British Prime Minister Andy Burnham has said that Russia interfered in the 2016 referendum on European Union membership, a conclusion successive governments in London had declined to reach in the decade since the vote.
He made the claim in an interview with the podcast The Rest Is Politics, released on October 12. Burnham said he had put the question to officials on entering Downing Street in July and had been given an unambiguous answer.
“I’ve had the clear answer that yes, there was,” Burnham said.
No intelligence assessment or supporting document was published alongside the remarks. Burnham did not say which part of government had supplied the answer, nor what evidence it rested on.
Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee concluded in 2020 that the government of the day had failed to assess what impact Russian state media and so-called troll accounts might have had on the referendum campaign. It stopped short of finding that the result had been affected.
Ministers rejected the committee’s call for a retrospective review at the time, saying there was no evidence of successful interference. Britain voted to leave the EU on June 23, 2016, by 51.9 per cent to 48.1 per cent, and left the bloc in 2020.
Burnham became Prime Minister on July 20 after Keir Starmer stood down, and has since reopened the question of Britain’s relationship with Brussels ahead of a UK-EU summit delayed since the summer. He told the Labour conference in Liverpool that Brexit had done more harm than good and has not ruled out a future manifesto commitment to rejoin.
Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey welcomed the intervention, saying the statement “needed to be said by a Prime Minister”. Downing Street has not said whether the assessment behind the Prime Minister’s answer will be published or put before parliament.
Burnham also told the podcast he had discussed Russian influence in European politics with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in Berlin on October 8. He said Merz had raised the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party’s suspected links to Moscow, and that disinformation from Russia was reaching German politics.
The Prime Minister told the United Nations General Assembly in September there was evidence Moscow had tried to interfere in the 2019 British general election. British courts have dealt with the question too, and a former Brexit Party MEP was jailed for more than 10 years in November 2025 for taking Russian bribes.
