Explaining the situation at the disciplinary interview and then preparing my appeal against the "outcome letter", I was still hoping that the verdict on my programme prompted by the former Soviet propagandists would be overruled by senior management. This didn't happen. Although Tony Blair, the Prime Minister at the time of Litvinenko's murder, did not make a public statement about it, in May 2007 Britain demanded the extradition of Andrei Lugovoy, the main suspect in the murder case. Two months later, when Moscow refused to hand him over, Britain expelled four Russian diplomats. By the time the British government had finally formulated its position on the issue, the World Service was eager to show that it had been doing the right thing all along. When confronted by the parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee about Russian Service coverage of Litvinenko's murder (by that time, complaints about its pro-Kremlin bias had become public), the then Director of the World Service, Nigel Chapman, was adamant that the coverage had been objective and comprehensive, while the case of my programme could not be discussed as it was still "under review". The "review" lasted more than three months after my appeal hearing and predictably was not decided in my favour. 

So when the Foreign Affairs Committee was looking into the complaints about pro-Kremlin bias, my feature was safely out of the range of scrutiny and nobody could ask why it had been pulled off the air, or any other related questions. Moreover, the "defence case" on the Russian Service's Litvinenko coverage was prepared, conveniently, by the regional executive editor, the Russian-speaker chosen by Chapman for this task. As a result, everyone from Chapman to MPs and government ministers used the same — very selective and distorted — information about Russian Service broadcasts that they could not understand. Chapman covered his subordinate, who in his turn mounted a defence for them both. The Foreign Affairs Committee took Chapman's side and since then neither the BBC nor the government has doubted the excellence of the Russian Service's coverage of Litvinenko's murder.

This was particularly obvious during the Westminster Hall debate on the Russian Service that took place two years later, in December 2008. Greg Hands, the Conservative MP who initiated the debate, talked about "Soviet-era journalists" who seemed "consistently afraid of broadcasting anything that might offend the Kremlin". He got an immediate response from Edward Davey, a Liberal Democrat MP, and Bill Rammell, then an FCO Minister, who both claimed that he had no evidence for that particular accusation. While those who could understand Russian were sure of the opposite, parliamentarians, with only a few exceptions (most notably Hands and another Tory MP, Dr Julian Lewis), preferred to side with the BBC. Internal unity seemed of greater importance than any concern about listeners in Russia or their idea of Britain.