Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Jeremy Corbyn and Novichok: what did the Labour leader really say?

Jeremy Corbyn’s spokesman this afternoon caused something of a stir when he insisted to journalists that the Labour leader had always said that the evidence from the Salisbury attack pointed to direct or indirect Russian involvement. This didn’t seem quite right: Corbyn attracted a great deal of opprobrium for failing to blame Russia for the attack at the time.

It’s worth going back over what precisely the Labour leader did say after the attack – and what he didn’t. On 12 March, when Theresa May made her first statement to the Commons about the matter, she told MPs that ‘the government have concluded that it is highly likely that Russia was responsible for the act against Sergei and Yulia Skripal’. She added that ‘either this was a direct act by the Russian state against our country; or the Russian government lost control of their potentially catastrophically damaging nerve agent and allowed it to get into the hands of others’. Corbyn called for ‘evidence and a full account from the Russian authorities in the light of the emerging evidence to which the Prime Minister referred’, before quoting Conservative chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee Tom Tugendhat, who had predicted that May would most likely ‘point the finger at the Kremlin’. At no point in his speech did Corbyn himself say he believed that there was Russian involvement.

Two days later, May returned to the House with an update after Russia failed to meet the deadline for explaining how Novichok came to be used on British soil. She announced that ‘there is no alternative conclusion other than that the Russian state was culpable for the attempted murder of Mr Skripal and his daughter, and for threatening the lives of other British citizens in Salisbury’.

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