It's the eternal question : 'What Would Iain Do?'

Back at the height of the controversy over the release of the convicted (if unlikely to be the actual) Lockerbie bomber, Iain "the Snarl" Gray informed the Scottish Parliament that if he had been First Minister, Megrahi would still be behind bars. The only possible interpretation that could be put on those words is that Gray would have issued binding instructions to that effect to whoever had been his Justice Secretary - an utterly extraordinary admission, given that the legal position is that decisions on compassionate release must be taken by the Justice Secretary alone, and indeed on a quasi-judicial basis, free from political considerations.

All the same, given Gray's refreshing keenness to share with us how he would act in a variety of hypothetical scenarios, I wonder if he'd now care to tell us what he would have done if he'd been...oooh, I don't know, a junior Labour minister in the Foreign Office just after Megrahi's illness was diagnosed? Would Mr Gray have helpfully advised the Libyans on how to apply for compassionate release as the actual Labour junior Foreign Office minister Bill Rammell did at the time, or wouldn't he? Come on, Iain, you don't even have to - hypothetically - contravene the law in answering this one...