Donald Trump has stayed silent on the Russian threat because he fears Putin's juicy 'kompromat'

All around the world, from Norway in the north to Australia in the south, political leaders have condemned the Salisbury nerve agent attack with a remarkably unified voice.

Yet on a certain Twitter account operated in Washington, the silence is eloquent.

While Russian diplomats across the globe, including the 60 in the States, begin packing for the journey home, the American president is cast against type as the most famously mute character in English literature.

“Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” Inspector Gregory of the Yard asks Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of Silver Blaze.

“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

“That was the curious incident.”

The incident of the Trump who doesn’t tweet in the night is also undeniably curious. After 14 months of keeping us so intimately informed about his thinking on the issues of the day with barrages of pre-dawn tweets, this week has found his tiny typing fingers stayed on two fronts.

About Stormy Daniels, he has nothing more to share (beyond a single oblique reference to “fake news”) than he does about Moscow’s responsibility for the novichok attack.

After yesterday’s announcement about the expulsion of Russian diplomats and the closure of Russia’s consulate in Seattle, the official White House line on Salisbury was admirably blunt.

A spokesman called the chemical agent attack “brazen” and “reckless”, and said it is impeding Trump’s hopes of building a constructive relationship with the Kremlin.

From the Tweeter-In-Chief himself, meanwhile, not a dickie bird.

Even before this latest twist in the saga, Trump’s silence was the source of intrigue. Last Wednesday, a certain John Brennan hinted strongly at blackmail.

Asked if he thinks Trump is frightened of Vladimir Putin, he said, “He may have something on him personally … The Russians, I think, have had long experience with Mr Trump, and may have things that they could expose.”

Brennan isn’t just another partisan Democratic congressman looking to score a point, or a hack trying to turn a buck in the fashion of Michael Wolff. From 2013 to 2017, he was the director of the CIA.

Former CIA chiefs aren’t generally given to speculating wildly on national TV. When Brennan openly suggests that his president is being blackmailed by a hostile foreign power, it feels pretty safe to assume he is basing it on something far more solid than guesswork.

The precise form of any kompromat remains a mystery to most of us, if not necessarily to Brennan. Judging by the disappointingly anodyne nature of the Stormy allegations (a little light spanking, a single unsatisfying episode of unprotected coitus), it probably isn’t kinky.

We all desperately want to believe in the pee-pee tapes. Of course we do. But the odds seem against the sexual, and firmly on the commercial.

While Robert Mueller continues with his collusion investigation, and a recent leader of the US spying community voices suspicions about blackmail, the walls appear to be closing in on an ever more isolated Trump.

He is struggling to find any top criminal lawyers willing to represent him in the matter. He is finding it so hard to recruit relatively sane senior staff that he has resorted to making John Bolton, the pantomime lunatic who would nuke St Kitts And Nevis for looking at him funny, his National Security Adviser.

This despite Bolton being a ferocious critic of Russia, and dead against any high level talks with the North Korean regime.

The mid-term elections in November threaten to hand control of the House of Representatives back to the Democrats, who would then be in position to launch the impeachment process.

And hovering over all his other problems, John Brennan seems to think, is the spectre of a newly re-elected president of the Russian Federation – whose patience with Trump may not last much longer.

Vladimir Putin has his own troubles this week. He plainly miscalculated the force and unity of the global reaction to Salisbury.

He will probably cope with the Australian threat to boycott his World Cup. Everyone knows how dedicated the Aussies are to parading the highest moral standards in sport, so the gesture will be discounted accordingly.

But to be responsible for Theresa May having a genuine diplomatic triumph at the EU, at this point in the relationship with Brussels, is quite an achievement. If that doesn’t shake his confidence, the fact that the US is chucking out 60 diplomats must.

If Trump’s deafening Twitter silence is intended to send the message that the expulsions have nothing to do with him, at its best that makes him look like the impotent puppet of anti-Russian forces in the White House.

So the question is this. Assuming that Putin does have some juicy kompromat in his Kremlin safe, as John Brennan apparently believes, will he weaponise and unleash it as an instrument of revenge if and when he concludes that Trump, like other double agents before him, has been turned?