Margaret Thatcher and John Major knew that bluff and bravado doesn't work in Brussels.
Locking people up without reducing the risk of them committing new crimes against new victims the minute they get out does not make for intelligent sentencing.
Unless and until I can see an opportunity of actually reversing Brexit and restoring a stable membership of the European Union, then in the real world I concentrate on minimising the damage.
No country anywhere in the world allows material that genuinely puts national security at risk into the public domain, and that includes a courtroom.
I am a firm believer in open justice, and an opponent of closed justice in any normal circumstances. But I am also an opponent of legal purism, and have no time for institutionalised mythmaking - whether from the authoritarian right or the liberal left.
If the prime minister really believes it, he must be the only person left who thinks that the recent bombs in London had no connection at all with his policy in Iraq.
