The Salisbury Poisonings: Haunting stories behind the horror of a Kremlin killing

The Salisbury Poisonings 

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Every night on the news, as reporters investigate a stabbing or a suburban drugs bust, you will hear a bystander say: ‘That sort of thing just doesn’t happen around here.’ It’s the universal cry of the baffled neighbour.

It could have been a slogan on the T-shirt of every character we met in The Salisbury Poisonings (BBC1) – a meticulous dramatisation of the aftermath of 2018’s assassination attempt on a former Russian spy in the small Wiltshire city.

Police and local authorities were not simply unprepared for it, the attack – using a synthetic nerve agent called Novichok – was literally unimaginable.

We saw it on the faces of doctors at Salisbury hospital, as they encountered police firearms officers in bullet-proof jackets guarding the wards. We heard it in the voices of council staff, trying to get their heads around what was happening.

‘The security services have become involved,’ said an official. ‘Which ones? All of them!’ He might as well have announced that aliens had landed. 

That sort of thing just doesn’t happen around… no, actually, since Wiltshire is the county of corn circles and UFOs, aliens would be positively commonplace compared to spies with a licence to kill signed by the Kremlin.

The closest this opening hour came to comedy was the way local detectives uncovered the background of a man found unconscious and convulsing on a park bench – they Googled him and realised they had a notorious ex-Soviet defector on their hands.

Director Saul Dibb depicted their stunned sense of disbelief for a purpose. The aftershocks of the attack were all the worse because at first no one knew how to react.

Police who searched the house of the target, former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, lacked proper protective equipment. 

Instead, one of them brought along hazchem suits borrowed ‘off a mate in the fire brigade – best I could do on a Sunday’.

This inadequate gear could be directly responsible for the poisoning of DS Nick Bailey (played by Rafe Spall), who was infected by a fleck of Novichok probably at the Skripal house – we saw him lift his goggles to rub an eye at one point.

When the three-part series was written and filmed, of course, there was no inkling that failures of protective equipment would lead to the death of a number of NHS staff during a viral pandemic just two years after Salisbury.

Those parallels were all the more grim for not being highlighted. We were woefully under-equipped in 2018 and no better prepared the second time round.

Almost a docudrama, this account is based on interviews with many of those who were involved – in particular, the police and public health officials but also friends and family of the victims.

There’s a danger with relying so heavily on factual accuracy, that the human aspects of the drama are overlooked. That couldn’t happen here, thanks to a deliberate decision to cast actors known for their emotional performances.

Annabel Scholey is DS Bailey’s wife, terrified by her husband’s collapse and trying to hide her fears from their two small daughters. 

Anne-Marie Duff plays the head of the council’s health and safety department, horribly aware that none of her training covers civic protocol for a chemical attack by a foreign superpower.

Most of all, it paints a rounded portrait of Dawn Sturgess – the troubled mother-of-three whose life, you might think, could not possibly be affected by international espionage or political grudges. 

Dawn and her boyfriend, Charlie Rowley, were also exposed to the nerve agent and she died while her partner survived.

MyAnna Buring gives a complex portrayal of a woman who was too often dismissed in TV reports as an ‘alcoholic’.

We see Dawn as an affectionate mum, clinging to her religious faith and making a determined effort to keep the peace with her own mother. 

But we also see her being patronised by social workers, who penalise her for being unreliable but offer no support. Dawn is more to be pitied than condemned.

Far better to see the effect on her and her family, than to glorify the murderers. 

In the first episode, the two Russian agents have not featured – perhaps they will make an appearance tonight or tomorrow – but we can be thankful there was no attempt to turn this crime into a thriller.

Writers Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson evoked how everyone involved was floundering in the first hours by using a few throwaway phrases. 

Seeing a uniformed constable trying to clean up the park bench with a dustpan and brush after the Skripals were taken to hospital, a police sergeant said: ‘Let Trumpton give that a thorough hose down.’

How marvellous to think that some coppers still refer to their chums in the fire brigade as ‘Trumpton’ – nothing to do with the US President but a reference to Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew and the rest in the Sixties children’s puppet show.

Not that the line was much to smile about. By cleaning up the scene with a fire hose, emergency workers risked flushing Novichok into the water supply.

And as one military scientist explained, the nerve agent can remain lethal for at least 50 years – too microscopic to be detected and too virulent to be neutralised.

‘In terms of protecting citizens, this is about as bad as it gets,’ he said. Such an insipid remark hardly conveys the scale of the disaster threatening an entire town. But then, what words could do it justice?