Mr. ‘Steele Dossier’ is Back Again, Now Slinging Russian Mud at Nigel Farage

Steele Farage
TOLGA AKMEN/AFP via Getty Images / Gage Skidmore, Wikipedia Commons
Oliver JJ Lane

Christopher Steele, a former British spy and creator of the notorious anti-Trump Steele dossier, has surfaced to try his hand at creating a new narrative of Russia having been behind the week of England riots all along.

Britain’s foreign intelligence agency MI6 will look “very carefully” at Reform UK leader, Brexit boss, and Member of Parliament Nigel Farage after he challenged the government on the official narrative around the Southport stabbings, a former top spy has said.

Christopher Steele, the former Russia station chief for MI6, is best known now for the notorious and now “discredited” Steele Dossier, which alleged that President Trump had conspired with the Russian government to influence the 2016 U.S. election.

A report in the British newspaper of record, The Times, revealing Steele’s new comments damning Mr Farage with association and implication, did not mention Steele’s most famous ‘intelligence’ claims, however.

Linking Farage, the riots, and Russia, Steel said: “I think the security service will be looking very carefully at the instigators of these activities, including people like Tommy Robinson, even conceivably Nigel Farage, who incidentally said that we were being misinformed by the government about Southport.”

The comments Steele appears to be referring to may be when Mr Farage asked in July whether “the truth is being held from us, I don’t know”. Critics subsequently asserted that Mr Farage asking what he called “entirely fair” questions had actually incited the riots. 

As for how the intelligence agency for which he was once an official employee would search for dirt, Mr Steele is said to have continued with The Times: “They’ll be looking at things like their travel movements, who they’ve been in touch with, monetary transfers and so on, because that will reveal or not, as the case may be, a pattern of behaviour which can lead to some conclusions about the degree to which Russia has been interfering in this situation.”

Speaking to the paper’s rolling podcast, Steele also clearly implied that Nigel Farage had been an “instigator” of the riots seen in the United Kingdom earlier this month. While several left wing activists and commentators in the country have already made this claim, Mr Farage has repeatedly criticised rioters and has a years-long track record of excluding street agitators from his political movement, somewhat deflating the potency of the assertions.

In Steele’s mind, it is “clear” that the riots in England were influenced by Russia. He stated: “When you look at the original disinformation that surrounded the Southport killings, that does seem to have come from a Russian-linked website.”

Brexiteers have suffered Russian hoaxes in the past, particularly after the 2016 Brexit Referendum, as the London establishment scrabbled for comforting explanations for why the electorate hadn’t done as they were told. Major damages were eventually awarded, in one particularly persistent case of Russia-smearing in the United Kingdom, to Brexit-backer Arron Banks.

His ally Andy Wigmore said to Breitbart London at the time of that ruling the accusations of supposed collusion made in the media were intended to have a “destabilising effect on Brexit, being able to accuse Brexiteers of being Russian funded and Putin’s puppets, all of those narratives they used were hugely damaging”.

“It gave the Remain camp, the people that didn’t want Brexit, something to hang their hat on and the mainstream media were very much a part of that and you will not hear anything about the settlement, they will not do anything because it doesn’t fit that narrative.”

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