MI5 Confirms the Brexit Attempt but Disputes the Effect
Russia did try to interfere around the 2016 referendum through state broadcasters and “trolls and bots and so forth”, the MI5 chief said, but “there is a really important difference between interference attempted and outcome swayed”. He stressed the result is “not in dispute” and warned against making the trolls “look 10ft tall”.
This is an intelligence chief adjudicating a row that has run since the weekend, and it lands on both sides of it rather than settling it for either. He confirmed the attempt was real and on the record — Russian state outlets “came in pretty strongly around the referendum”, with a second line of interference through fake accounts — while declining to say it changed anything. He also agreed strongly with the prime minister about a hack-and-leak operation during the 2019 general election campaign, which is the firmer of the two claims. His warning was about the argument itself: if the debate runs for days more, “Russian trolls who didn’t appear to do all that much… will be delighted because they are front page news again”. The Conservative deputy leader Alex Burghart called it “an extraordinary slap down to the prime minister”, which overstates it: Downing Street had already said it did not believe the interference succeeded. Published studies put the reach of Russian state content in the hundreds of millions of impressions while estimates of active troll accounts range from 54 to 150,000 — uncertainty that is itself the point.