Severally these personages represent the view that it is good to talk. They forget that Churchill was not Bob Hoskins in a BT ad and did "war war" as well as "jaw jaw". There seem no limits to interlocution. Mo Mowlam once recommended that the US government talk to al-Qaeda, a line we have heard more recently from Tony Blair's former chief of staff Jonathan Powell when he had a book to promote.

From 2002, successive Sri Lankan governments entered into ceasefires and Norwegian-brokered negotiations with a totalitarian death cult called the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. This organisation murdered moderate Tamil politicians, used child "soldiers" to carry out indiscriminate suicide bombings and financed itself from kidnapping, piracy and heroin. Its supporters among the large Tamil diaspora have an influence on the Labour Party through a number of elected councillors, to range no higher into the party nomenklatura. This may explain why Tiger supporters have been allowed to bring chaos to Westminster. 

Before the Tiger leadership was decapitated by the Sri Lankan armed forces in May, it ran a Pol Pot-style state within a state based on the strange personality of its leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. Interference by human rights lawyers, some NGOs, and the British Foreign Secretary, conflated as one interfering entity, would have meant — had the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa taken any notice — loss of sovereignty over one-third of the island. As in the case of Israel's incursion into Gaza, the international moralists fail to grasp that terrorists misuse ceasefires to escape, rearm and regroup. They also use civilian bystanders as hostages and shields.

Having obeyed bien pensant Western opinion by talking to the Taliban, the Pakistani government forfeited control of the Swat Valley only to find itself menaced in Buner province and even Islamabad. It is currently fighting a bloody campaign to regain control. 

International moralism is like a household fragrance sprayed from a cheap aerosol; it makes the sprayer feel good, but the environmental effects are deleterious. Such interventions often perpetuate conflicts, and their death toll, sustaining the misrule of criminals and maniacs. 

It also harms Britain's influence, since countries like Sri Lanka have turned to China, India, Israel, Iran and Russia for support that our moralising government withheld, even as it claims to oppose terrorism. Doesn't it know that the Tigers were linked to Hamas, Hizbollah and al-Qaeda? It is a case of abandoning our national interest as well as our ethical responsibility.