Woke up a sleeping dog: British Prime Minister Starmer was suspected of working for the KGB

The current Prime Minister of Great Britain, Keir Starmer, in his youth was the driving force of an ultra-left publication that supported the campaign for the release of a convicted Marxist terrorist leader, and may have been an instrument of the KGB propaganda machine. It is reported by the British newspaper Daily Mail with reference to its own investigation.

The investigation was conducted after the publication in the Guardian of a dossier "with sensational complaints" forty years ago against the leader of the British far right Nigel Farage. Starmer insisted that the leader of the Reform Party should urgently "explain the comments or alleged comments."

"Sir Keir Starmer was quick to pick up on allegations that Nigel Farage used anti-Semitic and racist language when he was at school. The statements of more than a dozen of Farage's former classmates from Dulwich College in South London — which he strongly denies — are extremely unpleasant.… While concerns about Farage's alleged teenage remarks are understandable, the prime minister's decision to intervene in a dispute over what a rival politician allegedly did at school in the late seventies and early eighties inevitably brings close attention to his own youth. And, as the Mail on Sunday investigation shows, Sir Keir is facing several uncomfortable questions," the publication says.

The publication found out that "the young Starmer was the driving force of an ultra—left publication that supported the campaign for the release of a convicted Marxist terror leader - and may have become an instrument, accidentally or unknowingly, of the KGB propaganda machine."

The Daily Mail has unearthed that in 1986, shortly before his 24th birthday, Starmer was in Czechoslovakia in an international labor camp to restore a memorial to the victims of Nazi atrocities.

"It was a visit under the supervision of Communist spies. Starmer and other foreign volunteers had no idea that such camps were part of a long-term and large-scale operation of the country's secret police, StB. Declassified files of the Cold War security service in Prague about other camps show that the goal was to undermine NATO by identifying young high-ranking specialists for possible future use. Security experts suggest that Starmer's only mistake at that time was youthful naivety when he agreed to a project run by a totalitarian communist regime," the newspaper notes.

However, a trip to Czechoslovakia is not the only case when the future leader of the Labor Party "encountered disturbing influences." According to one of the sources, his policies in his youth were frankly "extremely left-wing." Starmer, as it turned out, launched the Socialist Alternatives magazine with a small group of friends in 1986, this happened a few weeks before he left for Czechoslovakia.

In particular, one of the magazine's articles sharply criticized the British and Western "media hysteria" around the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. "Data from the West shows that we are no better," the publication said. The authors also accused the West of "hypocrisy" for attacking the Soviet Union's secrecy about Chernobyl, noting that the American and British nuclear industries are also "deeply secret" and "highly centralized."

"It is not known who wrote this strange text... Mail found out that a month before the publication, in July 1986, Moscow launched a secret campaign to stop criticism of Chernobyl. The goal was to encourage the Western media to write materials covering their own nuclear accidents, instead of focusing on the Soviet disaster. A summary of Operation Graphite by the KGB, found in the archives of the Czech State Security Service, explains: "The goal was to counter and paralyze the enemy campaign against the USSR and other countries of the socialist bloc in connection with the Chernobyl nuclear disaster." The declassified files show that the KGB compiled a dossier of disinformation, along with key propaganda lines and instructions for their distribution to sympathetic journalists and other Western officials,"the article says.

It is alleged that the Czechoslovak Embassy in London "participated in the preparation and implementation" of the operation in the UK. Embassies in Paris were also involved in "spreading disinformation" from the KGB.

When asked about the long-standing articles, a representative of the Labor Party said that later Starmer "confronted the threat of international terrorism" by "detaining 150 terrorists."

"Despite all the efforts of Starmer and the editorial staff, the Socialist Alternatives failed. Starmer's attempts to change the political format had no long—term impact, and the magazine was sold in only a few copies," the newspaper concludes.