Your friends who say that international law is quite clear in this respect, and I’m not saying this aggressively, I believe them to be simply wrong on the law. The law is in a state of flux and the concept of opaque sovereignty cannot account for Kosovo, to take one example; it cannot even account for Haiti. So I’d say we’re in a period of change. Whether we will lodge in a translucent view which I think is closer to the view of your Foreign Office or lodge in a transparent view I don’t know.

DJ: Can I throw this back at you Michael as the politician in the room? I know it’s not your responsibility at the moment but it might one day be. Do you think that, whether we like it or not, when people on Right and Left say “enough intervention, these are not our problems. Let’s retreat back into our own sphere, our own immediate environment. We don’t want to be anybody’s poodle. We don’t want to be dragged into places like Afghanistan by Nato or anybody else”, that is a widely held view? It might even be the majority view at any one time but is it the responsible, statesman-like view?

MG: I don’t believe so, no. I think that almost everyone could think of situations where there would be a moral responsibility to intervene. The locus classicus would be the Holocaust. Once you’ve accepted, as I think more and more people are doing, that you cannot any longer cling to an outdated model of sovereignty that says that what a state does within its own borders is only its business, then various arguments may follow but you’ve accepted the principle that it is legitimate for other nations to intervene. And we know that it’s happened when Tanzania intervened in Uganda, when Vietnam intervened in Cambodia. So there are precedents that we accept and have subsequently been ratified by history. The question then is: do you accept as Philip has outlined that there can be lower thresholds to intervention – that you don’t just require genocide or tremendous human suffering – that there can be lower thresholds, lower barriers of human rights abuse which can trigger or justify intervention?