Tom Simons

And therefore, it was clear this was an attempt to shock everybody about what Russia could do and that none of that would have happened without the knowledge of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president.

And so the blame, the moral blame for this is laid firmly at his feet by the inquiry chairman.

Well, so I think it's fair to say, given that we'd had the Litvinenko poisoning, the Russian journalist poisoned with a radioactive material some years before in the UK, that this was sort of on the radar of the intelligence services.

But Sergei Skripal felt that he was safe.

And I think that appears to have had quite a big play in this.

He felt that he'd been pardoned effectively by the Russians because they'd allowed him to leave the country as part of a spy swap.

What perhaps hadn't been taken seriously enough was that he was working with British intelligence, briefing them on what he knew about the Russians.

And the Russians had said, as a famous quote from Vladimir Putin, where he says that traitors will choke on the pieces of silver that they've swallowed, that there was an anger there.

And despite the fact that Sergei Skripal did not want to be put in a safe house to be given a fake name or that sort of thing,

Perhaps there wasn't enough done to make sure that he was safe and that this couldn't happen.