Richard Ingrams' Week: A lone voice of sanity amid howls of outrage

Outrage, fury and anguish were, according to the Daily Mail, the response to reports this week that following talks with Colonel Gaddafi Tony Blair might have agreed to return the so-called Lockerbie bomber to his native Libya. The anguish was being evinced by relatives of those who died in December 1988 when Pan-Am flight 103 blew up over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing all 270 people on board. Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was convicted in 2000 and given a life sentence.

Amid the various outraged and furious protests mustered by the Mail to justify their story, one rather incongruous note was sounded by Dr Jim Swire who lost his daughter at Lockerbie and has since campaigned nobly, but in vain, for a full and official inquiry into the disaster. Dr Swire said: "I personally don't believe for a moment that he (Megrahi) is guilty as charged."

But surely Colonel Gaddafi has publicly admitted as much and has paid out more than £2bn in compensation to the relatives of the victims. Could Dr Swire be so cynical as to think that Gaddafi might have done so while knowing perfectly well that Megrahi was an innocent man?

But you didn't have to be a cynic to think that way. Because in February 2004 the Libyan Prime Minister Dr Shokri Ghanem went on BBC Radio and announced that his country was not responsible for the Lockerbie bomb after all. So why, he was asked, had they paid out the £2b to the relatives?

"We thought it was easier for us to buy peace," the Prime Minister said. "And this is why we have agreed to compensation."

There was then a bit of a panic in official circles with attempts being made to explain away Dr Ghanem's remarks. But this only confirmed the impression that the British and American governments knew perfectly well that what he said was true.

Off the rails with too much stress

Another headline tells us that we are all living in a "Prozac nation" in which more people keep going with the help of antidepressants. As usual the wrong question is asked - what can be done to stop people from taking all these antidepressants? - when the important question is: why is it that so many people are suffering from depression on the first place?

My friend Bill Deedes, who celebrated his 94th birthday the other day and who is still busy writing away in The Daily Telegraph, speaks with the wisdom not just of old age but as one who has served on various committees concerned with drug addiction. "Human beings," he wrote last week, "are not constructed to live under the pressure that many put themselves under these days." The reason they need drugs - not just antidepressants - is because they cannot put up with the pace of life without them.

A rather similar message was being preached this week in the improbable purlieus of Reading station, where the Bishop of Reading, Right Rev Stephen Cottrell, was to be seen handing out egg-timers and urging commuters to slow down and try to take things easy.

As someone who has spent a good proportion of his life at Reading station, I was sorry to miss the bishop. Had I seen him I might have drawn his attention to the non-stop flow of announcements about platform alterations, delayed trains, cancelled trains, signal failures, technical difficulties, etc. So was this the ideal environment in which to try to impress on punters the need for peace in their daily lives?

* I was hoping that the thousands who phoned Channel 4 to complain about this week's Princess Diana programme might be doing so because they had found it boring. Not so. It was apparently those blurred photographs that upset them all.

Much more objectionable than any photograph was Channel 4's claim that this documentary was important, historic and of enormous public interest, giving the true story of events that had been for years clouded in doubt and obscurity.

Yet the story of those paparazzi, originally accused of being responsible for the fatal crash but later exonerated, has already been told over and over again in miscellaneous reports and books. Most of it will be familiar to readers of Martyn Gregory's excellent book Diana: The Last Days, published long ago in 1999.

This is the problem confronting the media hoping to cash in on the 10th anniversary of Diana's death. Whatever they may claim, there is nothing new to be said on the subject

How fortunate for Channel 4 that the blundering intervention of the royal princes' private secretary, the absurdly named Colonel Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, ensured a far greater audience for the programme than it ever deserved.

Lowther-Pinkerton wrote to Channel 4: "These photographs are redolent with the atmosphere and tragedy of the closing moments of her life. As such they will cause the Princes acute distress... Not just for themselves but on their mother's behalf in the sense of intruding upon the privacy and dignity of her last few minutes."

Proof once again that the Royal Family is incapable of hiring even half-sensible staff who can express themselves in intelligible English.

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