Western media present this material as if "Russia" means the Russian government means Putin. But there is a large presence of Russian oligarchs and organized criminals in the UK, who do the things those types of people do. It doesn't make sense that all of it is being planned by the Russian state, let alone Putin personally.
That's not only false, but obviously false, since it's an extreme oversimplification of a situation with many players, competing interests, and so on. You won't find any serious scholar taking that naive a view, though plenty of journalists do. The question is where this fantasy of an evil monolith with a spidery mastermind comes from.
I didn't say it's a monolith, or there's a spidery mastermind. Rather, it's a sort of a swamp where ugly things move around all the time - today he is a mob leader, tomorrow he's an elected member of the parliament (real world example from my hometown) etc. The problem is that they keep their social connections as they move around, so in the end you end up with this weird network of "friends and colleagues" where, say, a high-ranked police official visits a funeral of his old and dear parliamentarian friend, back from the day when they were both mobsters.
That's a direct outcome of the "vertical of power" concept. As soon as you position yourself as a strongman father of the nation, you also invite the blame. Can't have your cake and eat it, too.
I suspect that will only get worse with the torrent of "but muh Russian collusion"-type political speech which seems to come up every time people feel like blaming somebody else for their decision not to vote.
