Boris Johnson And The Lebedevs How I Exposed The Prime Minister S Defining Scandal Boris Johnson

It was the beginning of an era, not the end – on 24 July 2019, Boris Johnson entered 10 Downing Street after being elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. But the seeds of a scandal that is beginning to look like it could – and should – become the defining legacy of his premiership had already been sown. Because the latest Johnson scandal to catch fire is of a different order to Wallpapergate or Partygate or the one that finally forced him to resign, his lies about disgraced MP, Chris Pincher. Former KGB lieutenant general Alexander Lebedev left and his son Evgeny. Photo: Wenn Rights Ltd/Alamy It concerns his relationship with a former KGB lieutenant colonel, Alexander Lebedev, and specifically a meeting with him, without his security detail or Foreign Office officials, at the height of the Skripal poisoning crisis. This scandal has nothing to do with breaking his laws or messing with Conservative party funds or the Lulu Lytle wallpaper. It’s not even a scandal in the traditional sense. This is what appears to be a fundamental breach of our national security. A breach that potentially endangered not only our country but the entire NATO alliance. And we still know almost nothing about it. But it’s hard to overestimate the seriousness of what we do know. In 2018, the Kremlin ordered two military intelligence officers to use a banned chemical weapon on a British road. The thrown bottle of novichok killed a British national, Dawn Sturgess. But it was only luck, pure luck, that was nothing more. As President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Fiona Hill said this year: “There was enough nerve agent in that bottle to kill several thousand people.” In Britain, we treated it as a botched assassination attempt, but NATO realized that something much more sinister had happened. It was a chemical warfare attack on the civilian population of a NATO country. According to NATO rules, an attack on one member state is an attack on all. Act quickly and decisively. Sergei, right, and Yulia Skripal, who were targeted by Russian military intelligence officers with novichok in Salisbury in March 2018. Johnson, as foreign secretary, oversaw Britain’s response, working with NATO as he orchestrated almost unprecedented international cooperation, imposing sanctions on Russia and expelling 342 Russian diplomats from countries around the world. Then, on April 27, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg convened a meeting in Brussels with the foreign ministers of NATO member states to discuss critical next steps. The British Foreign Secretary attended the meeting. He left it, apparently still holding documents. Somehow he managed to miss the 24/7 security detail that all secretaries of state have. He flew alone to Italy. And there he met former KGB lieutenant colonel Alexander Lebedev, a spy who was in the Russian embassy in London in the late 1980s and served alongside other officers including Vladimir Putin. It was a meeting, Johnson admitted to MPs last week, that was held in breach of all protocol, with no foreign office officials present. We still don’t know what was said in that meeting. We don’t know if there are any official records for this. We don’t know who else was there. We do not know what documents Johnson had in his possession. We don’t know if he betrayed secrets – either intentionally or unintentionally – about NATO’s strategy. “Profumo lost his job for much less,” noted former Tory MP Rory Stewart, referring to Britain’s most famous political scandal. In America, Trump’s national security adviser, General Mike Flynn, was fired over off-the-record meetings with the Russian ambassador and Priti Patel for informal talks with the Israeli government. But what’s really striking about this story is that it was evident almost throughout Johnson’s tenure. In Britain, there is no need to bury abuses of power or even potential acts of treason. You don’t even have to bother covering them. Here we let our scandals fester literally for years. Boris Johnson looks disheveled at Perugia Airport after attending a party at Evgeni Lebedev’s villa. Because if you’re a careful reader of the Observer, none of this was new. We first revealed this meeting with Alexander Lebedev in November 2019. We brought attention to it again when the Russian report that Johnson suppressed was finally published in July 2020. Again when Russia invaded Ukraine, highlighting the extraordinary its implications not only for the security of Britain but NATO in March this year. The news didn’t “break out” last week. It wasn’t even, as the BBC claimed, the first time it had been “confirmed”. We got confirmation from Lebedev’s press secretary three years ago and we – the Observer, the Guardian and specialist independent media Byline Times, Open Democracy and Tortoise Media – have been talking about this relationship to anyone who will listen for years. What happened last week was just the first time someone with access to Johnson had asked him a question about it. It was a bullet Johnson narrowly dodged. A day before he stood on the steps of Downing Street and finally accepted the inevitable by resigning, he faced his final appearance before the liaison committee, the parliamentary body tasked with overseeing the prime minister’s office. Between the investigations into Ukraine and the cost of living crisis, there was a buried landmine. Meg Hillier, the Labor MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch, stumbled over her accent as she asked: “Could you just confirm, and I’d appreciate a yes or no, that you met with ex-KGB officer Alexander Lebenov – Lebedev – when you were Foreign Minister without officials on April 28, 2018?” Even in the frenzy of a Westminster news cycle that had made headlines around the world, Johnson’s fumbling responses grabbed attention. “Boris Johnson admits he had one-on-one meeting with ex-KGB agent,” reported the Guardian. And a day later, shadow defense secretary Yvette Cooper asked an urgent question in the house, followed by Labor deputy leader Angela Rayner calling for a full inquiry. Something else important happened last week too: the BBC finally covered it. Yevgeny Lebedev on his induction into the House of Lords after being nominated for a life peerage. Photo: PRU/AFP/Getty Images I remember what the weather was like the week Johnson took office because I spent it cycling around London trying to track down people I thought might have information. I had a tip about Johnson and his relationship with an unknown Russian oligarch from an undisputed source and a months-long process of elimination eventually led me to Alexander Lebedev, the one-time owner of the Evening Standard and the Independent and his party. -beloved son, Eugene. He is the man who still owns these papers and who, in 2020, Boris Johnson has pushed to the top. A few days before Johnson became prime minister, Nick Hopkins, then the Guardian’s investigative editor, had a startling story. He had learned that Johnson had traveled to Yevgeny Lebedev’s Italian villa for the weekend after that NATO summit without his security detail. That first article prompted a Guardian reader to write in more detail. Johnson was seen at Perugia’s San Francesco d’Assisi airport alone, without luggage, in a disheveled state, “looking as if he had slept in his clothes” and “struggling to walk in a straight line”. But I had more information and had to find other sources and over the next few days, I tried to find anyone who might know more. It featured Sarah Sands, then editor of Radio 4’s Today programme. She was a friend and colleague of Johnson’s, had been appointed editor of the Evening Standard by Evgeny and attended his weekend parties in Italy. He agreed to meet me at Broadcasting House and told me he had been to Lebedev’s parties. “But I was always on the first shift. There was an early shift at his parties and an evening shift. I was one of those boring married couples who went to bed early.” Sarah Sands, former editor of the Evening Standard. Photo: Sarah Lee/The Guardian That same day, I met Chris Steele, the former head of MI6’s Russia bureau and the man behind the “Steele dossier,” a series of early—if disputed—revelations about Trump’s relationship with Putin. “There is no such thing as a former KGB officer,” he claimed. I spoke to a former senior executive at the Independent and former guests at Evgeny’s famous parties, which he threw at his London residence, Stud House, and at Terranova, his Italian villa (his father owns a nearby castle that the former guest complained “it has a medieval dungeon filled with chains, but no pool” and where there were always “blondes draped over the furniture”). There were so many that it was already an open secret. The pro-Putin comments written by both Evgeny Lebedev and Alexander Lebedev in the Independent. Alexander’s support for Russia’s illegal occupation of Crimea. Evgeny’s friendship with Johnson dates back to his days as London mayor, when the support of the Lebedev-owned Evening Standard was a key asset in his re-election campaign. The fact that Evgeny had a pet wolf that he named Boris and that he kept him on a leash for photos. (Another dog was named Vladimir.) None of this was classified information. The most unusual thing isn’t a former KGB lieutenant colonel taking ownership of two major British newspapers and befriending the then mayor of London, it’s…