ANNA MIKHAILOVA: The Lords who can’t stop counting their roubles…
Foreign Secretary Liz Truss is talking tough about halting the deluge of Russian money and influence in Britain.
Last week she announced plans to give the UK ‘the power to sanction a broader range of individuals and businesses’ and ‘target anyone providing strategic support close to Vladimir Putin’. Fearless Liz’s officials have no doubt given a clean bill of health to every rouble donated to the Tory Party and its MPs by Russian donors and their wives.
And of course none of her plans apply to the entirely above-board links to Moscow enjoyed by some next door in the House of Lords.
Lord (Francis) Maude sits in the Lords while running a consulting firm that has advised the Putin-friendly Kazakh government. It didn’t stop him from being made an adviser to the Cabinet Office and Treasury in 2020. Lord (Greg) Barker, a Minister in the Cameron government, took a leave of absence from the second chamber to trouser £6 million a year from a Russian energy giant linked to Putin’s pal Oleg Deripaska.
Foreign Secretary Liz Truss is talking tough about halting the deluge of Russian money and influence in Britain writes ANNA MIKHAILOVA
As a result, he cannot vote or sit in the Lords but keeps his title, use of parliamentary stationery and dining facilities for up to five guests, oh, and no longer needs to register outside interests.
I can reveal that Lord (Robert) Skidelsky, who since 2016 sat on the board of Russian oil company Russneft, while keeping his position in our legislature, has seen the light and quit the oil giant’s board last month.
The former Tory and now crossbench peer tells me: ‘On reflection, I thought it was not appropriate to serve on the board of a sanctioned entity.’
That didn’t stop him taking Truss to task on Twitter over her decision to make public MI6 intelligence saying Russia is plotting a coup in Ukraine, comparing it to how the security services were accused of ‘sexing up’ Tony Blair’s dodgy Iraq dossier.
But it looks like his fellow peers can keep guzzling their caviar.
Untangled from Webbe
Claudia Webbe MP for Leicester East
A politician has resigned after being investigated by the police. No, not that one. It’s Claudia Webbe, who’s quit the Foreign Affairs Committee after her conviction for harassing a woman she suspected of having an affair with her partner.
She still refuses to resign as MP for Leicester East though, despite losing the Labour whip.
Committee members will miss her cross-examining skills, such as when she kept asking the then-Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab why he wasn’t considering ‘legal action’ in Belarus without saying against whom and why.
Webbe, left, who threatened to throw acid at the woman she harassed, told relieved committee colleagues it had been a ‘real pleasure’ working with them.
Suck-up Tories in the ‘Save Big Dog’ guard are coming across more Suicide Squad than Avengers. Workington MP Mark Jenkinson equated the idea of the PM resigning over a fixed penalty notice for breaking lockdown rules to a parking fine.
And Peterborough MP Paul Bristow told hacks on leaving Monday’s 1922 Committee meeting with Boris that he felt ‘absolutely pumped’.
That’s the same Bristow banned for doing 76mph in a 50mph road after two previous speeding offences.
What’s a fixed penalty notice between such upstanding politicians going nowhere fast?
South Ribble MP Katherine Fletcher is another loyalist being wheeled out by Team Boris, which likes having a straight- talking Lancashire lass to parrot the party line. But a fellow Red Waller tells me that Fletcher tries a little too hard pushing the ‘us Northerners’ image.
When at the now-notorious ‘Fizz with Liz’ dinner last year at a Mayfair private members’ club, she apparently necked beer, engaged in ‘loud banter’ with the Foreign Secretary host before throwing a napkin at Truss’s head. ‘Liz semi-laughed, but it was a very weird moment,’ a source present said – OTT even for Yorkshire girl Truss.
Looks like Dominic Cummings’ eyesight has radically improved. The vengeful weirdo has managed to change the small type of his WhatsApp description from ‘Get Brexit done then ARPA’ (his space/science quango idea) to… ‘Regime Change’.
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