Howard Phillips shared details about Sir Grant Shapps with MI5 officers posing as Russian agents, saying he wanted to work in intelligence to avoid an office job
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Will Humphries, Southwest Correspondent | Duncan Gardham
Friday November 07 2025, 3.55pm GMT, The Times

Howard Phillips was given £1,000 in cash and was asked to prepare documents on a USB stick
A former City worker who “loved James Bond” has been jailed for seven years after he volunteered to spy for the Russians in an attempt to avoid going back to an office job.

Howard Phillips, 65, from Ware, Hertfordshire, told two MI5 officers posing as Russian agents that he wanted to work in intelligence to avoid a “nine-to-five office” job after retiring aged 58 and running out of money.

Phillips was filmed offering his services to Russia during an elaborate undercover operation which involved two MI5 agents adopting Russian accents to pose as agents of the SVR, Russia’s civilian foreign intelligence agency.

During a meeting he handed over the home address and landline for Sir Grant Shapps, his local MP who was the defence secretary at the time.

Shapps said in a victim impact statement that the reckless behaviour of Phillips had exposed “my entire family to the extremely serious risks that come from foreign intelligence service activities”.

He said: “The UK has enough to do dealing with external threats. It is shocking to find someone in the neighbourhood would think it a good idea to try to sell information about the UK defence secretary to an unfriendly foreign state.”

Winchester crown court was told that Phillips had filled in an online application form for MI5 in 2014 and again in 2024, because he “wanted to act in the service of my country”, but did not get a response.

Phillips, from Harlow in Essex, had applied to work for Border Force

In 2022 he began writing letters to Boris Johnson and Liz Truss and applied to be a Conservative councillor but later switched his attention to Reform UK. In one letter he offered his services to the chief executive of BP and in another to the Emir of Qatar.

Phillips, who is divorced with four grown-up children, eventually offered to provide logistical support for Russian agents across the world.

Amanda Phillips, his ex-wife, told Winchester crown court that Phillips had become infatuated with spy books and films and had over the top dreams about “serving this country somewhere and being James Bond”.

She said: “He loved James Bond and the image, the suit and the nice car, being someone you could respect, someone people liked, someone special.”

Phillips grew up in Swiss Cottage, north London, and attended St Marylebone Grammar School before working for his father in a factory in the East End and then becoming an insolvency practitioner in 1986. Police found no material on his phone or computer that suggested he had any sympathies for Russia.

Mrs Phillips told the court he was a “kind caring man, a good friend, a good dad, not a great husband but he’s got a good soul”. She added that he was “a daydreamer, big time” who had “pipe dreams, big time”.

Phillips, a bass guitarist in a pub rock band who loved fish and chips and beer festivals, had worked for Bond Partners in the City, became self-employed in 2011 and then worked as a manager in the charity sector before going into “semi-retirement” in 2018 and doing work in GDPR compliance for websites.

As his savings ran out, Phillips described how he sent out hundreds of CVs and applications online, adding: “I was avidly seeking employment but none was forthcoming.”

He told the court: “I wanted to be able to do something useful, I wanted to be able to put my name to something and to leave my mark.”

In October 2023 he applied to join the Border Force and, on February 22, 2024, he wrote to a home care company saying he was “looking for a role as a companion or carer to an individual”.

On March 15 last year, Phillips volunteered his services to the Russians, the Iranians and the Chinese in letters to each of their embassies. The Russian letter was intercepted by MI5.

Phillips was asked to prepare a document on a USB stick that would explain how he could assist Russian intelligence and deliver it to London on April 4, leaving it in the seat post of a silver bicycle locked to railings behind St Pancras Station.


In the document he said he could “completely blend in as an upstanding citizen locally or tourist in any worldwide location”. The MI5 officers directed him to turn up to the London Bridge Hotel on April 24, where they met in a private apartment.

Sitting on a sofa, Phillips told two MI5 officers playing the part of Russian intelligence officers, “Dima”, and his boss, “Sasha”, that he spoke only English and “a little bit of French, un peu”. He told them: “I have worked nine to five in offices for most of my life. I want to be doing something different.”

Sasha asked why he had picked Russia, Phillips replied: “None of us are without sin, we all — whether Britain or America — do what we feel we have to do. I feel that also we could work well together.”

At a meeting with “Dima” on May 9 at a Costa Coffee shop in the Lakeside Retail Park in West Thurrock, Essex, Phillips was told to book a hotel in London under his own name and contact details, purchase a mobile telephone, and prepare for a “senior officer from my organisation” who was arriving in London for a “sensitive meeting”.

Phillips, checked into the Hilton Hotel in Upper Woburn Place in Euston, shortly before 3pm on May 16.

The MI5 officers directed Philips to turn up to a hotel
He then met Dima at the Leon café in the nearby Brunswick shopping centre and handed over a brown paper bag containing a mobile phone, the hotel key card and a USB stick that contained the details for Shapps.

Phillips was handed an envelope containing £1,000 in cash and given instructions to meet a Russian man at the Black Sheep coffee shop near King’s Cross, but when he arrived plain-clothes officers surrounded him and arrested him.


Phillips denied materially assisting a foreign intelligence service to carry out UK-related activities under the National Security Act 2023. He was found guilty after a trial.

Phillips had told the court that he had been “intending to track and expose a Russian agent that might be operating in the UK”.

Jeremy Dein KC, in mitigation, said that his client was an eccentric and zany character who had made a monumental error of judgment.

“He is proudly British and there is nothing to suggest he poses an iota of anti-British sentiment or wished harm to the country, quite the opposite,” he added. “He was an ageing man whose life had collapsed and was clearly not thinking straight.

“Believing he could make a meaningful contribution, he was fantasising as to what he could do as far as the Russian authorities were concerned.”

The court was told that he was facing increasing financial pressures, having used up all the money he had gained from the sale of a property. By May 2024 he had only £374.48 left in his bank accounts.

Howard Michael Phillips, 64.
He had moved out of his girlfriend’s home in Ware and into a bedsit in Harlow, Essex.

In the draft of a book from April 2024, Phillips wrote that for the past five years he had been on top of the world with “wonderful offspring, the love of a beautiful and lovely lady, a fabulous social life, a very nice vehicle and fabulous holidays … I am now sitting in a Weatherspoon’s pub having spent the night sleeping in my car.

“I have taken my eye off the reality ball and blown the kind of money in five years that most people won’t see in their lifetimes.”

Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb sentenced him to seven years in jail saying he was “an intelligent man with a distorted concept of his own significance who is unwilling to own up in public that he was prepared to behave in a dishonourable and treacherous way”.

She said he had an overblown sense of his own importance and had “disengaged from his previous loyalty to this country and was out to benefit himself if he could, regardless of the potential damage to the interests of the United Kingdom”.

Addressing Phillips, who was wearing a grey zip-up top, she said he was prepared to betray his country for money and the purpose of the new National Security Act was to protect the public and deter others from doing the same, whether it was for ideological reasons or “ugly greed”.LINK

Only 7 years? WTF.

Also, what a sad little man.

quote:

Originally posted by flesheatingvirus:
Only 7 years? WTF.

Also, what a sad little man.

Well, if an ordinary office job is too oppressive for him, seven years in the slammer might put him in the ground.

Except, does the UK have the same fakery we have here where a purported multi-year sentence turns out to be actually for no more than a couple of months when the parole board boots the perp. back out into the street?

I think they are happy to imprison UK citizens. It's the foreigners they refuse to confine.

It would solve his housing and food expense categories for a while...

quote:

Originally posted by ChuckFinley:
It would solve his housing and food expense categories for a while...

He won't have to take that office job, either.

They should double his sentence because he is also stupid. 1,000 lbs. for a chance to lose everything you have for the enemy. Not bright.

I’m having trouble understanding what the guy actually did. It seems like some Brits got him to give something to other Brits that were on the same team as the first set of Brits. He sounds like a kook.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: trapper189,

Too bad they don't have "hard labour" in UK prisons anymore. 7 years of that instead of an office job would be just punishment for the traitor.

He got a number, aight?
___________________

Wanna do it again?

https://youtu.be/PHu_ekAq5Js

He's 006, apparently.

Bond had his Aston Martins and BMWs, Emma Peel had a Lotus (and I think a Jensen Healey); one wonders what 00 spies for Russia drive?

Well if he was going to pass on info to the Russians that would hurt the current Muslim regime he might have been doing the country a favor.

They should re-think this.

Double naught spy.

How did MI5 surveil the mail sent to the embassy?

Talk about self incrimination!

Let's all meet Howard Phillips: