Transcript of Press Preview | Friday 7 March 2025

After his wife was killed by a rare virus, according to investigators in Santa Fe, California. The couple's bodies were found at their home last month. Three Bulgarians have been convicted of gathering intelligence in the UK for a global Russian spy ring and plotting to kidnap and kill critiques of Vladimir Putin's regime. The Reform Party has reported one of its own MPs, Rupert Lo to the police after allegations of serious bullying and violent threats. Hello there. You are watching the press preview. A first look at what's on the front pages of the newspapers as they arrive. It's time to see what's making the headlines with Guardian columnist Zoe Williams and political commentator, Benedict Spence. They'll be with us from now until just before midnight. So let's see what's on some of those front pages for you now. Well, the The Times reports on US President Trump's comments, Putin doing what anyone else would. The Financial Times leads on Donald Trump's effects on Wall Street, reporting that the Federal Reserve has played down economy fears after a blow to jobs. The Express has the story about the three people found guilty of spying for Russia. The Mail leads on the same story with the headline, How many more Putin spies in UK?

That's also in the Telegraph, which splashes on the spy's alleged contact in Moscow. The Eye reports that UK animal rights may be watered down as the price of labour's Brexit reset with Europe. The Sun reports that a flight carrying former England footballer Stuart Pears, was forced to divert after he suffered a health scare. And the Star says that it's going to be hotter in the UK this weekend than in Ibiza. Here come the grills. We're going to get the barbecues out, I think is what they're saying. We're joined tonight by Zoe Williams and Benedict Spencer. Good to see you both. Let's start with the Telegraph. This is following on from a long investigation that they've carried out but could only put the evidence and the story in the public domain following the trial of those three Russian spies. This is the mastermind at the center of that That's Spiring, the spy master, I guess.

Yeah, it's interesting because the Telegraph is the only paper that really goes big on this guy, Jan Marsalek, who was running quite a major tech operation. In his own right, he was earning a lot of money and had a seat at the table. But the fact that he was also running a spy ring in the United Kingdom is something of a surprise, I think, to authorities, because he skipped Germany very easily. He skipped the UK very easily. He had no real impediment to going where he pleased. And there are thoughts that he's still heavily involved in drone operations and conversations between Russia and China with regards to Ukraine. So they haven't really clipped his wings with this operation, even though, obviously, it's really problematised his anonymity that he's been named as the Spy Master. He's still that large.

And the Telegraph claiming that they had a year long investigation. Certainly, they had suspicions about his operations.

Yeah. And I mean, this is We're almost only going to hear a lot more of these sorts of stories in the coming weeks and months, not necessarily because they're tied to any court case, but of course, because British taxpayers are going to be asked in the next couple of months to tighten their belts and pay for a lot more when it comes to the defense of this country. And It'll be this thing that is held up as front and center, is that your money isn't necessarily going to be spent on tanks or planes or anything like that. A lot of it is going to be going towards counter espionage and also espionage as well, let's be honest. I think that this is the That's something that we are going to have to be reminded of quite often on the front pages of newspapers in the coming months, which is that Russia is not simply a military threat on the borders of Eastern Europe, but also it poses a very direct threat when it comes to aspects intelligence, but also gray zone warfare as well.

The piece saying that he had Western secret services in his pocket. He had access to a series of informants inside the police and secret services of the UK, the US, Austria, Israel, Italy, Switzerland, France, and Hong Kong.

Yeah. It shows very thoroughly, I suppose, actually, what people ostensibly, I think of as being quite upstanding organs of the state, can be penetrated. That's one of One of the dangers, I suppose, that you face when everything becomes a lot more globalized, you get a lot of benefits that come from that, but also actually these things become a lot easier. This is a good example of somebody who is able to flit in and around the world and has friends in many parts of the world. You take many of the positives, but also when it comes to aspects of national security, nefarious individuals such as this can use those things to their advantage as well.

We take us to the Express, and they have pictured the foot soldiers, as it were, the operatives on the ground found guilty of spying.

As I say, the Telegraph has given us the most sober-minded account of these spies, because in both the Express and later in the Daily Mail, you've got much more about the relationships between the spies, the fact that Ivanova on the left there was already going out with the deputy spy leader, whereas the other one was thinking of having an affair with him. So there is already, because it's all landed in one tranche with the court case, there's a huge amount of information ranging from the extremely salacious and ultimately quite trivial to the pretty size It's like if there were serious incursions into the civil service in terms of corruption, then that's a really big deal. But the Express is going very much on these operatives tailing enemies of Putin within the United Kingdom. Those are going to be Russian dissidents and Ukrainians. That's not going to be the British Civil Service. They're not going to be looking for British state secrets.

And to your point, Benedict, Commander Dominic Murphy, Head of the Metz counterterrorism, Command said it was a clear example of Moscow hiring proxies and criminals are mourned. We will see more of that.

Yeah. And I think I can't remember where it was, in which paper it was, but something like one in five of all issues that they're currently facing in in that part of the Met is to do with espionage, it's to do with foreign states. It's not just Russia is the thing, of course. We must remember it is also places like Iran and China as well that are doing this. The other thing, of course, to bear in mind is because this particular story had the salacious aspect to it, also gives off the impression that it might not have been quite as professional as it could have been. There will be far more people who will be operating on behalf of foreign governments who will actually be very good at their and not risking at all to have an affair with each other. Also, people can exist embedded in different countries for decades at a time and not even be active, not even be using or researching or recruiting or anything like that, waiting until they are activated. We actually saw this during the Ukraine invasion by Russia, when suddenly there were lots of explosions all across Russia, lots of sabotage going on because, of course, former Eastern Bloc countries, none of which you ever had rusted each other, but are all now part of NATO, had started activating cells that they'd had in the former USSR for decades.

It's not simply a question of active cells like this. They can be found in all sorts of corners, and many of them may never even be used. Is the point. It's an insurance strategy. It's the fact that they can get there and lie very low that is the key.

I'm a little bit skeptical about that because you need quite a big payoff to have that operation. These operations are super expensive, right?

Not always.

Are you going to say that it's actually quite cheap to have undercover spies in Great Yarm.

Well, in Great Yarm. But it can be. It's to do, I suppose, with the ideology that's underpinning it, what the motivation is. Obviously, if you're hiring mercenaries of a different nationality, that's one thing. But one, of course, one of the issues around Russian espionage in particular and leftover aspects of the Cold War was that a lot of it was ideological. That's also the case for China and for countries like Iran as well. A lot of their objectives aren't necessarily motivated by money. It's a much more broad worldview, and they are happy to go and assimilate into society, knowing for well, they may never actually be used for anything, but what it is that motivates them is the cause rather than any financial gain.

I don't know. It costs a lot of money. Cover costs money. Living a different life costs money. Having a network of a façade costs money. It costs loads of money.

But the more money that you spend on that, the more it increases the likelihood of you being identified, because then you're trying to create too much of a cover around yourself. Actually, it's very often people are just living very ordinary mundane lives.

If they're sleepers, they are just carrying out normal functions, living normal lives, having normal jobs, but are laying dormant until they're called upon. I've watched too many readers. The Mail front page, they're asking the question, how many more of these people exist in the UK?

I'm really sorry. This is a completely niche press-obsessed point and nothing really to do with the spies, but this is such a classic male approach. If they can't get the smoking gun, their next best thing is, how many smoking guns could there be? So they definitely haven't got what they want from this. They've got to use the word honey trap. They've got to print that super-glamorous photo, but they haven't really got what they want in terms of... They want to be... There's somewhere in the mail, there's an editor screaming his head off, going Find me the bit where they're trying to get into Buckingham Palace, and nobody can find him that bit. So instead, they do this highly speculative, there could be a spy around every corner. But Ben, that's the question that people will be asking, though. Are you asking that question Which question? How many more spies are there?

It's the Spider-Man joke, isn't it? Get me pictures of spy demand. Where can you find the evidence? The whole crux of this, though, isn't it? Is that a lot of this stuff just isn't freely available to the press. A lot of this information isn't freely available to the press. It's not as if you can go to MI5 and say, How many people are you looking into? Because they're not going to turn around and go, Oh, well, we've narrowed it down to this many people, because then if they are able to work out how many people they've identified, you end up spooking them. It's a really open-ended question, how many could there So we take us to the Times and the headline there, Putin doing what anyone else would.

This is Donald Trump speaking this evening.

This is a chilling new intervention from the President of the United States. He's not actually talking When he's talking about the spying. He is talking about the bombing campaign against Ukraine. He's basically responding to the politics of violence and death in an improving way and saying that...

He's saying that the Kremlin leader wants to end the war, though.

Well, yeah, but that's a... You know in America, they're calling Trump and Vance, they're using the language of the abuser in the sense that they just take your observed reality, turn it on its head, and dare you to challenge them on it. The person bombing a country is not the person... You don't bomb a country into peace. And that's not... So he's trying to make Putin sound like every man and make him sound like he's pursuing a peaceful solution with violence, and that's not what he's doing.

He's also saying, Benedict, that he thinks that Putin is going to be more generous than he has to be. What does that mean?

I'm not entirely sure unless what he means is that the mineral deal that supposedly they're going to strike is going to involve minerals that are going to be in the part of Ukraine that Russia is currently occupying, because that's the great hilarity about the mineral deal is that in the west of the country, there aren't very many minerals. Most of them are, in fact, in Donbas. That would be a key crux. Maybe Vladimir Putin is going to be willing to give the US some of that. I don't know. Putin does want an end to the war. He wants an end to the war by winning it and by occupying this country that he's invaded. So I suppose technically, Donald Trump isn't lying, just looking at it from a rather grim perspective. But I think what is very clear now is that Donald Trump believes that the war is over. He just thinks it's a matter of time, and he wants to effectively decide who is going to be the victor. He wants to be friends with that country. Supposedly, this is because they want to peel away Russia from China in the event of an invasion of Taiwan.

Whether or not that comes to anything, I don't know. But it's rather sad that it's just been decided above the heads of the Ukrainians.

We must leave it there to go to a Ben Dickenso. Thank you very much for the moment. Coming up, we'll discuss this story on the front of the Telegraph, the headline, reform at Civil War as MP, reported to police. Do stay with us.

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Welcome back. You are watching the press preview. Still with me, Zoe and Benedict. Let's take a look at the Telegraph. And this story, it's only a little story, actually, on the front of the Telegraph, but a huge story for what you formed UK, seemingly imploding and civil war breaking out. Zoe.

So Rupert Loews is accused of certain things which he denies really strenuously, and for a million reasons, A, that I don't know exactly what they are, B, that the police are now involved.

Shall I read you the statement? Yes. That he's put out. This is from I'm disappointed but not surprised to read reform's untrue and false allegations. Let me be abundantly clear this investigation is based on zero credible evidence against me, as has been repeatedly stated by the neutral investigator. None has been provided. Allegations of physical threats are outrageous and entirely untrue. I've never made any derogatory comments about women or those with disabilities. This is a lie. These allegations are not even referring to me. I will be seeking legal advice immediately.

Good heavens. I was thinking, when I first started in journalism, people used to be encouraged to cheat on their expenses because they wanted an excuse to get rid of you without having to go through all the process. So it was a Built in, you can just get fired when we want to fire you. And I think, is that how reform chose its candidates? They chose a huge number of candidates against which they could launch any amount of accusations when the time came, thinking that they were the straight-talking people who probably had done something and probably would slink away quietly. If that was their thinking, it hasn't worked, plainly. Rupert Lowe is not slinking away quietly. And a number of things he said about Nigel Farage and the reform party, generally, that it has no real identity. It just has this king who made himself and walks around being king. I think they're observably correct. So whatever So whatever the guy has done, the ensuing row is going to be interesting to watch.

Ben, is it? Yeah. It's curious that Nigel Farage has now managed to pick fights with, I suppose, if you wanted to say the ideological underpinning of reform in Ben Habib He's managed to kick him out of the party, and now he's gone after Rupert Lowe, who you'd have to say is an interesting one in that he can actually... What I think the major threat he poses is that, as Zoe says, Farage is reform, and reform is Farage. But Rupert Butlow can stand on his own two feet. He's done this revolutionary thing since he was elected, where he's gone in and he's actually behaved how a constituency MP is meant to. He's pointed out issues in legislation. He's written questions to different departments. He's published the responses. He's also raised questions of his own party. He's behaved, generally, how most people would quite like their MPs to behave. He's managed to become quite popular off the back of that. And that is a threat.

And he has been praised by Elon Musk. We'll just leave it there, Benedict and Zoe Great for the moment. Thank you.

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