Mandy: wanted for questioning

As political scandals go, it may be less immediately compelling than all this business about the Home Secretary’s love life. But in terms of import and, I suspect, shelf life, the extent of British involvement in the attempted coup against the government of Equatorial Guinea is certainly the one to watch. With every careful, clever parliamentary question set down by the shadow foreign secretary Michael Ancram, the Foreign Office position looks less and less tenable. With every further bit of digging by journalists, more weird and murky stuff emerges.

The chief questions at the moment are these: why did Jack Straw suddenly change his mind and agree that Britain did, after all, know about the attempted coup as early as January this year? He had given point-blank denials to two newspapers investigating the story — and then suddenly decided that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office had been given the intelligence. And so it follows that if Britain did know, why didn’t we do what we were meant to do under international law and tell the — admittedly corrupt and loathsome — government of Equatorial Guinea about it? We know that the FCO took the various reports it had received about the planned coup seriously enough to revise its civil contingency plans for the possible evacuation of British nationals from that appalling west African country. But this does not square with its current excuse that it did not take the reports of a coup seriously enough to inform Equatorial Guinea’s revolting dictator, President Obiang.

But there are more questions, many more. Rather pleasingly, a lot of them relate to the involvement of the new EU commissioner, Mr Peter Mandelson. You just knew he had to be involved somewhere along the line, didn’t you? It is alleged that the coup was backed financially by a British-domiciled Lebanese businessman, Eli Calil.