Why, asks Douglas Murray ...

... are politicians forced to resign over trivia but never over serious matters. His example is Andrew Mitchell who resigned over alleged rudeness to the Downing Street coppers whereas he ought to have been forced out over his performance at DfID where he agreed to use UK taxpayers' money to pay terrorist leaders' salaries.

A report by Palestinian Media Watch recently revealed that British taxpayers have been paying salaries to terrorists. It revealed that £3 million every month is paid by the Palestinian Authority (PA) in salaries to Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. The salaries come from the PA's general budget. That "general budget" is kindly provided by the U.K., among other EU countries.

Many British taxpayers, struggling to pay their family's way through a recession, might rightly wonder why their money is going to pay as much as £2,000 a month to people serving the longest sentences—those who have targeted Israeli buses and other civilian targets with suicide bombers, for instance. That is higher than the average wage in nearly all of Britain. You might be forgiven for wondering, if you were a struggling teaching assistant in the North of England, why failing to tick "suicide bomber" on your careers form should have left you so much worse off than a terrorist in the Middle East.

This is not new, of course, and, despite denials or pleas of ignorance by Alan Duncan, Mitchell's successor it goes on. The lunacy of cutting defence spending and eviscerating our armed forces while paying out money to terrorists who are itching to attack us and our allies is self-evident.

It is, perhaps, time to restart a campaign for the cessation of all international aid.