In 2009, before I left The Observer, I was approached by a private intelligence agency with a story of a London court case concerning shady business deals by rich Russian businessmen. I never got to the bottom of the plot, which was basically a settling of scores between oligarchs, but just as intriguing was the broader narrative that underlay it: the allegation that a wall of Russian money was starting to bend out of shape the UK professional services sector, with potentially disastrous consequences for the integrity of British justice and the honesty of British business in general.
As well as corrupt deals, manifestations ranged from taxi drivers’ tales of lurid mafia-style parties in postcodes they swore they’d never take fares from or to again, London councils unable to take Russian high-spenders to court for multi-storey excavation of superhomes for fear of bankrupting themselves (what’s come to be called ‘lawfare’), to multimillion purchases of UK trophy assets such as newspapers and football clubs, Roman Abramovich leading the way with his purchase of Chelsea FC in 2003.
At the time, the ‘corruption’ seemed to be simply the collateral consequence of very rich people flashing around unheard of quantities of cash. With hindsight, it’s tempting to see it as something more deliberate and more sinister: a deliberate institutional softening-up as a prelude for the more ambitious Russian covert attempts to subvert UK (and indeed Western) democracy that would follow.
This has taken two forms. The first is the continued inflow of Russian money, encouraged by successive governments and only halted in the last few months by events in Ukraine, into London. Not for nothing has the capital earned the nickname ‘Londongrad’ and the City of London ‘laundromat’ for the red carpet laid out for wealthy oligarchs – 700 of whom have purchased fast-track UK residency for amounts varying from £2m to £10m – and the efficiency of the laundry service for their wealth provided by a thriving network of law, PR, property, banking and accounting firms as ‘enablers’. The tentacles extend deep into the political parties – Labour says that Conservative Party has taken donations worth nearly £2m from Russian sources, mediated by no less than its co-chairman. One estimate puts Russian investment in the UK at £27bn.
Whatever: by the middle of the last decade, The New York Times concluded that Russia was ‘ensconced in…British life, and has been for so long that, now, it does not draw much notice. It is just another part of the background scenery’. In 2020 Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee echoed: ‘Russian influence in the UK is “the new normal”’, adding that the current level of integration ‘means that any measures now being taken by the government are not preventative but rather constitute damage limitation’. Some go further. Reviewing Oliver Bullough’s unambiguously entitled Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tyrants, Kleptocrats and Criminals, the FT’s sober Martin Sandbu noted that ‘America’s and the UK’s enabling industries… are plainly international security risks. It is mind-numbing that it should take a war in Europe to make politicians aware of this’.
In turn the seepage of Russian money and influence helps explain why, despite the probing of the US Mueller Report (widely ignored because it didn’t indelibly compromise President Trump) and the The Observer’s own indefatigable Carole Cadwalladr, the darks arts of fake news, obfuscation and manipulation that were unquestionably at work in the 2016 US presidential election and UK Brexit campaign were brushed aside as nothing special – indeed, just part of the scenery.
Which, as we now know, they were. But that was why they were so dangerous. And what made them so insidiously effective was the ubiquity and reach – both global and deeply personal – of the business plumbing those dark arts depended on: not just the local butlering services, but also at global level the social media platforms. It’s now abundantly clear that the Russians were far faster off the mark than the West to spot and exploit the opportunities they offered for serious political and social mischief. Less appreciated is the central part that advertising and marketing, the fuel that the platforms run on, has played, and continues to play, in furthering the mayhem.
As the outspoken Bob Hoffmann, author of the The Ad Contrarian Newsletter, told British parliamentarians last year, much online advertising would be better described as spyware, tracking users over every inch of their internet travels, the better to keep them online where they can be fed a steady diet of lucrative (for the platforms) advertising. In effect, it is targeted advertising, a $360bn (2020) market owned by Big Tech, that supports and stokes the fake news, distortions and pile-ons that are driving our societies apart as effectively as financial corruption.
Online advertising is notoriously both universally detested by consumers and riven with fraud – much of the money that goes in simply vanishes without trace. Yet the industry unforgivably resists reform of the surveillance marketing model that has been so expertly weaponised against us by unfriendly actors of all kinds, and politicians with their own axes to grind are slow to enforce it. Those who are now loudly demanding redoubled sanctions against rich Russians they have welcomed in the past should be aware that dubiously acquired wealth in the past is less than half the story: unless the business vectors that smooth the translation of money into political influence – ‘butlerisation’ and surveillance marketing – are disabled, the rot will continue to spread. In other words, it’s a business story as much as a political one. I wish I’d written it a decade ago.