As an urgent review into foreign financial interference in UK elections gets underway, there is a recognition in London that outright manipulation of electoral campaigns is all too easy. In an age when enemies work relentlessly to undermine national security, this is a gaping hole that’s temptingly easy to exploit. 

How bad is it? Let’s consider this: 

I’m a thoroughly nasty despot running a resource-rich, cash-rich dictatorship. I really hate the British, who have consistently interfered in my affairs by killing off promising schemes to damage and divide the West.  

The British lack hard power, and they’re strangely unwilling to invest in it, given the threat posed by me and my authoritarian friends (more about that in the coming years). But their special services are annoyingly good, and their non-politicized and organized bureaucracy is admired, and exercises outsize influence across Europe and the US. They’ve been getting in my way for decades (ask my blood-soaked secret services, whose plans have repeatedly been derailed), and it’s made me very angry. 

I want change. And I’m prepared to pay for it — although, to be frank, it will cost me peanuts. I assume funding of a little under £19m (about $25m) annually for my scheme. That’s an insane amount of money for most people, but less than a day’s pay for the mega wealthy and under an hour’s earnings for the very richest.  

Buying the UK would require a medium-sized, four-year project for a nation-state. Some 81 countries were developing offensive information operation capabilities in 2021, according to the Oxford Internet Institute.  

My first step would be to intellectualize my arguments and develop evidence to use for later campaigning.    

To do this, I would commission reports from two separate institutions, spending £100,000 on studies into the economic benefits of closer relations with my country, and, two weeks later, on the social benefits of peace between my despotism and the UK. There is no obligation for UK think-tanks to disclose the source of their funding, so my fingerprints will never appear. 

I would now utilize Britain’s extensive PR sector. My aim would be to get my proposal onto Radio 4’s Today Programme, which still sets the news agenda. Happily, my new PR friends tell me there is a long track record of reports from opaquely funded think-tanks getting on the BBC and appearing in British newspapers.  

PR is expensive, so I budget for as much as £1m annually to push my ideas. There is also corruption in PR and in journalism, though it has been seriously underinvestigated. Feeding free red meat to democracy’s supposed guard dogs is surprisingly common in many countries, and the UK is no exception. 

If the PR effort works, we need amplification, and this is where my so-called troll farms come into play, using artificial online engagement with false accounts and false likes, as well as false reposts to indicate that the British public are enthusiastic consumers of my country’s mendacious promises. 

Tens of thousands of automated social media accounts, using an AI tool that can adopt local personas of any demographic group from more than 100 towns across the country, would then amplify the message. Sock puppets (a team of people impersonating  British voters) could also be deployed to build online chatter.   

This would run on social media platforms, football bulletin boards (why is my country unfairly excluded from European matches?), gardening websites (have you heard about my country’s revolutionary lawn-greening chemical that the British authorities won’t let you buy?), and newspaper comment pages.   

It is legal for UK citizens to engage the services of a troll farm. This would cost me £2m annually. Of course, I am concerned about discovery and a rise in the phobia associated with my well-run nation, so I would use a friend based in Dubai, paying her for fictitious services using cryptocurrency, which she would then use to hire the troll operation in a third country.     

I may be venturing into money laundering at this point, but my British lawyers (another cost, and pricey, but they’re absolutely willing to do things that might make even my spies blanch) tell me they have never seen anyone prosecuted. Even assuming the British authorities wanted to act, there is insufficient investigatory capacity.   

The lack of political will to tackle online platforms would greatly help my campaign: many platforms clearly only care about fiduciary risk for shareholders, so they spend less money looking for problematic content. We have yet to see any real impact from the Online Safety Act, UK legislation, which was first discussed in 2017 and, after nearly a decade in gestation, is facing a rapidly changing threat landscape.  

The authorities lack teeth, and there are no transparency obligations, so it is harder for UK-based civil society organizations to investigate malign behavior in the way their European Union counterparts can.   

Trolls and sock puppets rely on the purchase of virtual sim cards, which can be had for as little as 8p ($0.11), according to the Cambridge Online Trust and Safety Index, which monitors real-time prices in the online manipulation economy.   

There is an opaque global influence industry that can provide these discreet services, and many are run offshore. Meta’s threat reporting highlighted “for-hire operations” in China, the US, and the Central African Republic. 

Once I had established my cognitive narrative, and a digital air war was underway on social media, I would turn to my ground war. 

I would not bribe a politician directly. The boys and girls in my lavishly funded intelligence services aren’t fools. But there are groups in the UK who we have known for some years, who are sympathetic to my broad aims (and also inspirationally amoral).  

We would provide some crypto to close relatives of key figures who are as hungry for foreign funding as they are for power. Once installed, we would expect payback, indeed we would insist on it, given the evidence we hold on their treachery. 

Offshore to offshore crypto exchanges, through intermediaries in Dubai or Thailand, wouldn’t leave much of a trail. £100,000 pounds a year each should cover it, or more if needed.  

Given that buying politicians is a key chapter in the Bad Actor Playbook, it is highly likely Russia, China and foreign oligarchs already “own” political assets in the UK. (The jailing of Nathan Gill, Welsh leader of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, for taking Russian bribes was just one case among many across Europe over the past decade.) 

My next step would be funding social media influencers, with dedicated audiences on Twitter/X, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. 

The US Department of Justice’s indictments over the funneling of millions of dollars of Russian money to influential US political commentators show how it could work.   

Much of the activity I have described is legal in the UK, or has yet to be tested in court, and successive UK governments have failed to prioritize legislation, reform, or countermeasures. The door is currently wide open, as our despotic friend describes above.  

With the right investment and a following wind, a pro-despot party could use these techniques to get itself into power before action is taken, by which point it could strangle any investigation.  

What to do? The current UK review into political finance is welcome but overdue, and needs to look at the entire global influence industry. There is also little evidence of an adequately funded investigatory capacity sufficient for the scale of threat the UK faces.  

The National Security Act of 2023 has tightened the limits on foreign interference, but the UK needs to consider how evidence can be captured across multiple activities, including wealthy individuals overseas supporting UK political initiatives, and how prosecutors should react. 

Any government professing national security as a primary goal should prioritize legislative action and spending on investigation and enforcement above any other activity.   

The UK should: 

• Criminalize the use of offshore influence providers by UK political parties, campaign groups, think-tanks, and lobbyists. This would need to include content seeding, amplification, bots, sock-puppets, and astroturfing. 
• Extend Politically Exposed Individual (PEI) status to all politicians, their family members, and influential policy actors, and oblige them by law to disclose their cryptocurrency holdings.  
• Establish transparency registers for think-tanks and policy institutes, with a centralized portal capturing sources of cash, major donors, board affiliations, and foreign funding. 
• Increase investigative capacity in government and civil society, with a dedicated interference investigation unit to audit campaigns, crypto flows, and institutions.   
• Require social media transparency and data access, with platforms obliged to publish algorithmic logic, systemic biases, and amplification reports. They could also be ordered to provide anonymized data for the detection of artificial amplification and foreign influence. 
• Establish a Cognitive Defense Agency to replace fragmented responsibilities with a dedicated body to aggressively counter hybrid threats, interference, and information manipulation. It would have clear escalation thresholds, with prime ministerial or parliamentary oversight, allowing rapid implementation of relevant powers, and would be responsible for developing a whole society approach to civil resilience.  

Andy Pryce is a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He is a former British diplomat and a globally recognized expert in countering information threats, cognitive defense, and strategic communications. He brings decades of leadership advising governments and organizations on crisis management, countering foreign information manipulation, and impact in contested information spaces. As a diplomat, Andy led national efforts to counter foreign information manipulation, establishing innovative capabilities to anticipate, analyze, mitigate, and disrupt malign state actors and their proxies. His senior diplomatic roles included serving as Head of Public Diplomacy at the British Embassy in Washington and at the UK Mission to the EU in Brussels. 

Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.

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