1. Ideally it would have been preferable to see Bin Laden and al-Baghdadi facing trial at The Hague for their crimes against humanity, and answering to the superior secular justice system of the “infidel West” that they so despised.

2. It’s regrettable that Baghdadi, in killing himself & his children, was able to commit one final act of the kind of sadistic violence & cowardice that defined his life. Better that we could have denied him his aspirations of martyrdom and ended his story on our terms, not his.

3. But I recognise that a commitment to suicide-murder by such people often renders ideals of this kind totally unfeasible. I acknowledge the difficulties of such operations & I salute the courage of those who risked their lives to stop this man destroying anyone else’s.

4. If Corbyn felt the overwhelming compulsion to make his only statement on Baghdadi’s neutralisation to be one about principles of justice, this is what he could have said.

Instead, his belated & flaccid remarks were dedicated to casting aspersions on the U.S armed forces.

5. His instinct was not to praise the people who took part in the operation. It was not to celebrate the eradication of someone responsible for horrific crimes against civilians including British citizens. It was not to reaffirm our commitment to defeating terrorism.

6. It was not even to reiterate the superiority of our values.

It was to accuse the West of judicial double standards and to lament the death of the worlds most wanted terrorist - as it was with Bin Laden before him.

7. If such remarks had been made at the time, they would have been appallingly tactless. That they were instead made after a week of conspicuous silence, is even worse.

This is not the response of someone fit to be leader of the opposition, much less leader of the UK.