Questions over peerage for Russian oligarch

Tne Sunday Times reports on the strange circumstances in which the Moscow-born son of an ex-KGB agent and media mogul ended up in the House of Lords.

The paper alleges that the security services withdrew an assessment that granting a peerage to a Russian businessman posed a national security risk after Boris Johnson pushed ahead with the nomination of his friend Evgeny Lebedev, even after officials raised concerns:

Johnson is said to have responded to advice to drop it by claiming: “This is anti-Russianism.” In March 2020, the House of Lords Appointments Commission (Holac), which vets peerages, wrote to the prime minister advising him against granting Lebedev, 41, a lifetime seat in the Lords.

Lebedev, who owns the Evening Standard and Independent newspapers, derives his wealth from his father Alexander, 62, a billionaire oligarch. Previously described as a Putin critic, he is thought to retain close ties to the Kremlin and is understood to be in Moscow.

Holac’s objections were based on intelligence provided by MI5 and MI6, relayed to the commission by Cabinet Office security officials. A source with direct knowledge of events said: “Their initial advice was that they considered that there could be a threat to national security ... There was some security concern about the whole situation.”

Johnson, 57, met Lebedev, who has British citizenship, at his home on March 19, 2020, two days after the initial rejection. No 10 will not say what they discussed.

The prime minister returned to Downing Street and took a personal interest in the case. A former adviser said he refused to accept the verdict of the security services and would not drop the issue.

One source said Johnson’s political aides had helped to unblock sensitive peerages to which Holac had objected at around the same time — such as Lord Cruddas of Shoreditch, the former Conservative Party co-treasurer — as they were deemed to be of wider importance to the party.

While they were “pretty disinterested” by Lebedev’s case, Johnson was insistent his peerage “go through”. By June, Holac received an update about Lebedev. Cabinet Office officials advised that the security services no longer deemed his peerage to be problematic. The source said: “The security services withdrew that particular quite damning bit of advice.”

Asked whether the intelligence itself seemed to have changed, they said: “Yes it did. It did. What the intelligence would say was, that with the extra information it got, they felt it wasn’t as big a threat as they had initially thought.”

The commission no longer had any basis on which to advise Johnson against Lebedev’s peerage. The source said: “Faced with that, the committee had no option really [but] to cave in and to agree with it. But there was always concern there.” It approved the peerage.

A source said the strongly held suspicion was that Johnson had asked the security services whether “perhaps their advice could be watered down”.

A second source, a former Downing Street aide, confirmed there had been a change in the security assessment, but they, like other senior officials at the time, did not know the exact circumstances leading up to it. A third source, who also worked in No 10, said they believed a “secret deal” had been done with security officials at the prime minister’s behest.

Johnson has a long history of association with Lebedev, and like all Prime Ministers, has tremendous powers of patronage. This is yet another argument as to why the House of Lords should be an entirely elected second chamber.