Gulp. A week ago I printed here a little piece of doggerel relayed to me by Labour backbenchers but (reportedly) emanating from within the Cabinet:

At Downing Street upon the stair,

I met a man who wasn't Blair.

He wasn't Blair again today.

Oh how I wish he'd go away.

Yesterday in the Commons a Tory friend of mine, Alan Duncan, put it to the Business Secretary, John Hutton, that he was the author. Mr Hutton absolutely denied this.

Before this spins out of control, let me say I have not spoken to Mr Duncan and have no evidence of Mr Hutton being the poet. Further, my informant had forgotten the start, and said: “Di-dah, di-dah upon the stair/I met a man...” etc. I improvised the first three words myself.

At the dispatch box Mr Hutton replied that he would have composed a much better poem, and I'm sure he's right.

Like (I imagine) many newspaper readers inexpert on the law of libel, I was not so much surprised that the Express has just been forced to apologise to and compensate Kate and Gerry McCann as I was surprised the British press so carelessly published defamatory attacks on them in the first place. Whatever questions may be raised (and I have raised some) about this couple's judgment in hiring professional PR, with all the massive and relentless publicity this has led to, the McCanns were in the end always going to emerge with at least their honour intact.

Not so their neighbour in Praia da Luz, poor Robert Murat, against whom (like the McCanns) there has never been a shred of evidence, but who has had to watch silently as his character was pulled apart by the British press. Gagged (as an arguido, like the McCanns) from making any public statement, and with no media spokesman (as the McCanns have) to organise responses on his behalf, Mr Murat has been silent witness to the very public destruction of his reputation.

I do not know that Robert Murat is innocent. I do not know that Kate and Gerry McCann are innocent. I do not know that the Angel Gabriel, or my Aunty Dolly, are innocent. I know only that we have no evidence for the guilt of any of these people. Due process and common decency forbid us from suggesting otherwise.

I devoted a Saturday column in The Times last summer to the plight of Mr Murat, suffering death by a thousand innuendos in British newspapers, and being spun into some kind of “one-eyed” “weirdo” “loner” and obvious suspect - when nobody who knew him, including even his now-separated wife, describes him unkindly.

Unlike the McCanns, who will be remembered as innocent, Mr Murat's possible fate could be that if and when those close to the case officially declare he was uninvolved, the media, bored by the story, will simply saunter away and stop writing about him, leaving on the battlefield, bayoneted by their reports, a man with his name forever associated in the public mind with something unspeakable - the world having forgotten that no evidence for this was ever produced.

You need deep pockets to risk hiring the top-flight libel lawyers. I dislike our laws of defamation: only theoretically open (like the Ritz, as someone once remarked) to all. But if any libel victim ever deserved a remedy in law it is Robert Murat. Should the system serve Gerry and Kate McCann but prove unable to help Mr Murat, then a serious injustice will have been done.

Last year in The Times I wrote a column about the daily diary of a little German girl, Hilke, growing into an adolescent through the Second World War. “To this diary I will entrust my joys and my sorrows,” she writes, aged 12, in her chintz-covered little diary's first entry.

Her experiences, through British bombing, displacement and separation, were awful, and she was very brave and crossed the country alone, often on foot. Though she at first supports Herr Hitler, like all her friends, politics and “history” are strangers to her. Hilke survived, but was killed in a car crash later. Her sister Geseke, who has married and lives here, showed the diary to a neighbour, my brother in Warwick.

Encouraged by the attention that the Times column attracted, her family have published the diary, edited by Geseke Clark (www.tempus-publishing.com) - a small, moving, sweet, sad and compelling book. I think there is a message but I don't know what it is.

Hilke's Diary is published today

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