Boris Johnson has for the first time defended his apparent claim that Porton Down scientists had told him Russia was responsible for deploying a military grade nerve agent to poison Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury last month.
Making the first defence of this claim since Porton Down scientists said they could only describe the agent as novichok, but not ascertain its country of origin, Johnson implied he had never said Porton Down told him Russia was responsible.
Since he made the claim, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has confirmed the British finding that the nerve agent was that described by British scientists, but again did not say the agent could only have been made in Russia.
Johnson was severely criticised over misdescribing his conversations with Porton Down chiefs, mainly in an interview with Deutsche Welle last month. There is great pressure on British politicians to be precise in their allegations against Russia, and the source of them.
Johnson told BBC One’s Andrew Marr Show on Sunday: “I was being very clear. I thought I was being very clear to Deutsche Welle, the German programme, which is that Porton Down told us in absolutely no uncertain terms that this was a military grade novichok agent, and furthermore of a type that had been produced and stockpiled in the former Soviet Union.”
He told the BBC he asked Porton Down “‘Are you sure about that?’ And they said they were absolutely certain that it was. Now it is not the business of Porton Down, and I don’t know if whether it is even possible for them to identify the origin, any more that you might be able to identify the origin of a sample of sulphuric acid. But, as the OPCW confirmed this week, it was indeed a military grade nerve agent novichok of a type that has bene stockpiled likely for assassination purposes by Russia in the last 10 years.”
Johnson added he had made his remarks to Deutsche Welle before UK intelligence told him Russia had been practising putting novichok on door handles. UK intelligence in a letter to Nato released on Friday also revealed that Soviet spies had been hacking Yulia Skripal’s phone for years.
He said anyone who continued to deny Russian involvement in the Skripal affair was showing an extraordinary and perplexing blindness to reality.
Without naming any individual or the Labour frontbench, he said some people seemed to possess a “defiant refusal to accept that the Kremlin could be responsible”.
In the Deutsche Welle interview, Johnson was asked: “You argue that the source of this nerve agent, novichok, is Russia. How did you manage to find it out so quickly? Does Britain possess samples of it?”
Johnson replied “Let me be clear with you … when I look at the evidence, I mean the people from Porton Down, the laboratory …”
The interviewer interrupted “So they have the samples …” before Johnson replied: “They do. And they were absolutely categorical and I asked the guy myself, I said, ‘Are you sure?’ And he said ‘there’s no doubt’.”
Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, attend the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show in London yesterday.
