It’s the mundanity that is striking. The perfume bottle, the Gatwick Express, the London Underground, the budget hotel in east London (”£59 per night, Towels and Toiletries are provided, along with a self service Continental Breakfast”), reconnaissance in broad daylight, the toxic tour of a cathedral city, relying on trains on a Sunday to carry out a political assassination, before flying home together to Russia. “This was more Johnny English than James Bond,” Ben Wallace, the security minister, tells The Times. And yet its apparent unprofessionalism makes it all the more chilling. There were gasps from MPs as Theresa May laid out the details of how the men who carried out the Salisbury nerve agent attack, and used the names Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov,…

Source: The Times September 06, 2018 08:03 UTC