Did anyone notice that Liam Fox had an audience of Rupert Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks, or I suppose they of him although you know how these things work around here, some time this spring? It’s in the latest MOD meetings disclosure, which runs up to March 2011. MOD is probably the most assiduous department for meetings disclosure – not only do they provide lists up to March, they have yet to randomly change the file format even once, insert random foreign characters, use multiple spellings of the minister’s surname, suddenly start publishing PDF files, or indulge in any other quirks. (On the other hand, the Cabinet Office has suddenly developed an addiction to PDFs.)
However, I notice that this meeting doesn’t have a date, nor a purpose. It’s just there – Liam Fox, Rupert, and Becks. It’s possible that this is a quirk, as immediately before it there is a meeting listed with John Witherow of the Sunday Times for a “Defence Briefing” in March 2011 and perhaps they interpolated the duplicate items. (The doctrine of just war, however, does require as well as just cause and reasonable chances of success that the decision be taken by legitimate authority.)
Meanwhile, WhosLobbying.com has a problem with the Home Office, in that if you try to look up the Home Office on their website, the site chokes and returns a 500 internal server error.
I suppose it’s understandable. If you want any other shocking document release stories, the Daily Hell has plenty. I especially like the image of Blair in the den, plugging through the borrowed prose of Saif Gaddafi’s PhD thesis. Haven’t I seen this before somewhere?
One suspects that Fox may have been wanting to find out what the people who feel they control popular opinion were going to make it feel about Libya.