I met Jeffrey Sachs a few times in my diplomatic career, in Warsaw, Accra and Vienna and certainly found him interesting and intelligent. But I do not think I ever before saw him this unguarded and engaging his heart just as much as his mind. Can anyone find a transcript?

In a world in which our Queen and Prime Minister toady Arab despots, and Uzbek gangster and convicted blackmailer Alisher Usmanov is the UK’s richest man, where is the modern Thackeray or Trollope to chronicle the moral vacuum of high society?

It is no consolation to the three British men tortured in Dubai, that their treatment at least temporarily lifted the conspiracy of media silence on the evils of the Gulf regimes. Not to the extent of provoking in-depth reporting of the running atrocity that is Bahrain, or even a single mention in the mainstream of the torture imprisonment and secret trials of 94 entirely respectable pro-democracy activists in Qatar.

Where money talks, the politicians and the mainstream media do not.