Daveybloke Does Diplomacy

Calls for a no-fly zone over Bahrain were so nuanced as to be virtually undetectable today as troops and riot police attacked protesters. Unlike the pro-democracy protests in Egypt and Libya, the protests in Bahrain have stoked sectarian tensions to the extent of needing to be chastised by the resolutely non-sectarian Saudi military, and have also caused international unease by being supported by Bad Men including the Iranian president, the leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and a known diluter of the Iraq invasion's uranium-tipped benignancy.

For some reason or other, Daveybloke has apparently decided to have a stab at dealing with this situation in a banker's-bonus way rather than a British-Empire-versus-uncivilised-tribes way. He telephoned the king of Bahrain to call for "restraint on all sides", a common diplomatic euphemism in conflicts where less than two sides are armed to the teeth; and the king of Bahrain responded in much the same way as bankers generally respond to the urgings of Daveybloke's social conscience. It is not clear to Britain's leading liberal newspaper whether Daveybloke knew in advance that the régime was going to attack, but let us hope he had the presence of mind to warn the king against using British-made weaponry for unnatural purposes.