Appointment of Lord Lebedev

Drew Hendry Excerpts

Tuesday 29th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Brendan O’Hara]

The hon. Member is absolutely right. This is about why the Prime Minister chose to ignore the advice of the security services, but there is also a hugely important back story about what got us into the position where he did so, and the implications of that.

[Drew Hendry (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey) (SNP)]

My point is a rather similar one: if there was no problem with Lebedev being appointed as a peer and if the guidance from the security services was benign, what is the problem with scrutiny of that advice, which would put to rest all the concerns that people have?

[Brendan O’Hara]

That is right. A theme appears to be emerging on this side of the House. All we want to do is see what was there. All we want is to be reassured that the advice of the security services was not ignored, and that the appointment of Lord Lebedev was above board and beyond reproach. I do not think that, in a democratic system, that is too much for the House to ask.

As Putin’s army continues to commit its war crimes in Ukraine, we have to get to the bottom of how a man with such close connections to the Kremlin was parachuted into this Parliament. We have to establish exactly what advice was given to the Prime Minister by the security and intelligence services in the summer of 2020, and whether or not he chose to overrule that advice, or sought to alter it in any way, in order to get the outcome that he required.

We know that this was not a straightforward appointment. It could not possibly have been, particularly since, almost a decade ago, the head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, made it clear that he did not consider it at all appropriate for Mr Lebedev, then the owner of the Evening Standard and The Independent, to join him at MI6 headquarters for lunch. Advisers to the Prime Minister would have known for years of those security service concerns, and one would have hoped that an aspiring politician—or an aspiring Prime Minister—might be wary of becoming too close to Mr Lebedev, but that was not the case. It would appear that in return for favourable headlines in the Evening Standard, Mr Lebedev gained access to the centre of power in the Conservative party, and, particularly after 2019, the centre of the UK Government itself.

Surely Mr Lebedev’s very public utterings about the illegal annexation of Crimea should have set alarm bells ringing in the Conservative party. Did no one in the Conservative party hear or take notice of him calling on western Governments to “stop cold war rhetoric” when they condemned Russia for its aggression in Crimea? Did no one notice his justification that because Crimea had been Russian “for many years”, this was not something to get overly upset about? Did his claim in 2014 that Russia would not be making

“any further incursions into any land”

fall on deaf ears?

The clues were all there, if people chose to look for them. On Syria, Mr Lebedev said that Putin had “shown leadership” in the conflict, and urged the west to accept his offer of a coalition. He followed that up by saying, “Let us keep Assad in power”, because it would be the least worst option, and he doubled down on that by saying:

“On this point I am emphatically with Putin.”

The list is endless. Where was the condemnation of the events surrounding the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, and how in the name of the wee man did our Prime Minister end up having an off-the-record talk with Lord Lebedev—or Evgeny Lebedev, as he was then—48 hours after the Skripal poisonings?