Gordon Brown reported back to the Commons yesterday on the failure of his meeting with President Medvedev at the G8 summit to repair Britain’s frayed relations with Russia. The Kremlin made its views known the old-fashioned way. Within hours of world leaders leaving Japan, the FSB, the successor to the Soviet KGB, named a British diplomat at the embassy in Moscow as an intelligence officer and accused him of spying.

Espionage disputes between London and Moscow are nothing new, but the timing of the latest accusation was seen as a direct response to Britain’s own allegations.

This year British officials have blamed Russia for the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, named it as the third most serious threat to British security and accused its three main intelligence agencies (the FSB, SVR and GRU) of increasing their operations on British soil.

If intelligence battles can be confined to the shadowy world of Lubyanka and Vauxhall Cross there is no reason why the rest of the Anglo-Russian relationship should be affected. Spies were routinely unmasked and expelled during Boris Yeltsin’s rule with no visible impact on good bilateral ties.

That ceased to apply during Vladimir Putin’s era when political, cultural and trade relations were also damaged.

Under Dmitri Medvedev it had been hoped that the new presidency, which is responsible for foreign policy, might seek to redress the crisis in relations with Britain.

That now seems unlikely. Perhaps Mr Medvedev and Mr Brown failed to hit it off. It may not have helped that Mr Brown spent half their meeting listing Britain’s complaints and concerns. Maybe neither was able to make the concessions necessary to restore the relationship. Very possibly Mr Medvedev is still being controlled by Mr Putin and his powerful clique of former KGB officers.

Either way Britain and Russia face a rocky future. Tonight the victim is one British diplomat in Moscow. Next time the cost could be a multibillion-pound energy deal or the life of a Russian émigré living in London.

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