The Russia report could be damning for the Tories, but not for the reasons you think

Would, I wonder, the Intelligence and Security Committee of parliament’s report on Russia be drawing quite so much attention if the government were not giving every appearance of trying to suppress it?

The Home Office minister, Brandon Lewis, was the latest hapless figure to have been wheeled out to defend the non-release of the report, telling the BBC Today programme: “We’re now in purdah, which will delay that [publication] a little bit, but once the election is out of the way, we will publish that report.”

All right. But “a little bit” is quite a big bit when it covers the weeks of a general election campaign. And to use electoral “purdah” as the defence for non-publication (rather than the explanations proffered so far – still checking, need to be very careful, more to be done, etc) suggests, as has not been conceded by officialdom before, that the report has, potentially, been judged to contain information that could have a bearing on the election.

If this is so, the prime minister is likely to have made the calculation that holding the report back would be less costly politically than publishing it. Whether that line can be held for the duration of the campaign may be in question. The clamour does not appear to be subsiding and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a decidedly non-partisan organisation, is going to court to try to force the report’s release. So the unpublished Russia report could remain in the headlines for a while yet.

Despite the lack of leaks from the famously watertight ISC, however, the contents of its report may be more knowable than they might seem. From what has already become public, from hints dropped by people who claim to know, and from my own experience of reporting on such subjects, it is possible to extrapolate something.

The report is just 50 pages long, so it is hardly a major thesis. Given its timing, its genesis was primarily concerned about electoral interference. The frenzy about Russian interference in the US presidential election was at its height, which had in turn spawned speculation about Russian interference in the 2016 EU referendum. Russia was supposed to have hacked Emmanuel Macron’s campaign during the last weeks of the 2017 French presidential election, and there were fears that Russia could interfere also in this year’s EU parliamentary elections.

Electoral interference, however, does not seem to be its main finding. If it had been, then I wouldn’t mind betting that its report would have been published before parliament was dissolved for the election. It would have validated the image of a malign Russia out to bend western elections to its dastardly will; we would all have been cautioned to be on our guard against Russian social media bots, and we might already be seeing quite a few Newsnight-like mock-ups of Jeremy Corbyn in a Russian-style fur hat.

The absence of all that is one reason why I doubt that the committee found evidence of any concerted Russian effort to influence UK elections – and this would chime with the findings elsewhere. Despite his best efforts, the US special counsel, Robert Mueller, could find no evidence of Donald Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia, and the much-vaunted attempts by the Russian state to subvert the US election turned out to be both small (by comparison with social media traffic generally) and unclear in their motivation as between commercial and political.

Claims that it was Russia that hacked Macron’s campaign were specifically rejected by the French cybersecurity chief a month later – although the allegation lives on as one of those phantom facts that never dies. And no one has produced any evidence of Russian interference in the EU parliamentary elections, or in other European elections over the past two years.

In other words, the whole alarm about Russian interference in other people’s elections seems to have been vastly overdone, in the UK as elsewhere. It is understandable that a strand of the Remain constituency and Hillary Clinton – who made her own call for the Russia report to be published during a book tour in London this week – might want to find someone to blame for their surprise defeats. But the evidence is, to say the least, elusive.

Indeed, the Europe and Americas minister, Christopher Pincher, who had the unenviable task of rebuffing Dominic Grieve’s call for publication in the last days of the old parliament, may have let the cat out of the bag when he said this: “The hon Gentleman [Grieve] asked about evidence of Russia’s involvement in our elections. There is no evidence of any successful Russian involvement in the British electoral cycle.” For what it is worth, Boris Johnson is on record as saying the same thing when he was foreign secretary.

Something else that has been stated about this report is that there is “no smoking gun”. That would suggest, in addition to no advance on electoral interference, that there is nothing that adds anything either to what we have been told about the death of Alexander Litvinenko from radiation poisoning or the attempted killings of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury.

These largely negative findings would be despite the best efforts of those experts who have said that they gave evidence to the committee – who are all fervent believers in Russian malfeasance of all kinds. This suggests that at least some of the witnesses from the intelligence services may have taken a more sceptical view.

What the report apparently does do, however, is to produce some rather colourful and potentially embarrassing examples of hobnobbing between senior UK politicians and UK-based Russian glitterati. Now a lot of this is already known – or should be known, given that MPs and peers are supposed to register their interests and sources of income. Nor is it a secret that big donors to the Conservative Party include wealthy Russians resident here. So long as the donors have UK citizenship, which many Russians do, that is not illegal.

But some of the conclusions being mooted – that UK Russians are Putin-cronies infiltrating UK politics at the behest of old friends in the KGB (now FSB) – seems pretty desperate stuff. Many are Putin adversaries, which is why they sought refuge here. And is it not more likely that Russian – and other – exiles are using their money to lobby the party most likely, in their view, to defend their interests: visas to buy, free movement of their money, UK property rights, and private schools for their offspring? That seems a far more likely reason for them to cosy up to the UK’s great and good than being in cahoots with the FSB.

Whether it is desirable, of course, is another matter. It is more than 10 years since George Osborne was caught breaking his holiday in Corfu to go partying on a yacht belonging to the Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, but it is still remembered. And it is certainly not a good look in the run-up to an election.

But this is not – or at least it should not be – a question of Russian money. It should be a question of illicit money washing around in the scandalous free-for-all that is London, by no means all of which is Russian. Which is why I wonder whether an ISC report that set out – and failed? – to find one thing (Russian electoral interference), actually ended up rediscovering something else: attempted buying of political influence, which is a blight that goes way beyond exiled Russians.

In the end, the prime minister may be proved right – that keeping the Russia report under wraps for six weeks will cost less than releasing it. One way or another, though, he has surely sacrificed one of the big points he might have used against Corbyn. After all, how credible is it for Johnson to brand Corbyn as a risk to national security so long as Downing Street is withholding a report that may, or may not, show senior Tories, himself included, cheerfully fraternising with super-rich friends of Vladimir Putin? Then again, the loss of that propaganda point may be preferable to letting the voters see it set out in black and white