THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

'Seen from the inside, the chaos is a hundred times worse than you can imagine,' said one former senior White House official. There seems even less chance of a special deal for Britain after this month's disastrous G7 meeting. 'We're like the piggy bank that everybody's robbing,' the President said. Britain will have to pay a 25 per cent steel tariff just like the rest of the EU and Canada. There was a testy phone call about this with Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minster. 'Didn't you guys burn down the White House?' Trump is supposed to have said. The President had better not learn this was the British Redcoats or he might begin to suspect a pattern. This is because of the extraordinary number of British connections to what Trump has described as a conspiracy to destroy his presidency: the Russia investigation.

The most important 'British connection' is, of course, Christopher Steele, the former MI6 officer whose 'dossier' is the road map for the US inquiry. After he wrote it, Steele asked the retired head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove what he should do and was advised that the US authorities had to be told. Dearlove's partner in a forum for intelligence professionals at Cambridge University was Professor Stefan Halper, apparently a long-standing CIA 'asset'. Halper was used by the FBI to get close to George Papadopoulos, an aide on the Trump campaign. Papadopoulos was drinking in a Kensington wine bar with the Australian High Commissioner and told him that Russia had supplied 'dirt' on Hillary Clinton. Hearing about the conversation, the then director of the FBI, James Comey, began a counter-intelligence investigation with the CIA.

That is the cover story, anyway: a US intelligence official told me there were 'many gathering clouds' in the summer of 2016. Among them might be GCHQ's intercepts of Trump's associates talking to Russians. Some -- credible -- reports say the head of GCHQ flew to the US to hand-deliver this incendiary material to the CIA director. Later, Steele's dossier was passed, in its entirety, to Comey, thanks to a former British ambassador to Moscow, Sir Andrew Wood.

Then there's Cambridge Analytica. The (now shuttered) British company did the Trump campaign's data. Its speciality was 'microtargeting': individual messages tailored to individual voters, delivered by email, Facebook and Twitter. The US intelligence agencies believe that Russian internet 'troll factories' were also pushing out pro-Trump propaganda on social media: sometimes fake news, sometimes real news, such as the hacked contents of Clinton's emails. The question is whether this was done in coordination with the Trump campaign. An American lawyer I know told me that he was approached by a Cambridge Analytica employee after the election. They had had the Clinton emails more than a month before they were published by WikiLeaks: 'What should I do?' Take this to Mueller, the lawyer replied.

Tweet   @brothersjudd