Corbyn’s Salisbury response is straight from the Trump playbook

It is deeply weird that Jeremy Corbyn will not condemn Russia for carrying out a chemical weapons attack on British soil. Actually, it’s beyond weird. It’s astonishing. Earlier this year, Corbyn saw the same intelligence that convinced everyone else – including his closest comrade John McDonnell – that the Salisbury novichok poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia was carried out by Russian agents and approved at the highest levels within the Kremlin. This same evidence was deemed sufficient grounds by 27 countries to expel more than a 150 Russian diplomats. Yet rather than express outrage and condemn what was clearly a peace-time atrocity, Corbyn obfuscated – “assertions and probability are not the same as certainty” – and pulled punches in a way that seemed at best bizarre. He continues to do so now. Why?

At PMQs this week, after Theresa May named the two Russian agents that British intelligence is certain carried out the attack, Corbyn spoke only of bringing “those responsible” to justice.