That Ethical Dimension Again

It appears that the Vicar of Downing Street's chum, Colonel Gadafi, may suffer the displeasure of the present incumbent, who has done so much for human rights from Burma to the Guantánomaly. Nor is it merely a case of guilt by association, embarrassment over the al-Megrahi business or epidermally-oriented rough justice, as the uncharitable might expect. Hisham Matar, a Booker Prize nominee whose father was renditionised from Cairo twenty years ago, has induced a Liberal Democrat peer to ask the Government to ask the Libyans where the man might possibly have got to. Even the Upper Miliband is worried about conditions in Libyan prisons and the country's un-American use of the death penalty. As a result, New New Labour has given "a series of important assurances", one of them being that the British Government cannot quite see its way to being very best chums with Colonel Gadafi while this sort of thing is going on; and we all know the worth of a New New Labour assurance.