Why politicians will ignore Lockerbie truth

[This is the headline over an editorial in today’s edition of the Maltese newspaper The Times.  It reads as follows:]

When Jim Swire, father of one of the Lockerbie victims, visited Malta last November he told this newspaper the truth about the 1988 terrorist attack will one day come out. “The question is whether I will be in a box by then,” the indefatigable campaigner said.

While the truth over the atrocity that killed Dr Swire’s daughter and 269 others in 1988 might never be fully admitted by the powers that be, an Al Jazeera documentary, aired last Wednesday, made a strong case for the increasing number of those who believe Abdelbaset Al Megrahi was not the Lockerbie bomber.

The documentary squarely pointed fingers at Iran, which wanted to avenge the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by a US navy ship in July 1988.

The Al Jazeera investigation also debunked the official story, on the basis of which the late Mr Al Megrahi had been jailed, that the bomb was loaded at Malta before being transferred to the ill-fated aircraft at Heathrow.

The theory is that the Lockerbie bombing was commissioned to a Palestinian terrorist group, the PFLP-GC, which had a cell in Malta at the time. The terrorist attack could have been plotted from a St Julian’s flat but the bomb was loaded at Heathrow, not Malta, as the court concluded, according to the documentary.

It might be 25 long years since the bombing occurred but the questions are now more pertinent than ever.

Did high-level involvement put obstacles to the truth by shifting the blame onto Libya? Was the CIA aware of who the guilty party was but then decided to go for a small pariah State for its geo-political motives?

Did it work the case in reverse so that the wrong man would be convicted? Did it merely coerce a Maltese witness with money to point at Mr Al Megrahi?

The American and British governments will undoubtedly dismiss the new findings as conspiracy theories and stick to the Camp Zeist trial conclusions. Despite the source of these claims, Scotland’s Crown Office said it was unmoved.

But unless the Western world wants to make a mockery of justice, then the case should be reopened. The question is: who will instigate it?

The world cannot seriously expect the US or Britain to push to reopen the case. With the US and Europe desperate to reach a new nuclear deal with a seemingly more open Teheran regime, discussions about Iran’s role in the Lockerbie tragedy at this stage will not be politically welcome.

Why would the US government want to admit it helped put the wrong man behind bars for Europe’s worst terrorist attack? And what about the money Muammar Gaddafi was forced to pay to the victims’ families to work his way out through tough sanctions?

Even the Maltese government, whose foreign minister declared in no uncertain terms that Mr Al Megrahi was a scapegoat, said it would not push to reopen the case.

In reality, there are so many potentially embarrassing banana skins.

But the pieces which were unravelled this week fit too well to allow us to merely shrug and move on.

This means it is down to the victims’ families to take the case forward and file the appeal Mr Al Megrahi wanted to start before he was released from a Scottish prison and sent home to die.

While it is understandable that our government does not want to ruffle any allied country’s feathers, it should collaborate in any way possible to facilitate any information our police and security services might still be privy to.

I do know for certain Megrahi never got a fair trial

[A letter from Tom Minogue headed Rough justice is published in today’s edition of The Scotsman.  It reads as follows:]

Thomas Crooks (Letters, 14 March) says the Scottish legal system is blind to justice and the Crown Office Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) is acting out of a desperate distraction by searching in the rubble of Libya for evidence of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi’s accomplices.

Given the lawless situation in Libya, which deteriorates by the day, I doubt the COPFS will have any further photo opportunities in that regard.

So I don’t expect we will see our Lord Advocate in the media again posing in front of that enormous bookcase, full of weighty, leather-bound, legal text books, announcing his latest initiative to bolster the Megrahi conviction by visiting Libya on the trail of his supposed accomplices. I don’t pretend to know if Megrahi is innocent of the crime or not, but I do know for certain he never got a fair trial by the Scottish Court in the Hague. [sic]

My certainty in this regard was confirmed when the UN-appointed observer to the trial reported that there were unidentified US Justice Department people in the dock of the court apparently supervising the COPFS prosecution team.

Independence gone.

Any lingering doubts I may have had were allayed when our then Lord Advocate stated that the main prosecution witness, Tony Gauci, was “an apple short of a picnic; not quite the full shilling”.

We now know Gauci was every penny in the shilling, because he received a reward for his testimony reported to be $2million (ex-diplomat Craig Murray says this was only the first instalment of $7m reward) and his brother got $1m too, making the prosecution totally flawed.

If the COPFS travels to Libya with promises of rewards in the region of those doled out at to the Gaucis, it may just manage to get a host of further witnesses to testify regarding Megrahi’s accomplices.

Just a thought: it couldn’t add to the damage already inflicted on the reputation of our legal system, could it?

Flight 370 families deserve the truth, just as Lockerbie families do

[This is the headline over an article by Niall Fraser in today’s edition of the South China Morning Post.  It reads as follows:]

Barring dramatic overnight news, by the time you read this, more than a week will have passed since a Boeing 777 jetliner vanished over the South China Sea.

Our hearts go out those directly involved, the 239 souls on board Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 and their loved ones waiting for news, who must be in a living nightmare.

The wait for facts and an explanation of what has happened must be as unbearable as it is heartbreaking.

It will come as no comfort to them, but they are not alone. And - at the risk of sounding insensitive - not even time might tell.

More than 25 years ago, on the evening of December, 21, 1988, a terrorist bomb blew apart Detroit-bound Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland, killing 259 passengers and crew instantly. A further 11 people perished on the ground as burning wreckage and aviation fuel rained down on the tiny town of Lockerbie.

The man many - but by no means all - believe carried out the atrocity, Libyan intelligence agent Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, has already been jailed, released and died of cancer.

Yesterday, a documentary on the Al-Jazeera news network cast credible doubt over Megrahi's conviction, reporting that the bombing was carried out by Palestinian terrorists on the orders of Tehran as an act of revenge for the downing of a passenger jet full of Iranian civilians by the United States months earlier.

This theory is not new. Less than two weeks after Lockerbie, the newspaper I then worked for in Scotland reported the same story. In fact, it was a widely believed to be a credible turn of events, until, that is, it fell victim to the geopolitical machinations of the United States and United Kingdom, who "discovered" evidence that Libya - a much smaller and convenient suspect - did it.

Almost three decades have passed since Lockerbie and grieving families still ache for the truth. The nearest they came was not long after the Iranian theory was ditched in favour of Libya.

At a meeting in London, Dr Jim Swire, who lost his daughter, Flora, at Lockerbie was told [RB: It was actually Martin Cadman who was told] by a senior UK official: "Our government knows who did it, the US government knows who did it, but they're never going to tell you."

The families of flight MH370 must be given the truth - whatever it is.

Was the wrong man convicted for the Lockerbie bombing?

This is the headline over a long review (three pages, nine columns) by Jennifer May in Ireland's Big Issue of Dr Morag Kerr's Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies. Unlike most of the journalistic outpourings following the recent Aljazeera documentary, this review appreciates just how completely and comprehensively Dr Kerr has destroyed the foundation of the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi, namely that the bomb suitcase was ingested at Luqa Airport in Malta. Through a rigorous analysis of the luggage loaded on container AVE4041, Morag Kerr conclusively demonstrates that the Samsonite suitcase containing the bomb was already in that container before the feeder flight from Frankfurt (which supposedly contained an unaccompanied suitcase from Malta) arrived at Heathrow. It was not Luqa's security that was subverted, but Heathrow's. And whoever subverted it, it was not Abdelbaset Megrahi. 

The review can be read here.

Crown Office defence of a crumbling conviction

[Blind to justice is the headline over a letter from Thomas Crooks in today’s edition of The Scotsman.  It reads as follows:]

In response to the detailed revelations in the Al-Jazeera documentary attributing responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing to Iran and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), the Crown Office said: “There is nothing new in these claims and some of the accounts of the evidence are inaccurate” (your report, 12 March).

The claims included US intelligence cables which read: “The execution of the operation was contracted out to Ahmad Jabril, the PFLP-GC leader. Money was given up front in Damascus for initial expense. The mission was to blow up a Pan Am flight.”

They also included the views of Robert Baer, a CIA agent who said an “executive decision was taken, coming from the White House, to focus on Libya”. These claims, in the context of the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by the USS Vincennes, support the view that Iranian retaliation was the motive for the bombing. Despite the source of these claims, the Crown Office said they were worthy of being ignored.

That response was amplified by a further statement: “The only appropriate forum for the determination of guilt or innocence is the criminal court, and Mr Megrahi was convicted unanimously by three senior judges. His conviction was upheld unanimously by five judges, presided over by the Lord Justice General, Scotland’s most senior judge.”

Here we have the definitive deployment of the philosophy of arithmetic and judicial status in defence of a crumbling conviction: if eight of Scotland’s senior judges hum in harmony, their deliberations and decisions are effectively infallible and therefore too robust to be undermined by evidence to the contrary – “old” or “new”.

The consequences of that mindset and its infatuation with the merits of Megrahi’s conviction are alive, well and thriving in the rubble of Libya, where delegations of the Scottish legal establishment continue, periodically, the search for Megrahi’s “accomplices”.

As an example of the art of desperate distraction, the Libyan expeditions are impeccable.

As an exercise in the pursuit of truth and justice, they are arguably deplorable, distasteful and disgraceful.

New Lockerbie claim Zionist propaganda: Iran

[This is the headline over a report published today on the website of Iran’s Press TV.  It reads in part:]

An Iranian deputy foreign minister says a new allegation about Iran’s involvement in the 1988 attack on a Pan Am flight over Lockerbie in Scotland is a Zionist propaganda.

The “fabricated report” broadcast by Qatar’s state-run Al Jazeera on Iran’s involvement in the attack just ahead of a joint Tehran-Doha Committee is highly questionable, Deputy Foreign Minister for Arab and African Affairs Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said on Wednesday.

Amir-Abdollahian said Tehran has urged Doha not to allow the Zionists to push their agenda through Qatari media.

The Iranian official also stated that Tehran’s stance on fighting terrorism has always been clear. (...)

In a Monday interview with the Doha-based Al Jazeera TV, Abolqasem Mesbahi, who claims to be a fugitive former Iranian official now living in Germany, alleged that the bombing was ordered by Tehran and carried out by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC).

Iran categorically dismissed the allegation and reiterated its strong opposition to any “act of terror.”

Lockerbie theory vindicated

[This is the heading over a letter published in today’s edition of The Independent.  It reads as follows:]

The theory put forward in your article “New Lockerbie report says Libyan framed to conceal the real bombers” (12 March) has long been considered the most probable explanation for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, on which my brother Bill Cadman and his girlfriend lost their lives.

You report that there may have been was political interference from Washington and London to protect Syria and Iran. The cover-up, however, grew out of control with the very expensive Camp Zeist trial, and what has always puzzled us is why such a cover-up was necessary. In the vacuum created by false information and manipulation of facts dark fears emerge, and our worst-case scenario remains that the bombing was allowed to happen, and that my brother and the other 278 people on board were offered up as sacrificial victims to appease Iran.

We felt right from the beginning that something was being kept from us: the CIA were out in force on Scottish soil before the work of identifying bodies had been properly undertaken, and the brave Dr David Fieldhouse who worked tirelessly on the night of 21 December finding and labelling bodies, and who gave evidence in the Scottish fatal accident inquiry, was discredited publicly, although he later received an apology.

One theory was that Flight 103 was regularly used in the drugs-for-arms circuit connecting Nicaragua  to Iran, and that the message instructing carriers to  “put suspect packages in the hold” was in some way connected to this. It would have been relatively easy to slip a bomb on to a plane in this context.

My father, Martin Cadman, was haunted by the memory of being told by a member of the American Presidential Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism that our government knew what had happened but that the truth would not come out. He has now lost his memory and it is very bitter to me that now truths that he shouted from the rooftops against the prevailing wind are commonly reported as facts.

Marion Irvine

Magnus Linklater: There may be a case for staging a fresh inquiry into Lockerbie

[What follows is the text of an article by Magnus Linklater in yesterday’s edition of The Times:]

There may be a case for staging a fresh inquiry into Lockerbie. This film does nothing to advance it. For all the sensational headlines it has provoked, it contributes no new evidence, merely a recycling of familiar allegations.

Those allegations are, of course, far more enticing than the evidence that originally convicted the Libyan, Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi — conspiracy theories always are. The al-Jazeera documentary suggests not only that the guilty verdict passed on him by a Scottish court was a miscarriage of justice, but that an “executive decision” to redirect the evidence and implicate Libya rather than Iran was taken early on.

Asked after the film was shown in the Scottish Parliament yesterday, how high up this decision went, the producer suggested that it was taken in the White House. That is some claim. In order to believe it, however, one has to accept the kind of evidence that would be described in a court of law as hearsay.

For all the talk about CIA documents, incriminating cables and terrorist cabals meeting in secret to plan the bombing, no new written evidence is produced to back it up.

Suspects are approached for confirmation about their roles, and shy away from the confrontation; lines of inquiry are left hanging in the air; worse, the main source of the allegations — a defecting Iranian — has been touting his information around for at least 15 years.

There may well be grounds for appeal. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission reported that the identification of al-Megrahi as the man who bought the clothes in which the bomb was wrapped was based on unreliable evidence, which it thought should be tested again. However, it is a long road from that to a claim that the entire Lockerbie case was a miscarriage of justice.

Just one section of the film serves to illustrate the point. A former CIA agent, Robert Baer, is interviewed at length. He claims that the bombing was carried out by a terrorist suspect called Abu Talb, who was rewarded after its success with large amounts of Iranian money.

The commission examined this in great detail, interviewing Baer three times in all. In the end, however, the Commission concluded that nothing he said would have stood up in court.

“As with all intelligence,” it reported, “the validity of [his] information was very much dependent upon the reliability of its source, for which in many cases Mr Baer was unable to vouch.”

It would, of course, be good to have the Lockerbie evidence tested again in a court of law. However, the one opportunity to do that was forfeited by al-Megrahi himself, when he chose to return to Libya rather than pursue his appeal. If he remains a convicted terrorist in the eyes of history, he only has himself to blame. 

[More about Magnus Linklater’s views on Lockerbie and the Megrahi conviction can be found here.]

Re-open the Lockerbie case? Not if it means facing the truth about Iran

[This is the headline over an article by Jonathan S Tobin published yesterday on the website of Commentary magazine.  It reads as follows:]

Could there be a worse week for new revelations about the 1988 Lockerbie tragedy to be unveiled? The report claiming that Iran rather than Libya was the culprit in the atrocity should raise eyebrows around globe. But despite the persuasive case made for this theory, don’t expect the United States or any other Western country to heed the new evidence and re-open the case. With both the US and its European allies desperate to reach a new nuclear deal with Tehran that will enable them to halt the sanctions on the Islamist regime, discussions about the true nature of the administration’s diplomatic partner are, to put it mildly, unwelcome. If Washington isn’t interested in drawing conclusions about Iran from the seizure of an arms ship bound for terrorist-run Gaza last week or even the latest threat from its Revolutionary Guard about destroying Israel uttered yesterday, why would anyone think the Obama administration would be willing to rethink its conclusions about a crime that was long thought to be solved?

To be fair to the administration, a lot of time has passed since the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland that cost the lies of 259 passengers and crew and 11 persons on the ground. The US and the West put a lot of energy into proving that agents of the Libyan Gaddafi regime were responsible. The Libyans were known state sponsors of terror and had an axe to grind against the US at the time. After the conviction of a Libyan intelligence agent for these murders, even more energy was spent on vainly trying to persuade a Scottish court from letting him go home to Libya, where he eventually died of cancer. [RB: It was, of course, a Scottish Government minister, not a Scottish court, that granted compassionate release.] Why would anyone in the US government want to admit that we were wrong all these years? Nor would most Americans think an investigation undertaken by a news organization like the reliably anti-American Al Jazeera, no matter how meticulous, would persuade them to rethink their long-held conclusions about the case.

But, as David Horovitz writes persuasively in the Times of Israel, Al Jazeera’s report is based on information from the same Iranian defector that accurately testified about the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires, Argentina that killed 85 persons. Though the full truth about Lockerbie is yet to be uncovered, Horovitz is right to point out that if we accept the word of former Iranian intelligence agent Abolghasem Mesbahi about Tehran’s terrorist plot in South America, there’s no reason to dismiss his detailed claims about Lockerbie. The pieces here fit too well to allow us to merely shrug and move on.

But the problem isn’t Mesbahi’s credibility or even the embarrassment that a finding that debunked previous Western intelligence work on Lockerbie would cause in Washington and London. Rather, it’s the fact that the defector is pointing the finger at a government that the West wants very much to rehabilitate these days.

The United States and its European allies are deeply invested in the notion that Hassan Rouhani’s victory in Iran’s faux election last year marked a genuine change in the country’s political culture. Justifying a weak interim nuclear deal that granted Iran both significant sanctions relief and a tacit recognition of its “right” to enrich uranium was made possible not only by the arguments about Iran’s supposed desire for a new start with the West but also by a determination by the administration that it wanted to step away from confrontation with Tehran at all costs.

The president is so worried about hurting the delicate feelings of the anti-Semitic government in Tehran that he is willing to veto new sanctions legislation that would have strengthened his hand in the talks. This policy is difficult enough to justify in the face of Iran’s continued support for terrorism, its genocidal threats against Israel (which make its possession of nuclear weapons more than a theoretical security problem), and its long record of diplomatic deception. The last thing the president and Secretary of State Kerry want is to have the Lockerbie case disinterred and for the regime—many of whose leading players were active in the security apparatus at the time—indicted for mass murder of innocent Americans.

So don’t expect anyone in Washington to take the new evidence about Lockerbie seriously or even to pay lip service to the notion of re-opening the case. Horovitz is right that Al Jazeera’s report ought to justify a new investigation that will fearlessly follow the evidence to the guilty parties. But as long as making nice with Iran is one of the diplomatic priorities of the United States, the truth about Lockerbie is likely to be ignored.

Lockerbie lies

[This is the heading over a letter from Ian Johnstone published in today’s edition of The Scotsman.  It reads as follows:]

The latest Al Jazeera documentary investigating the Lockerbie bombing effectively concluded that much of the swerve towards Libya as the appointed culprit, and eventually Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi (or anybody Libyan with intelligence connections, however flimsy) hinged on a phone call from George Bush Senior to Margaret Thatcher.

Again, as the documentary pointed out – high-level involvement has put obstacles to the truth in position.

Lying, alas, is institutional, reputational and implicit in our Western politics.

Dr John Cameron (Letters, 12 March) is right to point to the prevailing belief that it was the shooting down of the Iranian passenger jet, Iran Air Flight 655, by a US warship on 3 July, 1988, that triggered the deadly explosive device in the cargo-hold of the Pan-Am flight over Lockerbie on the night of 21 December, 1988.

Everything pointed in this direction. The assembled evidence, which has unfortunately had to tackle a heap of discredited evidence, is overwhelming.

Perhaps it is too overwhelming for governments too acquainted with shuffling false cards to handle comfortably.

The great consolation is that common sense retains its credentials.

It has, again, prevailed. Thanks to a posse of people whose painstaking piecing together of related information has presented a believable picture.

John Ashton on Aljazeera's "Lockerbie: what really happened?"

[What follows is the text of an item posted this evening by John Ashton on his Megrahi: You are my Jury website:]

Aljazeera last night premiered its long-awaited documentary Lockerbie: What Really Happened? The programme’s broad thrust, with which I agree, is that the bombing was ordered by Iran and carried out by the PFLP-CG, with help from Hezbollah. It also suggests that Libya may have had a role, which I don’t rule out.

Before commenting further, I should make a declaration of interest: I was paid consultant and interviewee for the producers’ previous Aljazeera programme Lockerbie: Case Closed, (which you can view here) which was broadcast on the day that Megrahi: You are my Jury was published, and was also a paid consultant during the development phase of this one, although I was not involved with the production itself. The most significant discoveries I made during the development phase were of no great interest to the producers, so I took them to Channel 4 News, who took a different view and commissioned a special report, which was broadcast on 20 December (you can view it here).

Last night’s programme has generated a lot of media coverage, but contains little that hasn’t already been reported previously. Most of the coverage has led on the allegations made in the film by Abolghasem Mesbahi, the German-based Iranian defector, who alleged that the bombing was carried out in revenge for the US shootdown of Iran Air flight 655. His claims have been reported as if they are new, but they are not: they originally surfaced in the German media in 1996 or 1997. Mesbahi gave his first broadcast interview about Lockerbie to the German channel ZDF in 2008 and Aljazeera’s interview, which was in fact shot by ZDF, featured in another ZDF documentary last month.

Mesbahi was a former senior official in Iran’s security service, Vevak, and was based in, among other places, Paris and Bonn. In late 1988 he was imprisoned briefly as a suspected US double agent and in 1996 defected. He claimed to have first hand knowledge of the plot that resulted in the 1992 murder, by Iranian agents, of several leading Kurdish separatists in the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin. His testimony proved crucial in the subsequent trial of some of the Iranians. It was not until some months after his defection that he began to talk about Lockerbie.

Last year I spoke to a leading German journalist who is very familiar with both Mesbahi and the Lockerbie story. While he believes that the evidence that Mesbahi gave in the Mykonos case was credible, he is very sceptical of his claims about Lockerbie.

By Mesbahi’s own admission, all his information about Lockerbie was second-hand. His accounts to the German police (documented in memos disclosed to the Abdelbaset’s lawyers pre-trial) were erratic. Some of his claims were unlikely, others patently nonsense. He claimed that the Iranian government initiated the operation and Iranian foreign minister Velajati held talks with Colonel Gadaffi, during which they’d agreed on a joint operation in which Iran would be responsible for the explosives and Libya for the electronics. There was no reason for Iran to rely on the Libyans to sort out the electronics, when they had plenty of other bomb makers at their disposal. He did not mention the PFLP-GC and instead suggested that the operation was not only commissioned by the Iranian government, but also largely undertaken by Iranian agents.

He said that the technical instructions for the bomb came from the Abu Nidal Organisation. He initially claimed that it was assembled and loaded at Heathrow by Libyan agents who had access to the airport’s ‘secure area’ (by which, presumably, he meant airside), but later claimed that it was assembled there by a ANO members. He also said that the bomb was activated by a chemical detonator, which again seems unlikely. He reported that the Iranians sent explosives to London after which the green light was given to the Libyans to deliver the electronic components. This, a source told him, was done by Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and Lamin Fhimah only days before the bombing.

However, there is no evidence that they were in London at any point. It is clear that Abdelbaset was in Prague and Switzerland from 9th to 17th December and that he and Lamin were in Malta on the 20th and 21st. I suspect that Mesbahi stitched together a story that would implicate Iran, while accommodating the official ‘Libya-did-it narrative.’

Another disappointing aspect of the programme was the prominence it gave to the claims of the Operation Bird reports, about which I have written previously (here and here). Some of the reports’ key allegations are, in my view, unlikely, in particular the claim that the PFLP-GC’s German ringleader, Hafez Dalkamoni, attended a crucial planning meeting in Malta in October 1988. This claim is contradicted by documentary and witness evidence gathered by the BKA, which is far stronger than the evidence that the programme presented to corroborate the claim (essentially, a 1989 Maltese newspaper article).

The film was on more solid ground when it presented US Defence Intelligence Agency reports from 1989 and 1990, which implicated the PFLP-GC and Iran in the attack. Unfortunately, it implied that the reports were secret and stated that they would have been used at Abdelbaset’s second appeal. Neither suggestion was true: the reports had no role in the appeal and are available online having been declassified many years ago.

There were other exaggerated and misleading claims. For example, the commentary stated ‘this programme has learned’ that Tony Gauci had picked out a photo of Mohamed Abu Talb before his partial identification of Abdelbaset. In fact it is well known that, when shown a photo of Abu Talb by the police in October 1989, Gauci said that he resembled the clothes purchaser. The programme also stated that the Toshiba radio-cassette player that housed the Lockerbie bomb was of the same type as the one seized by the BKA during the Autumn Leaves raids, but in fact it was substantially different.

On the plus side, the film contained powerful interviews with former CIA investigator Robert Baer, researcher and campaigner Morag Kerr and, surprisingly, the former Times political editor Robin Oakley. Overall, though, it was a wasted opportunity.