Somewhere in Epsom, Chris Grayling was sobbing loudly having managed to lock himself in a cupboard. Wondering how he hadn’t managed to acquire vital intelligence about the intelligence and security committee. Wondering how he had managed to come second in a rigged election. Wondering how he had failed to suppress a report on interference in UK elections for a little while longer. The irony of all this rather passed him by. Meanwhile up in London, Julian Lewis, who had stolen the chair of the ISC from under Failing Grayling’s nose simply by promising the four opposition MPs on the committee that he would publish the Russia report as soon as possible, was happily taking centre stage in a book-lined room, having first made sure the curtains were firmly drawn. Satisfied there were no foreign spooks peering in, Lewis began the press conference by insisting he was only the facilitator. The compere, if you like. He hadn’t been on the committee when it had written the report, so he wanted to leave the interpretation of its findings to two men who had. Labour’s Kevan Jones kicked things off by referring to the nine-month delay in publication. This had been entirely down to the prime minister, whose four different excuses for postponing and discrediting the report had all been outright lies. Jones didn’t mince his words. He’d been waiting a long time to let Boris Johnson know what he thought of him and he wasn’t going to waste the opportunity now. Thereafter the press conference turned into a double act for Jones and the SNP’s Stewart Hosie, with each man taking it in three-minute turns to expose the ease with which the British political process could have been corrupted. Neither MI6 or GCHQ had been tasked with investigating Russian interference and MI5 had never got round to tasking itself with doing the job. After all, it was well known that Russia was actively trying to destabilise the west, having already attempted to influence the Scottish independence referendum and the 2016 US presidential election. What’s more, UK politicians had become far too chummy with Russian oligarchs and not too bothered about the source of the money flowing into the “Londongrad laundromat”, just so long as it continued to arrive by the sackful. But the killer line was that it was impossible to say whether the Russians had tried to influence the Brexit referendum because the government had made no attempt to find out one way or another. The result had gone the way that Vote Leave had wanted, so there was no point in rocking the boat. Why take the gloss off a result that had given so many people so much pleasure? Not to mention put Boris into Downing Street three years later. Besides, it was unthinkable that the Russians would bother to interfere in something as inconsequential as the UK’s membership of the EU. The government had been given the warnings, been given the chance to investigate, and yet had chosen to do precisely nothing. Such laissez-faire attitudes opened up some fascinating possibilities. At a stroke, the police could get rid of all their unsolved crimes simply by saying those crimes had never been committed. That boy who had been stabbed had merely accidentally tripped on a knife. That car hadn’t been stolen, someone had merely driven it by mistake. But why stop here? Why not see just where a total lack of curiosity might get you? If no one had gone to the trouble of identifying the coronavirus, it was self-evident that no one could have died from it. That way we could have avoided all the hassles and economic hardships caused by lockdown. Far better for hundreds of thousands of people to have died from unexplained causes than to have inconvenienced those who either didn’t get the virus or managed to recover. Both men were too canny to allow themselves to be drawn on why the government had tried to cover up the report or might be so uninterested in even sounding out the possibility of Russian attempts to interfere with the UK democratic process. Instead, they merely contented themselves with raising the odd eyebrow from time to time. It was the political equivalent of the dog that didn’t bark in the night. AKA, never open an inquiry unless you know what you might learn first. And the Tories under both Theresa May and Johnson had had a pretty good idea of what they might find. Having insisted it had made no efforts to discredit the report before its publication, the government went out of its way to discredit it immediately afterwards. If there had been anything to investigate then it would have been hot on the case. So the absence of any investigation was a sure sign that nothing untoward had happened and that the Russians had dozed off during the Brexit referendum. Besides, why bother to drag up something that had taken place four years in the past and would cause more trouble? Any attempt to portray the government as colluding with the Russians was just a smear. If Boris was guilty of anything it was being asleep on the job. And since when was idleness a crime? If only the Americans hadn’t had such a hissy-fit over Huawei, we could have happily ignored the Chinese too. Let bygones be bygones.