More Spicer meetings emerge

Labour MP Andrew McKinlay has been told in a Commons reply that Foreign Office officials met mercenary Tim Spicer eight times in the last year, twice in the UK and six times overseas.

One of these occasions will have been the meeting in February 2004 which Jack Straw said discussed rumours of the coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea that materialised a month later.

It would be interesting to know the exact dates of the other meetings. These have not been provided although Mackinlay would seem to have asked for them.

The meetings could be to do with Iraq, although the British Government has said it is not a party to Spicer’s contract there.

It ought to be surprising that Foreign Office officials have had so many meetings with a man who one of their number has described as "extremely difficult to pin down and shifty".