I’ve not heard that Sandi Thom single all the way through yet, but I’ve seen the TV ad about six billion times, and the short, poxy burst on that is more than enough to convince me that if her sudden rise to stardom WASN’T the end result of a shrewd marketing campaign, the implications are terrifying. Because to believe the official story - that thousands of people voluntarily subjected themselves to this shit online, then recommended it to their friends - is to lose your faith in mankind completely.

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Elizabeth is cause celebre far away from Fleet Street - in a Manchester community that cares about her survival and utterly believes in her plight. She’s a Ugandan who fled to Britain in 2004 after escaping from a semi-official “safe house” where she’d been held for five months and repeatedly raped and beaten. Was she a common criminal, then? No, she was a lesbian, snatched away from an underground club. She feared for her life: she asked for shelter.
Her Manchester solicitors, her doctors and support organisations have played by the rules ever since she arrived. They’ve ploughed up and down the asylum process, making a case, entering appeals. But there’s a bizarre snag, which the adjudication in the case makes painfully clear. Home Office adjudicators recognise that homosexuals can be persecuted in Uganda - but they don’t accept that the word “homosexual” covers lesbians, too. And because Elizabeth had a child when she was very young, they scratch their heads over whether she’s a lesbian at all.

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Christopher Greenwood QC, the international lawyer who advised the attorney-general that the Iraq war was lawful, will argue for the British government, which has intervened in support of Saudi Arabian officials accused of detaining and torturing four Britons in Saudi jails.

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A high court judge yesterday accused the Home Office of disregarding the rule of law in trying to “spirit away” an immigrant couple it illegally detained then tried to deport.

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Mr Justice Munby said: “What the present case and others like it reveal is at best an unacceptable disregard by the Home Office of the rule of law - at worst an unacceptable disdain by the Home Office for the rule of law, which is as depressing as it ought to be concerning.”

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Many exports approved by the Department of Trade and Industry involve selling arms to some of the most deprived states and to countries with poor human rights records.

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Tony Blair, BBC News, May 1999: “It is no exaggeration to say what is happening in Kosovo is racial genocide. No exaggeration to brand the behaviour of Milosevic’s forces as evil.”

New Statesman, October 2004: Why does Tony fear the G-word?
“The people of Darfur have been murdered, raped, forced to leave their land and abandon their livelihoods. Yet the British government says that claims of genocide are exaggerated.”

70,000 dead in Darfur at last count. A Kosovo body count is difficult to come by but it seems it’s considerably less than 70,000.