‘Hillary Clinton has condemned the early release of the Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, accusing the Scottish government of ignoring “repeated” US demands to keep him in prison until he died’. (Google News)

Personally, I have a thing about repeated demands. The more they’re repeated, the more I want to tell the person or organisation making them to go forth and multiply. This is especially true when they are behaving in a vengeful, childish and hypocritical manner.

I doubt very much indeed if I would’ve let Al Megrahi out. And I think it highly likely that I’d have asked the real doctors their opinion about the bloke’s chances – rather than listen to an Iranian. The bomber did not, after all, give a second’s thought to all those people he sent to an early grave. I’m also largely unimpressed by the protestations of innocence, because I’ve learned just how low a value to put on the word of any representative of an Islamic regime.

But while we’re all up and demanding and stuff, I’d like to demand that the US apologise for not backing us up on Suez, and not joining the war to liberate the Falklands. I’d like to demand that the Americans give us the lend-lease money back, given that without us standing alone against Adolf, the chances are the US would still be trying to dislodge Nazi Germany from everywhere between Dublin and Vladivostok. I’d like to demand an apology for Joe Kennedy telling FDR that we were finished. Listen: get me started, and I’d be demanding everything from freedom for native Americans whose land was cynically stolen all the way through to the US coughing up for the ecological damage caused by the Torrey Canyon and Piper Alpha oil-spill disasters.

But I don’t want to do any of that, because we have a special relationship. And so in return, my advice to Secretary of State Clinton would be as follows: when you get yourself a consistent foreign policy that makes sense, I just might listen to your demands, repeated or otherwise.