By jumping the gun Johnson is only helping Putin

British foreign secretary’s claims over the Skripal poisoning, leaving no room for doubt, have handed Moscow a major propaganda victory

Boris Johnson is not a disaster waiting to happen. He is a disaster that has been repeatedly happening for years now, and the only change is that the disasters have got progressively bigger. He should have been sacked as Foreign Secretary months ago, when his blundering intervention in the case of — the charity worker jailed in Iran on spying charges, after what her family has always insisted was a simple visit home to see relatives — gave a hostile regime an excuse to prolong her ordeal.

Having survived that gaffe only because British Prime Minister Theresa May was too weak to move him, Johnson should at least have had the grace to learn from it; to grasp that the Foreign Office is not the place for winging it or exaggerating to make a point; that even tiny deviations from the script carry grave consequences when dealing with intelligence-related matters or regimes such as Iran. But he wasn’t sacked and he didn’t learn, so here we are again.

A slapdash interview the foreign secretary gave in Germany, in which he appeared to claim he’d been personally and categorically assured by “the guy” at Porton Down that Russia was behind the Salisbury poisoning, backfired on him last week when Porton Down’s chief executive, Gary Aitkenhead, explained that scientists could certainly identify the nerve agent involved, but that naming the culprit was above their pay grade.

Anyone claiming that all this blows a hole in the idea of Russian guilt needs to cool their heels. It doesn’t change a government case that always relied on science to narrow the range of suspects, by identifying the means of poisoning, but on the intelligence services to complete the jigsaw. It was for them to advise on who might have not just the significant technical capacity required to deploy a Russian-manufactured toxin, but also the desire to kill enemies of the Russian state; the audacity to do it in a way bound to cause a crisis in Anglo-Russian relations, given its uncanny similarity to previous Russian operations; and the opportunities to get it in and out of the country. The case for this mysterious culprit being Russia was never definitive, but unless anyone produces strong evidence to the contrary, that’s by far the most likely explanation. That much hasn’t changed.

Undermining national security

What has changed is the credibility of the government in saying so, because the foreign secretary’s over-egging of the pudding — whether by carelessness or design, and in the circumstances both are inexcusable — gives Russian President Vladimir Putin a perfect excuse to cast doubt over anything and everything the British government says. Frankly, Johnson has a nerve accusing Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn of undermining national security when he himself has handed Moscow a propaganda victory on a plate, dragged politically neutral Porton Down staff into an uncomfortably partisan political row, and needlessly undermined the work of the wider intelligence community.

But there is a broader problem here, one that awaits any future Labour government as much as this Conservative one, and which Johnson’s departure may be necessary but not sufficient to solve. That problem revolves around the management of doubt. Intelligence-led decisions invariably involve some degree of doubt. We can be certain about what put Sergei and Yulia Skripal in intensive care, and Novichoks are so difficult to handle that Porton Down concluded that probably only a nation state could have deployed them. That “probably”, however, is where real certainty ends.

There is a clear contradiction between his theory that mafia gangs might have done it and Porton Down’s explanation of why the evidence points towards a nation state; it is not unreasonable to ask when Corbyn was made aware of that contradiction. But he is absolutely right that it should never be considered unpatriotic or inappropriate to ask searching questions, or require a government to explain itself. That is the duty of opposition.

The quid pro quo, however, is that governments of all shades should somehow be allowed to have honest doubts too; to admit gaps in their knowledge without instantly inviting derision, or the assumption that whatever you just read on Facebook is equally valid. With the right to question comes the responsibility to keep an open mind, to scrutinise all sides of the argument equally rather than hunting for reasons not to believe one of them. On the evidence of last week, sadly, neither politicians, press nor public have got that balance right in Britain.