Sonia Purnell’s

PERSPECTIVES

Nathan Gill and Nigel Farage: ‘Coverage of Such a Serious Scandal has, at Best, Been Largely Anaemic’

My occasional encounters with former or serving intelligence officers over the years suggest that they are prone to talking in riddles. But the sixtysomething greybeard I met late in 2016, when I was researching my Second World War spy book, A Woman of No Importance, spoke all too plainly.

The biggest security story today, he told me over lunch of jacket potatoes, is Russian influence in our politics and where that could lead. But, he added, people just won’t listen.

Since then, of course, a stream of heroic writers – notably Catherine Belton who in 2020 published Putin’s People: How the KGB took Back Russia and Then Took on the West – have tried to warn us of the scale of the problem. Gradually, it has become clearer to us all – or it should have.

Last month, former MI5 chief Eliza Manningham-Buller joined other security and military top brass in warning that the UK, and the West, is now in effect at war with Russia.