It shouldn’t happen in Salisbury
THEY don’t have assassinations in Salisbury. For all its famed geopolitical prowess, Russia picked the wrong place with that market town and cathedral city. When Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned in the swish Millennium Hotel, it was in London, a cosmopolitan centre where all sorts of things can happen both in fiction and in reality.
The attempt on the Skripal family was quite different psychologically: if Salisbury’s dangerous, nowhere in England can feel safe, an understanding Theresa May grasped immediately and Jeremy Corbyn did not.
Hurricanes hardly ever happen in Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire and nor do assassinations in Stowmarket, Shropshire or Salisbury. If they do, that means they can happen anywhere and we’re all under threat.
Until now, Salisbury has been more likely to feature in the property pages of COUNTRY LIFE than in the accounts of international intrigue and espionage. It’s the fact that hundreds of Wiltshire people have been asked to wash the clothes they were wearing that fateful day that has really brought home how close we could all be to this sort of attack.
Death from a mere smear on a door handle anywhere—that’s the power of chemical weapons. They need no ballistic missiles, no warheads and no declaration of war. Indeed, their localised use has overcome the historic barriers to their use. Fears that they might affect the user’s troops and that their coverage couldn’t be contained are unwarranted if you can pick and choose your victims anywhere and at any time.
Events in Salisbury immediately ensure that Nikolai Glushkov’s death last week won’t pass without investigation. At another time, who knows how interested the police and press would be in the demise of a 68-year-old man living unpretentiously in a London suburb. Perhaps another of Vladimir Putin’s enemies may have died of natural causes, but now it will not be taken for granted.
The menace of the Russian State apparatus has begun to haunt us again, as it did for two centuries or more, interrupted only briefly by the years of hopeful Glasnost. Salisbury brings it all closer to home and tells us much more about ourselves.
Whatever Englishness is, it’s certainly Salisbury. People all over the country recognise a common bond with this city in a way they don’t with London. That’s the downside of London’s success as a world city: it’s the driver of the nation’s economy, the brilliant jewel and centre of our history and State, but it isn’t England in the way that Salisbury is.
Perhaps the perpetrators miscalculated. They didn’t realise just how much an attempt at murder on British soil would matter in so English a target. Foreigners get assassinated—we know that from novels and from history— but this is an English crime and that will not be forgotten. Whereas Bulgarians and umbrellas in London have passed into folklore, Salisbury puts us all on the front line.
That’s why this is not just another incident in a battle among the great powers. It’s not merely a matter of foreign policy to be settled by recalling ambassadors and expelling diplomats—it’s an assault on us in our own home, on the real England. That’s what shifts the situation so dramatically and is why it will have long-term effects on our attitudes to everything from Europe’s dependence on Russian gas to Russian investment in UK business and property. Salisbury has brought foreign policy dramatically to the heart of our domestic affairs.
‘Wiltshire people being asked to wash their clothes has really brought it home’
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