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Labour slams Johnson over dodgy claims

Shameless foreign secretary accused of misleading the public by saying Russia was definitely behind poisoning

LABOUR accused Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson today of misleading the British public by blaming Russia for the Skripal poisoning before the origin of the nerve agent used has been confirmed.

Referring to the admission by the government’s science facility at Porton Down that it cannot identify the source of the substance, shadow home secretary Diane Abbott told BBC Radio 4 Today programme: “It doesn’t surprise me Porton Down is saying this because the security services were always very cautious in what they said.

“What surprised me was that so many were willing to rush into the media and say it was unequivocally Putin. That’s not necessarily what we were told.”

Former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious last month on a public bench in Salisbury and rushed to hospital in a critical condition. They were later found to have been poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok.

Asked why the government believed that Russia was the source of the substance, Mr Johnson told German TV: “The people from Porton Down, the laboratory, they were absolutely categorical.

“I asked them that myself. I said ‘Are you sure?’ He said: ‘There’s no doubt’.”

Prime Minister Theresa May was initially “careful” in her statement on the incident to not draw similar conclusions, Ms Abbott said, but she declared two days later that Russia was responsible and that 23 of the country’s diplomats would be expelled from Britain.

Moscow retaliated by expelling 23 British diplomats. In total, around 20 countries have now expelled Russian diplomats “in solidarity” with Britain.

Ms Abbott said: “Boris Johnson apparently going on international media and saying he was 101 per cent certain it was Putin — I don’t understand where he got that information from.”

She expressed hope that Labour will “get some credit for taking a more thoughtful approach and asking the right questions.”

A post from March 22 stating that analysis by Porton Down had “made clear” that the Novichok was produced in Russia has been deleted from the Foreign Office’s Twitter feed.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has been mocked not only by the Tories but by a number of his own backbenchers for saying that the origin of the substance should be confirmed before action is taken against Russia.

On a local election campaign visit to Watford today, he said: “Either the Foreign Secretary has information that he’s not sharing with Porton Down or it was a bit of exaggeration. I don’t know which it is, but I think we need a responsible, cool approach to this.

“We need to get to the source of this to prevent it ever happening again.”

In a statement regarding Mr Johnson’s comments on German TV, a government spokesman said: “He goes on in the same interview to make clear why, based on that information, additional intelligence and the lack of alternative explanation from the Russians, we have reached the conclusion we have.

“What the Foreign Secretary said then and what Porton Down have said recently is fully consistent with what we have said throughout.

“It is Russia that is putting forward multiple versions of events and obfuscating the truth.”

British representatives rejected Russia’s call for it to be allowed a role in the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) investigation into the nerve agent attack.

The international body is conducting tests on samples of the nerve agent.

Britain was backed by the European Union during the OPCW meeting in The Hague. Moscow’s position won the support of 14 countries, according to the Russian embassy in the Netherlands.

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