The Russian election is rolling on, so far with no major hitches, and maybe even less than the expected level of Western sniping. Ghouta continues to be liberated, and so far the predictions of a chemical weapons false flag to justify NATO cruise missile attacks on Damascus have not come about. For the sake of global survival we have to hope that continues.Meanwhile the Skripal case is exposed more and more as a poorly executed, ragged and ridiculous piece of political theatre.The name “novichok” was very possibly grabbed from a Sky TV drama aired earlier this year.

In the TV show novichok is presented as a secret and deadly and exclusively Russian nerve agent, and this is indeed the way May presented it in Parliament. Her research team possibly didn’t bother to look any further, and this is why, when the truth about real-life novichoks emerged, the government was left floundering.

Risible of course, but currently not completely impossible.

Rather than acknowledging the dismal and embarrassing failure of their narrative the UK government, in the person of Boris Johnson, is apparently doubling down and telling fresh and even more extraordinary stories. On the state-funded BBC’s Andrew Marr show today, Johnson talked parallel-universe nonsense for 20 minutes, completely unchallenged by state-funded Marr of course, who simply let him say whatever he felt like saying, in the grand tradition of state-funded BBC complicity in state-level deceit. Johnson’s brand of weasel-words and lies by omission and commission was in the best tradition of “perfidious Albion”, even going so far as to allege at one point:

We actually have evidence within the last 10 years that Russia has not only been investigating the delivery of nerve agents for the purpose of assassination, but has also been creating and stockpiling novichok.

A claim that flies in the face of every known fact, including a) that Russia’s entire stockpile of chemical weapons was verified as destroyed last year by the OPCW, and that novichoks had never been considered viable or manufactured anywhere prior to an alleged OPCW-observed succesful atempt to do so by Iran in 2016.

The government’s rhetoric is currently so deranged, its conduct by turns so delusional and so furtive, while the basic facts of what happened to the Skripals remain so contradictory, it’s legitimate at this stage to wonder how real any of this “drama” actually is.

And what the endgame here can possibly be.