Farage, Net Zero, And Russia

While questions are asked by the Murdoch Sunday Times this morning about the peerage awarded to Evgeny Lebedev by alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson and his pals, given that there were concerns raised by the security services, and that Lebedev Père had been a KGB officer - one strand of thought is that there is no such thing as a former KGB officer - another link to foreign influence is being ignored.

But thanks to former Brexit Party Oberscheissenführer Nigel “Thirsty” Farage, we are being reminded of one Christopher Chandler, born in New Zealand, and with his brother Richard, a significant beneficiary from their investments in Russia in the 1990s. Chandler founded Legatum, a private investment company run out of Dubai. Legatum has a significant stake in Gammon Broadcasting News (“Bacon’s News Channel”).

Legatum, via its then economics director Shanker Singham, pushed for a hard Brexit. He had, as the Guardian noted at the time, “coordinated a letter written … to Theresa May demanding a hard Brexit”. Now Legatum is effectively paying a fair whack of Mr Thirsty’s fees for his GB News appearances. What is also notable about Chandler is that his Russia connection keeps being raised, and keeps not being convincingly denied.

Back in 2018, the Guardian article continued “Speaking in the Commons, the [Labour] MP Ben Bradshaw who has previously raised questions about the Kremlin’s possible role in Brexit said he called for an investigation into Legatum last November … he was concerned by … by the ‘growing corruption, money laundering and sale of passports by Malta, where Chandler has just acquired citizenship’”. And then came the news from Monaco.

Tory MP Bob Seely used Parliamentary privilege to state “According to the French intelligence services, as recorded by their colleagues in Monaco ... Mr Chandler is described as having been ‘an object of interest’ to the DST since 2002 on suspicion of working for Russian intelligence services”. Legatum mounted a forceful rebuttal.

“Neither Christopher Chandler nor anyone at Legatum is aware of any such alleged ‘investigation’ by the French authorities [they should voice their suspicions publicly?] … To be clear Christopher Chandler has never been approached at any time by the French or any other authorities regarding Russia [ditto]”. So why is this now so important?

One look at today’s Mail on Sunday tells you why. Farage, paid in part by Legatum’s backing, is the subject of a puff piece by the paper’s political editor Glen Owen, headlined “Farage’s new drive for vote to kill off Boris’s ‘ruinous’ green agenda”. Mr Thirsty spent years demanding a Brexit referendum. Now he’s demanding another one.

Christopher Chandler

Who might benefit from ditching the Green Agenda? From abandoning Net Zero? That would be providers of fossil fuels. Like Russia. Which right now is having difficulty selling its oil, and desperately needs the cash for its gas to keep rolling in in the face of concerted economic sanctions following its invasion of Ukraine ten days ago.

Farage is calling his new campaign “Power not poverty”, fraudulently presenting the issue of green agenda meaning impoverishment for the less well off. He will have the support of all those Tories in the Net Zero Scrutiny Group, who make the same equivalence, despite the hike in energy bills being mainly down to their party’s own actions.

Does that make Steve Baker, Craig Mackinlay and their pals agents of a foreign power? No. It just makes them yet more useful idiots. As the Green Party’s Caroline Lucas has pointed out, “There is something deeply confused about the Baker-Mackinlay attack on green levies as a burden on poorer people, when those levies have played a significant part in keeping energy bills down”. Not that Farage will care. And there is more.

“Wind and solar generators in the last quarter of 2021, far from being a charge on bills, actually contributed £160m to lowering them. Furthermore, the MPs’ supposed concern for the least well-off in society didn’t stop them voting this month for a new ‘green’ levy to finance nuclear power stations that will put bills up … global gas prices are overwhelmingly responsible for the spike in energy bills”.

Farage’s campaign is utterly pointless. All that his push to abandon Green Levies would do would be to leave the UK exposed to the next spike in gas prices. And the next one. And the one after that. This is yet another campaign that, like Brexit, is about rich people gaslighting the less well off under the pretence that they are there to help them.

What we actually have here is what John le Carré’s fictional spymaster George Smiley would have called “an embarrassing chain of events”. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin needs fossil fuel revenues to increase one day, Nigel Farage pops up in the Mail on Sunday advocating a policy that will do just that the next. An embarrassing chain of events.

And there in the middle is the thus far publicity-shy Christopher Chandler, whose firm Legatum pushed for a hard Brexit and got it, and is now backing GB News, where Farage is pushing his fraudulent Net Zero abandonment campaign. Along with useful idiots in the Tory Party, and the usual reactionary squad from our free and fearless press.

There will no doubt be the usual cries of “Russophobia” at the linking of another fraudulent campaign, that will ultimately impoverish the poorest, back to the gangsterist régime in Moscow. But that, right now, is where it gives every appearance of leading.

Of course, Legatum could divest itself of GB News. But then, GB News would not exist.

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