Inside the 2018 Salisbury poisoning: ‘A shocking lack of care and precision’

Read time: 6 mins

In brief…

• Amber Rudd tells Lewis Goodall of the government response to the 2018 Novichok poisoning, and how some government ministers wanted to rush to blame Russia before evidence had been collected.
• Mark Urban says the attack was deliberately timed to gain support and sympathy with Russian voters, following worldwide condemnation of the attack, as it took place weeks before an election in the country.
• They say Russia is unlikely to conduct another poisoning in the UK, but say another type of attack could happen in the future.

A journalist, an intelligence officer and a former politician walk into a recording studio.

No, it’s not the start of a joke, but The Crisis Room, a new Global podcast exploring the biggest issues facing the UK and world today, presented by former Home Secretary Amber Rudd, renowned journalist Mark Urban, and decorated former CIA officer Marc Polymeropoulos.

The past few years have not been short on global crisises, not least the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the threat it poses to the wider world.

Today, that threat is mostly felt in Eastern Europe, but in 2018 it was the UK feeling the dangerous reach of President Vladimir Putin, when it attempted a botched assassination on double agent Sergei Skripal. A Russian agent, Scripal was recruited by MI6 in the mid nineties to report on Russian activities to UK authorities.

Scripal and his daughter Yulia were both poisoned with nerve agent Novichok, along with a police officer and two Salisbury locals. One affected, Dawn Sturgess, died from exposure to the drug.

Both Rudd and Urban were involved in the case, with Rudd serving as Home Secretary in Theresa May's government, and Urban as a journalist who knew Skripal, having met him in the months prior to the poisoning.

"What was extraordinary about this is that we didn't know the severity of it, because we didn't know who was going to be impacted," Rudd tells Lewis Goodall.

"Initially, when the news came out, we were told that Skripal and his daughter were in a coma and the implication was that they weren't going to survive it."

How the UK government responded

Government COBRA meetings were held, and the case was discussed in the House of Commons.

"You genuinely didn't know what was going to happen next. For a while we didn't know where the Novichok had been transferred to the Skripals and to the policemen," she adds.

"Everybody was very tense to know whether there might be some other impact somewhere."

She says Theresa May and her security advisors were “pretty sure” the poisoning was a Russian act, but had to prevent Boris Johnson, who was then the foreign secretary, from publicly attributing the attack to Putin’s forces.

Lessons had been learned from the 2006 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, who died from exposure to polonium-210 in London.

"When the Litvinenko murder took place, we attributed it to Russia too quickly, and therefore they were able to rubbish some of the information that we put out," Rudd says.

"So we had to be absolutely clear where the poison had come from."

She adds that Johnson, and some other MPs at the time wanted to “go too early” and “didn’t really appreciate being held back” following the Salisbury poisonings.

Lack of ‘precision’ could have cost many more lives

Dawn Sturgess was exposed to Novichok when her partner gave her a perfume bottle, found in a bin, and she sprayed its contents on her wrists.

Rudd describes this discovery as the “most extraordinary part” of the incident.

"Imagine if somehow it had been tipped in a river or something, who knows how much damage could have been done," Rudd says.

"To me, that is the really shocking part of this attack, that it wasn't done with care and precision.

"It was done in a way that targeted the people they wanted to target, but also could have targeted many other people."

Urban says that suspicions were on Russia due to the method of the murder, when staging a traffic accident, faking a suicide or a break-in gone wrong would have been a more deniable method of execution.

"As the crisis developed, what became clearer was that the Novichok was a signature in just the same way that the polonium was with Litvinenko," he says.

"It was a signature to say this could only really have come from a Russian state enterprise."

Two Russian men, Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, were identified as suspects, but claimed they were tourists who had visited Salisbury to see the cathedral.

"We learned the identities of those two guys who went down to Salisbury, who gave the interview to Russian TV, and that they were colonels in Russian military intelligence," Urban says.

"More of the pieces fell into place, the more we understood that the purpose of this, and I would argue, sending those guys with such a flimsy cover identity was to get it quite clearly imprinted with the hallmark of the Russian state, and say 'this is what we do to traitors'."

A carefully timed attack?

Urban adds that the timing of the poisoning was no coincidence either, being just weeks before an election in Russia – which he describes as “not exactly a free democratic process.”

"Immediately, both Putin and Sergey Lavrov, his foreign minister, cast this as Russophobia, the accusation that they'd been responsible, and they did manage to stir up a decent turnout," he adds.

Rudd says that, due to the UK going through the Brexit process at the time, Putin underestimated the supportive response it would receive from the US and other countries in Europe.

Could this happen again?

Russia is now focused on its war with Ukraine, and is not known to have committed any acts of violence on British soil since the Scripal poisonings. But Rudd says it's not out of the question that its attention may one day turn again to its citizens in this country.

"You can never say never," she says.

"I don't think we'll get something like this again. But Russia has made clear that there are other ways they're going to disrupt us."

"The type of activity that we saw in Salisbury is not the way they're going to go in the future."

She says Russia's biggest war right now is to keep its status, and what little support it has left, intact.

"They want to keep their supporters together. They want their alliance to keep together," she says.

"They're trying to take the moral high tone in their war against Ukraine, which is absolutely ridiculous."

Urban adds that any action Russia takes in the future is likely to be much less obvious than the Salisbury poisonings.

"More recently, Russia has been accused of involvement in the arson attacks on properties belonging to Keir Starmer – which it has denied.

"We have to tread carefully, but I do think that is very, very serious," Rudd says.

"We've had attacks on, and even murders of, members of parliament, but the fact that this is an attack on the Prime Minister is very serious and so chilling for him.

"It's chilling for everybody around him and for everybody in politics, and I think it's incredibly important they find out who, why, how, attribute – and take some action."

The first episode of The Crisis Room is out now, and can be found here.

Rudd describes it as similar to The News Agents but "more polite and not so rude about politicians all the time."

"What we've got is three people who've had different experiences behind that secret door – an intelligence officer, a former politician and a journalist," she says.

"I certainly find it fascinating as I explain what's going on in government, what people are trying to work out, hearing what the journalists are doing and hearing what the intelligence officer is doing."

Listen to The Crisis Room on Global Player.