Back to HOMEPAGE Kenny MacAskill delivers sermon
with the spirit of Monty Python
Magnus Linklater
Political Sketch: The Times
Filed 27Aug09
©Magnus Linklater
This article was originally published in The Times on 25th August 2009.
It is reproduced here with the kind permission of its author and of the newspaper.
There are those who rise to a great occasion and there are those who drag it down with them. The Scottish Justice Secretary, for whom natural eloquence is as elusive as a ray of sunshine in a Scottish summer, falls firmly into the latter camp.
It would be inopportune — a word he favours — to reach for a cricketing analogy in Ashes week, but he is the Geoffrey Boycott of the Scottish parliament, a stonewaller of the old school. His statement on what might have been a parliamentary day to remember was a steady plod through all the things that he had already said, but with slightly longer pauses.
He has adopted, for the gravity of the Lockerbie affair, a style which I guess he may think is Churchillian. It reminded me of a thousand sermons I have heard in Presbyterian churches and I wondered whether he had ever aspired to the cloth.
This impression was emphasised when he said: “Al-Megrahi now faces a sentence imposed by a higher power. It is one that no court, in any jurisdiction, in any land, could revoke or overrule. It is terminal, final and irrevocable. He is going to die.”
At that point my theological parallel was brushed aside by the realisation that this was straight out of the Monty Python dead parrot sketch. Except of course that al-Megrahi has yet to fall off his perch.
Kenny MacAskill chose to defend himself by a drawn-out explanation of how he had abided by the rules. If he used the phrase “due process” once, he used it a hundred times. He told us how he had consulted widely, checked each section of the relevant legislation, then took a decision “which was mine and mine alone”. Thus, he exercised his right to release the Libyan bomber on compassionate grounds, “without reference to political, diplomatic or economic considerations”.
These are precisely the considerations that might have led him to a more balanced conclusion.
It was notable, for instance, that although he assured us that he had talked to the families of the victims he never told them that he intended to release the bomber. Indeed he gave them the opposite impression: “... it appeared to me that the American families ... were led to believe that there would be no prisoner transfer and the sentence would be served in prison.”
That was, of course, technically true. But, as the Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray, pointed out, he did not go on to say: “But, by the way, I’m going to let him out on compassionate grounds.” Then there was the odd decision to go into al-Megrahi’s cell and talk to him. Mr MacAskill said that it would have been “out with the tenets of natural justice to refuse this request”. No it wouldn’t, it would just have been good sense.
And so, as Mr MacAskill reached the end of his peroration, we were left with the impression of a man who had satisfied himself that he had put not a foot wrong.
He had, however, still ended up flat on his face.
©Magnus Linklater
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