Mikel and Nina Malyshev were deported back to Uzbekistan on Friday evening. At 6am Saturday morning they telephoned relatives and said that they were met in Tashkent at the plane steps by a representative of the British Embassy, who escorted them from the airport, bypassing passport control and security checks. They were about to be put on a bus to their former home in Zarafshan.

But they never arrived in Zarafshan and there has been no word of them since. The British Embassy say categorically they did not send any representative to meet the plane. That fake British Embassy representative was almost certainly from the Uzbek security services.

I gave written evidence to their asylum appeal stating that any returned asylum seeker would be picked up by the security services at the airport and be in extreme danger. The Home Office told the court this was not true and there were no human rights problems in Uzbekistan. The court accepted the Home Office view.

Having callously deported the Malyshevs to join the lists of the “disappeared” in Uzbekistan, the British government now repudiates any further interest in their fate. The British Embassy in Tashkent has told their relatives in Wales that they are Uzbeks in Uzbekistan and not their responsibility.

The truth is the British government knew perfectly well what would happen to the Malyshevs, and was lying to the court in saying that this would not happen. The coldblooded brutality of the government’s behaviour is stunning. President Karimov’s support for NATO operations in Afghanistan is placed at a far higher value than human life.

The barefaced lie about Gadaffi being killed in the crossfire bodes ill for the openness, transparency and good government we can expect to see now in Libya. But today I am worrying about the effect on our society of human death as entertainment. I have never been an apologist for Gadaffi, but if his regime tortured and murdered, the remedy is not to torture and murder him – even the Nazis were given due process.

This murder is becoming the norm. It was a NATO air strike which took out Gadaffi’s escaping convoy and first wounded him. Two days ago two teenage sons of Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical US/Yemeni cleric executed without trial last week, were executed by a US drone attack as they had dinner. They were aged 16 and 19. They had committed no crime I can find alleged against them. There has been no publicity.

All this killing brings triumphalist politicians smirking on our screens. We seem to have become as dehumanised as ancient Rome. Little human pity is expressed for the way Gadaffi was killed – indeed there is notably less media reflection of pity or revulsion than there was at the (at least judicial) hanging of Saddam Hussein. Is that a measure of the descent into bloodlust barbarism in our society? The complete lack of empathy towards the traveller families being torn from their homes at Dale Farm is part of the same brutalism towards “the other”. Why don’t we go the whole way and have them eaten by lions in the ring?

History shows that bloody appetite once aroused feeds upon itself. We have already had Defence Secretary Hammond on Sky News today positing NATO action now against Syria, while the current US proto-pretext for attacking Iran – the fantasy plot against the Saudi Ambassador – is as believable as Gadaffi’s death in the crossfire.

More death is on the way, to keep the circus going. Then the crowds may not notice there is no bread – no jobs, and their earnings and income eaten up by huge state enforced transfers to the bankers, whether by bailouts or “quantitive easing”.

Quantitive Easing is the best con of all for the ruling classes. In the UK, the £225 billion of printed money to date under quantitive easing has been – every single penny – given to the bankers. Good money for bad, used to buy up the junk bonds which the bankers bought in their terrible investment decision making, and for which fake assets they had awarded themselves many, many billions in personal bonuses. They are rescued from the consequences of their disastrous judgements by the Bank of England printing (in old parlance) new, good money to buy the rubbish they invested in. The result – more rounds of huge personal bonuses for celebrating bankers!! Hooray!!! For you and I, stagflation.

30 months ago, when I explained that Q.E. was another huge transfer to the bankers and predicted it would lead to stagflation, I was widely ridiculed across the web. Now we have the stagflation and everything I predicted has come to pass.

All of which you would normally expect to make people pretty unhappy at the biggest transfer of wealth from poor to rich in history.

Quick! More War! More Militarism! More Blood! More Executions! More Victory for Democracy! Keep the Peasants Happy!
Get a Move On There! Come On!! Come On!! More Blood!! More Blood, Quick, Damn You!!

UPDATE

You are not alone. On the average of the last three hours, 900 people per hour were reading this article and fifty others are at this moment reading this, invisibly alongside you. Those who understand what is happening are not given a mainstream media or political voice, but we are more than you may think. Don’t feel alone in your perception of the tricks of those who govern us, and leave a comment so we can start to feel each other’s support.

NATO were wrong to bomb Libya and kill so many, but that does not make Gadaffi a good guy. He was not – he was cruel, avaricious, and a dictator and really was mentally unbalanced – I speak as someone who met him.

What I now hope for is that civil war ends in Libya and in short order there are genuinely free and fair elections, in which all who wish may participate, to elect the government the Libyan people want. I hope that NATO country interference in Libya now ends and that no commitments are made over Libya’s mineral resources until an elected government is in place to make them.

But I fear that future NATO power interference, starting with the elections, will be less obvious than the mass killings, but in the end even more damaging, and that Libya’s resources and its finance will be handed over to the big corporations lock, stock and barrel. Those who trumpet this as a triumph of “Liberal intervention” are going to have to show a great deal of progress very quickly, if they claim it outweighs the many civilians NATO killed in Sirte and elsewhere – if you believe such a stark utilitarian equation of dead children for democracy can ever have validity.

Mikel and Nina Malyshev’s family have been told by the UK Border Agency that they have been moved from Yarls Wood to an undisclosed location before deportation to Uzbekistan tomorrow. The UK government continues to refuse to acknowledge the terrible human rights situation in Uzbekistan in general, or the fate that awaits the Malyshevs in particular. No reply has to date been received to a fax to the European Court of Human Rights asking for a suspension.

Please take action – contact your MP, and contact William Hague and Teresa May. The UK government cannot be allowed to continue to pretend that it does not know about the human rights situation in Uzbekistan.

Please repost this and my appeal yesterday on any website on which you can.

UPDATE

Could someone kindly give Amnesty International a call and see if they will urgently contact the British government on this one? They have run cases recently against Uzbeks being deported back from the Ukraine and from Kazakhstan. I have to dash to a meeting on another asylum case.

Atlantic Bridge’s web presence has disappeared, as has the Charity Commission’s report on it when it had its charitable status removed. Indeed it has proved rather hard to glean information on this Fox/Werritty vehicle: it seems that William Hague was a member as were, according to Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donell, not just Fox but the two junior defence ministers Werritty met. So this shady fake charity with undisclosed finance sources really was running British foreign and defence policy.

With thanks to my informant, it appears the domain for the Atlantic Bridge website was listed to a Mr Michael Pearsall of 15 Broomfields, Longfield, Kent DA3 8BW. Now what can anybody tell me about him? The contact email for the site registration was [email protected]. Presumably that email address relates to Fox’s portfolio of health before he was switched to defence? If he didn’t make any money from his worngdoing, isn’t it strange how these business consultancies and donation seeking organisations linked to him reflected his official portfolio at the time?

So Michael Pearsall, Peter Stock and ukhealthgroup.com. Let’s get digging!!

Further involvement of the British state in the callous ruining of lives today. Mikel and Nina Malyshev have been taken to Yarlswood Detention Centre and will be deported to probable imprisonment and torture in Uzbekistan on Friday 21 October.

The Home Office continues to insist in asylum cases that there is no human rights problem in Uzbekistan. But no serious authority outside government doubts that Uzbekistan is one of the worst human rights abusers in the world. Unfortunately the lives of Mikel and Nina Malyshev are to be sacrificed to the British government’s agreement with the Karimov regime to provide transit for supplies to the British military in Afghanistan.

It is noticeable that, since the current British government came to power, no government minister or official, nor the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, has made a single reference to Uzbekistan’s terrible human rights abuses, including over 10,000 political prisoners, absolutely no free media or assembly, banning of all opposition parties, millions of children used as forced slave labour and torture and extra-judicial killing on a massive scale.

In fact such is the British government’s enmity towards the people of Uzbekistan I am afraid that Mikel and Nina will be sacrificed without a thought. They have been living around Swansea for years as valued members of the local community. They have not claimed state benefits and have done much voluntary work. Nina’s daughter is today in labour, brought on early by her mother’s detention. The total number of Uzbek asylum seekers in the UK is in the low dozens, escaping the cruelest regime on earth. I understand and share indignation at fake asylum seekers, but we should be deeply ashamed at our vicious attitude to genuine cases like this.

Please send messages to your own MP, to William Hague and to Teresa May, via this website. You may help save a life.

You may also wish to send a message to their own MP, Hywell Francis, who yesterday refused to help, saying “Haven’t I done enough already?” Not just cruel but lazy with it.

Hillary Clinton starts an official visit to Karimov on Sunday to mark the resumption of US arms supplies to Uzbekistan, which were suspended after the massacre of 800 pro-democracy demonstrators in Andijan in 2005.

Anti-Gipsy is the last socially acceptable racism. Even regular commentators on this blog chip in on Dale Farm posts with “They fly tip and make a terrible mess” “They nicked stuff from my local pub” “They just laid a quarter of an inch of tarmac straight on the soil” and other ethnic caricatures. “They” steal children too, no doubt.

Watching the violent ethnic cleansing in Essex live on TV this morning was a heart-wrenching experience. Councillor Tony Ball, leader of the authority conducting the ethnic cleansing, a Murdoch star, explains that his action is popular. I have no doubt it is. It would be popular in Basildon if the council hung a black man from the council flagstaff every day. No doubt the smug little bigot is a happy man this morning.

Those who justify breaking up family homes, destroying a community and disrupting childrens’ schooling, on grounds of narrow legality and planning law, have to answer this narrow legal point too. The attack (for such it was) on Dale Farm this morning was carried out by riot police with no participation of bailiffs. At least two female inhabitants, both travellers and permanent residents at the site, have needed hospital treatment. The police smashed down fences, both internal and external to the site, which the High Court had specifically said were on the site, legally owned by the travellers and could not be destroyed by the bailiffs. Where does that illegal act of destruction sit with the narrow legalistic defence of this racist attack?

Murdoch News this morning gave the gist of the police’s legal defence. Police had “Intelligence” of a “stockpile of items to be used as weapons”. They therefore had had to storm the camp in the interests of public safety. This necessitated the breaking down of the High Court protected fences as an emergency measure to save lives. All of which is a transparent pretext, a flouting of the law by the police much worse than any law the travellers’ flouted, because the police breaking of the law resulted in violence and injury. The weapons stockpile of course does not exist.

Let me state once more the key facts. Although situated in a greenbelt, every inch of the travellers’ site was brownfield land, previously occupied by a scrapyard. Satellite photos prove that the travellers did not expand at all onto green land. The reason they did not have planning permission is that multiple applications for planning permission have been rejected, and the reason they have been rejected is that Basildon Council are racists. A nice Tory builder would undoubtedly have been allowed to shoehorn countless houses onto this ex-scrapyard. The travellers do own all the land they were on.

What harm were they doing? None. What was their crime? Their ethnicity. All the else is legalistic camouflage of the type that states have used to pursue ethnic cleansing everywhere. Ethnic cleansing is always enforcing the law in the eys of the state which carries it out. That is rather the point.

My mole told the truth – the delay was the reformating of a four page A4 report (merely 2,700 words) to spread it super-thinly over ten pages, using line spacing, large font and paragraph breaks.

It is a work of breathtaking insouciance. It brushes over Werritty’s meetings with other defence ministers on the pretext that, as this was in the context of Atlantic Bridge, that makes it OK! In fact, that is precisely what makes it unacceptable.

It also mentions only the Fox-Werritty meeting with Matthew Gould, UK Ambassador to Israel, in the MOD and fails to mention that they met him at least once again in Israel, or to answer a single one of the questions I asked about how this meeting was set up or what other contacts Gould had with Werritty.

The statement that the Cabinet Office were unaware of Werritty’s existence is a downright lie. Also interesting that it makes no mention of other government departments, particularly the FCO. And no mention at all of Werritty’s Israel Lobby funding or Mossad.

This is less whitewash, more transparent bollocks.

My investigation continues…

The Guardian has for the last ten hours had an over-optimistic live blog entitled “Liam Fox Report Published.” Four hours ago the BBC told us rather hilariously the delay was caused by technical difficulties putting it on the Cabinet Office website. I bet the photocopier is jammed too.

A Murray Mole has struck again!! What was already a very sparse report on very narrow terms of reference had huge chunks hacked out of it by Number 10. The result was so obviously pathetic that it is being bulked out with guff and waffle, large font, line spacing and paragraph breaks.

I kid you not.

British Ambassador to Israel Matthew Gould has refused to answer my questions about his relationship with Werritty. With multiple Whitehall sources having pointed first me and then the Guardian, Times, Mail and Independent to a link between Fox-Werritty and Mossad, this refusal is unacceptable. Just what was the Ambassador’s relationship with Werritty and how much did he know?

This is the reply I received to my questions to Matthew Gould:

As the Prime Minister made clear in the House of Commons on Wednesday, the matter is being looked into by the Cabinet Secretary who is producing a report. We are working with the Cabinet Office on this and cannot prejudice its outcome by commenting in advance.

But I was not asking Gould for opinions, but rather for a series of simple facts. Knowledge of the facts of the case cannot prejudice a report – unless the purpose of the report is to be extremely selective about the facts allowed to come out.

These are the questions I put to Matthew Gould:

You are widely reported in the media to have met Mr Werritty with Liam Fox at a meeting in the MOD before your posting to Tel Aviv.

1) Was this part of your official series of pre-posting briefing meetings?
2) Who organised the meeting? Was it organised by another official, eg in Heads of Mission Section (if it still exists) or the geographical department?
3) At what stage did you know that Werritty would be in the meeting?
4) How was Werritty introduced to you?
5) Who did you think that Werritty was? In what capacity did you believe or presume or were you told that Werritty was at the meeting?
6) Was there any aspect of the discussion which you would normally view as classified? If so at what classification?
7) Was any note made or minute or letter written as a result of what transpired at that meeting? Did any other action arise?
8 ) What was the classification of any note, document, minute or letter arising from the discussion at that meeting?
9) Had you ever met Werritty before?
10) You and Werritty reportedly both attended an anti-Iranian conference in Israel, as did Fox. What contact did you have with Werritty at that conference or in its margins? What did you discuss?
11) Please list the total number of occasions on which you have met, corresponded with (including email), or spoken by telephone with Werritty.

I am willing to bet the report gives almost none of these answers. As it is apparently due out in the next half hour, let me remind you what my outraged Cabinet Office source told me a week ago had been stitched up in advance:

Gus O’Donnell, Cabinet Secretary, has fixed with Cameron the lines of his investigation to allow him to whitewash Fox. This will be done by the standard method of only asking very narrow questions, to which the answer is known to be satisfactory. In this case, the investigation into Werritty’s finances will look only at the very narrow question of whether he received specific payments that can be linked directly to the setting up of specific meetings with Fox. The answer is thought to be no; that is what Fox was indicating by his extraordinary formulation to the House of Commons that Werritty was “not dependent on any transactional behaviour to maintain his income”.

So O’Donnell will announce that Werritty received no specific money for specific meetings with or introductions to Fox.

But the deal between Cameron, Fox and O’Donnell is that O’Donnell will not address the much more important question of who funded Werritty and why. Having claimed there was no wrongdoing, O’Donnell will say Mr Werritty’s finances are private and should not be made public. It was on that basis that Werritty agreed to give financial details to Sue Gray in the Cabinet Office yesterday.

The Cabinet Office will only look for direct evidence of a little grubby money-making for introductions to Fox. But what is actually happening is much worse and much more serious. Who paid for Werritty’s eighteen overseas trips with Liam Fox and his stays in exclusive hotels in the World’s most expensive destinations? What does he live on?

The answer is that Werritty is paid by representatives of far right US and Israeli sources to influence the British defence secretary. It has been discussed within the MOD whether Werritty is being – knowingly or otherwise – run as an agent of influence by the CIA or Mossad. That is why the chiefs of the armed forces are so concerned, and why there is today much gagging at the stitch up within the Cabinet Office.

Newspaper revelations may have caused O’Slimebag to deviate the tiniest bit from this formula. but I am willing to bet this is still basically the stitch-up we will see,

I am ganuinely glad to see Gilad Shalit go home, and to see so many Palestinians reunited with their families. In conflict resolution we tend to refer to such events as “confidence building measures”, and there is no doubt that prisoner releases have to be a part of any eventual solution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. But this is hardly an unprecedented event – I can remember three or four similar ones, with no long term effect. Still, on balance a good thing.

I find the wall to wall media coverage so laughably one-sided that I am surprisingly relaxed about it. Anybody likely to be paying the slightest attention to a news channel is going to know some background on the Israeli occupation and the plight of the Palestinians, so the ludicrous one-sidedness of the BBC and Sky News is much more likely to provoke derision than to have the desired propaganda effect.

I had the peculiar thought this morning that the crazed extremism of the Netanyahu government, with their walls and accelerated settlement building, may not be a bad thing in the long term. Another year or two of this kind of land grab and a two state solution will become patently impractical, and unacceptable to all Palestinians. As someone who has always favoured a single, secular democratic state in Israel/Palestine, I am hopeful that the two state idea, which is a Zionist trap into which well meaning but despairing liberals fell, will lose support when it becomes clear that the proposed Palestinian state is becoming an ever shrinking, increasingly disconnected series of tiny waterless and resourceless bantustans.

It is my birthday today.

Here is a picture of Tilda Swinton which I lifted from Mondoweiss. It is apparently from a photoshoot for the November 2011 edition of Vogue. Good for her, and here is a small parcel of praise to counter the avalanche of hate which will shortly be launched at her.

A week late, but the mainstream media has finally learnt (not least through my telling them) that it was the Mossad link that was really worrying Whitehall about Fox.

And I have an article in the Mail on Sunday.

The Indie on Sunday story of a Fox-Israel plot against Iran is a great deal more credible than Obama’s announcement of a plot by Iranian used car salesmen to employ the Canadian Mounties to assassinate Justin Timberlake outside the Won-Ton Chinese restaurant in Champaign-Urbana (I may have got some of the details of Obama’s fantasy wrong, but what’s the difference?)

It is now absolutely essential that Matthew Gould. British Ambassador to Israel, answers the questions I have put to him.

Peter Oborne managed to get me on a BBC Radio 4 programme he was guest hosting, Week in Westminster, and presumably due to his involvement I was, for the first time in three years, not cancelled at the last moment. You can listen here by clicking on the first “listen now” button. I am on briefly after about 9 minutes, but it is all worth hearing.

I have repeatedly recommended Oborne’s books The Rise of Political Lying and The Triumph of the Political Class, both essential reading.

Incidentally my single sentence reference to Mossad was edited out, but I think my meaning remains clear.

A mainstream media source has finally plucked up the courage to publish the widespread concern among MOD, Cabinet Office and FCO officials and military that the Werritty operation was linked to, and perhaps controlled by, Mossad – something which agitated officials have been desperately signaling for some days.

“Officials expressed concern that Fox and Werritty might even have been in freelance discussions with Israeli intelligence agencies” write Patrick Wintour and Richard Norton-Taylor in the Guardian.

As I have been explaining, the real issue here is a British defence secretary who had a parallel advice structure designed expressly to serve the interests of another state and linked to that state’s security services. That is not just a sacking offence, it is treasonable.

UPDATE

It seems to me the questions now starting to be asked about the connection to Israel and possibly to Mossad might well have had a major effect on Fox’s sudden throwing in of the towel. If he did not believe that resigning would stop some further investigation, he might as well have toughed it out over the weekend; nobody has ever accused Fox of being thin-skinned.

The need for answers to my questions to Matthew Gould is in fact now greater, not less.

An interesting and insufficiently explored aspect of the Werritty scandal is the role of Matthew Gould, UK Ambassador to Israel. Gould met with Werritty and Fox at least twice, at a pre-posting briefing meeting in the MOD and at an anti-Iranian conference in Israel. It is quite probable he had many more contacts with Werritty than that. As Werritty’s financiers specifically sought to promote the interests of Israel though Werritty, and it is thought by some within the MOD and Cabinet Office that they may have been acting on behalf of Mossad, these links with Matthew Gould are crucial.

Matthew is a good man, of whom Robin Cook thought highly. I have this morning sent him this email:

My dear Matthew,

Belated congratulations on your Ambassadorship and I do hope that you and your family are enjoying life in Tel Aviv.

I wish to ask you some questions on your role in the Adam Werritty affair. This email and the response will be published on my blog. I appreciate you will probably pass this on to News Department but it seemed impolite to address questions about you to somebody else, and you will need to provide them with the answers anyway. As I am sure you are aware, I can get a number of MPs very easily to ask these questions for me, but I hope you will be so good as to ensure that full and true answers are provided to me.

Anyway, here are the questions. I should like a brief but fully true answer to each individual question:

You are widely reported in the media to have met Mr Werritty with Liam Fox at a meeting in the MOD before your posting to Tel Aviv.

1) Was this part of your official series of pre-posting briefing meetings?
2) Who organised the meeting? Was it organised by another official, eg in Heads of Mission Section (if it still exists) or the geographical department?
3) At what stage did you know that Werritty would be in the meeting?
4) How was Werritty introduced to you?
5) Who did you think that Werritty was? In what capacity did you believe or presume or were you told that Werritty was at the meeting?
6) Was there any aspect of the discussion which you would normally view as classified? If so at what classification?
7) Was any note made or minute or letter written as a result of what transpired at that meeting? Did any other action arise?
8 ) What was the classification of any note, document, minute or letter arising from the discussion at that meeting?
9) Had you ever met Werritty before?
10) You and Werritty reportedly both attended an anti-Iranian conference in Israel, as did Fox. What contact did you have with Werritty at that conference or in its margins? What did you discuss?
11) Please list the total number of occasions on which you have met, corresponded with (including email), or spoken by telephone with Werritty.

I apologise for the long list of questions but you will understand the level of precision I am attempting to obtain and thus most of them require only very short answers.

I would point out that Werritty is in precisely the same position as me; merely a private individual and taxpayer. In asking these questions I am quite as entitled to your attention and time, and to be given information, as Werritty. I trust I will be given the answers; knowing you I am sure you will wish to be open, honest and helpful.

Craig

These are of course exactly the questions which the opposition and mainstream media ought to be asking, but I rather fear they are not. The Cabiner Office “Inquiry” is deliberately not asking.

This information comes straight from a source with direct access to the Cabinet Office investigation into Fox’s relationship with Werritty.

Gus O’Donnell, Cabinet Secretary, has fixed with Cameron the lines of his investigation to allow him to whitewash Fox. This will be done by the standard method of only asking very narrow questions, to which the answer is known to be satisfactory. In this case, the investigation into Werritty’s finances will look only at the very narrow question of whether he received specific payments that can be linked directly to the setting up of specific meetings with Fox. The answer is thought to be no; that is what Fox was indicating by his extraordinary formulation to the House of Commons that Werritty was “not dependent on any transactional behaviour to maintain his income”.

So O’Donnell will announce that Werritty received no specific money for specific meetings with or introductions to Fox.

But the deal between Cameron, Fox and O’Donnell is that O’Donnell will not address the much more important question of who funded Werritty and why. Having claimed there was no wrongdoing, O’Donnell will say Mr Werritty’s finances are private and should not be made public. It was on that basis that Werritty agreed to give financial details to Sue Gray in the Cabinet Office yesterday.

The Cabinet Office will only look for direct evidence of a little grubby money-making for introductions to Fox. But what is actually happening is much worse and much more serious. Who paid for Werritty’s eighteen overseas trips with Liam Fox and his stays in exclusive hotels in the World’s most expensive destinations? What does he live on?

The answer is that Werritty is paid by representatives of far right US and Israeli sources to influence the British defence secretary. It has been discussed within the MOD whether Werritty is being – knowingly or otherwise – run as an agent of influence by the CIA or Mossad. That is why the chiefs of the armed forces are so concerned, and why there is today much gagging at the stitch up within the Cabinet Office.

This has parallels to the Christine Keeler case but is much, much worse.

That the British Defence Minister holds frequent unrecorded meetings in the Ministry and abroad with somebody promoting the interests of foreign powers is much, much worse than a little cash-grubbing. That the person representing the foreign powers is actually present, apparently to all as a ministerial adviser, at meetings of Fox with important representatives of foreign nations is simply appalling.

That we are being so easily misdirected to a narrow cash question – and that the media have followed that misdirection – is ludicrous.

A civil service mole has promised me some insider news about Gus O’Donnell’s planned whitewash of Fox relating to how they will treat Werritty’s finances in the investigation. This entry is being posted 45 minutes after I leave home to meet them, by an unorthodox route and method of transport, to an improbable location. Oh, and neither of us is carrying a mobile phone either. So don’t bother, you’re stuffed.

I remember the gay-baiting student Liam Fox as active in the banning of a Gay Society at Glasgow University Union in the early 1980’s. As President of Dundee University Students Association, which at the time had close ties with our Glasgow counterparts in the Scottish campaign against the NUS, I tried to change their mind, and that was my first memory of the odious little bigot.

Being sick in bed this weekend and paying little attention to the news, I had presumed that Fox’s “ex-flatmate” Adam Werritty was of his own age, a flatmate from students days or impecunious early employment. I also presumed that Werritty had been Fox’s best man back in a similar period. I am surprised to find that the 40 year old Fox picked up the 24 year old Werritty at a meeting in Edinburgh Unversity only ten years ago, shortly after that Werritty moved into his flat, and after they had known each other just four years, Werrity was apparently Liam’s closest buddy on earth and became his best man.

Fox accommodated Werritty in taxpayer funded accommodation and around the best man period was funding him on his MPs expenses – before the “Atlantic Bridge” fake charity wheeze. Fox was found by the expenses scandal investigation to have “overclaimed” over £20,000 in mortgage payments and was forced to pay it back. It is unclear why Fox was not prosecuted. He also charged mobile phone bills of over £17,000 to the taxpayer. There must now be an investigation of how many of those calls were to Adam Werritty.

The fact that when Liam Fox was shadow health secretary, Werritty ran a health consultancy, and when Fox became defence secretary, Werritty became a defence consultant, tells you all that you need to know about this relationship. Tory attempts to fog the big picture by focusing on what exactly was discussed at individual meetings are irrelevant. I commend this Telegraph article by James Kirkup, who deserves a prize for best use of the phrase “by coincidence”.

I came back from Ghana at the weekend specifically so I could speak to the Stop the War rally in Trafalgar Square yesterday. Unfortunately I brought back a collection of interesting diseases and a fever with me, and a cold wet afternoon seemed too unwise. Oh dear, am I losing my edge?