AT THE BACK OF THE QUEUE TO RESCUE EX-PATS

You would be hard pressed to make this up.

This morning at around 6 I heard that Turkey and the USA had sent in boats to rescue people from Libya. Since then I have read that Bulgaria, Russia, China, Tajikistan, France, Portugal and several other nations have managed to remove their citizens from the country.

Bulgaria even sent in military aircraft.

Britain, however, was doing its best to charter a plane this morning, while oil workers were saying that they had tried to get in touch with the British Embassy in Tripoli but that no one had got back to them.

Later in the morning, after criticism from families of ex-pats and from the Labour opposition they had stirred their stumps and a plane was due to leave at 12.30, with another later in the day and yet another tomorrow.

As of 7 pm, the chartered flight due to leave at 12.30 pm still hadn’t gone (according to on line papers). It was on the tarmac at Gatwick, broken down. And Alistair Burt, a Foreign Office minister, pictured below, said when questioned about it: "Sometimes planes develop faults through nobody else's fault or error. We will hopefully get those planes out as quickly as possible."

Hopefully Mr Burt? Hopefully, you say? Oh well, there’s not much you can do in an emergency when British citizens are trapped in a foreign country that is in the middle of a violent and deathly revolution and a plane brakes down. Especially if you’re only the government. I mean it’s not like you could get another bloody plane or anything, is it?

I’ve just checked and it appears that the plane has now left (8pm). At long last.

And Cameron has the brass neck to say that he has done everything possible to get stranded Brits out of there, and that the FCO officials were working round the clock to get people out. He said: "I don't want to give details of the exact plane arrival times or what ships and when, but we are doing everything we can to make sure we get people out and there are all sorts of different means that we can use to make sure that happens." Just as well you didn't hand out the timetable, huh? What with it all coming down to one broken plane.


All I can say is that they seem to be pretty crap at it if they were doing everything possible and this was the best they could manage. I think too that they might want in their redundancy programme to look at some of the officials who work round the clock to produce a laughing stock fiasco like this.