Dear Mr Straw,

            I was delighted to read your splendid piece in the Guardian (Comment Is Free/”Our Record Isn’t Perfect…” 27th February 2009). You really are an amazing man! I haven’t laughed so much in years. No doubt those blighters at Bremner, Bird & Fortune will be stealing your jokes any day now. I think my favourite bit was where you said, with an absolutely straight face, that our democratic system was a guard against an intrusive state because a heavy-handed party could be voted out. And the way you said it really sounded as if you thought that wasn’t going to happen to you at the next election. Honestly, Jack Dee couldn’t have done it better.

            Like every good comic, you kept some of your best stuff for the last few lines. I love that little mention of the Freedom of Information Act, which was hilarious on so many levels – the fact that you have personally refused to comply with an FoI ruling in the last week, for example, or your colleague David Miliband’s recent and somewhat shaming encounters with the courts over possible British complicity in the torture of Binyam Mohamed, which appears to have taken place while you were Foreign Secretary.

            I think my favourite thing is what you don’t say: that it’s now an offence to take a picture of a bobby or possess information “likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism”. A lot of tourists will be in breach of that one, I fear. And of course, police officers regularly cite anti-terror laws in mundane situations and use them to harrass your legitimate opponents (at your own party conference, no less). Then, too, in a time of asymmetric warfare, almost any information of any kind could fall into that latter category – the location of a school; a bus timetable; a chemistry textbook. At least we’re all equal now – everyone’s guilty of something.

            There are one or two other details which really spice the pot – for example:

            42 Day Detention (you, of course, have recently expressed doubts over that, but voted in favour of 90 days, so one knows where your heart is);

            that brief attempt in 2005 to deploy evidence obtained by torture in British courts, which went all the way to the Law Lords; 

            those extremely expensive I.D. cards whose precise purpose – beyond monitoring our movements and controlling us more effectively – is hard to ascertain;

            and of course that DNA database which contains the samples of a large number of innocent people and children which the European Court of Human Rights has ordered you to dispose of, but which you propose, by sleight of hand, to retain.

            And then, to cap it all, that final, ringing line, delivered without a whiff of irony. I honestly don’t know how you do it, Mr Straw. I would have been unable to finish the gag – because you have not ‘extended liberties’ or ‘constrained government’ during your time in power. You have transformed a system which was arbitrary, unfair and bigoted into one which is universal, oppressive, and arrogant. And yet, with that glorious, Blairish disregard for reality which marks the best political comedy these days, you proclaim yourself a champion of civil liberties.

            You are a riot.

            Yours Sincerely,

            Nick Harkaway

[Edit: since I posted this, it's been reported that various government departments and similar routinely abuse anti-terror powers, and the Home Secretary has, apparently with absolute impunity, gone over the head of the court to order the arrest of five men in spite of a ruling that their bail should not be withdrawn. Whatever else, we live under a government which absolutely believes that executive power trumps law.]