THOSE who were present that night are unlikely to forget the moustachioed man in the audience, who got to his feet clasping the microphone and began to introduce himself.

“My name is Alexander Litvinenko and I am a former KGB and FSB officer,” he said in English, before asking if his comments could be made in Russian through the translator who was handling the Q&A session between the audience and guest speakers on the platform.

It was back in October 2006 in London’s Frontline Club, a hangout for journalists and foreign correspondents that I sometimes frequent while in the city, when Litvinenko spoke that evening. The session was meant to be a commemorative one, celebrating the life and work of the great Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin, who had been gunned down outside her Moscow flat barely a fortnight before. But by the time Mr Litvinenko had finished his remarks, pulling no punches in laying the blame for the death of his friend Ms Politkovskaya squarely on Mr Putin, reporters had swarmed around him.

A few weeks later television pictures showed him as almost unrecognisable. By then he had been poisoned with radioactive polonium-210, administered in a cup of tea. By late November he was dead, murdered many believe by the Russian state.

This week I couldn’t help thinking back to that night at the Frontline Club, not least after the former spy’s widow, Marina Litvinenko, herself spoke out in the wake of the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal, the latest former Russian spy the UK Government now believes to have been targeted by the Kremlin.

By its very nature the intelligence world is never transparent, not least in the wake of such a devastating event. Even now Russia denies involvement, while no definitive proof has been made public by the UK Government implicating Moscow. That’s not to say it doesn’t have such proof. In publicly revealing gathered intelligence, operations are almost inevitably compromised, a simple point the usual conspiracy theorists who come out of the woodwork at such times fail to grasp. These armchair spook specialists almost always see smoking guns, culprits and motives where they’re least likely to lie.

It was for good reason that the CIA’s famous head of counter-intelligence during the Cold War, James Jesus Angleton, referred to his experience as “the wilderness of mirrors”, capturing as he did the enduring lot of the professional counterspy who is never quite sure who’s really running the show.

While much of what has happened over the attack on Mr Skripal remains opaque, certain things have become increasingly transparent. I’m talking of the way the crisis has revealed almost as much about the state of British politics as it has done about Russia’s.

Mrs Litvinenko made that much clear this week highlighting how the Tories received more than £3m from Russian-linked tycoons and their companies, since the Conservative Party’s return to power. During Theresa May’s tenure at No 10, Russian oligarchs and their associates alone registered donations of £826,100 to the Tories. Mrs Litvinenko, then, is right that Britain should now look at wider and bigger personal sanctions beyond those in the US Magnitsky Act, which imposed visa bans and asset freezes on Russian officials. “Severe targeted sanctions” as she called it.

It’s not like the presence of dubious Russian money swilling around the city of London is anything new. It was as far back as 2001 that a wave of Russian oligarchs arrived in London, coincidently at the same time almost all of Britain’s national security resources were going into the fight against Islamist- inspired terrorism after the September 11 attacks in the US that same year.

The failings that Mrs Litvinenko flags up is proof that the UK Government has been far too cosy with the money-men from Moscow for far too long. Ask most intelligence analysts and they will tell you that for some time it’s been impossible to put a piece of cigarette paper between the Russian security services, mafia and big money in London and elsewhere.

So why is it only now that Tory MP and House of Commons foreign affairs committee chair Tom Tugendhat is suddenly suggesting having government officials use Unexplained Wealth Orders to seize the assets of Russian oligarchs until they have been properly accounted for? Sudden pangs of patriotism perhaps, or simply a case of getting in first before much more comes out in the wash?

But before anyone thinks I’m singling out the Tories in their duplicitous response over the Skripal case, let’s not forget the wrath that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has invoked with his failure to judge the prevailing situation. As he himself admits the Government no doubt has access to intelligence others don’t have. Wariness in this regard post the Iraq War and weapons of mass destruction is to a degree understandable. But as pointed out, some intelligence cannot be shared that openly and by failing to condemn even any potential Russian involvement, Mr Corbyn has again revealed how out of touch he is at times with a very dysfunctional Labour Party.

As for the SNP, it’s to their credit that it stood its ground in the Commons and showed the solidarity needed when such an outrage takes place on UK soil. Where it was let down of course was by the usual fruitcake fringe associated with Scottish nationalism, which habitually, stupidly and often shamefully, as in this instance, sees difficulties in England as Scotland’s opportunity. Disguised in the clothes of political progressives they are only too happy to defend the likes of Mr Putin’s Russia provided that England is getting it in the ear. Reading some of the remarks on social media from those within their ranks you would think that simply by condemning any Russian involvement in the Skripal case, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and leader of the SNP Westminster group, Ian Blackford, were stooges of MI6 or the British deep state.

These ultra-nationalist fringe types are blinkered beyond belief, not unlike the one-trick political ponies that make up Donald Trump’s team. Not surprisingly the SNP itself is now rightly distancing itself from such political liabilities.

Dysfunctional, divided and beset by double standards, yes, the state of political Britain has been thrown into revealing sharp focus by the Skripal spy crisis.