THE Court of Appeal has overturned the convictions of four men involved in supplying arms to Iraq.

The court decided they had been denied a fair trial because vital documents were witheld by the Government.

Is there no depths to which this administration will sink in its frantic efforts to hang on to power?

This whole sorry saga provides yet more evidence of the Government's slide into sleaze.

Everything, it would seem, has to be done under a cloak of secrecy.

There is an inbuilt attitude which smacks of "Nanny knows best."

And there is also an arrogance about this Government which is reflected in their dismal performance in every opinion poll held.

In short, they have been in power too long.

They believe that they are more important than the country and are abviously prepared to use any tactic which will enable them to hang on to power.

As has been demonstrated all through this Arms to Iraq affair, the rest of us are not even allowed to know what influences are brought to bear.

Following the debacle over the Nolan findings and the unseemly scramble to hide MPs' backhanders this latest revelation will only serve to demean Parliament still further.

The four men dragged before the courts have been to Hell and back.

The appeal process was long and it was only in July this year, three years after the original trial, that the appellants were granted access to hundreds of documents denied them at Reading Crown Court.

How the likes of Peter Lilley, Kenneth Baker, Douglas Hurd, Michael Howard and Ministry of Defence and Foreign Office officials could remain silent while these men were pilloried is beyond us.

It is one more example of a desperate Government determined to hang on at all costs.

And it is also worth asking what Customs and Excise were doing during the lead up to this scandal.

True, it was a Customs and Excise man who spotted a suspicious "length of pipe" which led to the full discovery of the plot but one of the accused men, who had been working for British Intelligence, had been the first person to inform Whitehall that Saddam Hussein was building a supergun.

By the time Customs took action - and that involved the authorities prosecuting their own informant - Saddam's men were in possession of many pieces of vital equipment which had arrived in the their country via a tortuous route and with a nod and a wink from the British authorities.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.