If we won’t talk to John Cantlie’s captors, then why not have Qataris to do it for us?

It is a horrible thing to say, but I suspect that sooner or later we will begin to get irritated by the John Cantlie Show. Mr Cantlie is the British photojournalist who is being held captive somewhere in Syria by the maniacal and barbarous Islamic State. He has delivered two video lectures of a geopolitical nature, and we should assume that he delivers them under not only duress, but out of a very terrible fear too. However, he is fluent and very calm, insisting that the views he espouses are entirely his own. These amount to a castigation of the UK and the USA for refusing to do some sort of deal with Islamic State in order to procure his release; a view which, if you are in Mr Cantlie’s position, seems to me fair enough, even if it is probably wrong.

But there is also a broader analysis from the hostage — a warning that Barack Obama should not become embroiled in another war in Iraq, because this would lead to the sort of ‘mess’ unwitnessed since Vietnam. More video lectures have been promised, and one hopes that they will be forthcoming, because the alternative is that he will get his head chopped off by one of the possibly British-domiciled Muslim savages who abducted him from the Turkish border in the first place.

Clearly, Mr Cantlie has some sympathies with the people of Syria and Iraq, as does another hostage, the Mancunian taxi driver Alan Henning. Mr Henning was apparently on the verge of converting to Islam, for example, while Mr Cantlie has reportedly developed a great interest in Islam and, in particular, in the hundreds of western-based young Muslims who have turned up in Iraq and Syria to be cannon fodder for any of the competing groups of murderous religious zealots now tearing the place apart.