Foxy blonde spies and the world of double cross

WHAT a week of old-fashioned Cold War intrigue. I haven’t had so much doublecross-tastic fun since Lisbeth Salander set up boxer Harold Neidermann in the final chapter of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy.

It seems churlish not to start where I ended last Wednesday with my prediction that England would get their leg well, and truly, lifted in their 2018 bid.

No wonder Vladimir Putin was described as an “alpha dog” in the voluminous WikiLeaks documents which have poured across our lives in the past seven days. And he didn’t even have to be in Switzerland to do it.