When UK and Russia last brawled over spies in 1985, it gutted both their embassies

The last mass expulsion of alleged Russian spies from London took place in September 1985, at the height of the cold war, when the British government ordered 25 Soviet diplomats to leave.

It triggered a wave of tit-for-tat expulsions that were halted only after the British ambassador in Moscow, irate at facing the effective closure of his embassy, pleaded with ministers to quit while they were ahead. “Never engage in a p***ing match with a skunk, he possesses important natural advantages,” Sir Bryan Cartledge advised in a telegram to London.

Margaret Thatcher had ordered the expulsion of Russian diplomats after the defection of Oleg Gordievsky, a former head of KGB operations in London, who had named KGB personnel operating in the Soviet embassy in London.

Within two days of Thatcher’s move, the Russians retaliated by giving 25 British nationals – including journalists and diplomats – 48 hours to leave the Soviet Union. The list included the two Foreign Office/MI6 officers who had got Gordievsky out of Russia in the boot of their car, embassy staff, the BBC correspondent Tim Sebastian and journalists from The Observer, Daily Mail, Telegraph and Reuters.

“Their retaliation was numerically proportionate. That was bad enough because, as they always do, they pick the Russian speakers because they know that is going to cause the maximum damage. So I lost all my Russian speakers at a stroke and a third of my staff,” Cartledge told the British diplomatic oral history project in 2007.