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“The two men were sure that they were Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, though sometimes they appeared uncertain as to which was which.”

I’ve found from transatlantic phone conversations that the Novichok scandal, or Skripal affair (I’m surprised it hasn’t yet been dubbed Novichokgate), is not as much in the the U.S. news as it still is in the U.K., so it may need explaining.

Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer, that is, spy, became a double agent, selling secrets to the West; he was caught and imprisoned, and after his release moved to Britain and lived in a house bought for him in Salisbury.

His daughter Yulia came to visit him.  On March 4 they were found unconscious on a park bench, were taken to hospital, nearly died, recovered after some weeks.  Detectives found traces of novichok, a nerve agent developed in the former Soviet Union.  There were conjectures as to whether it had been touched with it in the supermarket or restaurant they had visited; much of the town was evacuated or closed off.  The poison was eventually found on the door handle of Skripal’s house; one of the police officers coming near it also nearly died.  And weeks later a couple picked up a discarded scent bottle, took it back to the nearby town of Amesbury, the woman tried the stuff on her wrist, she died, the man nearly did.

The British security services, and government, were increasingly convinced that the attack was the work of Russia and probably approved at the highest level.  Outrage was even stronger than in 2006 when Alexander Litvinenko was murdered in London with a radioactive cup of tea.  The Skripal case became a major cause, along with Russian cyber-interference in other countries’ elections, of the diplomatic row with Russia.

President Putin (himself a former intelligence officer) angrily denies Russian responsibility; somewhat undermining his denials by saying that he could not forgive disloyalty and that Skripal was a “scumbag,” “simply a spy, a traitor to the Motherland,” and “traitors will kick the bucket.”

Investigators found that two Russians, using the probable pseudonyms Aleksandr Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, had flown from Moscow to London, stayed in a hotel, and traveled on successive days by train to Salisbury and back, the first day presumably to reconnoiter.  There were airline records of them and CCTV footage.  The two men were presented on Russian television.  They averred that they were mere civilian tourists, driven by eagerness to see Salisbury’s famous cathedral.  The reason why, the first day, they stayed only an hour or so, without going near the cathedral, was that it was cold; there was snow on the streets, or at least slush.  If they had gone past Skripal’s house, it was unknowingly.

We happen to know Salisbury quite well just now, because we’ve made three reconnaissance visits of our own – we were trying to spy out a house we might move to, as it’s half way to London.  (Real estate agents claim that house prices there hand’t fallen, though tourists had been scared away.)  Newspaper articles didn’t make clear the unlikelihood that anyone on the way from the train station to the cathedral should wander into the suburb where Skripal’s house was, on the other side of the railway line.

The official Russian story was more like a deliberate insult: We’re a great power, we don’t need to bother with thinking up a believable excuse for sending our murderers into your petty country.  The feeble story lent itself to jokes about the Russians who found southern England too cold, and who borrowed phrases from Wikipedia to refer to the cathedral they pretended to have visited.  “Ruslan Borisov” has been identified as Colonel Anatoly Chepiga, another intelligence officer, and “Alexander Petrov” too will probably lose his pseudonymity.

It was John Crace, the Guardian‘s humorist, who made the sly remark that the two men on television “were sure they were Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, though they were a little uncertain which was which.”  That’s why I am regaling this tale, because it struck me as a lovely twist on the theme of identity.  Identity, related to so many deep themes of consciousness and selfhood.

Salisbury cathedral’s spire – my picture on the cover of A Bemerton Anthology