The rumbling after the release of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, has turned into thunder.

There was a storm in the Scottish parliament, where everything from the sanctimonious grandstanding of Kenny MacAskill, the justice secretary who freed Mr Megrahi, to the hero’s reception featuring Scottish flags at Tripoli airport, came under attack. The silence of Gordon Brown and evasions of his ministers are being parsed with condemnation while, across the Atlantic, everyone from President Barack Obama to FBI director Robert Mueller is outraged. “Your action makes a mockery of the rule of law,” Mr Mueller wrote.