But if reports prove true that our Government has known for at least four years that Libya’s leader, Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi, personally ordered the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, then it is one outrageous concealment too far from the electorate. In this affair, we need to watch Big Brother.

It appears to be the case, according to revelations by senior intelligence officers to the Sunday Times, that Gaddafi ordered his brother-in-law, Abdallah Senussi, head of Libya’s External Security Organisation (ESO), to destroy Pan Am 103 and all 259 people aboard the Boeing-747 airliner.

The Government issued a last-minute gagging order on the Sunday Times, preventing it from publishing full details of the intelligence information it has been given. But it is significant that the Government injunction did not prevent the newspaper publishing the main thrust of the story. Neither has the Government denied that it knew all along of Colonel Gaddafi’s culpability.

Many MPs, including Donald Anderson, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, have demanded that Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, explain as soon as possible why vital information known to the Government has been concealed from the British people. The Scotsman supports that demand. The prima facie evidence is that all the efforts that have been made to bring two minor characters in the Pan Am saga to justice in the Netherlands are a charade, a hoax, an act of treachery played by government on the governed.

The Government must be made to come clean. This will not be easy. Its arrogance is becoming legendary as it builds an unenviable record for dissimulation, whether papering over NATO’s cracks on Kosovo in league with Madeleine Albright or distancing itself from British mercenary activity in Sierra Leone. But in this case, quite apart from just one more gratuitous insult to voters, the whole Scottish legal system risks being duped and made to look foolish. The integrity of the legal system is one of the most important guarantees of our freedoms. We need to worry when government plays fast and loose with it, apparently to gain commercial advantage at the expense of proper respect for the truth about who killed 259 people over a small Scottish town and another 11 ordinary citizens on the ground.

The Government is already heavily spinning its excuse for this alleged breach of trust with the British people. It is saying that if, at the Netherlands trial of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, other people are shown to be implicated in the Lockerbie bombing then they will be relentlessly pursued. This is casuistry of a particularly cynical degree. It is nonsensical to try to proceed with the scheduled Lockerbie trial if the Government already knows the culprit is a head of state with whom it now desires a cosy relationship.