Yulia Skripal with Nash van Drake, in floral surroundings: Remember the suggestion that the family were poisoned by weedkiller?

What madness is this?

Here‘s The Guardian, dated April 6:

Two guinea pigs belonging to Sergei Skripal died and his cat was put down after the Salisbury nerve agent attack, the government has revealed.

A spokeswoman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said the dead guinea pigs and a “distressed” cat were discovered when a vet was able to enter Skripal’s home, which had been sealed off during the police investigation. Defra said it believed the guinea pigs had died of thirst.

Poor pets, right?

But – hang on – look at this:

A poisoned Russian double agent’s cat and two guinea pigs were taken from his home to be tested, according to a source.

‘Nobody has seen the poor pets since the poisoning,’ a source close to the family told the Sun.

‘I understand the cat and the guinea pigs were removed from the house and taken away to be assessed.’

Mr Skripal is very fond of his £1,500 black Persian cat called Nash van Drake and apparently spent thousands of pounds bringing the feline and gunea pigs to the UK from Russia. His vet Howard Taylor said he offered to help after he found out Mr Skripal had been poisoned.

It seems Nash van Drake was not the Skripals’, but Schrödinger’s Cat – both alive and dead at the same time.

Perhaps. Logic suggests it is more likely that the article quoted second – from Metro on March 17, which was quoting The Sun – was mistaken. But The Sun is also the source of information that Nash van Drake was euthanised after being tested at Porton Down.

So The Sun is Schrödinger’s newspaper – both wrong and right at the same time. Right? Wrong? Really? It’s so confusing.

In all seriousness, going by the most likely explanation, logically we have to ask why the animals were sealed inside the Skripals’ house for weeks at a time with no food or water – especially as questions were asked about them nearly three weeks ago!

Logically, again, we cannot expect the animals to have been missed by investigators, because the house must have been examined for evidence before it was sealed. Otherwise the government’s investigation would have been hopelessly compromised from the start.

These animals should have been taken out and tested for nerve agent contamination a month ago, after the Skripals were found on that Salisbury park bench.

The lack of any such investigation casts even more doubt on the truth of the UK government’s claims.

Not that any more doubt needs to be laid at 10 Downing Street’s door. And what does the RSPCA have to say?

Afterword: A commenter on Facebook has pointed out that this story seemed like a ‘dead cat’ strategy all along. I’m in two minds about whether the statement is in very bad taste, or entirely to-the-point.

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