There has been a surfeit of bad news of late. To be sure, some have viewed with schadenfreude the misfortunes of News International, but many other recent events have been indisputably catastrophic, from the Japanese earthquake and its nuclear fall-out, to the recent mayhem in Norway. When it comes to the British government, the newspapers have little pleasant to say: either Nick Clegg is tarred a hypocrite, or David Cameron is a detached toff who changes with each breath of the political breeze, or Ed Miliband is labelled a cipher.
Yet there are positive developments in the Summer of our discontent, and they merit underlining.
Sixteen years ago I was representing a British national, Nicholas Ingram, who faced execution in the State of Georgia. We had filed a petition asking the Pardon Board to commute his sentence. I had it on good authority from a source within the Board that they were prepared to show mercy on a simple request from Prime Minister John Major. Though Major was in Washington, and Nicky's mother dogged him around town, he refused to raise a finger. I watched Nicky die a gruesome death in the electric chair after dark on April 7th, 1995.
Then, as now, the British passport promised "the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary." Nicky did not receive it, and I am afraid I nursed a grudge against the PM for a long time after that.
But times have changed since then. The passport still bears the same fine words, but today they have some meaning. While the private letter that would have saved Nicky was never sent, today the Foreign Office goes much further in support of our nationals abroad. Kenny Richey was a Scot who was falsely accused of starting a fire in which a little girl died. The government formally intervened in the legal proceedings arguing that Kenny's death sentence was in breach of international law. After two decades on death row, Kenny was set free. In 2006, Tony Blair made personal representations to Vietnam on behalf of Le Manh Luong, probably saving his life. Last year, Neil Revill never had to face execution at all, since Gordon Brown personally contacted the California prosecutors to persuade them to drop the death penalty.
To fight is not always to prevail. The government's most Herculean effort came 18 months ago in the case of Akmal Shaikh, when Brown and a bevy of ministers called personally on the Chinese, asking them to take account of the mental heath evidence that we had just uncovered. Poor Akmal died, but the government cannot be faulted for lack of effort. And now Britain leads from the front in Europe, persuading other countries to engage with us at Reprieve in saving lives.
There will, no doubt, be future occasions when the government fails in its duty, and I can promise that we will hold them to account. But it is important to pause, and to recognise decency in government. Robin Cook once told me that he never used the phrase, "an ethical foreign policy." He should have. It is a good idea, one that he often tried to implement. Power may often corrupt, but power used responsibly can be the difference between life and death.