Appointment of Lord Lebedev

Sam Tarry Excerpts

Tuesday 29th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Sam Tarry (Ilford South) (Lab)]

I have spoken many times in this House in recent weeks about the troubling closeness of the relationship between many in this Government and Russian oligarchs, often with direct links to the Kremlin. Yet despite the clear evidence presented to the Prime Minister, much of it from our own intelligence services, the Government have repeatedly and deliberately turned a blind eye to those concerns. Even now, when presented with overwhelming facts about Evgeny Lebedev, and his father’s past in the KGB, far from acting swiftly and decisively to cut out the Kremlin’s insidious influence, Conservative Members have instead welcomed Putin’s cronies with open arms. Flush with oligarchic cash, it is little wonder that they have done little more than sanction a few prominent Russians, none of whom are Tory party donors. As bombs continue to rain down on Kharkiv and Kyiv, that is an insult to the millions of Ukrainians who are fleeing for their lives amid the ongoing bloodshed. It is an outrage.

As I have already alluded to, just a few thousand roubles is all it takes to gain access to the corridors of Whitehall. One such example was when the Conservative party accepted £30,000 from the wife of a former crony of Vladimir Putin. The donation was from Lubov Chernukhin, who is married to former Russian Deputy Finance Minister Vladimir Chernukhin. That was despite the then Defence Secretary’s own warnings, just weeks earlier, about Russian cyber-attacks, and it led to farcical scenes that included the UK Defence Secretary giving Mrs Chernukhin a private tour of the Churchill War Rooms in Whitehall.

Given that influence in the Conservative party is so easily bought, major questions over Russian financial influence need to be addressed urgently. Such actions put our national security at risk and potentially corrupt the very politics and democracy that we seek to uphold. We need to root out that dark money and truly defend democracy by cleaning up the malevolent foreign influence that is a consequence of that money. The Government have done none of that, though, because their insatiable greed has blinded them and continues to see them play fast and loose with our national security.

It is important to make the point, as my hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) did earlier, that the vast majority of Russians are decent people. Not everyone is linked to Putin just in the same way that, fortunately, not everyone in the UK is linked to our corrupt Government. That is why Labour is calling for Lebedev to be stripped of his peerage not because of his Russian citizenship, but because of his links to the Kremlin.

Lebedev’s father was a member of the KGB, as exposed so well by my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) and many other Labour colleagues. In this post-cold war era, we may well have previously been able to plant that fact firmly in the rear view mirror, but when the current President of Russia is a former KGB agent who continues to act as if he is carrying out orders directly from the Lubyanka, killing people on British soil in the process, it cannot be right that one of Putin’s close associates is sat in his robes able to influence our democracy in the opulence of the other place.

The Prime Minister cannot claim that he was not aware. His former chief of staff recently stated that he was in the room when the Prime Minister was told that intelligence officials had serious reservations about giving Lebedev the honour. That same advice was changed after the Prime Minister personally intervened and then, just months later, the first Lord of Siberia was ennobled. It is patently clear that the Prime Minister bent the rules to suit himself and put his personal interests and friendships first. Why? The truth is that he has been in hock to Lebedev for years. Lord Lebedev of Siberia quite literally helped him to secure two terms as Mayor of London, while also ensuring the Conservative party remained in Government.

As proprietor of the Evening Standard, London’s largest newspaper, Lebedev has repeatedly intervened to influence the outcome of elections. On 30 April 2012, just before the now Prime Minister was facing an election to secure a second term as Mayor, the front page of the Evening Standard, issued to almost a million Londoners, screamed:

“Boris Johnson: The right choice for London”.

Then, on 5 May 2015, just days before the general election, the front page once again instructed its readers:

“As we prepare to go to the polls in a knife-edge election, the Standard urges its readers to consider what is best for our capital… and support the Tories”.

The link is clear, present and direct.

In any functioning democracy, that level of propaganda would be called out, but sadly in the UK the press barons wield enormous influence, and one must question whether organs such as the Evening Standard are pulling the Prime Minister’s strings. Is that not the real reason why the Prime Minister is so averse to stripping Lebedev of his peerage? To do so would mean biting the hand of the puppet masters who feed him.

The Government can and must do more to help the people of Ukraine, as Opposition Members have said. As Declassified UK and openDemocracy recently revealed, British businesses recently sponsored an arms fair where sanctioned Russian weapons makers showed off munitions currently being used to attack Ukraine. It gets worse. While the Government were repeatedly spouting rhetoric in this Chamber about taking tough measures—this is scandalous—the Minister for Defence Procurement, the hon. Member for Horsham (Jeremy Quin), was among the guests at the world defence show in Riyadh. Other attendees included at least four Russian firms sanctioned by the UK Government as well as others whose executives have been personally sanctioned. Perhaps the Minister, in winding up, can tell us why his colleague was there, and why he was at the same murderous arms fair as Russia’s biggest arms exporter, Rosoboronexport, part of the sanctioned state conglomerate Rostec, which was busy promoting tanks and drones that independent arms researchers at the Omega Research Foundation identified as weapons used by Russia in the current war in Ukraine. Earlier this month the Russian Ministry of Defence even shared videos on social media of helicopters, exhibited at that very same fair by Rosoboronexport, firing at Ukrainian forces, yet our Government were there and present. That is shameful.

[Mr Richard Holden (North West Durham) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sam Tarry]

No, I won’t. Our defence procurement Minister was also rubbing shoulders—[Interruption.] I will give way at the end. Hear how bad it gets. Our defence procurement Minister was also rubbing shoulders with representatives of Almaz-Antey, a Russian state-owned anti-aircraft manufacturer also sanctioned by the UK for

“providing heavy weaponry to separatists in eastern Ukraine, contributing to the destabilisation of Ukraine”

that we see today in Russia’s all-out war. He was also pressing the flesh with representatives of UralVagonZavod, another sanctioned state-owned company exhibiting at the fair that manufactures tanks.

The reality is that the Government’s empty rhetoric, weak actions and toothless sanctions are giving cover to Putin’s murderous regime and costing lives in Ukraine. It is shameful. All of us on the Labour Benches would like the Minister to show some gumption and tell us the real reason why the Prime Minister is so unwilling to so much as even entertain the possibility of stripping Lebedev of his peerage and sharing the information we have requested. The Prime Minister’s continual failure to act makes a mockery of our democracy. It highlights the cesspool of cronyism and corruption that the Government are wallowing in and is an insult to the families of the dead who have lost their lives in this ongoing conflict.

[Mr Holden]

The real insult the hon. Gentleman should be thinking about is the insult to the dead people killed on the streets of Britain when the leader he supported asked the Kremlin to check whether it was their poison that had killed them or not. Does he not reflect on the fact that Britain was the first country in the world to provide military training and defensive weapons in support of the Ukrainian people, or that it was his party, under Ed Miliband, that did everything possible to stop our support for the Syrian opposition at that time? [Interruption.]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. First of all, the hon. Gentleman knows that he should not refer to another Member by name; he needs to refer to their constituency. Secondly, it is important that we stick to the motion in front of us. There is a bit of a tendency to wander off into different subjects that are perhaps leading us slightly astray from the matter in hand, which is the process we are discussing with regard to peerages and so on. It was said at the beginning that we should try to keep our language moderate and calm. I think we need to return to that and I am sure Mr Tarry will now do so.

[Sam Tarry]

Of course, Madam Deputy Speaker. I was merely thinking about the wanderings of the defence procurement Minister, which ended up at Russian arms fairs.

In answer to the hon. Gentleman’s comments, the irony is that if people had listened to the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), who for years and years has been calling for sanctions and actions against Russia, then perhaps those guys on the Government Benches would not have been—[Interruption.] I was just trying to answer the question. If only they had listened to the advice of Labour Members who were saying how dangerous it was that relationships with the Russians and our Government were far too cosy.

The Prime Minister’s continual failure to act makes a mockery of our democracy, and highlights the cesspool of cronyism and corruption at the heart of this Government. I am saying that this is a moment to reflect. The unwillingness to share that information and to shine a light of truth—a light of truth—into what many people across the country are wondering, led me to reflect on something I once read. Professor Richard Sakwa said in his seminal book “Russian Politics and Society”:

“Under late communism, nepotism and patron client relations undermined the political criteria of elite recruitment in the nomenklatura system. The political elite began to degenerate into a social class, perhaps one of the most economically useless in history…the Party fostered a class that grew at its expense and began to transform itself into a traditional oligarchy.”

That is a description of the collapsing Soviet Union, yet it could be used to describe the regime of the Conservative party.