The multiple policy re-launch has been a speciality of this government, whether under Tony Blair or Gordon Brown. Even so, it took some gall for the Foreign Secretary to go to the Nato headquarters, as he did yesterday, and present as an adventurous new departure the notion of Talking to the Taliban.
Not only were the principles of just such a policy set out by our US allies in some detail almost six months ago, starting with no less a figure than Gen David Petraeus, Commander of US Central Command, but even then Britain seemed already to have embraced such a policy. It was a full 18 months ago – Christmas 2007 – that two British diplomats were embarrassingly expelled from Afghanistan by President Karzai for, as it later emerged, treating with the Taliban.