‘No smoking gun’ in Lockerbie report
No smoking gun in the Lockerbie documents, but distinctly more smoke.
The SNP administration in Edinburgh was clearly looking to cut a deal on the Prisoner Transfer Agreement with Libya (which London wanted) and its own separate demands – putting an end to ex-offenders’ claims against the Scottish government over slopping out and getting powers given to Scotland on air weapons.
On 19 December 2007, Jack straw’s private secretary writes a note of a conversation between Jack Straw, then Justice Secretary, and Kenny MacAskill, Scottish Justice Secretary.
It records that Kenny MacAskill “… made the point that the SNP would be seen to be rolling back on something ‘deep in the Scottish pysche’ and taking a political step back without securing a corresponding step forward”.
That looks like the SNP administration saying it won’t help with the Libyan PTA (given that Lockerbie is an event ‘deep in the Scottish psyche’) unless it gets help with “corresponding step(s) forward.”
And before that, on 7 December 2007, Jack Straw reports to Des Browne, then Scottish Secretary, that Kenny MacAskill “has subequently linked progress on (slopping out) to the proposed prisoner transfer agreement with Libya”.
Now, Megrahi wasn’t released under the PTA, he was released under (entirely separate) compassionate grounds. But I don’t think the Scottish administration has previously volunteered the information that it was on a shopping expedition trying to trade off measures in return for going soft on the Prisoner Transfer Agreement that could have eased Megrahi’s release.
As for the Labour government, we learn that there was a “game plan” to get Megrahi out, either through an appeal in Scotland or through compassionate release. The Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell says that he has “not seen any evidence thatr HMG (UK government) pressured or lobbied the Scottish Government for the transfer or release of Mr Megrahi (and) … throughout this period the UK government took great effort NOT to communicate to the Scottish Government its underlying desire to see Mr Megrahi released before he died.”
You bet it did! Putting it in writing would’ve been dangerous and unnecessary. When Kenny MacAskill writes about something ‘deep in the Scottish pysche’ you can bet he is not referring to the handful of other Libyans detained under the Scottish justice system – he knows who he is talking about.
So what have we learnt about Megrahi’s actual release? We’ve learnt that people haven’t been entirely straightforward and transparent about the earlier contacts between Britain and Libya and between London and Edinburgh. And though Sir Gus O’Donnell says no-one spoke an untruth in ministerial statements, David Cameron has just said in the Commons that there was concealment – we “haven’t been given the full picture.”
But the PM said he sees no justification for an independent full inquiry. That is not how it’ll feel to people campaigning for just that who see yet again how pressure has revealed more of the picture and who won’t easily be convinced they’re now looking at the full picture.
By the way, David Rose’s Vanity Fair article makes a different point about how strange it is that Megrahi is said to have been 3 months from death on his release and yet also said to be about to embark on chemotherapy treatment, something, David Rose speculates, would normally suggest a longer life expectancy.
The SNP government has explained to me that the “deep in the Scottish psyche” mention above is a reference to the air guns law change they not the Lockerbie bombing. They also say that Jack Straw’s letter to Des Browne claiming that Kenny MacAskill “linked” the PTA with prison slopping out help is false and doesn’t accord with their minute of the only relevant conversation between the two justice ministers on 8 November 2007. Jack Straw, for his part, feels his memory of the conversations shows that the SNP’s much-touted principles had a price.