My Country: right or wrong?

Russia is in the news again this week. Reports have emerged that Sir Christopher Steele, former head of the Russia desk at MI6, has given evidence to the intelligence and security committee suggesting that Theresa May and Boris Johnson were aware of Russian interference in both the 2016 EU referendum and the US presidential election of the same year and yet “threw a blanket over it.” People have short memories when it comes to politics and it is striking that this report was withheld from publication before the 2019 election — no doubt due to concerns that it doesn’t paint Boris Johnson particularly favourably. Likewise, it is remarkable how quickly the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal has fallen off the national agenda. Other concerns (Covid-19; Brexit; Johnson’s rise to become PM; China, Huawei and 5G) have taken its place. Yet, the BBC’s three-part drama The Salisbury Poisonings has just aired in a juicy prime-time Sunday night slot with the following parts playing over subsequent evenings. Would this be an opportunity to refresh audiences of the ever-present danger that Vladimir Putin’s Russia poses to the free world?

Well, yes and no. Interestingly, The Salisbury Poisoning takes a different angle to that which you might expect. This isn’t your typical police-cum-secret service procedural. As Deputy Chief Constable Paul Mills says early on in episode one “our job in this room is not to find out who did it but to keep the people of Salisbury safe”. Although the show is an ensemble piece our protagonist is Tracy Dazkiewicz, Head of Public Health for Wiltshire, and the focus of the drama is on her and her team’s efforts to discover the source of the poisoning and trace its spread across the city. Is this beginning to sound familiar?

In what is probably a bizarre coincidence rather than some edgy programming from the BBC The Salisbury Poisonings is in several ways the perfect horror thriller for the age of Covid-19. It’s prescience over issues such as test-and-trace, personal protective equipment (PPE), the risks for and against opening up the economy and the sacrifices individuals are asked to make in the name of the public good is frankly remarkable. Its timing, as the debate roars on over how best to re-open society, could not be better.

If you’re unfamiliar with the events surrounding the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal it goes something like this: a former spy for the British, Sergei is brought to the UK to live after a spy swap; he and his daughter are then poisoned by taking in a nerve agent called novichok which attacks the brain and nervous system causing every major organ to go into overdrive — it can also survive on surfaces for up to fifty years. DS Nick Bailey, the first to search the Skripal’s home, picks some up on his gloves and also ends up in intensive care; months later Dawn Sturgess unfortunately passes away after her boyfriend accidentally came across the novichok source in a bin where it had been discarded. Of course, none of this was known to the authorities at the time. They don’t know how the Skripal’s got sick, or indeed where. They don’t know if it’s contagious, or still active. The unknowns, almost as much as the chemical agent itself, are sickening. By the time Tracy Dazkiewicz arrives on the scene, important mistakes have already been made. The first responders have washed down the park bench the Skripals were sitting on with a power-hose, potentially washing hazardous bodily material into a nearby drain. When Nick Bailey searches the Skripal house he asks his colleague: “are these even proper forensic suits?” The response: “Not exactly. Got them off a mate in the Fire Service. It’s the best I could do on a Sunday”, a charmingly prosaic way of accidentally consuming incredibly hazardous chemical material. It feels a little glib to compare this to Covid-19, but the similarities are there nonetheless. Covid-19, or “the novel coronavirus” as it is often called, has been so deadly effective precisely because it is new. This has been coupled by a lack of preparedness.

Similarly to Covid-19, the agent is spread invisibly when the patient is asymptomatic. A sequence where Nick Bailey returns home and touches various kitchen surfaces, taps, glassware and even the bin lid are now infused with a perverse horror. The domestic sphere, with no enemy to point at, should not be a place of profound danger — and yet it is. The task of tracking the source is not made significantly easier even when the agent has been identified. In a speech of quiet authority from Jonathan Slinger (he’ll make a great Chris Whitty when all this gets adapted for screen) the most remarkable detail is that no matter how close to the agent you may swab, if you miss it…you miss it.

With the agent identified, and the severity to public health understood, Dazkiewicz ramps up her measures to make Salisbury city centre safe. These include sourcing and constructing metal hoardings to cut off large chunks of the city that may have been contaminated, at huge costs. “Simon went to every builder’s merchant from here to Bristol” reports a colleague. Tracy replies: “how are you going to pay for it?” This is apparently the least of their problems. “This place is going to look very different tomorrow morning. We’re going to have dozens of calls from local businesses asking what’s going on. What am I going to tell them about this?” Here, as in 2020 Covid-struck Britain, the question of the economic hit, and the tension between transparency and panic, is pulling in two very different directions. At a town hall meeting in episode two a disgruntled local trader shouts “my takings are down 95%, who is going to shop in the shadow of one of those dreadful barriers?”. In this instance it is Salisbury’s reputation as a picturesque cathedral city that is also coming under threat from the poisoning, as the ugliness of police hoardings infect the environment.

Naturally, it isn’t long before Whitehall start sticking their noses in and sticking their noses up at the cost of the measures taken in Salisbury. Bean-counters from the Cabinet Office ask, for no real reason, how much the acquisition of vehicles for testing has cost: £488,000 is the answer. Presumably that’s at least two zeros too many. They then hone in on a request by Dazkiewicz to close down a police station that she is concerned Bailey may have contaminated. “But there’s no evidence?” cries one. “With respect” she hits back “we’re not prosecuting a crime here. We’re assessing a risk. And I believe there is a risk. There’s risk enough to close it.” This neatly encapsulates the nub of the debate over lockdown: whether it was brought in too late, whether it is being lifted too soon. On the one hand you have a side that is treating this as an all-or-nothing affair: there either is or is not evidence that lockdown is required. On the other hand, you have a side who recognises that the risk to human life is paramount: regardless of whether lockdown is entirely necessary, it is recommended because it’s better to be safe than sorry. Now this side can be accused of misunderstanding this issue as a zero-sum game; that any benefits to the economy will naturally come at a cost to public health and vice versa — which of course is not the case. That said, in the short term the more cautious approach is preferable, a perspective that is being borne out by the stats: those with earlier, more severe, lockdowns are doing better at re-opening now. In Salisbury, also, this appears to be the case. After Tracy at first loses the argument over closing the police station, novichok was found “all over the place” and it had to be closed the next day anyway.

This all comes to a head at the end of episode two with something that feels like a reference to Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz but did in fact happen: a “swan has been behaving strangely.” Concerned that the river may be contaminated Dazkiewicz wants all the swans caught, caged and tested. “But this is a report about one bird, Trace” the police groan. She fires back that if it’s in the water course “we can’t control it. It’ll be a full evacuation of the city.” That shuts him up, and Tracy is left to despondently stare into the gushing water. The next day, however, offers a more prosaic explanation: “Bumblefoot, it’s called. It’s a bacterial infection they get on their feet.” The swans, it appears, are fine. What follows is a debate between Tracy and Superintendent Dave Minty about dredging the river. She still thinks it’s worth it, he thinks it’s a waste of time and resources. “We’ve got to draw a line.” This is a refrain we hear plenty of at the moment, the argument being that life is a hazardous compilation of risks, that it’s impossible to live entirely risk-free and to force inertia or paralysis on ourselves is not sustainable or beneficial. DS Bailey and the Skripals have pulled through, nobody has died; we’ve done a fantastic job, time to move on.

But there’s still one episode left. We pick up the action a few months later. Summer is in full swing, the Russian 2018 World Cup, that archetypal example of soft-power, is on the telly and England are playing Colombia in the second round. In a funny twist on pathetic fallacy, Colombia equalise in the final minutes and Tracy Dazkiewicz gets a phone call. There are two more victims.

The story of Dawn Sturgess and her partner Charlie are woven into the first two episodes, but they bare little relation to the events going on in the main plot, which perhaps signposts what is going to happen to them. The pair have been living in sheltered accommodation, Charlie has a history of substance abuse, Dawn with alcoholism, but things are looking up. He’s managed to secure a place of his own and they’ve been sober for a while. Unfortunately, money is still tight and Charlie has to resort to searching through bins for furniture, clothes and nick-nacks for his new place. It is in one such bin that he comes across a discarded perfume bottle, still mostly full. He takes it as a treat for Dawn, unaware of its lethal contents.

There is clearly a class dynamic at play here. The avenues the authorities closed down in the city centre effected local businesses and were deemed unnecessary after a while. Yet the novichok slipped through the cracks, finding itself in a bin, where it didn’t occur to the police to look or to prioritise. After all, who from the public is going to go searching through bins? It’s an unfortunate case of institutional class bias. We can also conjecture that, as with Covid-19, Dawn’s socio-economic background, her history of alcoholism and potentially her malnutrition, will have hampered her chances of fighting off the poison in the way the Skripals and Nick Bailey managed. She passes away.

Naturally, our hero Tracy is racked with guilt. “What the fuck did we miss?” Superintendent Minty offers reassuring gestures “you know there’s no way any of us could have foreseen this” he says as much to himself as to her. But there’s something niggling away at Tracy: if only we’d kept going, gone that little bit further, done that little bit more. But in the end, the real world is impossible to control and you can only do as much as you can. The culmination of Tracy’s journey is an impassioned speech she gives to Minty after hearing of Dawn’s death. “When you rang me I thought ‘This is the important thing you’re supposed to do with your life. This is the reason you went through it all’…and now this has happened.” It is, quite frankly, a career best performance from Anne-Marie Duff. Superintendent Minty, played with a certain everyman charm by Darren Boyd asks her “How many fatalities since you got put on this job? One. And that is deeply, incredibly sad. But it could have been dozens. It could have been hundreds.”

The Salisbury Poisonings serves as a reminder of the profound effectiveness of the British state, something we all too often take for granted. Indeed, it is easy to take it for granted when it is so often faced by such ineffective politicians. The voices of Theresa May and Sajid Javid occasionally bleed through the action, but if anything this drama sheds a light on the quiet determination of civil servants and public officials to get the job done to the best of their ability. It is unbelievable that only one person died as a result of the novichok poisoning in Salisbury, and that statistic is a testament to the incredible work of the doctors, nurses, hospital staff, police officers and public health officers who worked tirelessly to clamp it down. As television drama goes, this is the most patriotic I’ve seen, possibly ever. What does it mean to live in a civilised country if it’s not to live in a country where there is a Tracy Dazkiewicz, where there is a DS Nick Bailey, a Prof. Tim Atkins at Porton Down? To live in a country which, when life throws up one of its horrid unpredictable twists, does its absolute best to take care of you.

Which brings us back, naturally, to the horrid unpredictable twist we’re currently living through. Covid-19 has brought the best out of a lot of people, and has managed to dramatically shape public opinion in favour of our civilising professions — our doctors, our nurses, our cleaners, our public health workers. That being said, the similarities with the events in Salisbury are not parallel. Caution has not been the overriding principle, as demonstrated by our late lockdown, and by public messaging — from the Prime Minister no less — that he was shaking hands with Covid-19 patients as late as March. Honesty and transparency with the public has been sorely lacking as the government struggles to cover up its own failings and the Prime Minister refuses to be the man to deliver bad news to the British public. With a testing regime seemingly designed to meet an arbitrary self-imposed goal, it’s hard not to summarise that the government is more focused on PR than on tangible results.

It’s obviously a lot harder to do all these things on a large scale, and Salisbury is very small. What is striking throughout the series is the closeness of the community, the sense that this is “a nice place to live in” and shock that something so barbaric has occurred there. Dazkiewicz had in fact met Dawn Sturgess, and Nick Bailey knew Charlie from his time on the beat. It’s much easier to be honest with people you know, and we are much more forgiving of people we know in turn. That being said, just because something is hard, it doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing properly. The government must be more honest, more reflective. It must acknowledge its mistakes, and welcome constructive criticism. As Keir Starmer said at Prime Minister’s Questions this week: “The Prime Minister should welcome challenge that could save lives rather than complaining about it.” In that regard, he could learn a thing or two from Tracy Dazkiewicz.