I have to confess I’ve struggled to get quite as emotionally caught up in this as some people. Those of us who stand for parliament do so with an underlying notion of public service. Of course we want our party to win. And there is always personal ambition: we want to be in there, making the decisions, with our fingers on the turning of the world. But nobody would go through the five weeks of gruelling punishment, preceded by four years of selection and campaigning, preceded in turn by how ever many years of becoming involved and going through a candidate approval process, unless there was more than simply the desire for our team to win.

Nick Clegg was always honour-bound to make his decision in the nation’s best interests. Anything less would have simply ruled him unfit to be a party leader.

The only question was: what decision would be in the nation’s best interests?

I will put my cards on the table: after last year’s expenses debacle, and this year’s scandal over the Ashcroft million, electoral reform seems to me to be one of the nation’s most important and pressing concerns. The result of the General Election — no clear majority in parliament, nothing like a majority in the popular vote (Tories polled only 12% more than Lib Dems, lest we forget, but gained more than five times as many seats) — demonstrates very clearly that the public are not satisfied.

But, although pressing, electoral reform is not the most pressing concern. I do not accept the view of the scaremongerers that Britain is about to go the way of Greece. David Cameron has already had to eat his words that a hung parliament would spell economic disaster. But it is true that the economy is right at the top of the list of things that need to be fixed now, and fixed right.

A coalition with Labour was always a long-shot, and Clegg was right to honour his election pledge and talk first to the party with the most votes. But he was also right to at least attempt a deal with Labour. This was not treachery, as some of the Tory press and some of my own correspondents have suggested, but a necessary and entirely honourable step: Clegg was duty bound to explore both feasible possibilities as he decided for the United Kingdom who should be the next prime minister.

For the record, I think it would have been possible to do it. (I do not say that it would have necessarily been the best thing, but I do say that it would have been possible). Those who argued that this was undemocratic forget the very shaky ground on which they stand: Labour and the Lib Dems between them gained more than 50% of the popular vote, although, because of our misrepresentative system, this was not quite 50% of the seats in parliament. Labour certainly seemed ready to promise a much swifter, much surer route to electoral reform. And Gordon Brown nobly was willing to accept Nick Clegg’s other election promise — that, whatever happened, Brown would not continue as Prime Minister.

But it was Labour MPs themselves who made it quite clear that they had no real interest in staying in government. From the point that (then, still) government ministers went on the record in public stating this, the chances of a deal with Labour were over.

Many Lib Dem voters find the coalition with the Conservatives distasteful. I personally remained on good terms with all the candidates in the Stratford election, except for the BNP who never attended any of the debates and with whom I never spoke. But there have been instances where Tory attacks were brutal and unfounded. And we have endured the jeers and scorn of the Tory press barons for more than a generation.

It is certainly true that very few will have voted Lib Dem with the aim of putting David Cameron in government.

But Nick Clegg still had to put the nation’s interest ahead of his own. The choice between a Conservative minority government which would be almost certain to fall in recriminations within six months, in which time it would have made little real progress in tackling the economic crisis, and none at all in electoral reform, or a true Lib Dem Con coalition, was one that simply could not be made in any other way from the way it has been made.

The solution is not perfect. David Cameron could have divested himself of the lacklustre George Osborne. If having Vince Cable as chancellor was too much to swallow (though it would have pleased the nation, and the markets), Ken Clarke was waiting in the wings, the only member of Cameron’s team who had ever served in a senior role in a government. There could have been (and should have) a commitment to a referendum on true electoral reform, not merely the disproportional Alternative Vote (AV) system. If the Conservatives believe that the public has no appetite for electoral reform, then they should have agreed to a referendum on the real issue. If they were willing to accept a grudging compromise and no more, they should have offered a simple bill on AV as Labour did, and left it at that. The nation is to be put to the trouble and expense of a referendum without being allowed to vote on the real topic of discussion.

Nonetheless, the prospect of an autumn election has receded to the horizon. Cameron’s lightweight team will be strongly bolstered by 5 Lib Dem cabinet ministers, and a total of 20 Lib Dems across his ministries.

Lib Dem fortunes at the next election will almost certainly suffer, and there will equally certainly be a spate of recriminations and even member-resignations. And this is the true mark of Nick Clegg’s leadership: at personal cost, he has put the interests of the nation first.

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• Tony Blair was elected in 2005. Gordon Brown was never elected, neither by the UK population, nor even by his own party, as no-one stood against him and he won the contest by default when Blair stood down.
• The expenses scandal, though run as a major newspaper publishing venture by the Daily Telegraph, was actually the fruit of years of work by Heather Brooke.
• Michael Martin was the first speaker of the House of Commons to be forced to resign since Sir John Trevor in 1695
• More MPs will stand down at this election than any other since the end of the second world war. 200 are expected to stand down, including John Maples, MP for Stratford-on-Avon, who announced his intention on 10 January.
• Contrary to popular opinion, this is not the longest parliament in recent memory. Five years and one day will have elapsed between this election and the last one. John Major’s term was ended by the election on 1 May 1997, five years and 21 days after he won on 9 April 1992. Margaret Thatcher’s 1987 to 1992 was also longer than this sitting. Prior to that, the longest sitting since the war was 8 October 1959 to 15 October 1964. However, although there can be a gap of more than five years between the elections, the maximum length of a parliament itself is 5 years.

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More seriously, Alternative Vote is not a true proportional system — up to 49 per cent of the votes would still be discarded, meaning that a government can still be elected with an absolute majority on around 30 per cent of the total national vote.

This paragraph is going to be short and mercifully simple. But if you lack the Liberal Democrat passion for discussing complex voting systems, please feel free to skip to the next paragraph.

So: in first past the post, you put down one X on the ballot paper, and, late that night, the candidate with the most Xs wins. The candidate may have gained not much more than 1/3rd of the total vote, and, often, only three quarters of the voters will have voted. As trust in politics declines, the numbers voting shrinks, and so our elected leaders have less and less of a mandate. The alternative vote system gives you a 1-2-3 etc choice of your favourite, second favourite, and so on. When the votes are counted, the least successful candidate is eliminated, and their second choices are distributed among the remaining candidates. This carries on, until one candidate has more than 50 per cent of the vote, and they are the winner. All the remaining votes are discarded. Although this is marginally more successful at giving people an MP they are happy with, it does not mean at all that the government is elected based on the votes cast across Britain. There’s a variation, AV plus, which I won’t go into, which is a much more proportional system. Truly proportional voting comes with the Single Transferable Vote, which is hideous to work out on paper, but which computers can do as easily as AV, AV plus, or even first past the post. And, these days, even the government has computers.

So where does that leave us? The one thing that the Alternative Vote Labour has pushed for tonight will give us is a system where it is much harder for a Conservative government ever to be elected. Gordon Brown may be counting on getting the support of Lib-Dems because of his fig-leaf gesture towards a proportional system, but, in truth, this is tinkering with the electoral system in order to change the result of future elections.

If Labour had done this, as it originally promised, when it first came to power, then we might have avoided much of the collapse of trust in politicians of the last ten years. Even Alternative Vote reduces the number of ‘safe’ seats which play no real role in an election. And it is in the safe seats that we have seen the greatest abuse of expenses. But this death-bed conversion smacks of nothing more than desperation. And it is a desperation which will surely further undermine the residual confidence the electorate has in government.

Quite simply, it is the wrong answer, too late.

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If you’re interested and you want to wade through all the policies, you can make your own mind up. Here’s a link to last summer’s policy guide. Actually, the guide is not very long, and is in (for politicians) relatively clear and unambiguous English.

Policy has not changed very much since then, except for the introduction of the pledge on a ‘mansion tax’ for homes worth £2million or more, which, currently, benefit disproportionately from the highest council tax band being band H. Lib-Dems are still committed to abolishing council tax altogether, so this is an interim measure only.

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What are we to make of this?

The first duty of government — and of opposition — is to serve the nation. Whether or not we like Gordon Brown, the Labour Party already had one chance to vote him in, or someone else. In the event, no-one else came forward, and Brown won by default. But it was a leadership contest, and they got the leader they collectively chose. With the economy in a parlous state, parliament’s own reputation in substantial trouble, and a leadership contest of a much more serious nature at the General Election looming, the nation is in no way served by panic in its ruling party.

If Gordon Brown had been caught with his fingers in the till, or was putting forward some dramatic U-turn which required a new mandate from his party, then a leadership contest might have been the right thing to do. But a contest to (allegedly) settle doubt and get things “sorted out once and for all”, will do no such thing. John Major tried to bolster his flagging leadership two years before an election, and it did nothing to establish his credibility. In fact, it only made him look weaker.

I’m sure that the majority of Labour MPs will have the sense to ignore it — if only out of self-interest. More chaos in Downing Street will simply rob them of votes they could still have counted on.

We need to leave this storm in a tea-cup behind, and get back to the proper business of politics. The pre-election debate has started. It is too late to change the debaters.

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Nobody should hold politicians to dogma: after all, do we want them to do the things which are best for the nation, or do we want to make them jump summersaults to uphold the letter of words spoken perhaps a year or five years before? However: Cameron’s dithering all came on the same day.

But what should we really be doing about marriage and the tax system? Shortly after returning to the UK after almost ten years working in Belgium for international Christian youth charity Operation Mobilisation (OM), my wife and I were hit with a double-whammy: Gordon Brown abolished MIRAS, which had just about made our mortgage affordable (OM was and is a voluntary organisation, that doesn’t pay salaries — you’re actually responsible to raise your own funds to be there), and also abolished the married person’s tax allowance. Instead, he put the money into working families tax-credits. As we don’t have children, we didn’t get any of that, and our income for a while dipped below the basics of mortgage and utility bills. Those were not comfortable days!

Did we deserve MIRAS and the married person’s allowance in the first place?

It’s fair to say that MIRAS, or ‘mortgage interest relief at source’ was a tax-break for people wealthy enough to be able to afford to buy their own homes. Although it was a struggle at the time, we’ve certainly benefited from the rising market since then. If we had been paying rent rather than mortgage, we would have had nothing to show for it all more than thirteen years later. From a strictly ethical point of view, it would be hard to make the case that we ‘deserved’ MIRAS, when there were people over the road who worked just as hard for less pay, and would end up with nothing to show for it.

Did we deserve a tax allowance for being married? I firmly believe that marriage is the back-bone of society, and that the life-chances of children from stable homes where both parents are married are better. This is a simple matter of statistical evidence, and all the indicators point in the same way. But those indicators point the same way whether or not there is a particular tax-break for married couples. On the one hand, is it not good to encourage marriage with a tax-break? On the other hand, why should we reward the people with extra money who will have better life-chances for themselves and their children, when we should really be investing in those who have poor life chances? Again, we should look to the evidence: there is nothing to indicate that marriage as an institution dipped as a result of withdrawing the married-person’s allowance, or that its original introduction made people more likely to marry. We could perhaps point to the disincentive to divorce which losing the allowance would mean. But divorce is vastly more costly than that, and the amount is insignificant. And, again, do we really want to penalise people who are trapped in abusive marriages by taking away money they rely on?

The real issue was that, whether we deserved it or not, we relied on it. The adjustment was painful, and could have been devastating.

Brown and Cameron need to be much more aware of the impact their pronouncements have on people who are at tipping points. Take £100 a month away from someone who earns £50,000, and they will dislike you for it, but they are unlikely to notice it much. Take £40 away from someone who earns £20,000, and who is teetering on the brink of paying for a mortgage taken out during the housing boom, and you may tip them over into serious difficulties. It is irrelevant to ask whether they deserve the money, and whether society should be rewarding the £50,000 people for their hard work and higher contribution in taxes. Government does not exist to pass judgement about how people live their lives, but to organise society so that all benefit.

Perhaps Cameron recognised a little of that today, which led him to rock to and fro on the issue.

But that’s another thing a true leader cannot afford to do: dithering by leaders leaves the land in chaos. Those who dither, simply, should not be leaders.

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His speech this weekend is full of promises on what he would to the economy. And I do mean ‘to’. The problem is, neither David Cameron nor treasury spokesman George Osborne have ever managed the finances of a large company, let alone a country. Their careers have largely been as political advisors and opposition MPs. They are skilled in saying things that sound right. They don’t have experience doing them.

If the General Election were a job interview, then David Cameron would be the candidate who has all the right words on the application form but, when questioned, can give no examples of how he has done them, and little specific about how he would do them, if given the chance.

This is the real reason why David Cameron has now suggested a ‘war-cabinet’. He’s thinking specifically of the war in Afghanistan, but he’s already made overtures to the Lib-Dems about us ‘not being so different’ in other areas. Clearly, Cameron’s hope is not very distant from Brown’s abortive ‘government of all the talents’.

Cameron doesn’t have the people who can rescue Britain’s economy, and he’s hoping that other parties will provide them. Naturally, of course, what he really wants is Vince Cable, the Lib-Dem treasury spokesman who foresaw the economic crisis, warned against it, and is the most trusted man in British politics. Gordon Brown wanted the same thing, and also didn’t get it.

It’s all very well for Cameron to talk about swingeing cuts to the public sector, higher taxes and (essentially) a national austerity programme. But this is not how companies are successfully turned around. My experience of turn-arounds, as a senior manager in some quite different organisations, is that it’s all about the senior team sitting down more or less every day tugging, tacking, adjusting, checking and re-checking the analysis, probing potential avenues, following up good decisions with careful planning even more carefully executed. Above all, it’s about a positive skepticism when things appear to be going in the right direction. Foolish optimism has been the death of far too many corporate recoveries.

It’s true that, in turn-arounds, companies do sometimes make redundancies, cut costs, increase their income stream by raising prices, issuing shares, or selling off capital. But companies that entirely fail to turn around and fizzle into administration also do all of these things. Especially when powerful forces are defending their own budgets, it’s often easier to cut the bits of the organisation that actually make it work, than to identify inefficiencies and deal with those. In fact, any company-wide solution, such as the ones Cameron describes, is apt to failure in a time of crisis. When times are good, companies can engage in grandiose strategy-rhetoric, and get away with it. When things are tight, the margin for error is slight, and the big picture stuff, without the little picture execution, hastens demise.

Cameron is increasingly revealing that he knows he does not have the team to make it work. Good. Voters should look elsewhere. Everyone know who the next Chancellor of the Exchequer ought to be. The current political system does not favour that solution. But it is five or more months to the election. And even a week in politics is a long time.

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What kinds of Prime Minister are there? I made a little list: Leaders, Managers, Administrators, and Caretakers.

Gordon Brown is a caretaker. He came in at the dog-end of the Blair years, and was instantly faced with crisis after crisis. The poor man has never got his head above water. The things he did well (the Millennium debt campaign, for example) are all forgotten about. Nobody can really point to anything he has done especially badly. It’s just that crises gather round him and he doesn’t seem to have the power to sort them out and get on with his real agenda. In fact, more than anything else, the public’s un-love affair with Gordon is based on him not having an agenda at all.

John Major was an administrator. Aside from the personal things (you can imagine him carefully filling in all the forms, and frowning when anyone had written in the space marked ‘do not write in this space’), his approach to Britain was to carefully make sure that we were fulfilling expectations, doing our duty, moving the agenda long in safe increments. But it wasn’t his agenda, and, since he’d been voted in because he wasn’t Thatcher, it wasn’t her agenda either. Really, it was the ‘Victorian values’ agenda — harking back to a time when politicians were good, and the people were good, and Britain could be proud of its place in the world, because it was good. John Major never went to university (he did a correspondence course in banking instead). If he had done, he would probably have discovered that history is not quite as simple as he thought it was, and that nostalgia is not all it used to be.

Cameron wants to be a manager. ‘Let us look after the economy, and we’ll do it somewhat better’, is his appeal to the electorate. I’m reminded of a story I read about a new manager who arrived at a company and found three envelopes on his desk, with a note: “If things are not going well after three months, open envelope 1. If things are not going well after six months, open envelope 2. If things are not going well after nine months, open envelope 3.” After three months, things were not going well, so he opened envelope 1. Inside was a note, which said “Blame your predecessor.” After six months, he felt obliged to open envelope 2. Inside, the note said: “Predict that things will shortly get better.” He duly did so. However, as things still did not improve, he found himself opening envelope 3 after nine months. The note inside was terse: “Prepare three envelopes”.

The ever fickle public may well believe that Cameron could not possibly do it worse than Brown, and may want to give him a chance. I have to say, I think that that confidence is misguided. But Cameron has no compelling vision of the future of Britain, and absolutely no vision at all of the future of politics in Britain. He wants to keep as much of the system intact as he can in the face of the overwhelming public hatred for the political class and their expenses. He will duck and dive and say all the right things. But Cameron will not be any kind of a reforming leader, and, to give him his due, he has never promised to be. If elected (and contacts in Mori are now saying it is unlikely he will obtain a sufficient majority), he will be blaming Brown after three months and after six predicting recovery.

Tony Blair, of course, saw himself as a great leader. As did Margaret Thatcher. But, of course, both of them led us into trouble. Thatcher established greed as the one great spiritual value of the nation and tried to turn it into policy with the poll tax, charging people based not on their ability to pay, but on the simple fact of their existence. Blair led us straight into the arms of George W Bush, and thence into the Iraqi desert. Leaders will be judged by history more strictly than managers, administrators and caretakers. It’s probably fair to say of John Major that he did no real harm, and of Brown that he did no real anything.

However, this is not the time for a caretaker, or an administrator, or even a manager. The expenses scandal is not the cause of what is wrong with politics, it is merely a symptom of it. For years the role of the MP has become steadily less clear and less valuable. Prime ministers have become more presidential, cabinet has become steadily less answerable to parliament. When I was small, ministers resigned when their departments blundered. These days, they simply blame officials and sack them.

In the mean time, parliament has increasingly realised that all it actually does is make or block legislation, and play a supporting role to the government-opposition media prize fight. Unsurprisingly, we have ever more laws, and yet no greater justice. MPs talk constantly about efficiency savings that could be made, but every bill they pass makes life more complicated and requires the creation of more jobs to administer and supervise it. And, before we see that as some kind of useful job-creation, the people who really have the ability to manage such new laws would be better employed applying their talents to the great problems of state.

I do not remotely condone the misuse of tax-payers’ money (and, more importantly, the misuse of power and privilege which we the citizen voted them in for). But I understand why some MPs, arriving perhaps full of ideals only to discover that their significance in a stitched-up secret society is essentially zero, would then look around for something else to do. The devil has indeed made work for idle hands. Or, if not the devil, Mrs Thatcher, who, to support her articulation of greed as the basic principle of the economy, created a system which rewarded inventiveness and brazenness at the expense of public duty and honesty.

People are talking about a March election suddenly. Of course, Cameron is talking it up, because he knows that the sooner the election, the less chance that he or his party will have been caught saying or doing something really stupid. But the larger question goes unanswered: just what exactly are we electing? What is an MP’s job description? What are the hours? What are the duties? What constitutes a legitimate expense and what is simply misconduct. More importantly, what is the role of the House of Commons? Clearly not to scrutinise — the House of Lords does that, and, despite the archaic system, is more effective in doing it, because it has a robust group of cross-benchers and independently-minded lords political who ensure that it is not simply the whipping dog of the party in power. Hopefully not to generate yet more regulation and legislation. We have — in many parts of our life together — moved to the point where we are no longer protecting people, but actively curtailing their legitimate life aspirations.

Liberal Democrats may have been a voice crying in the wilderness for a long time, arguing that politics should be changed, that the safe-seat system (which is at the heart of the vast majority of the really serious expenses breaches) needs to be abolished and every vote should be counted, not just the few that are cast by floating voters in a vanishingly small number of swing seats, arguing that MP expenses should be made public, and for an end to Punch-and-Judy two-party politics. A voice crying in the wilderness, but the wilderness is now at our doorstep.

When leadership is needed, we would do best to those who have been pointing the way consistently throughout their careers, not those who jumped when the bandwagon suddenly became popular.

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Richard Dawkins’s followers will no doubt be quick to claim this is another example of the heinous effect of ‘the God delusion’. But they would be wrong. Under charity law, the Church of England has to diligently pursue all of its debtors, and, coupled with the laws on ‘chancel repair liability’ which date back to Valor Ecclesiasticus in 1535, they have no choice.

At the same time, there can’t be anyone in the entire world who believes it’s right for Andrew and Gail Wallbank to be forced to sell their house to pay for repairs to a public building. And they are not the only ones. There is a long list of people who have been stung this way over the years, and the list is going to get longer by 2013.

For more information, see Chancel.Org.UK, which explains how a change in the law will mean that the Church of England has until 2013 to register its interest in properties with Chancel liability. To see the campaign site of the Wallbanks, look here. The official line is available here.

What lunatic changed the law in that way?

(You know the answer to this one, but, in case you don’t, the legislation is the Land Registration Act 2002.)

Since the Church of England is powerless to extricate itself from a situation which bankrupts ordinary people and brings the church, and thus the entire Christian faith, into disrepute, the government ought to have intervened to simply cancel chancel liability. This would free the Church of England to pursue grants and even Lottery money. This is in fact what the Law Commission and the Church of England Synod recommended in the 1980s.

Parliament long ago abolished tithing laws. Blasphemy laws have largely been set aside. But the Chancel Repair Act itself was updated as recently as 1932.

In 2008, the Prime Minister responded to a petition against it as follows:
“Chancel Repair Liability has existed for several centuries and the Government has no plans to abolish it or to introduce a scheme for its redemption. The Government has, however, acted to make the existence of the liability much simpler to discover. From October 2013, chancel repair liability will only bind buyers of registered land if it is referred to on the land register. By that time, virtually all freehold land in England and Wales will be registered. The Government believes that this approach strikes a fair balance between the landowners subject to the liability and its owners who are, in England, generally Parochial Church Councils and, in Wales, the Representative Body of the Church in Wales.
“The Government acknowledges that the existence of a liability for chancel repair will, like any other legal obligation, affect the value of the property in question, but in many cases this effect can be mitigated by relatively inexpensive insurance. It is for the parties involved in a transaction to decide whether or not to take out insurance.”

As far as the Wallbanks are concerned, whatever action is taken is now almost certainly too late.

Parliamentary Questions should have been asked. But it seems that they were not.

We are therefore left with the entirely unsatisfactory statement made by Mr David Lammy, Under-Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs, in 2002: “The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs (Mr. David Lammy): On 14 September 2003 a Transitional Provisions Order relating to the status of chancel repair liability was made under the Land Registration Act 2002. The making of the order follows the reversal by the House of Lords in June 2003 of the Court of Appeal’s decision in Wallbank v Parochial Church Council of the Parish of Aston Cantlow and Wilmcote with Billesley, Warwickshire. The order provides that, for a period of 10 years from the coming into force of the Act on 13 October 2003, chancel repair liability will remain an interest that binds successive owners of land even though it is not protected by an entry in a register kept by the Land Registry. As no land registration fee is payable for applications to protect similar ancient property rights, such as payments in lieu of tithe, Crown rents and manorial rights, the Land Registry intends to waive the fee for applications to protect chancel repair liability for the 10 year period.”

This is pure madness. The government ought to have abolished chancel repair liability outright and filled the short-fall from the public purse — remember, that, at the time, the public purse was overflowing, long before we bailed out the banks and put the nation into debt.

The government can still act. In its dying days, it can set aside a historic injustice: rather like the rhetoric Gordon Brown used in his speech today to drum up a faint pulse among the faithful. While it is certain that Labour can move no major new legislation between now and its forthcoming electoral defeat, it should be able to sort out this mess. Nobody will oppose it, nobody will try to talk it out in committee.

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Few in the Western world, I think, have any sympathy for the Lockerbie bomber. I certainly don’t.

There are of course many who believe that Megrahi was not the bomber. There are, regrettably, a few who believe that the whole thing was a cynical western plot. Nonetheless, to think that what the bomber did was anything other than one of the most reprehensible acts of cowardly mass murder in recent history is no more nor less than a refusal to face the truth.

However, one of the fundamental principles of justice is that it is blind, and another is that it is not interfered with by politicians or through the political process. Back in the democracies of ancient Greece, citizens wrote on shards of clay pot – ostraka – the names of who they would like to see exiled from the city. Those who ‘won’ this poll were expelled, ostracised. Such a thing surely goes down in history as the clearest early example of the tyranny of the 51% majority. A tyranny indeed, and nothing more than an adult version of the kind of class room bullying which we try to stamp out in schools.

If we had all voted as to whether Megrahi would be released, then he would never have been released. But, on the same basis, if we all voted on every crime and every criminal, the sentences of some would become horrific, while others — celebrities, the media-friendly, the very wealthy who could court our sympathies — would go almost free.

Megrahi’s sentence was passed in a nation which gives compassionate release to those within three months of death from terminal conditions. Why three months? Why not let them die in jail? Scotland may reconsider its laws in the light of the Megrahi affair. But, at the time it passed the sentence, such were the laws. Was Megrahi really so ill? We remember all too well the time when General Pinochet, whose hands were probably no cleaner than Megrahi’s, was not extradited to Spain to stand trial because of his health. Yet Pinochet staged a remarkable recovery on his return to Chile. It is entirely possible that we have had the wool pulled over our eyes.

But justice must remain blind. Nobody, nobody at all, except the justice minister who was charged with reviewing this case, should have applied political pressure, neither before nor after. If we allow political pressure to second-guess justice, then we will end up with the kind of show-trials of Stalin’s Russia, and the kind of injustice that saw a British football supporter jailed in Bulgaria for a sentence of 15 years, even though another man confessed.

Of course Scotland’s justice minister is now deeply unpopular. Of course many people are furious. And of course the entire Western world collectively put its head in its hands when Megrahi appeared to be welcomed back in Libya as some kind of hero or celebrity. But leaders are not leaders if they cannot make unpopular decisions. And Libya’s own decision to take Megrahi back in the manner in which it did has surely done it immeasurable harm in the eyes of the world.

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