“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” — Karl Marx
Philip Rycroft, the former civil servant, has been asked to examine foreign interference in British politics. The immediate trigger was the conviction of a former MEP for accepting bribes “to promote pro-Russian narratives.” That is a serious matter and the government is right to look further into the matter.
The Rycroft Review comes as the Head of MI6 has also warned about Russian propaganda and influence operations that “crack open and exploit fractures within societies.”
But if the review only confines itself to elections, party finance and overt corruption, it will miss one of the most consequential forms of foreign influence in recent decades: sustained Russian attempts to shape UK energy markets and energy policymaking.
It is now unarguable that decisions taken by ministers in the mid-2000s and 2010s left Britain dangerously exposed when gas prices surged in 2021–22. During this period, there were live debates on core questions of energy security: the future of strategic gas storage at Rough (closed down in 2017), nuclear policy, maximising recovery in the North Sea following the Wood Review (2013), the 2015 decision to end coal-fired generation, and the failure to develop UK shale gas. Through a combination of indecision and damaging policy choices, Britain’s exposure to international gas markets increased sharply.
The result was the UK energy crisis. Since 2021, its direct economic costs are estimated at £183 billion, dwarfing annual defence and NHS budgets and contributing to widespread household debt and de-industrialisation. As pollsters More in Common have noted, it has also disrupted our politics and fuelled deep levels of anti-system sentiment.
Not all of this can be attributed to gas imports alone, as climate lobbyists claim. Increased reliance on expensive renewables also played a role, as my colleague Andrew Montford has argued. But the underlying outcome was clear: deep structural vulnerability.
If the Rycroft Review is a genuine inquiry into foreign influence operations, it must ask not only whether foreign actors sought to influence UK decisions, but also how those efforts may have shaped outcomes in practice — by altering political incentives, public opinion and limiting the range of ministerial choices.
This is not conjecture. There is now a substantial public record showing that Russia treated Western energy policy as a strategic target for subversion. The goal of the Kremlin throughout this period was to normalise dependence on Russian gas (directly and indirectly) and to marginalise competing sources of supply from within NATO.
In her 2019 testimony to the US House Intelligence Committee, Dr Fiona Hill, a former adviser to President Trump and now a defence adviser to the UK Government, as well as a reviewer of the 2024 Strategic Defence Review, stated plainly that Russia was running propaganda campaigns to subvert energy policy. She also recalled that at the 2011 Valdai Conference, Vladimir Putin told her directly that US shale gas development posed a “strategic threat” to Russian interests.
This was not a marginal view. The 2017 US Intelligence Community Assessment concluded with “high confidence” that Russian influence operations were “state-directed”, “ordered by senior Russian officials” and “employed a multi-faceted approach”. Notably, the assessment observed that Russian state media devoted “significant coverage to the environmental impacts of fracking”, which it judged to be “likely reflective of the Russian Government’s concern about the impact of fracking on global energy markets and Gazprom’s profitability”.
A year later, a staff report by the US House Science, Space and Technology Committee documented thousands of Russian-linked social-media posts focused on “pipelines, fracking, fossil fuels and climate change”. The report concluded that these campaigns were designed not simply to persuade, but to “exploit contentious issues to sow division and undermine public confidence” in US energy policy.
NATO officials were warning of the same pattern at the time. In 2014, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, then Secretary-General of NATO, stated publicly that Russia was engaged in information and disinformation campaigns aimed at influencing European energy debates, including by working to amplify local opposition to shale gas in order to preserve dependence on Russian supply.
Throughout this period, Western energy policy was ground zero.
Unfortunately, too many within the British establishment have wanted to look the other way and remain remarkably incurious. But it would be naive to assume the UK was operating in an informational vacuum at the time. Britain is a major European energy market and a core NATO member. Both NATO and the Royal Navy have since warned that Russia is “actively mapping” undersea energy infrastructure, including pipelines and cables. It would be inconsistent of the UK government to recognise hostile intent in energy’s physical domain while assuming its absence in the informational and political one.
During the 2010s, a series of local opposition campaigns helped to render fracking politically toxic, increasing pressure on ministers to distance themselves from shale gas regardless of the underlying technical, economic or security case. For this reason, Sir Ed Davey, who served as energy secretary in the coalition government between 2012 and 2015, has said in 2022 that he is “very proud” to have been the person to have “basically stopped the fracking industry in this country” during his time in office. Politics, after all, is downstream from public opinion. Bashing the frackers became a popular sport within Westminster and the media.
I should know. During that period, I ran the North West Energy Task Force, a small campaign supporting shale gas development in Lancashire, backed by shale gas pioneer Cuadrilla Resources. I witnessed first-hand how Russia Today (RT) exploited the global network effects of social media to amplify anti-shale narratives on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Baseless scare stories originating in the United States, deliberately constructed to undermine the safety case, would rapidly appear in the UK information space. Activists with previous links to the Occupy movement and the Green Party were routinely invited onto RT to air their views.
To be clear, there is no suggestion that any of these activists were acting at the direction of, or in coordination with, the Russian state. But that is beside the point. Russian influence did not rely on command and control. It did not need to. Instead, it relied on exploiting existing grievances, networks and platforms to shape the political environment in which ministers were forced to operate. Ignoring this reality simply because it does not align with the UK’s push for Net Zero and renewables is not a serious approach to national security or democratic integrity.
Nor did Russian influence operate solely through social media or RT. It also moved through respectable Western intermediaries.
A 2015 report by the Brussels-based Corporate Europe Observatory documented that Portland Communications, a London-based strategic communications consultancy, had represented Gazprom. The report situated this activity within preparations for Russia’s 2006 G8 presidency, where “energy security was high on the agenda” and Gazprom was positioned as an “indispensable partner” for Europe.
Portland was founded by Tim Allan, who sold a majority stake in the firm to Omnicom in 2012 and stepped down following its full acquisition in 2019, after which he had no operational involvement. In 2025, Allan was appointed Director of Communications at Number 10. There is no suggestion that he personally lobbied on behalf of Gazprom or the Russian state, or that these past relationships have any bearing on current government policy.
Russia ceased to be a Portland client in 2014, following the annexation of Crimea. Much of this activity therefore predates the point at which Russian energy dependence came to be widely recognised within the British establishment as a strategic vulnerability, and any British PR firm was well within its legal obligations to offer advice to a Russian energy company that was at that time being welcomed across European chancelleries. Yet it occurred after a series of clear warning signs, including the 2005–06 Russia–Ukraine gas dispute, the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006, and Russia’s military intervention in Georgia in 2008, which should at least have caused hesitation from British and European governments.
If the Rycroft Review ignores this history it will inevitably tell only part of the story
Foreign influence is rarely visible in real time. Its effects accumulate slowly, shaping incentives, narrowing options and hardening assumptions. Taken together, this body of evidence makes it difficult to dismiss the possibility that UK energy policy was shaped, at least in part, by these wider influence dynamics over the past two decades.
If the Rycroft Review ignores this history it will inevitably tell only part of the story. That might serve Labour’s short-term political objectives, but it does not serve the national interest. A review that confronts it honestly has an opportunity to ensure that similar vulnerabilities are recognised earlier, and addressed before they become structural. As we enter an alleged pre-war period, answers to these questions are needed.
