PETER HITCHENS: We’re goading Russia into ‘dirty war’ we CANNOT win 

As I so often tell you not to be taken in by the current anti-Russian frenzy, you might expect me to have some opinions on the horrible events in Salisbury. And so I do. 

I was reluctant to believe without proof that this was a Russian state operation. I still think some people have jumped too readily to conclusions without facts.

But the more I look at it, the more I think that the message from this outrage is as follows. 

If Britain really wants a war with Russia, as our Government seems to, then Russia will provide that war. 

But it will not be fought according to the Geneva Conventions. It will be fought according to the law of the jungle. 

Before we embark on this, could someone explain why we actually want such a war? 

We are a minor power on the edge of Europe. What national interest does it serve? What do we gain from it? And will we win it?

Vladimir Putin, as I have often said, is a sinister tyrant. Nobody doubts that he, and his foreign intelligence organisation the SVR, are capable of such a heinous and shameful act as the outrage in Salisbury.

But he is also cunning, calculating and careful not to go any further than he has to. This is our second warning. If we do not heed it, the third could be much worse.

‘Despite the lack of conclusive proof, I have to accept that the Russian state quite deliberately killed Alexander Litvinenko (above) in the most public and memorable way possible’

What will we do? Withdraw from the World Cup? Break off diplomatic relations? That will make them cringe, in the SVR’s Yasenevo headquarters in the birchwoods on the south-western edge of Moscow, won’t it?

Despite the lack of conclusive proof, I have to accept that the Russian state quite deliberately killed Alexander Litvinenko in the most public and memorable way possible. 

I think this was a message to anyone who might choose to act in the same way. But it was also a warning to the Government and people of this country.

If the attack on Sergei Skripal was also a Kremlin operation, then it was done to tell us this: If we want to play tough guys with Moscow, we had better be prepared for the worst. 

If this wasn’t its purpose, then it was remarkably stupid to harm the courageous and selfless police officer, DS Nick Bailey, and also to harm Mr Skripal’s innocent daughter, Yulia.

But what if it was the idea? What if this is a deliberate and conscious escalation of menace? Why are we even in this violent, expensive and dangerous game against people far more ruthless than we would dare to be?

We are not morally perfect ourselves, with our head-chopping aggressive Saudi friends, our bloodstained Iraq and Libyan adventures, and our targeted drone-strike killings of British citizens who joined IS. 

A mournful end for the mile 

Roger Bannister pictured in 1954

Outside this country, how many now care how long it takes to run a mile? 

Will your grandchildren one day ask you: ‘What’s a four-minute mile?’ – the great feat first achieved by Roger Bannister, right, who died last week aged 88. 

There has never been a mile race at the Olympics, and since Bannister’s run, the decline of Britain’s importance in the world has meant more and more countries abandoning the mile. 

The 1,500-metre race has taken over even in the resolutely non-metric USA.

As one who loves English measurements for their familiarity and poetic names, I’m sorry to see this happen. 

Once the mile is gone, will the great Robert Frost poem be rewritten to say, ‘But I have promises to keep, and kilometres to go before I sleep’?

But we also have no real quarrel with Russia. We have made it up out of nothing, and now we are losing control of it.

Since aggressive war was outlawed in 1945, European nations have tended to use devious methods to destroy, weaken, undermine, deter or attack their enemies, rather than openly send their tanks across borders.

The old Soviet Union financed communist movements and their front organisations in Western countries.

And both sides also ran a secret war – submarines sneaking into each other’s territorial waters, secret support for dissidents by us, and for strikers and ‘peace campaigners’ by them, and of course spying. 

Spying is a hostile, dangerous and cruel activity which infuriates its targets, including us. 

Remember the 42-year prison sentence for George Blake, one of the few Soviet agents we managed to catch and prosecute?

You don’t spy on friends and you don’t spy on people you’re afraid of, or people you owe money to. 

I doubt very much that Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) tries to recruit agents, or to finance opponents of the government, in Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Washington DC, Riyadh, or Peking. I expect its main activity in these places is lunch.

But what the Skripal case tells us is that, long after the Cold War ended, we still choose to treat Russia as the sort of country where we should continue active, aggressive spying and efforts to bring down the government. 

Not only did we pay Colonel Skripal a lot of money for the names of Russian agents in the West, we financed opponents of the Russian government (and we complain that they mess around in our politics!). Why do we do this? 

Now that communism, the USSR and the Warsaw Pact are on the scrapheap, I am at a loss to see what reason we have to be Russia’s enemy, or what reason they have to be ours. 

‘What the Skripal (above) case tells us is that, long after the Cold War ended, we still choose to treat Russia as the sort of country where we should continue active, aggressive spying and efforts to bring down the government’

We have no common border, we have no colonial rivalries, we barely even trade any more since our oil deals collapsed. We cheerfully get on with equally nasty despotisms elsewhere, especially China.

Yet the Cold War had been over for nearly five years, and we were on good terms with Boris Yeltsin, when the SIS hired Colonel Skripal of the Russian GRU (Main Military Intelligence Directorate).

It took the Russians nine years to catch him, and a year of presumably pretty savage interrogation before they hit back by exposing MI6’s comical ‘fake-rock’ operation in Moscow.

The Kremlin could easily have had Skripal killed during his years in Russia’s disease-ridden, violent prison system. But they didn’t. 

They are much angrier with us now than they were then. Yes, what they apparently did in Salisbury is a filthy, inexcusable thing. 

But it is the face of modern combat, in a war our government chose to fight. What answer do we have to it that will not make it worse? 

Not even Carey could save this soggy drivel

‘The impossibly grand Sir David Hare – too grand, for example, to answer polite letters from yours truly – has made a prize fool of himself with his BBC flop Collateral, a non-thriller’ (above: Carey Mulligan in the show)

 The impossibly grand Sir David Hare – too grand, for example, to answer polite letters from yours truly – has made a prize fool of himself with his BBC flop Collateral, a non-thriller. 

Nobody at the BBC dared to tell him that he had written a clunker, partly because he is so majestic, partly because they too were so blinded by dogma and Leftist bigotry that they couldn’t see what was wrong with it. 

They presumably hoped that high-quality stars such as Carey Mulligan would save it. But they didn’t. 

It wasn’t just the soggy, exhausted cliches of Sir David’s clapped-out Hampstead imagination – saintly lesbian vicar persecuted for her love affair with an illegal immigrant, nice Left-wing police versus vicious Thatcherite MI5, cruelly persecuted refugees, evil Right-wing Army, evil Right-wing press – though these were bad enough. 

It was that almost all of them (the Left-wing police being the only accurate bit) are totally wrong. 

Sir David’s views of the world are as outdated and deluded as those of a blimpish, ancient High Court judge of 50 years ago. 

The revolutionary generation of 1968 are now themselves the fossils and dinosaurs. Isn’t it time they were swept away? Where’s the revolution when you need one? 

Alas, it’s probably going to look like Donald Trump. Does anyone know of a good monastery, preferably well-hidden among high mountains?

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