Jeremy Corbyn and Novichok: what did the Labour leader really say?

Jeremy Corbyn’s spokesman this afternoon caused something of a stir when he insisted to journalists that the Labour leader had always said that the evidence from the Salisbury attack pointed to direct or indirect Russian involvement. This didn’t seem quite right: Corbyn attracted a great deal of opprobrium for failing to blame Russia for the attack at the time.

It’s worth going back over what precisely the Labour leader did say after the attack – and what he didn’t. On 12 March, when Theresa May made her first statement to the Commons about the matter, she told MPs that ‘the government have concluded that it is highly likely that Russia was responsible for the act against Sergei and Yulia Skripal’. She added that ‘either this was a direct act by the Russian state against our country; or the Russian government lost control of their potentially catastrophically damaging nerve agent and allowed it to get into the hands of others’.