WHY did the Russians send assassins to Salisbury to poison the Skripals?

Because they could, seems to be the answer. As callous and contemptuous as that.

And why didn’t they do a better job of covering their tracks?

Because their motive, as in so many other murders, was to scare off anyone even thinking of rocking Vladimir Putin’s boat.

And because they weren’t afraid of any practical, political consequences. Our nation had, through its previous weakness, led them to believe there wouldn’t be any, although in the event, Theresa May’s response was robust.

Two years on, many questions remain, and conspiracy theories abound. But maybe it really was as simple as that?

I spent last Wednesday evening at St John’s Place, the community centre in a beautifully-refurbished church in Lower Bemerton, at a talk by Guardian correspondent and author Luke Harding.

How glad I was that my years in national journalism involved safe desk jobs when I heard about his experiences in Russia.

For starters, the plane that took his family to Moscow in 2006 was contaminated by radioactive polonium because the killers of Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko flew home on it.

He was followed everywhere by leather-jacketed goons, had his phone cut off in mid-call if he even joked about Putin, his flat was bugged by hidden cameras, and our diplomatic service offered no help. Britain’s insignificance was borne in upon him.

He told how the family would return to the tenth-floor apartment to find things moved – tights on the washing line left with their legs tied together, the fridge unplugged, a locked window next to a child’s bed opened. “Idiotically obvious” warnings not to overstep the mark.

As he put it, the whole machinery of the Russian state is like a Mafia.

Putin is probably “the richest guy on the planet”, “a common criminal dressed up as a head of state”.

Informally, he owns everything in his country. All the money invested in oligarchs is his to take away. In that respect, “he even owns Chelsea” (football club, that is).

Although much of his loot is laundered through British banks, he loathes Britain because oligarchs who have crossed him, like Litvinenko or Boris Berezovsky (also assassinated) have found shelter here.

But more worrying still is what Harding called the “comprehensive penetration” of Britain’s politics by Russian interests today.

He talked about the Russian-born Lubov Chernukhin, who last month paid £45,000 at an auction to play tennis with Boris Johnson.

In all, she has given the Conservatives more than £1.6mllion.

Her husband used to be Putin’s deputy economics minister. Er, yes.

There was a brief postscript from Guardian community editor Caroline Bannock, who lives near Salisbury.

She felt that the national media hadn’t covered themselves in glory with their reporting of Novichok’s two subsequent victims, Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley.

And her paper has been co-operating with the BBC over a factual drama that aims to capture how local people were impacted and how they reacted. Should be good.

anneriddle36@gmail.com