media commentator Raymond Snoddy subsequently examined how the Telegraph had covered the report. He found that its front page had relegated the findings to a small paragraph at the bottom, while giving much greater prominence to other stories.
Six years later, the same newspaper reported Burnham’s remarks under the headline Burnham claims Russia interfered with Brexit vote, suggesting that the Prime Minister might be preparing to use the allegations to justify another referendum.
The Daily Mail took a similar approach. Its initial report linked Burnham’s comments to speculation about Britain rejoining the EU. On 13 October, it published an editorial entitled A sorry attempt to impugn Brexit vote, presenting the allegations as an attack on the referendum’s legitimacy. The Express gave prominence to Farage’s assertion that Burnham was lying and that there had been no Russian interference.
None of these newspapers had completely ignored the story. The Telegraph had reported the original committee findings, and the Mail and Express have both covered Russian interference on other occasions. But there is a difference between reporting information and ensuring that readers understand its significance.
The distinction between attempted interference and changing the referendum result repeatedly became lost in arguments about whether Brexit itself was legitimate. A finding that the government had failed to investigate Russian activity could be presented as a finding that no interference had occurred.
This week provided another illustration. On 13 October, Ken McCallum, the director general of MI5, explicitly confirmed that Russia had attempted to influence the referendum through state-controlled broadcasters and social media trolls. He also said that those efforts appeared to have been relatively ineffective and warned against exaggerating their significance.
Both statements matter. Yet much of the subsequent political argument concentrated on his warning about exaggeration rather than his confirmation that interference had been attempted.
This has been going on for years
I first wrote about the relationship between Russian money, British politicians and our rather casual approach to national security in Security Breaches: 12 Years of Sloppy Ministers and Russian Money, published in November 2022.
I returned to the subject in Spies in Whitehall in September 2023, and again that December when the government confirmed that Russian intelligence had been conducting a sustained campaign of hacking and impersonation targeting British politicians.
The hacking campaign had begun in 2015, before the Brexit referendum. It involved attempts to compromise politicians, journalists and other influential figures. This was not speculation from disgruntled Remainers. It was an assessment announced to Parliament by the British government.
More recently I have examined allegations concerning Tommy Robinson’s Russian connections, the relationship between Reform UK and Russia, including Nathan Gill’s conviction for accepting Russian bribes, and the wider problem of foreign influence in British politics.
These are different incidents, involving different people and varying degrees of evidence. They do not establish that every politician who supports Brexit is working for Moscow, or that Russia was responsible for the referendum result. But they demonstrate why Russian attempts to influence British politics are a serious and continuing concern.
The story did not begin with Brexit, and it certainly did not end with it.
Living in different worlds
What interests me most about the reaction to Burnham is what it tells us about the way people consume news. Anyone who followed the Intelligence and Security Committee’s investigation, read the subsequent reporting about Russian cyberattacks, or paid attention to the government’s own announcements about Russian interference will have been familiar with this story for years.
Yet some people appear genuinely astonished. I suspect this has rather more to do with the information they consume than with the information available.
Newspapers don’t have to suppress a story to prevent their readers understanding it. They can give it little prominence, frame it as a partisan allegation, concentrate on the political controversy rather than the underlying evidence, or repeatedly emphasise what hasn’t been proved while paying rather less attention to what has.
Social media compounds the problem. Algorithms encourage us to consume information that reinforces our existing beliefs, while stories that challenge those beliefs struggle to reach us. Eventually we inhabit different versions of reality, in which facts familiar to one group are almost entirely unknown to another.
This isn’t a problem confined to the political right. But the reaction to Burnham provides a particularly striking example of what happens when an uncomfortable story is repeatedly filtered through the politics of Brexit. There is no convincing evidence that Russian interference changed the referendum result, and acknowledging that Russia attempted to interfere does not invalidate the votes of the 17.4 million people who chose to leave the European Union.
But it should be possible to recognise that a hostile foreign government attempted to influence British democracy without treating the suggestion as an outrageous slur on Brexit voters.
The most remarkable thing about this week’s controversy is not that the Prime Minister has revealed something extraordinary. It is that he has said something which ought to have been familiar to anyone who had followed the story over the past six years.
Perhaps the real question isn’t why Andy Burnham has brought up Russian interference in the referendum. It’s why so many people are hearing about it for the first time.