So BP lobbied the British Government for the release of Abdel Basset  al-Megrahi, the alleged Lockerbie bomber, in order to get prior access to Libyan oil – or so say 4 US Senators.   Al-Megrahi was almost cetainly not the culprit;  the bombing was much more likely to have been carried out by the Iranian-backed Ahmed Gibril’s revolutionary Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – but that’s another story.     The deal that was hatched whereby Libya would give up its nuclear ambitions (which showed no sign of materialising anyway), Al-Megrahi would be released on compassionate grounds that he was in the final stages of a terminal illness (which we now know he wasn’t), and Britain would graciously respond to these magnanimous gestures of goodwill from Libya by opening up its markets to Libyan goods (i.e. grabbing the oil).

Jack Straw, earlier Foreign Secretary, openly admitted as much.   He said last year: “We wanted to bring Libya back into the fold.   And yes, that included trade…and subsequently there was the BP deal”.   No country oozes high-mindedness to cloak its base commercial interests like the UK.   Indeed this motif has been played out repeatedly.

Britain supported the US unprovoked and illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, not because of WMD (there weren’t any, as US and UK leaders knew well at the time), but because of the oil, as showed conclusively in my Guardian article of 6 September 2003.   In 1998 Blair welcomed President Aliyev of Azerbaijan, one of the most corrupt and brutal dictatorships in the world, to Downing Street and made arrangements for him to stay at Buckingham Palace, not out of regard for a former KGB-style Communist boss, but to sign up oil contracts worth £5bn for BP.   The Foreign Office recalled in 2004 and sacked its ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, not because the President of that country boiled his political opponents to death, but because Murray’s loud denunciation of this practice risked the UK losing access to vast Uzbek oilfields.

Britain still resists Argentinian overtures for the Falklands 8,000 miles away from the UK, not out of concern for British sheep farmers, but because of the oil it has started to drill for there.   In the teeth of international opposition, Britain has quietly annexed three-quarters of a million square miles of the Southern Ocean off Antarctica because of large-scale oil deposits believed to be there.   And Britain is still giving covert backing for UK involvement in the exploitation of the Canadian tar sands in Alberta, where extraction will generate a turbo-charged explosion in carbon and greenhouse gas emissions in utter disregard of Britain’s ostensible climate change policy.

Oil is the elephant in the room, unremarked upon and apparently invisible. But it lies at the bottom of almost every nasty and seemingly incomprehensible deal that the British Foreign Office (and No.10) make.   The switch to renewables would not only hugely benefit the environment, it would also greatly lift the image of British foreign policy across the world.