It was easy for Putin to get Donald Trump in the White House – his real challenge will be shunting Corbyn into No 10

In Washington, a worrying rift opens up between Donald Trump and his soon-to-be spies.

This week, the CIA went further than the 16 other US intelligence agencies which recently concurred with its analysis that Russia was trying to weaken confidence in US democracy by hacking and disseminating Clinton-related emails. It now believes that, more than merely hoping to cause chaos by damaging Hillary, the Kremlin was actively trying to send the so-called Siberian Candidate to the White House.

The President-elect dismisses this claim as “ridiculous”, although just this once his opinion may not be solidly based on the facts. Famously, Trump dislikes wasting time taking intelligence briefings. If he needs to know something, he puts a metal colander on his head and intercepts it from the cosmic waves.

With all due respect to Trump – “all” in this context equating to the respect due to the guy on the bus, the one loudly discussing time travel with his invisible friend, Leopold the 39th-century Dalai Lama – most of us would back the CIA on this one.

Plainly Vladimir Putin sees Trump as someone he can do business with, while Trump reciprocates that feeling in a possibly more literal sense than Margaret Thatcher when she used the phrase about Mikhail Gorbachev. If this is the start of a beautiful friendship, you can guess who’s the ventriloquist and who’s the dummy.

Assuming the CIA is right that the Kremlin fixed it for the tangerine huckster and his trusty companion, That Thing On His Head, to share the Oval Office, the one pedantic quibble about this achievement is that it was a little too easy.

Admittedly, it didn’t look that easy when everyone assumed Trump would be schlonged. But with hindsight, all the Putin cybernauts had to do was pass Julian Assange enough mildly dodgy emails to dissuade a tiny proportion of Rust Belt voters from voting for Hillary. On this basis, fixing the US election was a challenge far beneath Putin’s dignity.

What he must do now, to confirm a reputation for electoral sorcery and prove beyond question that he can reorder western democracies at will, is pull off a serious miracle.

Sending Marine Le Pen to the Élysée Palace next spring won’t cut it. The Front National leader, although the outsider, is as short as 5-2 with some bookies. Nor will ousting Angela Merkel, who is a far from prohibitive favourite to cling on as Chancellor.

There is one and only one true test of Putin’s omnipotence. The Holy Grail for this cyber-Merlin is manipulating the British people into making Jeremy Corbyn their prime minister.

He may not have much time. If Theresa May decides she needs a Brexit mandate, and conjures a way to outfox the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, a general election might be a few months away.

With that in mind, Putin should get cracking. A useful first step would be to hack a tranche of texts from Fiona Hill, May’s rottweiler, to any Tory MPs who have been cast in the Nicky Morgan role in a remake of that well-loved animated short, The Wrong Trousers.

Something along the lines of “Pickles, you fat f***, one more syllable about the PM’s £14,500 ruby-encrusted leather gimp suit and I’ll stick one of her kitten heels up so far up your fundament, it’ll be moonlighting as a spare tongue. So there!”

That would be merely the amuse-bouche for the banquet of revelation to come. God knows what electronic indiscretions Boris Johnson has committed, but his email cache might well be a goldmine of witty sniping about colleagues. An intercepted phone recording of Philip Hammond sobbing to Mark Carney down the line would be a boon.

But exposing civil warfare and psychological frailties within the Cabinet wouldn’t be enough. The psephological hurdles facing Labour are so high that Putin would also have to take out the SNP, and Ukip in the English north. With assassination thoroughly out of vogue – isn’t Polonium just soooo 2006, dahlings? – his people might consider kidnapping Nicola Sturgeon and Paul Nuttall, drugging them, and taking some heavily staged yet touchingly intimate photos.

Even then, it’s hard to imagine David Dimbleby or whoever is staring blankly into a lens at 10pm one Thursday night, muttering, “Well, we’re going to have to check this very, very carefully indeed with John Curtis, but according to our exit poll Jeremy Corbyn is heading for No 10…” But in these days of wonderment, we accept the limitations of the human imagination.

So far as extending Russian influence, having Corbyn in power wouldn’t be all that much of a prize. Although you’d struggle to nominate any western politician, even Trump, who would be more uncritically friendly to Putin than Jezza, the Brexiting UK is a puny little runt in the farmyard of international affairs.

But however irrelevant in strictly geopolitical terms, sliding Corbyn into Downing Street would confirm that Putin has the powers of a demigod, and can do precisely as the fancy takes him. And that’s an incalculably valuable message for a tyrant to project.

With Donald J Trump, he proved he can pull off the highly improbable. Now come on, Vlad, show us you can hack it when it comes the impossible.