Russia is wrong

Of the many New Labour slogans which the government has tried quietly to drop over the past five years, none can have landed with quite such a thump as ‘ethical foreign policy’. The party elected in 1997, it may hazily be remembered, promised to put an end to the practice of making shady deals with dictators to further British strategic interests and of turning a blind eye to the misdeeds of faraway countries in order to promote British trade. The government’s moral compass, it was asserted, would read as true in an armchair in some distant presidential palace as it does in Whitehall.

It is hard to see quite where an ethical foreign policy fits in with Mr Blair’s words in the Commons regarding the ending of the siege at Moscow’s Melnikova Street Theatre, which amounted less to a statement on an international emergency than to a personal eulogy to the crisis-management skills of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin.