Glacial Mrs May could’ve been playing Cluedo

YOU had to pinch yourself. Yes, the Home Secretary really was at the Commons despatch box, accusing the President of Russia of conspiring in homicide at a hotel in Mayfair. At such times, actual events eclipse fiction. Le Carré trails breaking news.

You would have thought more MPs would have crowded the Chamber to hear this astonishing allegation. The Tory benches contained just eight backbenchers as Mrs May began her remarks. Perhaps word had gone out to Hon Members that the Establishment did not want too much parliamentary agitation.

One notable absentee was Sir Edward Leigh (Con, Gainsborough), normally so keen to praise Russia. Lady Leigh is Russian, you see, and Right-wing boiler Sir Edward seems to find it hard to deplore Putinesque nationalism. Sir Edward’s insights might for once have been heard with relish by the House yet there was no sign of him.

‘In the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel,’ said Theresa May. She could almost have been a person playing Cluedo, saying in which room the murder occurred. Rather than anything so clumsy as a revolver or piece of lead piping, the weapon here had been a radioactive tea pot. More polonium, vicar? After this outrage it will be hard to behold a Chekhovian samovar in quite the same light.

Mrs May had assembled her serious face, although to be honest that is much the same as her happy face. Seldom one of life’s smilers, is Theresa. She would be glacial even if she won the pools.

Alongside her on the Government bench sat Home Office ministers, the Solicitor General, and Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, sleek-suited and with that faint air of a Surrey golf club secretary. When foreign dignitaries meet him they must find it hard not to enquire about green fees at Sunningdale.

After Mrs May described the findings of Sir Robert Owen’s inquiry into the Litvinenko affair she hinted tantalisingly about ‘acts’ on British soil by hostile states. For such matters even to be alluded to was unusual.

She said the Russian ambassador would be summoned for a telling-off (presumably without tea). Any gettable assets of the two direct murder suspects, one of whom is a Moscow politician, would be frozen. Mrs May also she said that the Government would address the ‘closed’ part of the inquiry report (ie top secret, so she could not discuss it in any greater detail in the House).

But that was pretty much it. She did not accept repeated suggestions that intelligence officers at the Russian embassy in London should be expelled. ‘They’ll be quaking in their boots in the Kremlin, won’t they?’ scoffed Ian Austin (Lab, Dudley N). Mary Creagh (Lab, Wakefield) spoke of ‘British Government weakness’ while Ben Bradshaw (Lab, Exeter) alleged ‘ complete complacency’ about the London-based funds and investments which ‘sustain the Putin kleptocracy’.

Shadow Home Secretary Andy Burnham began with frustrated realism but soon yielded to something more shouty. He even started wondering if the 2018 World Cup in Russia should proceed and if EU sanctions against Russia were adequate. If Mr Burnham can persuade French industrialists to stop doing business with Moscow it will be a miracle to rival anything that happened at Lourdes.

JUSTbefore Mr Putin makes himself too comfortable, let him be warned – now you’ve done it, Ivan! – that Tom Brake ( Lib Dem, Carshalton & Wallington) is after him. Mr Brake cried that ‘a slap on the wrists’ was insufficient for Russia. I suppose we could always send them Lord Rennard.

Liam Fox ( Con, N Somerset), former Defence Secretary, argued that ‘the Putin government should never be treated as a full partner in international affairs’. David Davis (Con, Haltemprice & Howden) estimated that 100 other lawyers, accountants, journalists and so forth had been bumped off by Moscow. But as the Foreign Affairs select committee’s Crispin Blunt (Con, Reigate) put it, ‘ the challenge is to advance our remaining current interests, not least in the fight against violent Islamic extremism’. Realpolitik, as ever, trumps justice.