The Russia report may be drawing blanks but our democracy has still been damaged

If, as seems likely, one of Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy objectives is to weaken, divide and disorient the UK, then he has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

There have long been suspicions that Russian agents, formal and informal, have been at work attempting to skew British democratic elections. According to the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee Russia Report, this may date back to the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 and the Brexit referendum of 2016. The government has strongly suggested it extended to the 2019 general election.

The problem, with the Brexit referendum in particular, is that no one quite knows anything for sure. This is mainly because the May and then the Johnson government flatly refused to ask the security services to find out.

The Intelligence and Security Committee is the only official group to show any interest in discovering the facts, but it cannot order the security services to do anything. So no one knows for sure how the campaign was affected, for example by the spread of disinformation online.

The result is that the 2016 referendum will remain contested and controversial for ever, a constant source of distraction and anger. Nigel Farage claims that there is “no evidence” of Russian manipulation, while Alastair Campbell can say Brexit is a fraud.

They can both do this because no one since 2016 has cared to look into the allegations about the Russians. If they looked, they might have found the evidence, and then what? Cancel Brexit? Call another vote? That might have been for the best, but it would have been bitterly resented in certain quarters.

For Theresa May, and even more for Boris Johnson, that was an even more appalling vista.

Indeed neither government has shown much enthusiasm for curbing Russian activities in the UK, even after the Skripal attacks. There have been sanctions, the expulsion of diplomats and plenty of tough talk, but, as the Intelligence and Security Committee says, not much action against serious organised crime and espionage. The failure to defend British democracy from the hackers, the spies, the trolls and the bots was one of the worst derelictions of duty during the Conservatives’ decade in power. Why have the Russians tried to steal the Oxford Group’s promising coronavirus vaccine? There is no limit to the mischief that the friends of Vladimir Putin feel able to perpetrate, apparently with some impunity.

And so the Brexit divisions, overlain as they are by the other culture wars partly fomented by Russian actors, seem set to drag on.

Of course the EU was sufficiently unpopular that Leave might have won in any case. We will never know that, because it is impossible to tell. There probably will never be a true version of events. What we do know for certain is that there will always be a whiff of illegitimacy about it, and the nation will remain confused and divided by Brexit for years. Britain will also suffer economic damage and further alienation from its European allies. And that suits the Kremlin just fine.