Collapsing Empire: Saudi Arabia’s Unknown Brexit Meddling

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British Prime Minister Andy Burnham boldly accusing Russia of “interference” in the June 2016 Brexit referendum reignited largely forgotten controversy around potentially malign foreign influence on the vote’s outcome. Over many years, intelligence-adjacent media players including Carole Cadwalladr built careers promoting and probing this allegation, raising hopes among EU supporters of overturning the result, only to uncover nothing of substance. By contrast, potentially impactful, likely illegal and self-evidently sinister meddling linked to Saudi Arabia today remains unknown, uninvestigated, and unpunished.

From February 2017, openDemocracy began publishing explosive investigations exposing how a shadowy political campaign group donated an extraordinary £425,000 to Occupied Ireland’s pro-Brexit Democratic Unionist Party, with the vast sum spent on ‘Leave’ campaigning efforts across the ‘mainland’. Loopholes in British electoral law permitted the cross-Channel propaganda blitz, while Occupied Ireland’s own allowed for anonymous donations. Only in response to enquiries by openDemocracy did the DUP admit its dark money source was the hitherto obscure Constitutional Research Council.

CRC had no website or internet footprint, wasn’t registered as a company or charity anywhere, and who and/or what ran and funded the enterprise was unknown. Scottish politician Richard Cook, former Conservative Friends of Israel representative, told openDemocracy he led CRC, claiming it bankrolled “constitutional pro-Union causes.” The DUP’s Leave campaigning was one example, a post-referendum personal donation to then-Brexit minister Steve Baker another. In 2013, Cook founded Five Star Investment Management with Prince Nawwaf bin Abdulaziz.

Registered at Cook’s Glasgow home, CRC never filed accounts and was dissolved in December 2014, nine months before Abdulaziz’s death. He led Riyadh’s General Intelligence Directorate, intimately linked to 9/11 as a CIA “proxy”, September 1st 2001 - January 2005. His eldest, megayatch-owning son Mohammed bin Nawwaf served as Saudi Arabia’s British ambassador January 2005 - December 2018. Wealthy Saudis, including many members of the country’s ruling dynasty, had much to gain from Britain leaving the EU.

For one, it was openly reported Gulf investors were planning to exploit an inevitable post-Brexit collapse in the pound’s international value to bulk purchase British real estate and commercial assets at unprecedented discounts. Riyadh moreover well-understood London’s pursuit of deepening economic, military and political ties with non-European allies could produce favourable trade deals, while chilling condemnations of human rights abuses. Then as now, Saudi Arabia was leading a genocidal assault on Yemen, with legal battles against Britain’s integral material sponsorship of the conflict ongoing.

As ambassador to London, it’s inconceivable Abdulaziz’s son was not simultaneously involved in intimate, high-level discussions with British officials about their future relations on every score. Following Theresa May’s installation in Downing Street in the referendum’s aftermath, she and other key ministers began prominently meeting representatives of authoritarian regimes, seeking increased investment and offering expanded arms sales, under the bombastic banner of “Global Britain”. In London’s neoimperial post-Brexit world vision, Saudi Arabia loomed large.

‘Competitive Age’

In all, 56% of Occupied Ireland voted ‘Remain’. However, only £10,000 of the DUP’s £425,000 dark money campaigning budget - the largest political donation in Occupied Ireland’s history - was targeted locally. The rest was spent across Britain, financing sponsored social media posts, Leave-themed garments, and a variety of display adverts, including lavish wraparound ads in a widely-read London freesheet newspaper two days before the referendum. Serendipitously, the DUP’s spending spree commenced at a highly sensitive juncture for the wider Leave effort.

Two months prior to the referendum, Matthew Eliot, chief executive of Vote Leave - the official cross-party pro-Brexit campaign - wrote excitedly in an email to his senior staffers that the DUP had a £700,000 referendum spending limit, “which can be spent nationwide!” At that point, the DUP hadn’t even formally registered as a referendum participant. The party did so in late May 2016, and began spending with the plebiscite two weeks away - right when Vote Leave had almost maxed out its permitted campaign budget.

The DUP seemingly assisted Vote Leave in circumventing election spending limits, and thus British law, although both denied the charge. Funding of the respective Brexit campaigns almost precisely mirrored the referendum’s result, with 54% of donations flowing to Leave versus 52% of the vote. While Vote Leave and Leave.EU were later both fined for campaign finance breaches, in May 2017 the Electoral Commission declined to investigate CRC’s donation to the DUP. The investigations of openDemocracy also didn’t register at all in British newspapers.

Having to pay the sum back would’ve bankrupted the DUP. However, after Theresa May lost her parliamentary majority in the June 2017 General Election, she cut a “confidence and supply” deal with the party to hang onto power. A lack of political will to probe the DUP’s blatant dark money meddling in the Brexit referendum, with apparent Saudi involvement, was assured. Fittingly, the Prime Minister inaugurated triggering Article 50 - the legal mechanism by which member states can leave the EU - with high-profile trade talks in Riyadh.

Were the House of Saud in any way responsible for compelling Britain’s departure from the EU, it was a cloak-and-dagger gamble that spectacularly backfired for all concerned. Neoimperial illusions unleashed by the June 2016 referendum reached their pinnacle with the much-hyped March 2021 ‘Integrated Review’. It signalled a comprehensive overhaul of London’s “security, defence, development and foreign policy.” Titled “Global Britain in a competitive age,” the document outlined a comprehensive strategy by which the country would reclaim its superpower status post-Brexit.

Britain’s “thriving relationships in the Middle East and the Gulf,” especially with Saudi Arabia, were to be intensified, and leveraged as part of a wider impending push into the Asia Pacific. Meanwhile, the Integrated Review called for London to “deploy more of our naval assets across the world to protect shipping lanes and uphold freedom of navigation.” It boasted how the Royal Navy would “continue to ensure the flow of trade in the Gulf” from HMS Juffair, Britain’s Bahraini naval base.

‘Years Ahead’

Fast forward to this January however, and London quietly withdrew its last ship from HMS Juffair, effectively abandoning the installation with no apparent intent or ability to return after 46 years, ending permanent British military presence in the Gulf dating back centuries. This occupation assisted Saudi Arabia’s very creation, and British power projection through the Gulf and West Asia more widely. Now though, London lacks meaningful influence in the ever-increasingly volatile region, raising obvious questions about the longevity of its local proxies and puppets.

This impotence can be traced directly to a geopolitical convulsion well-beyond Britain’s control, far more revolutionary than Brexit. In late August 2021, the US finally departed Afghanistan. Over preceding weeks, British officials desperately pleaded with Washington to reverse course, and even considered maintaining Kabul’s occupation by leading an alternative ‘coalition of the willing’ of their own. Their fantasies shattered upon first contact with reality, forcing London to reconsider its neoimperial delusions in every area. A “furious” British minister reportedly remarked privately:

“America has just signalled to the world that they are not that keen on playing a global role. The implications of that are absolutely huge…We need to get the Integrated Review out and reread it with a yellow pen. We are going to have to do a hard-nosed revisit on all our assumptions and policies, be it China or the Middle East…Brexit was bad but this is much worse. The castle we thought was built on rocks is built on sand.”

The Integrated Review was duly withdrawn, and a formal “Refresh” published in March 2023, radically dampening its original ambition. Gone was deranged discussion of China as a “strategic competitor”, and London’s intended Asia Pacific “tilt”. Saudi Arabia was briefly mentioned twice, in the context of supporting London’s “future energy security.” The Gulf generally barely featured, save for vague references to the allegedly “rapid increase in the depth and quality” of Britain’s ties with the region since 2021, forecast to further strengthen “in the years ahead.”

Excerpts of the 2021 Integrated Review not featured in the 2023 ‘Refresh’

Again, events quickly intervened to sabotage even this much-reduced vision. The Gaza genocide and all that followed has placed the West on a war footing with the Resistance, in which militarily irrelevant Britain can barely manage a walk-on role. Meanwhile, Riyadh’s existence hangs precariously in the balance. In keeping with chaos theory, the litany of catastrophe and misguided hubris that dragged Britain and its Saudi client to this sorry state could lead back to a dark money donation to the DUP, over a decade ago.