Who says Britain is no longer a Great Power? To those of a declinist cast of mind, it must stand as a rebuke that, even with everything else on his plate, Vladimir Putin still regards our elections as worth interfering in. And, what’s more, those elections are so important that the Aussies are taking enough of an interest in them to consider that Russian interference newsworthy.

Russia may be trying to influence our elections, which as I say is flattering and all, but they aren’t trying very hard

At the same time as it’s heartening that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation considers this a big deal it’s also, I suppose, a little dismaying that our own Broadcasting Corporation didn’t seem to notice. But there we are. ABC uncovered what it thinks looks like a Russian influence operation in the form of five ‘co-ordinated’ Facebook pages pushing out propaganda for Nigel Farage’s Reform party. Between them these pages, which punt out Reform party talking points in apparent lockstep, are said to have just short of 200,000 followers.

The Conservatives are making much of being horrified by the discovery. Oliver Dowden says he finds the matter ‘gravely concerning’ – ‘These revelations reveal the real risk our democracy faces in this uncertain world’ – and the party chairman has written to the cabinet secretary and the national security adviser calling for an investigation.

That sounds grand and important, but I’m not sure what good such an investigation will do. Even if it’s conclusive, which it probably won’t be, that conclusion will be: the Russians are trying to influence our elections. And the action available to be taken on said conclusion is distinctly limited. Stern words, I suppose, can be spoken aloud. Perhaps they’ll even wheel Gavin Williamson out of whatever cupboard they’ve locked him in to reprise his classic message to Russia to ‘go away and shut up’. But the sanctions we have available are already in place, and with ICC warrants out for his arrest Putin is hardly going to tremble at a public ticking-off from an outgoing British administration.

And Russia may be trying to influence our elections, which as I say is flattering and all, but they aren’t trying very hard. Unlike the influence operation for the 2016 US election, where they really seemed to pull out the stops, this one seems to be a little half-hearted. Five Facebook pages? Your nan, given a bit of a run-up, could run an influence operation like that. In fact, if it’s on behalf of Reform, she probably is. And 190,000 followers sounds like a lot – it’s the same ballpark as Coldplay’s crowd at Glastonbury – but it’s much less than half a per cent of our electoral roll. My ten-year-old watches YouTube cooking channels with many multiples of that sort of reach.

So what sort of interference operation is this, anyway? As I say, it’s flattering that Mr Putin would still take an interest, but the nature of that interest is intriguingly opaque. One theory would be that Russia tries to interfere in elections, even if it’s not trying very hard, just because that’s their thing. People expect them to, they have an image to keep up, and they hate to disappoint. I once saw Alice Cooper play the Guildford Festival in a drizzly afternoon slot, and the slightly wan way he put a snake round his neck had something of the same vibe about it.

But let’s say that they really were hoping to influence the outcome. In what way? We’re always told that what they want to do is sow chaos and instability, in which case giving the Conservatives four more years would seem to be the optimal outcome. It’s not clear how this would achieve that. So are we to take it at face value: are these Facebook pages promoting Reform because the Kremlin wants to see Nigel Farage as the next Prime Minister? That would suppose that Putin returns Mr Farage’s admiration, which is to be doubted – he probably doesn’t have all that much idea who Mr Farage is. And if he did, he could also be assumed to know that increasing the 2024 Reform vote in the UK wouldn’t change the course of history as increasing the 2016 Trump vote in the US could have. It would just increase the woes of the Conservative and Unionist party.

In fact, if anything, this intervention has been damaging to Reform. It comes at a time when Mr Farage’s stated admiration for Putin is causing him all sorts of embarrassment. Any electoral upside he might have got from the 190,000 followers of these sites being influenced in favour of Reform will tend to be vastly outweighed by the downside from it coming out that Russia is running an insultingly bargain-basement psyop in support of him.

Which, itself, could plausibly be the point. You get your troll farm in St Petersburg to bung up a few stop-the-boats Facebook pages in their coffee-break, cheap as chips, and then have a good giggle once Oliver Dowden catches on and starts bloviating about how ‘gravely concerning’ it all is. Not because Oliver Dowden is gravely concerned, but because it’s a good way to keep the Farage/Putin connection in the headlines to the embarrassment of the former and the glacial indifference of the latter. We might note, for instance, that the Labour party doesn’t seem to be too fussed about this one way or the other.

The more I think about it, in fact, the more it seems to me that this cyber-interference is by way of pure trolling rather than anything else. Russia remains, of course, as Churchill said, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, so who can really know? But if I had to put roubles on it, it would be that these Facebook pages were by way of comic relief. In which case, it’s not after all the compliment we might at first have taken it as. Ignoring it would be the dignified way to proceed.