The Novichok inquiry raises some big questions for MI5

The inquiry into the death of Dawn Sturgess as an innocent victim of the attempt to murder Russian double-agent Sergei Skripal in 2018 has begun, a mere six years after the event. The question is, what can it tell us that we don’t already know?

Britain’s love affair with lengthy, expensive and tardy inquiries continues with, in this case, a brief to ‘ascertain… who the deceased was; how; when and where she came by her death’, to identify ‘where responsibility for the death lies’ and to ‘make such recommendations as may seem appropriate’.

While no doubt of great comfort to the Sturgess family, on one level this seems a rather pointless exercise. We surely know who she was, and how she died, having sprayed on her wrist what turned out not to be perfume, but the nerve agent Novichok hidden in a discarded bottle.