Don't UK cabinet ministers talk to each other?

[What follows is from a post by Andrew Sparrow on The Guardian's Politics blog.]

[UK Schools Secretary Ed] Balls appeared on BBC Radio 4's Today programme to talk about academies, but began the interview by taking questions on Libya.

Interestingly, he was much more willing than other ministers have been to acknowledge realpolitik, arguing that the interests of the families of IRA victims were outweighed by the wider diplomatic benefits to be gained from improving relations with Libya.

And, right at the end of the interview, he threw in this:

"The important thing is to be open and honest about the difficult foreign policy judgments which are being made here.

"As for William Hague's comment [about] the government's failure of judgment to release al-Megrahi, I have to say that none of us wanted to see the release of al-Megrahi, but that wasn't a judgment made by British government, it was a decision made by the Scottish executive.

"If William Hague says we should be straight, then I think he should be straight."

The problem with this is that it contradicts what we learned last week.

On Tuesday, the Scottish government released documents showing that, when Bill Rammell was a Foreign Office minister, he told the Libyans the UK government did not want Megrahi to die in prison.

The note, which recorded what Scottish officials were told about the meeting by the Libyans, said:

"Mr Rammell had stated that neither the prime minister nor the foreign secretary would want Mr Megrahi to pass away in prison, but the decision on transfer lies in the hands of Scottish ministers."

The following day, David Miliband confirmed this was accurate when he told Today:

"We did not want him to die in prison. We were not seeking his death in prison."

Then, a few hours later, Gordon Brown said he "respected" the decision taken by the Scottish government to release Megrahi on compassionate grounds. Downing Street said his comment was an endorsement of the early release.

Does this amount to much? We're probably in minor gaffe territory. The truth is that Brown, Miliband, Balls and everyone else probably wished the Megrahi problem had never existed in the first place.

But Downing Street is holding its weekly briefing later today – it's twice daily when the Commons is sitting, but only once a week in recess – and we'll see what people have to say then.

11.45am update: Downing Street refused to back Balls at the lobby briefing.

Asked whether he had been right to say ministers did not want Megrahi released, the prime minister's spokesman said: "The prime minister set out the position last week. I'm not going to go beyond that."

[It is, of course, not entirely beyond the bounds of possibility that Ed Balls was signalling that the UK Government wanted Megrahi to be repatriated under prisoner transfer to serve the remainder of his sentence in Libya, rather than being released on compassionate grounds. The problem with this interpretation is that it involves the UK Government advocating the breach of an international undertaking that the sentence would be served in Britain. Surely HMG would never do that!

A press release from the SNP on this most recent UK Government debacle can be read here.]