When the time comes for history students to write their essays on the two state-sponsored assassinations of 2018 they might conclude that one changed everything, and the other absolutely nothing.
It is a year since the picturesque cathedral city of Salisbury was terrorised by the use of a deadly nerve agent to poison Sergei and Yulia Skripal, found frothing at the mouth on a park bench.
And it is five months since Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, never to be seen again.
Yet the response from the West to these two cases of state-sponsored murder by Russia and Saudi Arabia has been markedly different.
Britain used the attempted killing of one if its former informants and his daughter as an excuse to throw the book at Vladimir Putin.
Things previously on a list of irritants now formed the basis of a lengthy charge sheet:
The foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, said the Salisbury attack was part of a pattern of behaviour from Russia which made the world ‘more dangerous’, pointing to the annexation of Crimea, Moscow’s support for the Assad regime in Syria and its use of cyber warfare.
As well expelling 23 Russian ‘diplomats’, it also got 26 of its allies to throw out another 143 intelligence officers. The gloves were well and truly off.
The response could not have been more different to the murder of Khashoggi, whom latest reports claim was incinerated at 1,000ºC in the consul-general’s oven to get rid of all trace of his DNA.
After initially saying there would be ‘serious consequences’ to the killing of the Washington Post journalist, Mr Hunt has gone on to do precisely nothing.
This despite there being plenty of things, like Russia, to throw the book at the Saudis for; the air campaign in Yemen which has killed thousands and left millions on the brink of starvation, the jailing and torture of women’s rights activists and the incarceration of pro-democracy protestors.
Far from cancelling arms deals with the Saudis that fuel the war in Yemen, the British government was last week berating the Germans for doing just that. This was because German parts are a vital component of the weapons we continue to supply and any unilateral action by the Merkel regime could upset our contracts with Riyadh.
So why the difference between Skripal and Khashoggi, between Russia and Saudi Arabia?
The answer is that governments are motivated more by the threat a country poses to its stability and prosperity than by any revulsion at the cold-blooded murder of innocent civilians on foreign soil.
Britain’s double standards at, on the one hand, being outraged at what happened in Salisbury, while not following through on Turkey, are plain to see.
But Russian meddling in Europe, whether it be interfering in elections or cutting off gas supplies to drive up energy prices, is a far greater threat to our well-being than anything Saudi Arabia can do.
Salisbury gave Britain the pretext for calling out Russia on the world stage, as Hunt did after meeting the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the UN in New York, when he said: ‘They need to understand that it will not be a comfortable place for Russia in the world if this is the way they behave’.
There were later dark threats from Hunt when a British citizen was arrested in Moscow on what’s claimed were trumped up spying charges.
Saudi meddling, by comparison, only leads to instability in the Middle East, as shown by its blockade of Qatar, now in its 22 month and its proxy wars with Iran, in Yemen and Lebanon.
Conversely, if we moved against Riyadh by cancelling those arms contracts, it would actually cause us instability because jobs linked to the defence industry in the UK would be lost and inward investment would fall.
However, even though politicians may find a way of conveniently forgetting when their allies send hit squads to kill and dismember the bodies of dissidents, the public’s memory is not so short.
This is why the Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, remains as toxic a figure in Britain today as Vladimir Putin.
While Theresa May might be quite happy to shake the Arab leader’s hand on the steps of Number Ten, she knows that to do so would backfire because of the widespread belief that he ordered Khashoggi’s murder.
The fallout from Salisbury was felt last June when it was announced that Prince William, as president of the FA, would not be going to Russia for the World Cup.
The decision by Robbie Williams to go ahead and perform at the opening ceremony led to the singer being accused of selling his soul to the ‘dictator’.
As the British MP, Stephen Doughty, said: “At a time when Russian jets are bombings civilians in Syria, the Russian state in poisoning people on the street… I can only assume Robbie will be speaking out on these issues alongside his performance”.
When you consider how Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal were also urged to talk about human rights when they agreed to play in a tennis match in Saudi Arabia in December, perhaps the response from the public to Salisbury and Khashoggi has actually been quite similar.
Anthony Harwood is a former foreign editor of the Daily Mail and US Editor of the Daily Mirror