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Last week we saw an astonishing flip-flop from the minister of state at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Sir Alan Duncan.

At 6.55am on Monday, Duncan seemed taken aback to learn that a Foreign Office-backed charity, the Institute for Statecraft’s Integrity Initiative, was running propaganda campaigns against Jeremy Corbyn (among other things the organisation has smeared him as a “useful idiot” for Putin) and meddling in European politics.

Duncan said “He would totally condemn it” if a Government-funded organisation had been acting in this way.

Two days later, answering urgent questions about the Initiative, Duncan had totally changed his tune.

In response to questions from shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry and others, he was firmly in dissemble and deny mode, before finally losing his rag with the opposition for doubting his words.

When he said the initiative “does some automatic retweeting... of anything that happens to mention Russia” he was suggesting that it was some kind of glorified non-partisan twitter-bot, that indiscriminately churns out anything mentioning Russia.

Anyone who knows anything about Twitter can tell that nothing could be further from the truth.

(Image: Sunday Mail)

Duncan’s claim that the Foreign Office wasn’t funding any of the Initiative’s “domestic” activities is contradicted by the evidence from the leaked documents and from what Thornberry revealed in her subsequent letter to Duncan.

The minister also insisted that what the initiative does is “a proper part of government activity, within the rules, according to a contract.” Duncan then sought to rubbish all media coverage of the organisation’s activities.

He seemed far, far angrier with whoever hacked the files, which he suggested was Russia, though he admitted he did not know, or reported on them, and with the Labour front bench for impugning his own integrity, than with the initiative itself.

The performance had a Cold War, McCarthy-ite “reds under the bed” feel to it – as if Duncan wanted to erect some kind of smokescreen around the initiative.

The Government’s line appears to be that it is wholly wrong for British media and journalists to expose what appear to be British “dirty tricks” – even though these could themselves be just as harmful to our democracy and to the freedom of the press as Russia’s disinformation campaigns are in the first place.

Duncan’s goal is to argue the whole thing is a non-story. But the Orwellian sounding Integrity Institute is a story.

Its parent, the Institute for Statecraft, claims to be “independent and impartial, not dependent on funding from political or government agencies”, yet it’s bankrolled to the tune of £2.2million by the Foreign Office, with additional funding from the Ministry of Defence, British Army, NATO, the Lithuanian Ministry of Defence, the US State Department, and even Facebook.

It is supposed to be a charity, yet it is churning out propaganda against Labour Party politicians and using a clandestine network of distinctly Russo-phobic “influencers” to try to manipulate European politics.

No wonder it is being investigated by the Scottish charities regulator. I believe more curiosity, not less, about its activities is required.