As Geoffrey Howe indicated, we had to expel those people because they were doing things which should just not be done at all and we had to get rid of them. We had to send them back to Moscow. We had hoped that with a new era dawning in relations, that with the Soviet Union taking a different view on many things, they might have accepted that and not have retaliated in the way they did, and the people in our Embassy who have been doing no such thing and certainly the journalists have not been doing any such thing, either. They were given a choice: were they going to show that things were different or were they going to prove by what they did that things have not really changed very much at all? They chose the latter. It was very well worth while trying to do it that way to show how much more powerfully; now people know.
We gave them a choice not to retaliate. They chose not to take that choice.
I have not myself spoken to Mr Gorbachev.