Alex Salmond should watch his own TV channel. One of the rare moments I have brought myself to watching the Kremlin’s global propaganda station, RT, was to see the two men alleged to have tried to kill Sergei Skripal, a Russian ex-spy, describe the real reasons behind their escapade.
The hapless Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, as they were presented to the audience, admitted they were in Salisbury on the day concerned. The attempted assassination in March 2018, using the nerve agent novichok (the Kremlin’s weapon of choice), gave the otherwise quiet city an unwanted global reputation.
Interviewed six months later by the editor-in-chief of RT, the slick Margarita Simonyan, the men provided the most intriguing of pretexts. Boshirov said he had long wanted to visit Salisbury Cathedral, which was “famous not just in Europe, but in the whole world. It’s famous for its 123-metre spire, it’s famous for its clock, the first one ever created in the world, which is still working”.
Shortly after, the investigative website Bellingcat outed “Boshirov” as a highly decorated agent of the GRU military intelligence called Anatoly Chepiga. It is still not clear why the Kremlin allowed them on to TV to provide their laughable non-denial denials. Perhaps it was to humiliate them for failing. Perhaps it was to show that Vladimir Putin doesn’t care what the world thinks.
What does this have to do with Salmond? Only that the former Scottish first minister has since 2017 had a weekly chat show on the notorious station every Thursday where, according to the official blurb, “he vows to battle the mainstream”.
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Now that Salmond is attempting a political comeback, he is offering himself up to all channels. When asked by the BBC about the Skripal poisonings, he refused three times to accept that they had been ordered from the top. Even though Putin has form – ordering the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006 and of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Salmond also cast doubt as to whether the Russians had tried to interfere in a number of western elections. In his mind, the electoral earth must be flat.
Distasteful it may be, but until recently it didn’t really matter. Now Salmond is fighting next month’s Scottish parliament elections, heading his party Alba, in an attempt to destabilise Nicola Sturgeon, his erstwhile comrade whom he has come to loathe. He might yet flop, but it is also conceivable that, in the fractured political environment, his small new group might wield influence.
Salmond is part of a motley group of British fifth columnists, from the left and right, who seek greater “understanding” for the poisoner in the Kremlin.
Britain’s approach to Russia has long been characterised by hypocrisy. A Conservative government that denounces human rights abuses is happy to take Russian money. Thousands of British PR companies, libel lawyers, financial advisers and property developers have got rich quick on the back of dodgy Russian activities.
Until only a few months ago, the world’s largest democracy was run by a man in thrall to the Kremlin. It remains to be seen what Putin had on Donald Trump.
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Now in a much smaller country another small man is hoping to do the Kremlin’s bidding.