It is ten days since Downing Street promised an “urgent review” of Britain’s cold-shouldering of Iraqis whose lives are in danger because of their services to the Crown. The Prime Minister, it was announced, had demanded an explanation from the Home Office. Presumably that “explanation” has by now been furnished. Downing Street may now know that Home Office “operational guidance notes for Iraq” already exist – and that they state that Iraqis seeking asylum in the UK “may claim that as a result of their work for the UN, NGOs or foreign contractors . . . they face a real risk of being targeted by insurgents”.

Gordon Brown may, further, have been informed that in April this year, an Iraqi interpreter for the Americans was granted asylum in this country. In allowing his appeal, the judges ruled that someone who “has worked as a translator or in any other way such as to be regarded by insurgents as a collaborator with the multi-national force . . . faces a real risk of persecution”. The Home Office concurred in that assessment.

The argument about how to treat these vulnerable people thus boils down to three words: “in the UK”. The phrase is a Catch22 that is as dear to bureaucrats as it is deadly to the Iraqis whose appeals to Britain have gone unanswered. Under the UN refugee convention, in order to qualify for asylum, fugitives must first reach these shores. This is almost impossible for the Iraqi interpreters, drivers and contract workers at risk, and wholly impossible unless they desert their families in time of danger.

If the Prime Minister is serious about this issue, he cannot afford to give civil servants weeks in which to devise some fiendishly complicated scheme that will then take months to set up, with people being murdered the while.

There are ways for him to cut the Gordian knot. He could order the suspension of the “in the UK” rule for this group and dispatch enough officials to Iraq to enable claims to be processed. The Home Office objects that to do so would “open the floodgates” to other claims for asylum from outside the UK. It would do no such thing. For other cases, UN rules would still stand.

If Mr Brown is disinclined to take on the Home Office, there is a second way out of this mess: keep the rule, but issue a visitor’s visa to those who have a strong case for asylum, together with their families, and welcome them on arrival with cash, advice and application forms.

A third way would be simply to set up an emergency evacuation programme, as Britain did for Kosovo, and give these Iraqis the right to live and to work here until they can safely go home.

Whatever the policy mix, it should include alternatives such as generous cash rewards and help to resettle elsewhere in Iraq or neighbouring countries. The guidelines are broad enough to cover those most at risk: not only interpreters and others employed by the Crown, but those working, say, for private security companies guarding Iraq’s vital oilfields and the Iraqis who risk their lives to help foreign journalists to do their job. Britain’s reputation sinks with each day of indecision, not only in Iraq but wherever this country has hitherto been regarded as a reliable ally. There is no excuse for any further delay. Churchill memos, headed “Action This Day”, famously would begin: “Pray let me have, on one side of a sheet of paper . . . ” A Brown memo is awaited.