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Middle East and North Africa

Sympathy from the hon. Gentleman is entirely unnecessary in my case; I can assure him that I will be fine without it. Anyway, I suppose I am grateful for it. Let us think about the alternatives for which he seems to be calling. One is to weaken in what we are doing, to say that we do not really care what happens in Libya, and to allow Colonel Gaddafi to run amok in murdering thousands of his own people, destabilising everything else in north Africa. I reject that alternative. The other alternative to our policy is to say that we are not really going to abide by the UN resolutions and that we will do whatever we are urged to do, because we think that our public's patience is too limited in any matter of international relations and so we will be panicked into doing other things. I reject that alternative, too. For too many years, we have been accused of not having the necessary legality or moral support for, or an international coalition behind, what we are doing. We are going to maintain those things in what we do in Libya and that requires persistence in the policy we have adopted.