No shit Sherlock! The head of MI5, Ken McCallum, has now publicly confirmed that Russia did attempt to interfere in the 2016 Brexit referendum 👉through anti-EU coverage on RT and Sputnik and through troll and fake social-media activity. Nigel Farage appeared on Kremlin-funded Russia Today at least 17 times between 2010 and 2014. He did not deny being paid. McCallum says the observable impact appears to have been limited and stresses the difference between attempted interference and proven effect on the final result. That caveat matters. But it also exposes the weakness in the political line that there was simply no evidence of Russian interference. 🚨 There was interference. And that brings us back to the legal point @JMPSimor made: the integrity of a democratic process is not always judged solely by proving exactly how many votes were changed. We already had proven electoral-law breaches around the referendum campaign. We already had Theresa May’s own barrister telling the Court of Appeal that she was fully aware of the notorious facts and decided to continue regardless. Now MI5 confirms Russia also tried to interfere. So: What did the British state know, when did it know it, and why was there never a full statutory investigation before Parliament and government treated the referendum as the political mandate for Brexit? That is why a public inquiry under the Inquiries Act 2005 now looks increasingly urgent. Documents. Intelligence assessments. Cabinet papers. Witnesses under oath. The complete Article 50 decision-making trail. Because “we cannot prove precisely how many votes Russia changed” is not the same proposition as “the democratic process was safe and sound.”