‘Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring’ is podcast journalism at its most activist

One panel in particular at July’s Byline Festival, organised by media network Byline Times, led me down a labyrinth of surprisingly vast proportions. It was in the form of a podcast, a damning tale of corruption and lies transmitted through my headphones on a CrossCountry train home. Among the characters introduced that day were Peter Jukes, Byline’s Co-Founder and Executive Editor, and an unassuming man in red trousers called Sergei Cristo. Sergei was the figure around whom the coming story revolved. Cue a complicated discussion of a decade of Russian meddling in British politics, charting, for example, encounters with suspicious diplomats, Putin’s designs on the West, and the UK’s security apparatus.

Leaving the packed room of festival attendees, my Boar friends and I were beyond confused at what we’d heard. A barrage of names, organisations, and a catalogue of dates had left us in the dust. Good thing there was a podcast to turn to then.

Jukes and Cadwalladr, together with their whistleblower associate Sergei, guide us through ten expertly explained and thrilling episodes, delving unrestrained into the dark underbelly of a shockingly silenced story

The panel had actually taken this podcast’s name, Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring, released by journalist and researcher collective ‘The Citizens’ back in January, and fronted by Jukes and investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr, formerly of The Guardian and The Observer. It was nominated in the ‘Documentary’, ‘Factual’, and ‘News and Current Affairs’ categories at the British Podcast Awards on 2 October, but didn’t take home any awards.

Our two narrators’ paths in this tangled web of government infiltration and email correspondence converged some years ago, but now, Jukes and Cadwalladr, together with their whistleblower associate Sergei, guide us through ten expertly explained and thrilling episodes, delving unrestrained into the dark underbelly of a shockingly silenced story.

In true investigative fashion, the pair ‘follow the money’, narrating step-by-step the mounting intrusions onto British soil of Putin’s influence campaign 

Ever since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, I’ve been fascinated by the idea of the ‘Russosphere’, but this podcast brought the Kremlin’s foreign overtures much closer to home. Its simple conclusion is that the UK’s political culture has been and still is severely compromised by the Russian Federation. Our national security chiefs are refusing to do anything about this, claim the pair – “not a sausage”, as Boris Johnson is heard saying in a different context. Cadwalladr and Jukes trace this alleged inertia back to 2012, when Sergei Cristo first entered the picture, meeting a suspicious Russian diplomat at the Conservative Party-affiliated Carlton Club in London. Plenty of surprises await the patient listener.

In true investigative fashion, the pair ‘follow the money’, narrating step-by-step the mounting intrusions of Putin’s influence campaign on British soil. That phrase, referring to the investigative method of tracking dodgy dealings, was popularised after the 1976 film All the President’s Men, which tells the story of Washington Post hacks Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the duo instrumental to unearthing the Watergate Scandal.

Likewise, exposing corruption is central to Jukes and Cadwalladr’s shtick here, particularly the matters of Russia making moves to prop up sympathetic factions in Westminster and promote the Brexit campaign. For Cadwalladr, who was also instrumental in reporting the Cambridge Analytica scandal, it’s a rabbit hole which she has been consumed by for much of her career, and this podcast is an homage to that monumental effort. Everything is connected in this true crime and detective-esque piece of journalism, tying Anglophile Russian oligarchs, slippery ambassadors, and several prominent Conservative politicians into what has evidently become a Kremlin-fostered clique in Westminster. One cultivated over the past decade and a half.

When it feels like a television documentary only without any visuals, that is the sign of a stellar podcast

An especially thrilling episode narrates the inside story of the 2018 Salisbury Poisonings, when Russian defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned by the nerve agent Novichok in the Wiltshire city. Described by Cadwalladr and Jukes as the first proper act of war on UK soil by the Putin regime, the presenting duo are insistent that Putin’s ‘siloviki’ – his elite inner circle – view Britain as enemy number one. For more context on the secretive goings-on in the Russian camp, though, journalist Owen Matthews put out a belter of a book in 2022 called Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin’s War Against Ukraine.

The limited series as a whole is a triumph. With some mysterious Tchaikovsky-influenced original music and frequent broadcast news soundbites from pivotal moments in history interspersed throughout, the tension is never lax, and the back-and-forth conversational style of the hosts works wonders. When it feels like a television documentary, only without any visuals, that is the sign of a stellar podcast.

The active measures of Russian intelligence services are part of a ‘great revisionist project’ masterminded from Moscow, he [Luke Harding] says in one episode, and Westminster, it seems, is a key target for that project 

Several guests are invited on to offer some extremely rare insight into the world of Anglo-Russian relations. Among them are Marina Litvinenko, the widow of murdered Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko, who died from polonium poisoning in 2006, and Steven Lacey, a victim of pro-Putin disinformation, who was for a number of years trapped in the Moscow bubble. Here he recounts that tale of seduction in depth.

We also hear from Luke Harding, a foreign correspondent for The Guardian, known for his coverage of Putin and infamous whistleblower Edward Snowden. Harding was deported by the Kremlin in 2011 for his outspokenness. The active measures of Russian intelligence services are part of a “great revisionist project” masterminded from Moscow, he says in one episode, and Westminster, it seems, is a key target for that project. One of the figures who facilitated that diplomatic rapprochement, and who purposefully delayed the release of the intelligence services’ ‘Russia Report’ until after his 2019 election victory, was a certain Boris Johnson.

It is a podcast predicated on activism, as much as it is entertaining in its own right. Byline’s mantra, ‘What the papers don’t say’, is exactly what you get in this podcast, and it’s a relief that there are those out there with the courage to speak and ask questions

Byline Times, the media outlet which Peter Jukes leads and Cadwalladr has ties to, has long been a vocal critic of the role and trajectory of former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson in British politics. ‘Vocal critic’ is in fact a gross understatement, and the platform continues to stand up to those it feels mislead the public. Indeed, it has reserved much of its print coverage of late to refuting the inaccuracies in claims made by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK (himself another player in this story in his UKIP days).

This podcast’s findings, I think, particularly the nuggets of intrigue unearthed by Cadwalladr relating to Johnson’s dealings in the wake of the Salisbury Poisonings, must be disseminated more broadly if the public at large is to understand the veiled threat posed to UK shores in this age of information warfare. It is no longer just about holding the Tory tenure to account, but about raising the distressing gravity of this ongoing and brushed-under-the-carpet situation to a higher status on the political agenda. It is a podcast predicated on activism, as much as it is entertaining in its own right. Byline’s mantra, ‘What the papers don’t say’, is exactly what you get in this podcast, and it’s a relief that there are those out there with the courage to speak and ask such questions. In a disturbing moment, Cadwalladr recalls receiving social media threats to her own person at one point in her years of ‘following the money’. When that happens to a journalist, when individuals set out to silence them, it usually means only one thing. That they’re doing a damn good job.