False flag? No. But Theresa May is clearly hiding something

by Martin Odoni

I still accept that the Russian Government is the number one suspect in the spy poisoning in Salisbury, but there are several reasonable doubts, as I mentioned on Friday. At the risk of drifting into ‘tin-foil-hat-wearing-mode’ my doubts are starting to increase. If anyone wishes to accuse me and like-minded individuals of being disloyal, or of making the Government’s job more difficult, allow me to respond: The behaviour of the British Government over the last week is precisely what is increasing the doubts.

It has been revealed that the Prime Minister played a very dirty trick on Jeremy Corbyn by keeping information from him about the Salisbury attack without his apparent knowledge. Theresa May has also repeatedly failed to answer his questions properly about it in the House Of Commons, and did not respond to Russia’s – I would say quite reasonable – request to see the evidence that supposedly implicates them. May’s insistence that Russia had to explain how the nerve agent ended up in Salisbury rather reverses the logical requirements of burden-of-proof, especially if she will not allow the Russians to examine the evidence against them. The United Kingdom even blocked a United Nations motion to set terms of an investigation into the poisoning.

There is, in short, a lot of secrecy that would seem, at face-value, quite pointless, given what has not been kept under-wraps.

Now, it is possible to conclude that the Tories were exploiting the attack to set Corbyn up for another media trashing, which has undoubtedly happened. That they should do that, and at the same time accuse Corbyn of ‘playing party politics’ with the matter, is so beyond-the-pale that it makes you wish Parliamentary hypocrisy could be made an imprisonable offence.

She should be staring out at the world through iron bars more frequently.

I am still dismissive of suggestions that the whole poisoning incident is some kind of ‘false flag’ set-up by the British, but there is no doubt that it has been a God-send to the Conservatives. They suffered a mini-massacre in a series of Local by-elections less than a fortnight ago, and last weekend, the national opinion polls were starting to look really dire for them. Now the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal has given them a week’s respite from the misery of the shambolic ‘Brexit‘ negotiations and the UK’s growing poverty crisis, it has given them an ‘outside enemy’ to look tough and statesmanlike against (always a popular tactic for any Government under pressure), and they have also exploited it in a disgustingly cynical way to try and present the Opposition leader, quite falsely, as a ‘Russian stooge’.

Opportunistic grandstanding would thus be my main suspicion. But at the same time, this does not really explain why May would not allow the Russians to see the evidence against them. Nor does it explain why she would not give more details about what that evidence is when speaking in Parliament. She was perfectly happy to let everyone know that the make-up of the nerve agent is, supposedly, of a type that can only be found in one small location in Russia. Why is that information good for public scrutiny, but any further evidence she apparently possesses must be kept hidden away? Why has there also been a black-out in the House of Commons of all discussion of the Russian dismantling of its chemical weapons capability, under supervision of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)? If it does not throw an outright spanner in the works, this detail should at least be a reason for caution. Sure, the OPCW might have been deceived by Vladimir Putin, but given OPCW experience in thwarting such chicanery, that could do with explaining.

Whether Craig Murray’s claims that the boffins at Porton Down have in fact not concluded that the Novichok they analysed must be from Russia are true or not, it is noticeable that the Government was slow to refute him, and their attempt was just a lame repetition of a previous statement. If the Novichok’s origin really has been identified, why does the Government not publish a summary of the report? Why was the leader of the Opposition, on a supposed matter of national security, apparently not allowed to see with his own eyes what Porton Down had to say?

Almost everything about the way the UK Government is behaving stinks. As I say, it is likeliest that the Tories have taken advantage of the poisoning to make a big show of looking like the nation’s ‘natural defenders’, and all that jingoistic claptrap.

(It was disturbing, incidentally, that May thought this incident was worth a personal ‘get-out-and-meet-the-people’ visit when nobody has even died, but lacked the courage to meet the survivors of the Grenfell Tower Blaze last year. That visit to Salisbury absolutely screamed of cheap theatrics. And given that May wants everyone to regard the poisoning as a dangerous attack on British sovereignty, it is noticeable that she seemed to be treating the outing as a silly laugh.)

But the conspiracy theory explanations, while most are silly, are being encouraged by the almost arbitrary way that the British Government is deciding what should be secret and what should not. Even critical thinkers are struggling to dismiss the suspicions. I for one am no more convinced that Putin is behind the poisoning than I was on Wednesday. Balance-of-probabilities would say he is, but it did a week ago too. The cloak-and-dagger behaviour of the UK Government is stopping the see-saw from tilting further towards certainty.

Trust in Government and public institutions is low in modern Britain, and the temptation is to blame that on the cynicism of the British as a people. But when a long succession of Governments has continued to engage in intrigues like these, even when there is no obvious reason for many of them, the blame for that lack of trust lies with the Government itself.