Ministers have 30 days to approve or reject plans to extend the period a terror suspect can be held without charge. This news comes 10 days after speculation that ministers were planning to extend the limit to 56 days. Evidently, they didn’t listen to us, or Amnesty UK when we gave them a list of reasons not to extend it.

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Justice said:

“It seems more like politics than policy-making to me. I think it is a real mistake as I’ve never seen such good will in the House of Commons.”

Quite so. If you’ll forgive the editorialising – who wants to take a bet that this is stage one of the distract them from the funding scandal plan?