Visitors from Russia: No flowers!

The Russian language, we don’t doubt, has an idiom that is the rough equivalent of the English exclamation ‘what a cheek they’ve got!’

That was almost certainly the initial reaction at the British foreign office when it received a request, presumably delivered by a diplomat from Moscow’s now spy-free London embassy, for a consular visit to Yulia Skripal, who is on the mend in a Wiltshire hospital.