Convenient timing

Verity

God - David Cameron, Obama and fantasist Hillary Clinton (who lied that she was strafed getting off a plane in Beirut).

Has the world really come to this?

Ed P

"The medical examinations were thorough & impartial" - not true: the first 2 doctors examining al-Meghrahi did not agree that he would expire within 3 months, needed to justify compassionate release. The third doctor, who did, was either lent on or incompetent.

Beer Moth

"Britain and Libya had to produce a PTA to normalise diplomatic relations so that trade could be opened and Gadaffi hired in the war on terror."

So, in order to fight terrorism, it's incumbent upon us to release terrorists, because a terrorist state stipulates this as a condition of their future willingness to work alongside us to defeat terrorism?

That should work.

As far as the 'unforseen advances in medical treatment' goes: you have got to be kidding. Not even on the authority of Doctor Massie.

Beer Moth

Your use of imagery is revealing also David.

You refer to the media task here as so much 'capping off wells'. The containment of any visible spill of ugliness, so that we can go on, oblivious to the build up of toxicity.

David Lindsay

BP is an only-too-classic case of privatisation and globalisation in action. Making it hardly, if at all, B anymore. That is the problem. By all means, let Middle America give voice to its long-latent hatred of all that. It would cause all the right dominoes to start to fall. All over the West. And all over the world.

Including in Scotland. This Lockerbie affair exposes the true character of the SNP, often lazily categorised as a party of the Left. In fact, most of its electorate is made up of the sort of people who became Conservatives as the Liberal Party collapsed in the long aftermath of the First World War. People like Margaret Thatcher, and who in fact did very well out of her Premiership, even if they couldn't stand her, hardly a sentiment peculiar to Scotland. They vote for the party best placed to beat the one that they really hate, Labour, which they still see in the terms defined by the right-wing media of the 1980s. Of course, that makes them very much like a lot of Lib Dem voters in the more Labour parts of England.

The Conservative Party has few remaining Tories, but there are still a few for now. The Lib Dems have few remaining Radicals, but there are still a few for now. The less said about what has become of the Labour Party, the better. But the SNP is nothing except the political wing of big business in Scotland, especially banking and oil. In the service of those interests, it will even engineer the release from prison, on wholly specious grounds, of a man whose legal status (I don't believe that he did it, but that is not the present point) remains that of a convicted mass murderer who has withdrawn his appeal.

Such is the sort of faction which devolution was designed to appease, and which it puts in charge of great tracts of public policy across great tracts of the United Kingdom. The alternative is to return to communities of interest among and across the several parts of the United Kingdom, safeguarding and strengthening the Union, and defined by the Welfare State, workers' rights, full employment, a strong Parliament, trade unions, co-operatives, credit unions, mutual guarantee societies, mutual building societies, and nationalised industries. Industries often with the word "British" in their names. For example, British Petroleum.

porkbelly

You must be joking, David. This whole malodorous episode may have been excused as enlisting Gaddafi in the "war on terror" but there can be no doubt - none - that it was really a shabby subterfuge to renege on an agreement with an erstwhile ally in return for commercial advantage. The Scottish clowns were used simply as a convenient method for publicly distancing Brown, Straw et al from American ire.

Perhaps some of the red-faced nationalists who post here could reflect that Britain has not exactly always covered herself with glory either in the Special Relationship. This and the oil spill would represent the last two nails in that particular coffin.

Craig Mitchell

It is laughable that the US Congress are seeking to attack BP; and by extension the British Government; as being soft on terrorism.
Perhaps Mr. Cameron could politely enquire as to the exact number of Irish terrorists that have been extradited from the US to the UK over the years?
Some countries were fighting terrorism before 2001.

steveal

Grumpy Bolton was exquisite last night, describing the Scottish Executive as "roadkill" in the issue...

TrevorsDen

If the world can succumb to posts like yours Verity, who knows what the future holds.

Mind you - you are a paragon of perceptiveness when compared to the outpourings of Mr Lindsay. 'most' members of the SNP are conservatives; which is of course why they have elected ex-socialist Salmond as their leader.

AF

Craig mitchell,
Spot on,furthermore America only understands tragedies when it visits its own shores,too many examples to list,
perhaps when a similar tragedy as experienced in Mexico whereupon some 26,000 have died,(innocents,government agents,and mainly drug dealers)have been slaughtered in three years,this would extrapalate to about 60,000 in the USA population then perhaps they would get to grip with their drug problem,helping us into the bargain.

TomTom

"Hillary Clinton will investigate rumours that the company conspired with the British government Hillary Clinton will investigate rumours that the company conspired with the British government "

Time for TB to make an entrance with Anji Hunter - it was not called Blair Petroleum for nothing, but maybe Lord Browne can pop by.

When US politicians tell US voters that they are sponsored by Big Oil PACs and Big Bank PACs but they need to "Bash The British" as in the 1920s to divert attention from Financial Excesses and BUST then we can see this humiliating performance by American politicians for what it is: CANT and HYPOCRISY

Mycroft

So 'Hillary Clinton will investigate rumours that the company conspired with the British government to include al-Megrahi in a Prisoner Transfer Agreement, and that BP pressured the Scottish executive to release al-Megrahi last summer.' So why doesn't she just ask the people from the British government whom she meets? Or perhaps she thinks she can't trust them, so will have to be carrying out an investigation to find out whether they are lying. The impertinence of this simply beggars belief, and just goes to show up the one-sided nature of the so-called special relationship. Cameron is taking the right approach with these people in my view, being amiably business-like, and neither grovelling nor being touchy or boorish.

porkbelly

Mycroft - it's "impertinent" not to trust the word of Mandelson, the man at the center of the exchange? Eh? Perhaps you feel confident in the honesty and probity of Blair, Straw and of course Brown? If so I have some Icelandic bank shares you might be interested in...

Mycroft

porkbelly - there wasn't an exchange, al-Megrahi was released on 'compassionate grounds', by the Scottish administration, a different matter altogether. And whatever the justification for an investigation, can one imagine the government here saying that it was going to investigate what the American adminsitration had been doing in such a situation? It is the asymmetry in this relationship that I find objectionable.

David Lindsay

steveal, I trust that after John Bolton's performance, no one will any longer suggest that American hostility towards Britain is an aberration of the Obama Administration. Christine Graham skewered him rather well.

But Gavin Esler never bothered to push the point, that this was an action of the most monolithically, devotedly oily party in the democratic world, which now stands exposed, once and for all, as precisely that.

RodiDodi

Well said, Mycroft!

Tankus

'ees ah medical miracle , he is .!...Just like Ernest Sanders !

Blessed be the guilty ! .....well those with political pull, anyways. !

porkbelly

Surely no one believes the "compassionate grounds" fiction? That was a figleaf if ever there was one (and a transparent one at that). Far be it for me to defend Obama and Clinton - but in this case there was a pre-existing agreement between the US and Britain that Meghrahi would serve out his entire sentence. Isn't it natural that one party to the agreement should ask the other to explain why it was broken so egregiously?

The net effect of all this will be to poison an already chilly relationship, and all Cameron's pink oiliness will not make matters better.

On a happier note, some Libyan doctor will surely receive the Nobel Prize next year for having found a cure for terminal prostate cancer.

Osred

The Megrahi case/conviction stank a wee bit. Having said that the tw@t deserved to serve time for being in Libyan intelligence. As for the real Pan-Am culprits the 1st reactions (quickly withdrawn) were that the Syrians were involved. I reckon thats where the real smell lies.

yank

Well, gang, it's sorta like LBJ once said... Sometimes you have to just stand there and take it... like a jackass in the rain.

When you release a mass murderer... under shady circumstance... best expect some rain to fall on you.

Mycroft

Dear yank, No one is raining on me, I don't think you'll find that anyone much cares here about all that self-righteous blathering in America about this issue. America never has never cared much about terrorism except when it affects its own citizens; remember the IRA. In my view, the evidence against al-Megrahi is exceedingly thin. Far more likely that it was an act of revenge by the Iranians for the incident in which the Vincennes shot down an Iranian airliner, killing 290 civilians in the previous July. I'm afraid cases like this are very liable to lead to miscarriages of justice.

yank

Not sure anybody much cares about it here either, Mr. Mycroft, despite the political class' sudden interest. The great mass of us just accept it as reflection of the relentless Euro transition to sharia (if we bother to consider it at all, that is).

Holly ......

I believe a deal was done.
Think back...
The great train robber would die in jail.
Two minutes later he would be free...
Then the lockerby bomber is freed.
How would Labour have squared that with the British public?
A mass murderer goes free while a train robber dies in jail.
Labour had no bright cabinet members & thought they were being clever by insisting the nasty train robber would never be free.
Then the bods told him about the deal & did the about turn.
Labour..The next generation aren't all that bright either...each blaming the other,yet backed every policy to the hilt when in office....
If it was such a great deal, for the benefit of the country...how come we are rock bottom cutting everything to the bone?
Lauding over the very people that threw our country into the gutter.
Mandelson will sell his book,as will Blair...who will buy it????
We are where we are & who we are because of OUR actions...Labour just told us what to do and we did it.
Do not now say,"I knew nothing".
You did. We all did....now we are reaping what we have sown....