Hague justified this drastic move on the grounds that openness would cause ‘serious harm to national security and/or international relations’. The reasoning was bizarre. As the Observer columnist Nick Cohen pointed out, which one was it? The submission was at odds with several centuries of jurisprudence and principles laid down by the late Law Lord Thomas Bingham.
Emmerson accused Cameron and Hague of cover-up. He added that they were ‘dancing to the Russian tarantella’ – an image that didn’t improve the more you thought about it – with Owen ‘steamrollered by two states acting in collaboration with each other’. I attended the High Court hearing. Whenever the colourful Emmerson spoke, the journalists picked up their pens. The lawyer said: ‘The British government, like the Russian government, is conspiring to get the inquest closed down in exchange for substantial trade interests which we know Mr Cameron is pursuing.’
The accusation was well grounded. It was left to Goldfarb to summarise what was really going on. He told me in the corridor: ‘HMG is worried about fallout with Putin; MI6 is worried about its agent being killed by polonium; the Russians are worried about being caught red-handed; Putin is concerned about being called a mafia boss.’
The same month Cameron flew to Sochi for talks with Putin. It was a friendly encounter; the pair discussed Syria; there was no mention by the British of the awkward subject of human rights. Putin must have been pleased. In a concession, Cameron agreed that British intelligence would resume cooperation with the FSB for the first time since Litvinenko’s death. It would work with its Russian counterpart to ensure the security of the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014.
Cameron’s blossoming friendship with Putin left the coroner in an invidious position. Reluctantly, he upheld in part the government’s request to keep secret material out of court. Without MI6’s files, the inquest would be a meaningless exercise. It would be unable to examine the question of Russian state guilt. In a further act of meanness, justice secretary Chris Grayling was refusing to pay Marina Litvinenko’s legal costs.
Owen came up with a solution. He wrote to home secretary Theresa May requesting a public inquiry. ‘I have formed the firm view that a public inquiry is necessary if Mr Litvinenko’s death is to be properly investigated,’ he told her. Owen offered himself as chairman.
The advantage of an inquiry, he argued, was that the chairman could consider the secret material in closed hearings, an option not available to an inquest. This was a pragmatic way forward which balanced the government’s security concerns with the need for open justice.
May, however, was having none of this. In a reply in June 2013, she rejected Owen’s request. She offered six reasons for her refusal, including public expense. It was the sixth, however, which stuck out:
‘It is true that international relations have been a factor in the Government’s decision-making. An inquest managed and run by an independent coroner is more readily explainable to some of our foreign partners, and the integrity of the process more readily grasped, than an inquiry established by the government … which has the power to see government material, potentially relevant to their interests, in secret.’
May’s reasoning was legally dubious. That autumn, Marina Litvinenko filed a judicial review claim, asking the High Court to re-examine the government’s decision. In February 2014, three High Court judges ruled unanimously in her favour. They described May’s refusal as ‘irrational’ and ‘legally erroneous’. They asked her to reconsider.
In its keenness to put trade above principle, the Conservative-led government had forgotten what the case was about.
Marina Litvinenko observed: ‘I have never been able to see why the British government should want to protect the people in the Kremlin who ordered my husband’s murder. This was the murder of a British citizen on the streets of London using radioactive poison. You would have thought that the government would want to get the bottom of who was behind it.’
The ball was back in May’s court. Marina said: ‘As one woman to another, I ask her to consider how she would feel in my position. If her husband had been murdered in this horrible way, wouldn’t she want to get to the truth?’
In 2010, I had flown from Moscow to Italy. My destination was the seaside town of Senigallia on the Adriatic coast. Two years previously Walter Litvinenko and his wife Lyuba had left Russia. After his son’s death, the harassment Walter had already suffered from the authorities continued. He joined his younger son Maxim – Litvinenko’s half-brother – in Italy. Other family members followed. They included Litvinenko’s half-sister Tatiana, her husband and their two kids.
By the time I caught up with them, the family were in poor shape. They had opened a restaurant in the tourist resort of Rimini. Maxim had been in Italy for nine years and was a professional chef. The local police accused them of operating illegally; during a late-night raid a cop pushed Tatiana over so she banged her head on the floor. The restaurant, La Terrazza, went bust. They were forced to move into a cheaper flat down the coast.
Walter blamed their misfortunes in exile on Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister, whose close friendship with Putin was well known. The family’s claim for asylum was going nowhere. ‘We have fallen victim to a political game,’ he told me. Walter blamed Putin for Alexander’s death, reasoning to me that – as in Stalin’s times – only Putin could have authorised the murder. ‘I know it was Putin who killed him. He’s a sick person,’ Walter said.
Tatiana, however, refused to impugn Russia’s president. She bristled at the mention of Berezovsky. The oligarch had initially supported the Litvinenkos in exile, but had eventually stopped payments; his money had run out. Tatiana and her husband had good careers with the FSB in Nalchik, Litivnenko’s home town; the international scandal surrounding her brother had cost them everything. ‘He’s clearly not interested in us,’ she said, of Berezovsky. ‘I wouldn’t stop to take money from him.’
The Litvinenkos – all eight of them, including two young children and Maxim’s wife – were living in a small three-bedroom flat. They were broke. A local church was donating bread and apples; they ate pancakes and prawns salvaged from the freezer of their former restaurant. Walter and his wife were both over seventy. It was clearly too late for them to start a new life. On the wall was a map of Russia and several Orthodox icons; I spotted an Italian–Russian dictionary on a bookshelf.
Walter and I went for a walk outside. He put on the same flat cap he’d worn to his son’s drizzly funeral at Highgate Cemetery in London back in December 2006. Since then he had urged the US congress to support a resolution that blamed the Russian government for Litvinenko’s death. A public role didn’t suit him. Walter was, it struck me, a broken figure – and a pitiful one. He was afraid. ‘In Nalchik I didn’t fear because I knew everybody’s faces. Here it is different. At any moment a person could come up to you and that would be the end.’
In signed statements, Walter listed persecution in various forms by the Russian state. The police had beaten him up, he wrote, in an attempt to force him to incriminate his son. For five years he’d held one person responsible for these woes: Putin. In May 2011, Tatiana called me with further bad news. Lyuba had died. The Italian government was still refusing basic income support. Walter had moved out, into a one-bedroom flat. He was too poor to pay the electricity, so would sit on his own in the dark.