Tim Luckhurst

Who really freed Megrahi?

From our UK edition

Who really freed the Lockerbie bomber? The question cannot be answered by deliberately looking in the wrong place. And for the fortnight since Kenny MacAskill, Scotland’s Justice Secretary, announced Mr Megrahi’s release that is what journalists have been doing, obsessively. Reporting with the pack mentality that often misdirects them, British newspapers have tried to prove that Gordon Brown authorised the release. Instead they have demonstrated only that the Prime Minister wanted Megrahi to be transferred to Libya under the prisoner transfer scheme, and that he had no power to make it happen. Granted, Mr Brown and the British Cabinet desired a result that would have appalled Americans nearly as much as the actual outcome has. But their view did not prevail.

Poles apart?

From our UK edition

In Warsaw last Tuesday the French defence minister, Michelle Alliot-Marie, continued her President's ham-fisted strategy of offering patronising advice to Eastern European nations on course to join the European Union. 'It was better to keep silent when you don't know what's going on,' she declared. Poland's deputy foreign minister, Adam Rotfeld, resented the lecture. 'France has a right to its opinion and Poland has the right to decide what is good for it,' he told an interviewer. Then, addressing himself directly to Ms Alliot-Marie's boss, 'I would prefer it if he expressed himself more politely.' Another East European diplomat said Chirac had spoken in a tone that even Moscow would have been reluctant to use with its Warsaw Pact clients.