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Seumas Milne is not a likeable man and his political judgement is - to put it mildly - fallible. So I was ready to believe people when they said his lobby briefing on Russia was a puiblic scandal.

Then I looked up what he actuially said:

‘The Government has access to information and intelligence on this matter which others don’t. However, also there is a history in relation to weapons of mass destruction and intelligence which is problematic, to put it mildly.  If the material is from the Soviet period, the break-up of the Soviet state led to all sorts of military material ending up in random hands.’

Every word of that is incontestably true. No one - not even Theresa May - denies any one of those facts.

The government may have firm evidence that the Russian state was behind the Salisbury attacks, but if it has, it hasn't yet shared that evidence with us - perhaps for good reasons.

The British security services did collaborate in a document which backed up Tony Blair's false claim to have evidence that Saddam Husein had weapons of mass destruction.

That did undermine our faith in the security servijces, and it does mean that we want evidence before taking their unsupported word that this or that country did this or that dreadful thing. 

And Milne's last sentence contains a terrible truth, which we all know, and which we don't think about too much, because if we did, we'd be permanently terrified.