Tower and Town, September 2020

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Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem and Russia's Remaking of the West, by Luke Harding

June, 2016: in a referendum on whether to stay in the European Union, the British people vote for Brexit. But the vote is dogged by allegations of Russian involvement, with a US senate report stating: "The Russian government has sought to influence democracy in the United Kingdom through disinformation, cyber hacking, and corruption." Four years on, the Russia report, completed last year by parliament’s intelligence and security committee, has only just been published. Why did the Boris Johnson withhold its release for so long?

March, 2018: Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy, and his daughter Yulia are poisoned with Novichok, a nerve agent, in their Salisbury home. They survive, but a British woman, Dawn Sturgess, later dies after coming into contact with Novichok. Two Russian intelligence officers are identified as the murderers but the suspicion is that responsibility for the attacks lies at the heart of the Russian government. The foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, says it is "overwhelmingly likely" that the poisoning was ordered directly by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Two years on, why has no one been held to account?

These and many other questions form the basis of Luke Harding's riveting Shadow State, the fourth of his books that investigate the nefarious ways in which Putin's Russia is infiltrating western politics. Few are better qualified to take on the task: among many stints as a foreign correspondent, Harding spent four years in Moscow, where his apartment was bugged ("I had no private space for years," he said in an interview with the Guardian. "My wife and I talked in the garden next to a plum tree."). He was deported in 2011 and his books are, he says, "literary revenge".

Spies, subterfuge, poison… it all sounds like the stuff of a James Bond novel. Yet for Harding, the truth is more banal, and all the more chilling for it: "Putin is not a super-villain sitting in a cave in front of a console with red flashing buttons. His talent is sniffing out weakness."

Ben Tarring