The Attorney-General’s Statement reads:
“It has been necessary to balance the need to maintain the rule of law against the wider public interest.”
TRANSLATION: The rule of law is of course very important, except when it’s inconvenient for the government. In the past few years we have found it increasingly inconvenient btw.
“No weight has been given to commercial interests or to the national economic interest.”
TRANSLATION: All those reports about Labour MPs being up in arms because of threatened job-losses in their constituencies if the arms deal with Saudi Arabia doesn’t go through are just media speculation. And even if they are true we paid absolutely no attention to them. What do you think we are — politicians???
“The prime minister and the foreign and defence secretaries have expressed the clear view that continuation of the investigation would cause serious damage to UK/Saudi security, intelligence and diplomatic cooperation, which is likely to have seriously negative consequences for the UK public interest in terms of both national security and our highest priority foreign policy objectives in the Middle East.”
TRANSLATION: The Saud regime may be the most despotic, corrupt, tyrannical and bigoted in the Middle East (now that the Taliban have been temporarily deposed), but we need to have those bastards inside our tent because they loathe and fear Al-Qaeda even more than we do. Also we need to keep them on-side as we try to slither out of Iraq.
Sometimes, one has to rub one’s eyes in disbelief. Yesterday, a Labour Prime Minister was interviewed by detectives investigating a corruption scandal engulfing his administration — and it was judged a triumph by his staff that he wasn’t cautioned. This meant he was ‘just’ a witness, and not a suspect in the inquiry. And at the same time, his government’s chief law officer halts an inquiry that was on the brink of revealing illegal payments of perhaps £1 billion to a posse of Saudi princelings and their hangers-on because they were (as the BBC’s Security correspondent intimated this morning) livid at the prospect of having their ‘privacy’ invaded.