The leader of Salisbury city council, Matthew Dean, has criticised Jeremy Corbyn for not making an official visit after the nerve agent poisonings in the town.
Dean revealed that he had not even realised the Labour leader had been to the city at all until Corbyn had said so in the Commons on Wednesday.
The city council had helped welcome visitors including the prime minister, two home secretaries, numerous ministers and Prince Charles after the events.
Dean, a Conservative, said: “Jeremy Corby’s office has made no contact at all with the city council. If he did visit, I’m sad that we didn’t have the opportunity to explain what we’ve been doing to recover from this terrible incident. We would have liked the opportunity for our officers to have briefed him and possibly to have arranged for him to meet residents, businesses and agencies involved. As the leader of the opposition I would like him to come.”
In the Commons, Corbyn simply said he had visited the city and gave no details. A Labour source said he stayed in Salisbury overnight on 21 July on a private visit. The source said: “He met local people and listened to them speak about how the town had been affected by the awful attack.”
Corbyn’s response to the novichok poisonings has prompted criticism from his political opponents and even some allies.
Briefing journalists after the Salisbury statement, Corbyn’s official spokesman gave a robust defence of his approach in March, when the prime minister first attributed the attack to Russia and some Labour MPs condemned their leader’s response as lacklustre. “Jeremy took a proportionate, evidence-based, approach to what took place, which was the right approach, and it’s been a step-by-step approach ever since,” he said.
Corbyn received a briefing from the security forces on Wednesday morning, and his spokesman said it had now become clear that the Russian state had been directly involved in the attack. “It’s clear now that very strong evidence points to Russian state culpability, and obviously Jeremy condemns the Russian state for that culpability,” he said.
He pointed to Corbyn’s remarks in the Commons that Labour would support “reasonable and effective action”, against Russia, adding that the most effective approach would be “financial action against the use of London by the oligarchs linked to the Russian state”.
Asked about remarks six months ago comparing the Salisbury situation to the claims about weapons of mass destruction made in the run-up to the Iraq war, the spokesman said Labour’s point then had been “as much about the political use of the intelligence as the intelligence itself”.
