The day before Boris Johnson agreed to step down as Prime Minister (after more than 50 members of his government had resigned), he admitted to the Liaison Committee something that had been long suspected: while he was Foreign Secretary he had met privately with former KGB agent and Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev, without security or aides.
In this video interview, former MI6 agent and intelligence expert Christopher Steele explains why the off-books meeting between Johnson and Lebedev poses a security risk to the UK, and what it tells us about the influence of Russia and Vladimir Putin at the highest levels of UK government.
Boris Johnson is also friends with Alexander Lebedev's son, Evgeny Lebedev. The younger Lebedev is the proprietor of the London Evening Standard and Independent newspapers, and in 2020 was nominated for a seat in the House of Lords by none other than Boris Johnson. Here Steele also discusses the influence his peerage might allow Lord Lebedev to exert, and the types of intelligence it would give him access to.
Christopher Steele was an MI6 intelligence operative, who ran the Russia desk at the MI6 London headquarters. During the 2016 US presidential elections Steele become notorious for compiling a dossier which claimed that Russia had compiled a file of compromising information on Donald Trump. This became known as the "Trump dossier".
