Couldn't agree more

It is not often I bother to read the Spectator or its highly overrated clogs, known pretentiously, as the Coffeehouse (in the year we are celebrating the 300th birthday of that great coffeehouse denizen, Dr Johnson, one cannot help feeling a little depressed at the title) but a friend alerted me to Rod Liddle's article on the al-Megrahi affair. He seems to agree with you, she wrote.

One is supposed to dislike Rod Liddle, not least for his idiotic outburst against the Countryside Alliance all those years ago, but somehow it does not work like that. Either I have become more tolerant or, more likely, Mr Liddle has been steadily moving right-wards as all intelligent people must at some point in their lives.

He is always an entertaining writer and I agree with him more often than not. In fact, I enjoy his writings even when I disagree and the only other writer about whom I feel that way is the great Christopher Hitchens.

This article is excellent. Those who have not read it should take the few minutes it takes to do so. Mr Liddle has a go at the government, American hypocrisy (the wide-spread support for the IRA and NORAID is a very relevant subject in the days after Teddy Kennedy's death), Peter Mandelson, the Libyan government and he even manages a glancing blow at Amnesty who seems to have been taken in by a very transparent ruse to do with the Libyan media. And Peter Mandelson who does seem to turn up whenever there is some skulduggery going on.

Mr Liddle's idea that we should have dealt with Saddam the way we are dealing with Gaddafi is, in my opinion, silly and naive. But one cannot have everything in an article.