Boris Johnson and Alexander Lebedev (nonfiction)

Boris Johnson and Alexander Lebedev.

Boris Johnson and the Lebedevs

In 2018, the Kremlin ordered two military intelligence officers to use a prohibited chemical weapon on a British street.

Their discarded bottle of novichok killed a British citizen – Dawn Sturgess. But it was only chance, pure luck, that it wasn’t more. As President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, Fiona Hill, said this year: “There was enough nerve agent in that bottle to kill several thousand people.”

In Britain, we treated it as a botched assassination attempt, but Nato understood something far more sinister had taken place. It was a chemical warfare attack on the civilian population of a Nato country. Under Nato’s rules, an attack on one member nation is an attack on all. It acted quickly and decisively.

Sergei and Yulia Skripal Sergei, right, and Yulia Skripal, who were targeted by Russian military inteligence officers with novichok in Salisbury in March 2018. Johnson, as foreign secretary, oversaw Britain’s response, liaising with Nato as it orchestrated almost unprecedented international cooperation, imposing sanctions against Russia and expelling 342 Russian diplomats from countries around the world. Then, on 27 April, Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, convened a meeting in Brussels with foreign ministers of Nato’s member nations to discuss the crucial next steps.

Britain’s foreign secretary attended that meeting. He left it, apparently still holding documents. He somehow managed to lose the 24/7 security detail all foreign secretaries have. He flew to Italy alone. And there he met the a former lieutenant-colonel in the KGB, Alexander Lebedev, a spy who was stationed inside the Russian embassy in London in the late 1980s and served alongside fellow officers who included Vladimir Putin. It was a meeting, Johnson acknowledged to MPs last week, that took place in breach of all protocols, without any foreign office officials present.

We still don’t know what was said at that meeting. We don’t know if there are any official records of it. We don’t know who else was there. We don’t know what documents Johnson had in his possession. We don’t know if he betrayed secrets – either deliberately or inadvertently – about Nato’s strategy.

• Boris Johnson and the Lebedevs: how I exposed the prime minister’s defining scandal @ The Guardian by Carole Cadwalladr (16 July 2022) - The ties between the PM and an ex-KGB officer, first revealed in the Observer three years ago, could be Johnson’s lasting legacy