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Reposted from Peter Jukes' narrative project, Trojan Horses: Trump, Russia, Brexit

With the news that a poll to call for a public inquiry has reached a sufficient number to be considered for a parliamentary debate, we might be inching closer to a full reckoning with the extensive 'active measures' and hybrid economic information war Vladimir Putin has waged against the UK since 2012.

The 10-and-a-half year prison sentence Nathan Gill, former UKIP and Brexit Party MEP and Welsh Leader of Reform UK, for taking Kremlin-linked bribes, has turned an intelligence concern into a criminal conviction - and activated a live constitutional question.

Nigel Farage's wingman in Strasbourg accepted around £40,000 to push pro-Kremlin lines in the European Parliament. One of Gill's bribes was to organise a roundtable for 'Putin's Man in Ukraine', Viktor Medvedchuk, who was also the ultimate payee of the Kremlin gold. This puts Nigel Farage firmly in the frame, directly linking one of his top aides to one of Vladimir Putin's.

EXCLUSIVE

Nathan Gill Sentenced: What He Was Really Doing for the Kremlin

Reform UK's former leader in Wales was in the centre of Putin's preparations to attack Ukraine, argues Sergei Cristo

Sergei Cristo

In a statement, Liberal Democrat Leader Ed Davey called Gill "a traitor … at the very top of Reform UK, aiding and abetting a foreign adversary" and branded Farage's party "a danger to national security".

But if you think this is bad, consider our former Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the troubling high-level Russian connections he had over many years.

Brexit and Blaming the Victim

As well as being the figureheads of their respective Brexit campaigns, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson share another thing in common: as Russia launched its first phase of war against Ukraine in 2014, they both blamed the EU for the conflict.

Back at the time of the Crimea land-grab, in March 2014, Farage told the press and the European Parliament that the EU had "poked the Russian bear with a stick" by encouraging Ukrainians to topple President Viktor Yanukovych, accusing Brussels of a "militarist and expansionist" policy that had provoked the crisis in Ukraine.

Nathan Gill echoed his leader's defence of Putin a few months later, in his maiden speech to the European Parliament in September 2014, warning that an association agreement between Ukraine and the EU would "lead to war", and insisting that "what you are doing today is throwing petrol onto the bonfire which the EU lit".

Nigel Farage went on to head the Leave.EU campaign a year later.

The other leading leave campaigner, Boris Johnson, directly echoed this two years later. In May 2016, he told reporters that "if you want an example of EU foreign policy-making on the hoof, and the EU's pretensions to running a defence policy that have caused real trouble, then look at what has happened in Ukraine".

How did it come about that both leading Brexiters were also Putin cheerleaders?

From Nalobin to Farage: the long Russian courtship of the Tory right

Carole Cadwalladr and I have documented in the award-winning Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring, how the Kremlin was trying to suborn the Conservative Party and UKIP long before Gill was taking envelopes of cash from Medvedchuk's bagman.

In late 2010, Russian-born Tory activist Sergei Cristo says he was approached at the Carlton Club by Sergey Nalobin, a first secretary at the Russian embassy and son of a KGB/FSB general, with an offer that Russian companies that would like to "contribute to the Conservative Party". An illegal act, like Gill's bungs.

Just as interestingly, Nalobin quizzed Cristo about the rivalry between the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, and his former Eton, Oxford and Bullingdon Club contemporary, the then Mayor of London, Boris ...