Everyone is talking about Partygate now that the former Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has been found to have misled Parliament over Covid lockdown parties. But much more serious is The Russian Partygate – the allegations that Boris Johnson put the country’s security into serious peril with his connections to Russia and the former KGB spy and billionaire Russian oligarch, Alexander Lebedev.
There are questions about this that Mr Johnson and the government still stubbornly refuse to answer. Why, for example, did Mr Johnson, when he was Foreign Secretary in 2018, leave a top-level NATO meeting to immediately fly, alone and without his officials, to join a party with Mr Lebedev, and his Russian-born son Evgeny, at his luxurious villa in Italy?
The next day Mr Johnson was seen at San Francesco d’Assisi airport “looking like he had slept in his clothes” and reportedly barely able to walk. In 2020, despite objections by the UK security services and the House of Lords Appointments Commission, Mr Johnson as Prime Minister appointed Evgeny Lebedev – owner of The Independent and the Evening Standard – to the House of Lords.
The government has resisted calls from Labour to publish the full documents related to the peerage. The government’s decision not to order an investigation into Russia’s alleged interference in the Scottish independence referendum, the EU referendum, and the 2019 general election, has been taken to the European Court of Human Rights for a ruling. The international court has ordered the government to respond to the legal claim brought by three MPs – Ben Bradshaw (Labour), Caroline Lucas (Green), and Alyn Smith (SNP).
Earlier this year, The European Court sent the government a list of questions going to the heart of the allegations. The government was required to respond by 26 April. We still don’t know if they did. The Court press office advised me [Mr Danzig] that a judgement on the case is “currently still pending” and in the meantime, “The parties’ pleadings are not published.” Commented Ben Bradshaw, “We argue that the government’s failure [to investigate Russian interference] was a breach of its duty to ensure free and fair elections in the United Kingdom, and as such constitutes a very serious breach of its obligations to the British people.”
* 𝗝𝗼𝗻 𝗗𝗮𝗻𝘇𝗶𝗴 is an independent campaigning journalist and film-maker who specialises in writing about health, human rights, and Europe. He is also founder of the information campaign, Reasons2Rejoin
Jon Danzig.
Jon Danzig on Facebook.
Bremain in Spain.
