Security chiefs were forced to ask the Queen to step in and stop Russian-British media tycoon Evgeny Lebedev getting a place in the House of Lords, it has been revealed.
A Channel 4 Dispatches documentary released this week, dubbed “Boris, the Lords & the Russian Spy”, featured two intelligence officers who were invited into Downing Street in 2020 to brief Boris Johnson about security concerns surrounding Lebedev, the son of oligarch and former KGB officer Alexander Lebedev.
Lord Clark, a Labour peer and member of Holac who vetted Lebedev’s nomination, said Johnson was “quite determined” to “get his own way”, that he “threatened” the usual conventions and “tried to overrule – and did overrule” security advisers and Holac.
Speaking publicly for the first time about the nomination, he said that it would have been unprecedented for No 10 to ask for the Queen to intervene. “I’ve never heard of officials seeking a meeting with Her Majesty to discuss these issues,” he said.
The queen is constitutionally entitled to halt an appointment to the unelected upper chamber, but the palace reportedly refused the 2020 request amid concern about involving the late monarch in a political controversy.
David Clark, a Labour peer and member of the House of Lords Appointments Commission (Holac), said government officials “were really concerned about” the appointment, and believed it was “a major, major mistake.”
It has since been revealed that Lebedev rarely turns up to the House.
He has spoken once on the floor of the House – on the Queen’s Speech in May 2021 – and submitted two written questions in March 2022.
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