THE GUARDIAN: Papers relating to former PM's meetings with Libyan leader will not be among those published by the government this afternoon
Downing Street has confirmed that papers relating to Tony Blair's meeting with the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, will not be among the documents about the Lockerbie bomber being released this afternoon.
The prime minister's spokesman said the government would publish all "relevant" correspondence relating to the release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the 1988 bombing, this afternoon.
The Foreign Office and the Ministry of Justice are putting documents on their website after 2pm. In Edinburgh the Scottish government will also be releasing its own documents, probably later in the afternoon.
But the papers will not cover Blair's meetings with Gaddafi in 2004 and 2007, which paved the way for a prisoner transfer agreement between the two countries, Downing Street said today.
Today David Cameron claimed that Gordon Brown's failure to say whether or not he approved of the release of Megrahi showed that he did not have the leadership skills required of a prime minister. Writing in the Times, the Conservative leader says that having the willingness to express an opinion was "a basic requirement of leadership".
The Tories have condemned the Scottish government's decision to release Megrahi on compassionate grounds. Brown has said that he was "repulsed" by the way Megrahi received a hero's welcome when he returned to Tripoli, but the prime minister has not said whether or not he approved of the decision to grant Megrahi his liberty.
In his Times article, Cameron says: "Mr Brown should have condemned the decision to release al-Megrahi. At the very least, he should have expressed an opinion. But all we got, day after day, was a wall of silence, finally broken after a long week when Mr Brown declared that he was 'angry' and 'repulsed' at scenes in Tripoli. We all were. But that wasn't the point. People wanted to know what the prime minister thought about the decision to release him in the first place.
"Such candour is a basic requirement of leadership – a quality that once again Mr Brown has demonstrated he lacks." >>> Nicholas Watt and Andrew Sparrow | Tuesday, September 01, 2009
