British MP boasts he was "fed" propaganda by Azerbaijan

PanARMENIAN.Net - A senior Tory MP has boasted that he was “fed” propaganda by the Azerbaijani embassy and used it to lobby the UK government, openDemocracy reveals.

The admission came in a podcast where Bob Blackman, the MP for Harrow East and chair of the Azerbaijan All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG), also said: “On a regular basis I put down positions on behalf of our good friends in Azerbaijan.”

Blackman – an executive secretary of the Conservatives’ influential backbench 1922 Committee – has taken seven free trips, worth tens of thousands of pounds, to oil-rich Azerbaijan since 2011. The three most recent trips were paid for by either the Azerbaijani parliament or its London embassy.

Blackman has received a series of briefings from high-level Azerbaijani figures, including Azerbaijani MP Javanshir Feyziyev – who was at the center of a high-profile court case that saw £5.6m ($7.5m) of laundered cash ordered to be seized from his family’s bank accounts this week.

Blackman told the student-run ‘Eye To Eye’ podcast in July 2020: “One of the things that happens, I’m afraid, in these types of conflicts is that [...] whoever gets the best propaganda tends to grab the attention of the listeners and the viewers.

“And in this regard I’ve been fed the information through the Azerbaijan embassy in the UK – so they’ve been very, very helpful, very, very proactive from the word go when the hostilities began,” Blackman said, referring to the clashes launched by Azerbaijan against Armenia in July 2020.