Offering the notorious duo a poisoned chalice

The Salisbury poisonings, to suspend disbelief, are going to be with us for while longer, it seems, with the Russian president himself determined to fan the Brexit smokescreen and keep the chattering classes, well, chattering.

You won’t have been able to avoid hearing the claims - attempted revenge-poisoning of a Russian traitor, then the death of a lady who somehow handled a bottle said to have contained the revenge poison.

A statement apparently from Salisbury’s own MP seems worth a spot of highlighting.

If I heard his comments correctly, he questioned why the spies-come-tourists would visit the town twice, travelling down from London on both occasions.

Spies would be more aware

A quick answer is that the historically important city deserves that and more.

Of course, whether the Russian tourists had anything to do with the attack remains unresolved. After all, their English might be shaky, but spies would certainly be aware that Britain gets very upset when Russian defectors are knocked off on our royal soil.

Spies and official assassins, surely, would have kept a very low profile.

I can’t help but wonder – an investigative journalist background surfacing – why these two (if they were agents) would be so relatively easy to trace.

Salisbury's worst weather

Official eyebrows are raised over the ruskies returning to London on the same day. However, it’s not disputed that Salisbury turned on its worst weather, so knowing Wiltshire weather, getting out of Salisbury seems wise.

Of course, we’ll never know if any facts at all lie within the claims and the counterclaims, and we can make of it what we will. The more we and our friends and neighbours mill it over the less we are discussing and thinking of Brexit. Perhaps there's a political party that desires that desperately.

One point that has surfaced in the arguments is an area where I am an authority, albeit rather reluctantly….

The MP invited the pair, now making a name for themselves on Russia’s TV news, to come back to England to sample our courts.

I suspect he’s referring to the justice system sometimes termed the envy of the world.

As Sailing to Purgatory tells, I was prosecuted along with a gang allegedly involved in drugs.

However, the prosecution assumed that the gang's modus operandi was not that the drugs came safely here in shipping containers, but were brought by 'Sunday sailors in small yachts' … all the way from the Caribbean.

Continues on the blogs for my ocean adventure book, Sailing to Purgatory, at SailingToPurgatory.com