War and Remembrance

The Ascended Incarnation of the Reverend Blair has taken a few moments from its ineffable communion with Mammon to say a few words about the practice of handing over Libyan dissidents to the Gaddafi régime. It would perhaps be uncharitable to assume that James Murdoch has donated some of his fabled mnemonic porousness to the Reverend Blair, in the spirit of any young master rewarding a faithful family retainer. Still, his reverence did his plausible deniability no favours by including his fellow prose stylist Gaddafi among "people in the Middle East [who] were also trying to fight terrorism and extremism", or by trotting out the old Abu Ghraib line about nice young men doing a difficult job under difficult circumstances. Nor did the empty suit who served his reverence as a Foreign Secretary prove much help, first contradicting the then-Upper Miliband's admission that Diego Garcia was used for kidnapping purposes and later taking refuge in Britain's still deplorably wide snoopery gap: "No foreign secretary can know all the details of what its intelligence agencies are doing at any one time."

Meanwhile, the Americans are showing their usual degree of respect for that special relationship whose true parameters the Reverend Blair did so much to clarify: a judge has ruled that the CIA need not hand over information to a British parliamentary committee because the said committee is part of a "foreign government entity". Fortunately, we may take comfort in Tony's moral certainty that everything will be investigated as it should be, now that Gordon Brown is no longer prime minister.