The political classes don t like this sort of thing. There s too much raw emotion involved. Like nervous prefects, they dismissed Davis as vain, egotistical, narcissistic and irresponsible. He was, said one commentator of my acquaintance, suffering from a mid-life crisis and probably knew he didn t have the brains to be Home Secretary, which is why he had bailed out.
That very much captures what is wrong with the Westminster village, which is so consumed with the talk of power, the jockeying for power, the acquisition and loss of it, that there is very little space left in the minds of journalists and politicians for principles and ideas. Yet that was what so much of last week in the House of Commons was about. Let us not forget that the Prime Minister won 42 days pre-charge detention by buying votes from nine hard-faced men from Northern Ireland, while 36 members of his own party stood up for the fundamental freedoms of our country. This was a moral defeat, not for Labour, but for Gordon Brown.
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But when you think of the magnificence of the gesture - in Cyrano's word, the panache - the wonderful departure from the norms of Westminster and the fatalistic reductions of the political classes, your support flies to him. Here was a man who threw dignity and prospects to the wind in order to defend 'the relentless erosion of fundamental freedoms'. After all, he said, what are MPs there for if not to protect Magna Carta?
Coincidentally, as he was saying this, Senator Barack Obama issued a statement welcoming the Supreme Court's rejection of the legal black hole at Guantanámo 'as re-establishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law, and rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus'.
Davis is right for the same reasons as Obama is, and many on the Labour benches who voted for the measure will eventually realise that.
