Law

Pete suggests there's little more to say about the Sunday Times story on the UK government's attitude towards the release of the Abdelbaset ali al-Megrahi. The suggestion given by the paper - and increasingly assumed to be true by everyone else - is that Megrahi was freed for fear that keeping him in prison in Scotland would jeopardise potentially £15bn worth of business for BP in Libya. The implication is that, like the war in Iraq, it's all about the oil. Well, we had to reach this point eventually, I guess. Nonetheless, though it's written by my old friend Jason Allardyce, there's a little less to the Sunday Times's story than first appears. That's because the letters the paper has obtained have nothing to do with the decision to actually release Megrahi.

No-one could mistake back-bench Conservative MPs for advocates for limited government. So it's scarcely surprising that Nadine Dorries and Edward Leigh are up in arms over proposals to "clarify" the law (in England and Wales) on assisted suicide. You might think it's your body and your life but that doesn't mean you have the right to decide your own fate. No way. Not if these energetic busybodies have anything to do with it. On her blog, Dorries raises the preposterous prospect of state-sponsored death squads marauding through Britain's nursing homes and hospitals, pulling out plugs and smothering pensioners with their pillows. She doesn't put it quite as colourfully as that, but that's the spectre she's raising. To put it mildly, this seems unlikely.