From the moment Tony Blair began the sickening process of cosying up to the Gaddafi regime, in order to win lucrative oil contracts, Britain’s relations with Libya have been a stain on the national conscience.
First, we armed and trained the murderous tyrant’s troops.
Later, in further dubious dealings over oil, the Brown government took the despicable decision to release from a Scottish jail the only man ever convicted of the Lockerbie bombing.
Oil shake: From the moment Tony Blair began the sickening process of cosying up to the Gaddafi regime Britain's relations with Libya have been a stain on the national conscience
Then, in the most extraordinary volte-face, the UK government has gone from embracing this mad tyrant to trying to kill him in what can, at best, be described as a highly chaotic military intervention.
But late on Wednesday came possibly the sickest inversion of morality, with the announcement that Britain is giving safe haven to Gaddafi apologist-in-chief Musa Kusa, a man who, as Michael Burleigh describes on page seven, is up to his eyeballs in murder and torture.
Turn around: Ground personnel from RAF Marham, in Norfolk, prepare a Tornado GR4 ahead of operations to enforce the Libyan no-fly zone
The Government it seems spent days coaxing Kusa into defecting to the UK, in the apparent belief that it would – in the words of Foreign Secretary William Hague – cause Gaddafi’s regime to ‘crumble from within’.
That may prove true but, as of last night, Gaddafi was reversing some of the territorial gains made in recent days by rebel forces.
Meanwhile, Kusa is almost certain to lodge an asylum claim, in the knowledge that human rights laws will prevent him from ever being returned to Libya.
Thus, we are now harbouring a man almost certainly deeply involved in the Lockerbie atrocity and the killing of WPC Yvonne Fletcher.
Furthermore, as chief of Gaddafi’s spy agency, Kusa was deeply implicated in the arming and funding of the IRA, providing them with the Semtex used in bombings from Brighton to Omagh.
This then is the murderous monster whose arrival in the UK the Government yesterday claimed was a diplomatic coup.
His very presence here is an affront to justice which pours salt into the open wounds of his many innocent British, American and Irish victims.
At the first opportunity, he must be placed on trial for his crimes.
The Mail, however, will place odds on him seeing out his days living in a luxury mansion in Surrey.
Broken promises
In London, a five-year-old girl is critically injured after an armed gang – hunting down a rival who we now learn was on police bail for a shooting incident – sprays shoppers with bullets.
Such violence is now common or garden in our inner cities. As we report today, gangs are even armed with sub-machine guns and other terrifying weapons.
In opposition, David Cameron promised repeatedly to fix the ‘broken society’ typified by such feral behaviour. Today we hear little of that phrase.
Critical: Five-year-old Thushara Kamaleswaran was gunned down in front of her parents by a bullet that narrowly missed her heart
Instead, the Coalition seems more concerned with mending broken societies in far-away countries of which we know little.
Betrayal of students
In a scandalous waste of money and potential, more than 75,000 students who began university in 2008 will fail to finish their course – with the drop-out rate at some former polytechnics now reaching 40 per cent.
Many of these young people – their confidence dented – are now saddled with debt.
Sadly, they are the legacy of a social-engineering Labour government obsessed with sending half of all school leavers to university – regardless of the cost to those students and the wider society.
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