Summary: Treason doth never prosper. What’s the reason? When it prosper none dare call it treason.

Since 2010, Russia under Vladimir Putin has launched a stunningly successful and sustained assault on liberal democracy. Timothy Synder’s book The Road to Unfreedom chartered the roots of this offensive including its initial forays into Ukraine, up to 2016. In Shadow State Luke Harding continues the story into 2020, detailing the depth of Russia’s penetration into the ruling cliques of both the UK and the US, identifying those involved and explaining how Russian espionage helped deliver both Trump’s election and Brexit.

Harding recounts that on returning home, Alexander Yakovenko, Russia’s ambassador to the UK from 2011 to 2019 was made a member of the Order of Alexander Nevsky and president of the Diplomatic Academy by Putin as a reward for “smashing the Brits to the ground. ‘It will be a long time before they rise again.’” 

The depth of contempt that Russia now holds for the UK was shown in 2018 when Putin launched a lethal chemical weapons attack in Salisbury in an attempt to kill the former Russian military officer Sergei Skripal. In doing this Putin aimed not only to deter other Russian intelligence officers from defecting, but he wanted to say to the UK, ”Fuck you”, as Harding notes. With his boy Trump in Washington and with the UK, at Moscow’s behest, isolating itself from its European allies with Brexit, Putin knew that there was little that the UK could do to hurt him in retaliation. Indeed, he could have killed half a dozen more British citizens in Salisbury and Boris Johnson would still think nothing of going hobnobbing with Russian intelligence officers and assets.

Johnson and Trump can afford to be sanguine about Russian assaults on their national democracies: they have been the beneficiaries of it. And even if they are in knowing collusion with the Russians, as opposed to mere useful idiots, their respective parties appear much too pusillanimous to do anything about it. Both know that they can count on future Russia support for any electoral contests and, particularly in the case of the US, considerable hacking and corruption of the electoral system. It is indeed a golden time to be a Quisling.

Shadow State is a fine, elegantly written work of investigative journalism. While it may be in the traditions of All the President’s Men, there is, at least at the moment, no justice in sight.