This smelly business was made as dull as a deed of conveyance
SHOULD you ever need a smelly piece of business to be tidied away, Attorney General Jeremy Wright is your man. Lawyer and Tory MP Wright is one of the Government front bench’s less prominent personnel. That is a polite way of saying he is a bit of a nobody.
And that is what makes him useful. Nobody knows who he is, so nobody bothers to dislike him.
Yesterday lunchtime he came to a sparsely-attended Commons to make a Statement about the settlement of a long running diplomatic problem.
Libyan politician Abdul Belhadj and his wife Fatima Boudchar had agreed to drop their case against the Government for some bad things done to them by MI6 (‘the Foreign Office’) back when Tony Blair was prime minister.
In 2004 our spooks handed the couple over to the Gaddafi regime, which Mr Blair was courting. To be more precise, we helped the Americans kidnap them in Thailand and the Americans completed the handover.
Mr Belhadj was an opponent of Gaddafi. Both he and his wife, who was then pregnant, were tortured. Now we (the British taxpayer) are paying Mrs Boudchar half a million pounds and the Government has published a long apology.
Mrs Boudchar was sitting in the Commons gallery yesterday while Mr Wright said his piece. In white jacket and a green and yellow head-scarf, she had settled herself in a central position where she could hardly be missed. Beside her sat a young boy – the child she was carrying when she was tortured.
As she listened to Mr Wright lay out the details of the case she remained strikingly impassive. Her son wriggled a bit but this was understandable. Mr Wright is not the most exciting of orators.
He explained that legal proceedings by the couple against Jack Straw, who was Foreign Secretary in 2004, and a former diplomat called Sir Mark Allen, had been dropped. Sir Mark is a vivid figure who has spent a lot of time in the Middle East and north Africa. His hobby was falconry. Mr Wright worked through his text bloodlessly. He made it sound no more remarkable than the details of some conveyancing document. The couple had been ‘subjected to a harrowing ordeal that caused them significant distress’. He kept using that opaque word ‘rendition’ – basically, it means beastly interrogation and non- judicial imprisonment. I don’t ever recall hearing of ‘rendition’ until the Blair years.
After his absence on Wednesday, Speaker Bercow was back in the Chair. When Mr Wright ended his opening remarks, the Speaker could not resist sticking his oar in to indicate where his sympathies resided.
Labour’s spokesman, Nick Thomas-Symonds, spoke only briefly. Given the New Labour regime’s culpability, he could hardly do otherwise.
Kenneth Clarke (Con, Rushcliffe) expressed regret that it had taken ‘so many years’ for the matter to be resolved. Mr Wright kept saying that the legal details had been terribly complicated.
One wonders if there was also perhaps the habitual inertia while The System waited for certain officials to retire before details of the foul-up became public.
Joanna Cherry, for the SNP, spoke of the episode as being ‘part of the dark side of Tony Blair’s deal in the desert with Gaddafi in 2004’. Mr Wright said Mr Blair had been told of the settlement of the dispute but he, Wright, could not speak about what happened under the Blair Government.
THIS may be one of those political conventions that voters find maddening. We have to pay damages but we cannot be told the full details.
Sir Edward Leigh (Con, Gainsborough) flashed with momentary anger. ‘Has any apology been given from Mr Blair? I doubt it, any more than an apology has been given over Iraq.’ No one asked how much the lawyers had cost. Lord knows how many noughts that would involve.
After a subdued half an hour or so, the procedural waters closed over this shaming little episode in British public life.