You can’t arrest Bibi, complains Lord Dave – he’s my Jacuzzi buddy

You can’t arrest Netanyahu! He’s one of us. International courts are for men called Slobodan Killalot, not democratic leaders with whom David Cameron has shared several summits and a Jacuzzi. Otherwise, who will they arrest next? Bush? Blair? David Cameron?

Lord Dave rose from the red benches to denounce the ICC’s investigation into Bibi as “wrong”. Green peer Baroness Bennett asked if we should suspend arms sales to Israel just in case it has broken some law? No need, replied Cameron; we supply so little.

But how much exactly? To find out, one had to jog to the Grimond Room, where Alan Mak, the industry minister, gave an answer before the committee. Mak is another of the 400 MPs I was at Cambridge with, though in his case a political career did come as a surprise. Some of the crueller undergrads laid bets on prison.

Whatever his virtues, and I’m sure he’s a lovely man, Mak always comes across as up to no good and in terror of being caught out.

Seated between Andrew Mitchell and a civil servant, like a client between lawyers, his nerves gave the committee the air of a police interrogation – as if Mak were suspected of supplying the weapons himself.

“So,” asked the panel, “what is the value of UK defence exports to Israel?”

“The figure for 2022,” replied Mak, was a paltry “£42 million”, amounting to “less than 1 per cent of Israel’s defence imports”.

Job done; he almost ran out the door.

Haaaang on, said the committee: “2022?” What about the figures for the last eight months – you know, the period in which Israel has been at war?

Had Mak replied “we don’t have them”, he would have appeared incompetent but honest. Instead he provided “wider context” that amounted to three minutes of trying to avoid saying “we don’t have them” in a manner that could only have sounded worse if he’d said: “We did, but the dog ate them.”

“This is completely unacceptable,” said Liam Byrne, the chairman. “These are quarterly statistics,” we are thus owed two sets of them, and “they are late” – so where are they? 

“We are updating our digital systems,” explained the mandarin, and perhaps sensing that her job would be safer if she let Mak take the wrap on this one, said little else.

“How confident are you,” asked Julie Marson, “that the UK has not provided any equipment that could be used in breach of the law?”

Mak launched into a discourse of nonsense peppered with general knowledge – Israel is in the Middle East, it gets around 21 inches of rain a year – concluding with “I hope that answers your question.”

“I’m not sure,” she said.

Mitchell leaned back in his chair and smiled. He looked like an attorney who knew full well his client was going down and had no intention of standing in his way. But smug as Mitchell was, he and the Government were implicated by Mak’s testimony.

For days they have said Britain exports too little to Israel for an arms embargo to make any difference – but we now know that they can’t say that for sure because Mak doesn’t have the numbers. I’m calling this scandal Makgate.