No one drooled over oligarchs like British toffs – I know, because I helped them | Comment

All wars begin similarly: with a crack team arriving on foreign soil. These operatives are strange and shadowy and not “directly linked” to any government. That way, said a British general last week, they can pull off feats of shocking violence before they simply “disappear again”.

He was talking about the 400 mercenaries who arrived in Ukraine five weeks ago with orders to kill President Zelensky, but it made me think of another mysterious advance party: the oligarchs. For two decades now the accepted narrative on the men who simply bought up London is that they were not really that dangerous, not if you were English. If they had worked closely with President Putin, so what? By the time they arrived here, nothing mattered.