Shadow Boxing Clever

We are expected to believe that a weapon of mass destruction was activated on our streets, but that only three people were injured, and that all three of them are still alive two weeks later. Oh, and that one of them was a first responder as a Detective Sergeant.

Anyway, either there is Novichok at Porton Down, or the sample from Salisbury could not have been confirmed as such there. It must be one or the other, so which is it? As for Boris Johnson's allegation that Russia has been stockpiling it, again I say that Vladimir Putin ought to sue him under the English law of libel.

The overrated Ruth Davidson wants RT taken off air in Britain, thereby guaranteeing the expulsion from Russia of the BBC and of all other British broadcasters, if not all of British media outlets without exception.

As with the appointment of his first Shadow Cabinet, as with the free vote on Syria, as with the whipped abstention on Trident (which is now a demonstrably useless deterrent in its supporters' own terms), and as with the failure to deliver for County Durham's 472 betrayed Teaching Assistants, Jeremy Corbyn has been disappointing here.

Specifically, he has given far too much credence to the spooks who were so magnificently skewered in The Enemy Within by one Seumas Milne. Their case is already falling apart. The denial of "intelligence" to Corbyn is because he would take one look at it and announce its sorry contents, or lack of them, under parliamentary privilege, if not on the sofa of a television studio. As well he should. As it is, though, he has not even complained about being denied the information that is his due.

But unlike in any of the above cases, Corbyn has chances to redeem himself this time. One of those would be in the vein of our people's much-needed cutting of their own deals in housing, education, academia and the media, bypassing the right-wing Labour municipal machines and the Liberal Establishment.

For example, we need to seek representation directly on whatever body was to take oversight of Sky News, and we need to make sure that we have representatives attending the Grenfell Tower Inquiry with a view to producing the report that the Prime Minister has made impossible by her refusal to broaden the panel.

Specifically, Corbyn should name a Shadow Consul General in St Petersburg, to do the best that he or she could in the interests, not exclusively but not least, of the British trade unionists whose collective representative organisations might therefore more than reasonably be expected to bear the cost. Craig Murray? His is the most obvious name, isn't? Yes. Craig Murray.