Trump-Russia Ensnares The Tories

Another week, another trawl of information, claims that more arrests are imminent, and the apparent appearance of many more sealed indictments in the probe led by former CIA Director Robert Mueller into the Trump Gang and its Russian connections - along with the added bonus of interference in last year’s US Presidential Election. And especially interesting to politics watchers in the UK is the involvement of another political party.

A complete Muppet. And Elmo from Sesame Street

We knew that former UKIP Oberscheissenführer Nigel “Thirsty” Farage and several of his associates were in the firing line ever since Nige was caught trying to sneak in to the Ecuadorian embassy to see Julian Assange, now viewed as a Russian asset. Now we know that the web of intrigue also covers the Tories, as befits the party in power either in Coalition, or alone, for more than seven years now.

And key to understanding this latest development is the recent news that George Papadopoulos had confessed to lying and was now co-operating with Mueller’s probe. The Trump Gang has attempted to denounce him as a minor player; nothing could be further from the truth. He was a major part of the Trump campaign, and we now know he met a major Putin backer in Athens at the same time the Russian leader was in town.

Did the two meet? We may not know now; we will soon enough. What we do know is that Papadopoulos is also connected to a number of Tory MPs, the first of whom was Tobias Ellwood, MP for Bournemouth East and a senior minister at the Foreign Office when Papadopoulos met him at the UN in September last year, in the run-up to that Presidential Election. Why would someone looking for “dirt” on Hillary Clinton want to meet him?

But that is a mere hors d’oeuvre for the entrée, Papadopoulos’ networking gained through his relationship with the Maltese Professor Joseph Mifsud. Papadopoulos met Mifsud; the Professor met … Alok Sharma, MP for Reading West, and at the time a Foreign Office minister for Asia. Mifsud met him a total of three times; and remember, he was the one whom Papadopoulos sought out for his Russian connections.

And the icing on the cake of this particular spider’s web is that when Mifsud attended Sharma’s constituency dinner in October, who should be there, but London’s formerly very occasional Mayor Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. Mifsud bragged that he’d be “meeting Boris Johnson for dinner Re: Brexit”. Bozza claims he doesn’t know who the Professor is, and has no recollection of having met him.

We can be reasonably certain that the UKIP contingent and their hangers-on will be the subject of some of those still sealed indictments; the inability of Arron Banks and Andy Wigmore to keep schtum is the dead giveaway. But the prospect of the Tories being sucked into the building maelstrom is an added bonus, especially if it subjects Bozza, a greedy opportunist if ever there was one, to a little additional discomfort.

With the sex pest scandal already in full swing, it’s almost as if The Blue Team has brought a curse on itself. So that’s more excellent spectator sport in prospect, then.