FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
Jeremy Corbyn: Boris Johnson Has ‘Egg on His Face,’ Lied about Alleged Russian Novichok
April 4, 2018 (EIRNS)—In an interview with Sky News today, British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn argued that Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson “has serious questions to answer,” given that his claim on German TV two weeks ago that Britain’s Porton Down had assured him “categorically” that Russia was the source of the Novichok nerve agent used to poison the Skripals, has now been disproven by Porton Down itself. Speaking with Sky News a day earlier, Gary Aitkenhead, chief executive of the Defense Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down, stated that DSTL had not be able to prove that Russia was the source of the Novichok.
So, Corbyn asked, where does that leave Boris Johnson? “With egg on his face.” The Foreign Secretary
“seems to have completely exceeded the information he’d been given and told the world, in categorical terms what he believed had happened, and it’s not backed up by the evidence he claimed to have gotten from Porton Down.”
Corbyn also pointed out that initially, the Foreign Office put out a tweet supporting what Johnson said, but when Porton Down said “it couldn’t and wouldn’t identify where [the nerve agent] came from, the Foreign Office deleted the tweet!” So, Johnson “needs to answer some questions,” Corbyn emphasized, because “there were clearly huge inconsistencies” in his story.
Amidst calls in social media for Johnson’s resignation from the Tory government, other Labour leaders are also speaking out. In an interview with BBC’s Radio 4 “Today” program, shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott commented that
“it doesn’t surprise me Porton Down is saying this because the security services were always very cautious in what they said. What surprised me was that so many were willing to rush into the media and say unequivocally that it was Putin. That’s not necessarily what we were told.”
Abbott also said that the opposition Labour Party was correct in not rushing to judgment when this poisoning story first came out in early March.
Johnson, meanwhile, is sputtering to anyone who will listen that Corbyn is “siding with the Russian spin machine” over the poisoning of the Skripals, “and trying to discredit the U.K. over the Salisbury attack,” the Telegraph reported. Attempting to explain the deletion of its initial tweet backing Johnson, a Foreign Office spokesman limply explained that it had been an “inaccurate summary” of remarks made by the British ambassador in Moscow.
