That is very helpful -- it is precisely the balance between the demands of accessibility and those of authoritativeness which is difficult.  It requires more inventiveness than I have shown, to date.

Incidentally, my own instinctive preference has been for cock-up explanations, rather than explanations in terms of conspiracies.

But there certainly are conspiracies.  Consider, for example, an
article which appeared on the 'FrontPage' site last January, entitled 'The Putin-Osama Connection'.

This is the same nuclear scaremongering which de Gondi unearthed in the wiretaps of Scaramella's conversations with Paolo Guzzanti, recycled for a U.S. audience, on an influential U.S. neoconservative site -- also the disinformation against Romano Prodi.

And part of the wickedness is that British intel people -- who are probably engaged in a CYA operation -- give this kind of dangerous rubbish credibility by continuing to disseminate the preposterous claims that Litvinenko was the victim of a state-sponsored assassination.  As also does much of the British media -- the only real sceptic about the whole farrago of nonense I have come across is Mary Dejevsky of The Independent.