POLICE investigating the Salisbury incident appear no nearer to finding out precisely how Sergei Skripal and his daughter were attacked as the political row over Labour’s approach to the attempted murder intensified.

Almost two weeks after the 66-year-old former double agent and 33-year-old Yulia were found slumped on a park bench in the medieval city, there is still no certain evidence about how the nerve agent was administered.

One theory is the Skripals might have received it in liquid form; another that it was hidden in Ms Skripal's luggage inside a gift from Russia and was opened at her father's house in Salisbury.

Police say as many as 131 people might have come into contact with the nerve agent; some 46 have already visited hospital, fearing they might have been infected.

The Zizzi restaurant and The Mill Pub where Mr Skripal and his daughter dined and drank shortly before being taken ill look set to be closed for months on the advice of the chemical weapons experts.

At Westminster, a prominent supporter of Jeremy Corbyn has intensified the party’s row over the leader’s response to Theresa May’s approach on Russia by suggesting those Labour MPs who have backed her stance are “political enemies”.

Chris Williamson, who until recently was the Shadow Fire and Emergency Services Minister, has staunchly defended Mr Corbyn, insisting he has been “acting in the national interest,” asking legitimate questions about the Salisbury attack given that last October the chemical weapons watchdog had said it had destroyed Russia’s entire chemical weapons stockpile.

“He did give a very measured, cool-headed and statesmanlike speech in the House of Commons on Wednesday,” declared Mr Williamson, noting how the bellicose rhetoric had come from the Tories, who had shamefully tried to brand the Labour leader an apologist for Russia.

However, the Huffington Post website reported how at a meeting of Momentum on Thursday night the Derby MP said Tory MPs, during Commons exchanges, were “baying for blood” and that some Labour colleagues had given similar knee-jerk responses.

“It would definitely be helpful for our own people on the green benches to fall in behind the leader’s very statesmanlike and measured response. It only helps our political enemies but, frankly, I see them as political enemies as well.”

Noting how he had for some time been advocating the mandatory re-selection of MPs, the backbencher referred to a “tiny minority of irrelevant malcontents” and added: “To be honest with you I’d be quite happy if some of them buggered off; the likes of John Woodcock and Ian Austin and people like that. God, it’s so depressing.”

Mr Woodcock, the MP for Barrow and Furness in Cumbria, has tabled a parliamentary motion "unequivocally" accepting the "Russian state's culpability" for the attack and supporting "fully" Mrs May’s Commons statement.

By yesterday evening, some 39 MPs, Labour, SNP and Liberal Democrats, had signed his motion, including Ian Murray, the Labour MP for Edinburgh South.

On Thursday, Sir Keir Starmer, the Shadow Brexit Secretary, followed Nia Griffith and Emily Thornberry, Labour’s spokeswomen on defence and foreign affairs, by backing Mrs May’s approach.

Labour backbencher Stephen Kinnock, a long-time Corbyn critic and a signatory to Mr Woodcock’s motion, said the leader's article in The Guardian in which he decried a “McCarthyite intolerance of dissent” over Russia and warned against rushing ahead of the evidence, had “not helped to clarify the situation”.

The MP for Aberavon said: “We have got a fundamental need for a debate in our party about our worldview.

"There are those of us who clearly feel that Nato and the EU and standing shoulder to shoulder with our allies...are fundamentally a force for good and those alliances are the fundamental piece of architecture that we have to be a part of. And there are others in our party who take another view.”