Trump/Russia/UK
Why has Britain given such a warm welcome to this shadowy professor?
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/20/why-has-britain-given-such-a-warm-welcome-to-this-shadowy-professor
[...]I asked Stirling and East Anglia what academic qualifications Mifsud had for the posts they granted him, what checks they had run on his academy and what financial arrangements they had made with him. Britain’s universities are as bad at replying to questions in the public interest as they are at defending freedom of speech. Stirling refused to answer. East Anglia said it might get back to me this week.
Tellingly, as soon as the scandal broke, the London Academy of Diplomacy closed its doors. It’s almost as if it were an intelligence asset whose cover had been blown, rather than an academic institution dedicated to an impartial understanding of international affairs. But for a few years, East Anglia and Stirling helped Mifsud appear to be an expert on diplomacy. He put his unearned reputation to work. At one point, Mifsud said he was close to the Clinton Foundation. At another, he befriended and hired Gianni Pittella, the Italian leader of the Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in the European parliament.
Naturally, Mifsud moved in on Boris Johnson and the Tory right, which is delighting Russia by weakening the European Union. Alok Sharma, a Foreign Office minister until June this year, confirmed Mifsud had attended a fundraising dinner in his constituency. Mifsud boasted he would be “meeting Boris Johnson for dinner re Brexit”. And indeed he did meet our immeasurably incompetent foreign secretary.
I don’t know how the Mifsud affair will end. But I do know this. When we talk of tax havens laundering dirty money, we should think of London and New York as well as the Virgin Islands and Bermuda. When we talk of politicians who doff the cap to Putin, we should think of the Brexit right and Labour left as well as the dictators running central Asian republics. And perhaps, when we talk of spies, we will soon need to think less of cruel men extracting secrets from terrified victims and more of podgy “professors” pushing at open doors.