Nicholas Bailey
I wrote back here that the Achilles Heel of the door handle theory is Detective Sergeant Nicholas Bailey. When his name was first mentioned publicly, on 8th March, it was widely reported that he had been one of the first responders at the bench in The Maltings. However, this was thrown into confusion the following day by none other than Lord Ian Blair, former Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police, who stated the following on Radio 4's Today Programme:
"There are some indications that the police officer who was injured had been to the house, whereas there was a doctor who looked after the patients in the open, who hasn't been affected at all. So there maybe some clues floating around in here.'"
As I pointed out in that piece, the phrase "some indications" was somewhat disingenuous, as The Metropolitan Police would have known by that time exactly where Mr Bailey had been. And in any case, there was no particular reason for Lord Blair to reveal this information.

The point I went on to make is that if it was known that he had been poisoned, which it was; if it was known that he'd been to the house, which it was; and if it was known that the poisoning didn't happen at The Maltings, which it was (at least according to investigators who ruled it out with surprising swiftness), then it MUST have been known that he was poisoned AT THE HOUSE. But if this was the case, why exactly was the house not locked down, with forensic scientists all over the house taking swabs? Why did it take nearly two weeks for that to happen?

As far as I can see, there are only two explanations for this. The first is sheer incompetence. That's possible, I suppose. I mean we are talking about an organisation which somehow managed to put out a formal statement setting out the case against two suspects, which contained the wrong street name, no real details of the suspects' movements in Salisbury, and the somewhat impossible feat of the men being at Gatwick Airport whilst the plane they were on was still in the air. There is that. But even this seems to be stretching it. As I say, it was known that Mr Bailey was poisoned, it was known that he was in two locations that the Skripals were also in, and one of these had apparently been ruled out. Which means it MUST have been ...? Not hard, is it? And yet the house wasn't swabbed until 22nd March.

The second possibility is that he wasn't poisoned at the house at all, but it took two weeks when the house wasn't being swabbed, when the door handle manual hadn't been discovered, and when the police were still searching for poison in places where Mr Bailey never went, to concoct a narrative that would place the location of his poisoning away from The Maltings.

But I don't think that Mr Bailey's role as Achilles Heel stops at the door handle. I think he is, in many ways, the Achilles Heel of everything in this case. Was he really at The Maltings? I'm not sure. Did he really go to the house? Again, I'm really not sure. When did he fall ill and go to hospital? Again, it's all a bit hazy. And by the way this has nothing to do with me refusing to accept official explanations; on the contrary, it is because every attempt by the authorities to explain Mr Bailey's role and how he got poisoned have been shrouded in riddles, mysteries and enigmas.

Just in case readers jump to the wrong conclusions, for the record I am quite certain that Mr Bailey had nothing to do with the poisoning itself. I say this on the basis that he is said to have driven himself to Salisbury District Hospital after feeling ill - hardly the actions of a man who was involved in the poisoning itself (had he been involved, he would surely have been taken to a secret decontamination location, not allowed to drive himself to an NHS hospital). But his role, the time and place of his poisoning, and his subsequent disappearance since the incident all stick out like a sore thumb.

One thing that is particularly interesting is the time of Mr Bailey's admission to Salisbury District Hospital. There are some doubts as to when this was, but since my aim in these pieces is to hold the official narrative up to scrutiny, I will go by the official statement released by The Metropolitan Police on 5th June:
"Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, a Wiltshire police officer who was amongst the first to respond to the incident, also fell seriously ill after being exposed to the nerve agent and was admitted to hospital on 6 March. Since being discharged from hospital on 22 March, Nick has continued to make good progress but remains off work."
So according to The Met, it wasn't until well over 30 hours, and possibly as much as 48 hours after the incident on 4th March, that Mr Bailey was admitted to hospital.

I have to say that the idea of the world's deadliest nerve agent taking 4 hours to take effect, before acting simultaneously on a 33-year-old woman and a 66-year-old-man, with a drive, a duck-feed, a risotto lunch and white wine in between, is almost more nonsense than I can reasonably cope with. But the idea that the exact same substance contaminated Mr Bailey at approximately 5pm on the same day, but took more than a day-and-a-half to take effect on him, has a strong tendency to make my eye start twitching, and my mouth start jabbering in much the same nervous and maniacal way that Herbert Lom perfected as Commissioner Charles Dreyfus in the Pink Panther films.

Seriously, how likely is it, do you suppose, that Mr Bailey got contaminated by the world's deadliest nerve agent on a Sunday evening, but was only hospitalised on the Tuesday? It is self-evident nonsense, is it not, but it does of course beg the question as to where he was poisoned then.

Not for the first time, I am indebted to Liane for digging out a piece of information that I had not previously come across. Here's a report from The Mail on 17th April:
"A multimillion pound operation, involving around 190 specialist military personnel, is expected to start in the coming days, with the process lasting months. The evidence room and a police officer's locker inside Bourne Hill police station will be among the first areas to be cleaned, along with two ambulance stations and The Maltings area - where the Skripals were found [my emphasis]."
And here's a report from Spire FM on 28th June:
"Decontamination work at Salisbury's police station and council offices, carried out after the spy poisoning, has now been completed. After extensive testing and cleaning by specialist teams Defra have handed Bourne Hill back to the Salisbury recovery group stressing it is safe to return to public use. The deep clean focused on two areas of the building, the evidence store used by Wiltshire Police and two lockers [my emphasis]."
I think we can assume that the decontamination of Bourne Hill was as a result of Mr Bailey coming back to the station, having - according to the official story - been contaminated with "Novichok" between 5pm and 6pm on 4th March at the door handle of 47 Christie Miller Road. However, not for the first time in this saga, it's interesting what was not contaminated. There is no mention of the door at Bourne Hill Police Station being contaminated, or of anyone becoming contaminated after touching it, and yet surely Mr Bailey must have come through the door.

But it might be an automatic door, you say. Yes, it might, but the thing is the station wasn't open. It was a Sunday, and thanks to the Municipal Department for Spending Taxpayers' Money on the Wrong Things, it wasn't open. And so if Mr Bailey went to Bourne Hill that night, he would have had to manually open the door. Yet just as we are asked to believe that the Skripals somehow managed to enter Zizzis and The Mill without contaminating the door handles with their contaminated hands, so we are asked to believe that Mr Bailey somehow managed to open the locked police station door without contaminating it with his contaminated hands.

But notice where the focus of decontamination was. The evidence store and two lockers. That's very interesting, not least of which because this was not - at that time - a criminal investigation. And so how and why would the evidence store have been contaminated?

There is an obvious explanation, and it is not that Mr Bailey touched it with hands that had been contaminated at Christie Miller Road. As I say, had that been the case, he couldn't have entered the station without contaminating the door, and perhaps other inner doors as well. No, the obvious explanation is that an item which was contaminated was placed in the evidence store. And given that the official narrative only has Mr Bailey being hospitalised on 6th March, which is the more rational explanation:
  • That he had been poisoned a day-and-a-half before, at the door handle of 47 Christie Miller Road, with a substance that allegedly took 4 hours to work on the Skripals?
  • Or that he (or a colleague) took something away from The Maltings, placed it in the evidence store at Bourne Hill, and then became contaminated when examining it on the morning of 6th March?
Yes, yes. I'm well aware that they don't do rational in this case. But just in case you wondered, the answer is the second of those explanations is the more rational one. I'm not saying it is the explanation; just that it's more rational than their explanation. But of course it can't be that, can it, because then it would imply that not just Mr Bailey, but the Skripals too were not poisoned at the door handle, but perhaps by an item passed to them in The Mill or The Maltings.

Let me end with a final observation. Liane (again) recently drew attention to something very peculiar in the statement given by the OPCW Director-General, Ahmet Üzümcü, on 4th April. This was about a fortnight after a delegation from the organisation visited Salisbury to take biomedical and environmental samples. Here is what he said:
"The OPCW experts visited the locations where two of the victims were reportedly exposed to a toxic chemical and collected several environmental samples. The team also took biomedical samples from these two victims, as well as from a third individual, a police officer reportedly exposed to a toxic chemical [my emphasis]."
Did you get that? Since they only visited the locations where two of the three victims were reportedly exposed to a nerve agent, and since Mr Bailey is not included in these three, it is implicitly stated that Mr Bailey was not poisoned at the same place as the Skripals. And since it is alleged that the Skripals were poisoned at the door handle, then Mr Bailey can't have been poisoned there, can he?

Could it have been the evidence store or the lockers? Given that these were said to be the focus of decontamination efforts at Bourne Hill, and given that the doors he entered were apparently not contaminated, I'd say it's a fair chance that this may have been where and how he got poisoned.