Historians amongst our readers might recall the “Zinoviev letter”, published on 25 October 1924, just four days before the General Election of that year, in which the Daily Mail suggested that the normalisation of UK relations with the Soviet Union under a Labour government would radicalise the British working class and put the Communist Party of Great Britain in a favourable position to pursue a Bolshevik-style revolution. It was, of course, a hoax but did its job, leading to a huge Conservative win and, in the process, the crushing of the Liberals.
The notion that Labour might be the opportunity that the Soviet Union needed was sufficiently credible to allow the hoax to work.
And here we are, nearly one hundred years later, in a situation where the Russian Government has infiltrated a British political party at the highest level. You wouldn’t have predicted that a decade ago, would you? And, whilst there is no suggestion that the Conservative Party is acting for the Putin regime, it is a mystery that Conservative and other right-wing politicians have been so welcoming towards Russian influence.
The receipt of significant sums of money from Russian donors, the welcome mat put down for Russian oligarchs, the willingness to be seen in public with said oligarchs, the appointment of one of their number to the House of Lords, all of these would have been unthinkable for the anti-communist warriors of the Conservative Party in the eighties.
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