David

Tom, I guess, I mean, question for you is, I mean, as a journalist, political editor now, you know, writing these novels, I mean, how much have you seen Russian influence in British public and kind of political life?

Like, is this, are you seeing it more and more?

I know it's hard to quantify, but how common are these kind of stories in British politics?

Why do we think we're having a long conversation about Russian interference and not, for example, Chinese interference?

Now, obviously, they both do it to some degree, and I think we talked a little bit about this, Gordon, in our series on interference in the US election, but it is a fascinating kind of fundamental piece of this that we're not talking about another country doing this stuff.

We're talking about the Russians, and we're talking about instances all over Europe,

the United States, and frankly, the globe, where the Russians do this.

And it doesn't seem like anybody else quite has the same toolkit.

But not at the same scale.

Well, I guess also, I mean, this is a point that John Cipher, former CIA officer and also friend of the show, we did a live stream with a while back on Epstein and the Russia connection.

He has made the case in writing for many years now that Russia...

is effectively an intelligence state and its foreign policy is conducted primarily by its intelligence services.

And those intelligence services, going back even to sort of Tsarist times, had embedded in them this concept of active measures, of not necessarily going out and just stealing plans and intentions, secrets around capabilities, but in actually shaping the environment around Russia politically.

to make it more amenable to Russian interests.

And so I think that is different from the way the Chinese have used their intelligence services.

I mean, to your point, Tom, it's the Chinese are engaged in a massive, you know, sort of generational wealth transfer program back to China of all kinds of IP and commercial secrets and all of that.

The Russians, I'm sure, do that.

But the Russian services bureaucratically just seem much more focused on kind of

trying to shape the environment around them.

Hence why it would make sense to be paying off British MPs to create division in the country and try to tilt British politics in a more pro-Russian manner.