I was about to write a post about Andrew Marr’s expressions of regret about resorting to a dubious legal method of gagging the media, but found that Charlie Beckett has expressed it better.

Like any citizen Marr had a perfect right to defend his privacy. But as a journalist he must have realised his legal actions would reduce his credibility as someone who can interrogate the powerful and famous about their personalities as well as their policies and actions.

It’s not his fault that the judges (or rather one judge in particular) has decided to extend the power of the the super-injuction to a point where corporations as well as celebs can avoid exposure. But it is his fault that he took advantage of it. (Of course, the Internet has made even the most super of injunctions a fallible tool for suppression but they still keep the facts out of the general public’s gaze – perhaps that’s why Marr was so rude about bloggers.)

Marr now admits that his actions were hypocritical, but I think it’s worse than that and that’s why he shouldn’t really be doing political interviews anymore. He is a very clever man who has written the best ‘straight’ history of British journalism we have. I hope he continues to broadcast as a presenter of programmes like Start The Week and those popular histories of Britain. But he has now lost any pretence to membership of the Pugilist Tribe.

We need people like Ian Hislop and Private Eye who are prepared to be wrong sometimes in their efforts to get to the truth. Yes, the Pugilists may act out of shallow and malicious motives. They may over-personalise attacks and get their facts wrong or out of perspective. But they are more likely to ruffle the feathers of the mighty. And critically, the best of them don’t see themselves as part of authority.

Yep. Apart from anything else, Marr has been critically weakened by this. He’s a talented and thoughtful man but there’s no way he can credibly take on slippery and evasive public figures from now on. The BBC has to drop the AM show on Sunday mornings. Or find someone with untarnished credibility to do it.

From Elliott Abrams.

Bahrain has a Shia majority (once estimated at 70 percent, but probably lower than that now due to a campaign of naturalization of foreign-born Sunnis, especially those who serve in the army and police). The current actions against the Shia community will embitter all its members and decapitate its moderate political, economic, religious, and moral leadership. Future compromises will be far more difficult, and are perhaps already impossible.

Why has the King taken this disastrous path? Clearly he has been urged and pressured to do so by his Sunni neighbors in the UAE and especially Saudi Arabia. The contempt for Shia and Shiism in Saudi Arabia is undoubtedly a key factor here, and the Saudis were concerned that an uprising by Bahraini Shia could spread across to the Shia in their own oil-rich Eastern Province. But the actions being taken in Bahrain now make it far more likely that this will be the outcome: Saudi Shia who see the Saudi government repressing Shia in Bahrain will become more, not less, embittered toward their own government. The Saudis also worried about opportunities for Iran to meddle in Bahrain and ultimately in Saudi Arabia itself. But here again, the policy being followed will only create new chances for Iran by assuring enmity and political volatility in Bahrain.

So the path being followed is disastrous. Perhaps it is not too late for outside figures to try to open a dialogue between the Government of Bahrain and the Shia community, but for that to work the King and the royal family must stop the persecution of the Shia leadership. As of now, they seem intent on crushing the Shia and eliminating all hope of a constitutional monarchy where the majority of Bahrain’s people share with the King a role in building the country’s future. If the King does not change course, he is guaranteeing a future of instability for Bahrain and may be dooming any chance that his son the Crown Prince will ever sit on the throne.

Yep. Bet the Iranians can’t believe their luck. They have such fools for enemies.