Why does no one blame Cameron for Libya?

Call me petulant, but I’m not sure Britain is getting enough credit for our fine, fine work in Libya. The Islamic State, so recently present only in the semi-mythical lands of Syria and Iraq — places you see on the news, but don’t really have to believe in — has now set up residence a short hop away from Italy, in the Libyan town of Sirte. Which is, just to be clear, a hell of a lot closer to Italy than we are. Maybe one-and-a-half times the stretch of a Hull– Zeebrugge ferry. We did that. Well done everybody. Top marks all around.

Also, Derna. That’s another town they’ve got. I’d never heard of Derna before, but apparently, Isis has held it since last October. Last week they took a group of six-year-olds to watch a beheading, ‘for educational purposes’. Derna to Crete is less than Liverpool to Dublin. You could almost swim it. I daresay some have tried.

A ‘key reason’ for the Isis success in Libya, reported the Washington Post last week, ‘is the chaos that has enveloped this oil-rich nation since the 2011 Arab Spring revolt’. Only — and I know it’s a little thing — but isn’t a ‘key reason’ for that chaos the way we bombed everything? You can’t have forgotten. Everybody was very excited at the time. David Cameron’s lips got terribly thin, remember, and his eyes burned with the holy conviction that everything in Libya would get much better — and not much, much worse — if we could find something to bomb, and bomb it. Or, better still, persuade America to bomb it. And then, when it didn’t get better at all, we just seem to have… wandered off. Whistling. As if the sheer, utter, hopeless collapse of a state, and the bombs — come on, it can’t just be me; surely you remember the bombs? — weren’t really connected at all.