Whitehall farce lets Strasbourg off the hook Officials advise, ministers decide; that is the Whitehall way. Even so, it is hard not to feel some sympathy for Theresa May, the Home Secretary, as she struggles to extricate herself from the imbroglio over the Government's attempt to deport Abu Qatada - especially since the embarrassing mix-up over dates that has allowed Qatada's lawyers to lodge an 11th-hour appeal to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) now looks to be the responsibility of Home Office civil servants. It emerged yesterday that under the terms of the European Convention - not on Human Rights, but on the Calculation of Time-Limits (yes, such an arcane document really does exist) - the deadline for appealing to the Strasbourg court was not midnight on Monday, as the Home Office has insisted, but midnight on Tuesday. Did the Government's lawyers take the trouble to consult this document? If so, it is hard to see how they could have committed such a howler. More to the point, if there was any doubt whatsoever about the deadline, why - as Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, asked yesterday - didn't officials simply pick up the phone and check? In the Commons yesterday, Mrs May put a brave face on the shambles, pointing out that Qatada has been successfully deploying delaying tactics for the past 11 years, and that this kind of thing was only to be expected. That will not do. The arrest of the radical Islamist preacher on Tuesday - with the media in attendance - now looks like a political stunt that has spectacularly backfired. With representatives of the 47 states subject to the court's jurisdiction meeting in Brighton this week to discuss British proposals for reforming human rights law, it must have seemed a good idea to highlight the ECHR's often perverse judgments and its painfully slow handling of cases. Instead, we have been given another reminder of the Government's worrying inability to display basic competence. It will also bolster the argument that when such egregious blunders take place, the officials responsible should shoulder the blame alongside their political masters. For David Cameron, this messy business is the worst possible backdrop for his attempts to cut the ECHR down to size by asserting the supremacy of national parliaments and courts, and giving them greater latitude in applying judgments. Kenneth Clarke, the Justice Secretary, said yesterday that he was "very hopeful" of such a deal. Sadly, it now looks likely that agreement will be confined to cutting the court's intolerable backlog of 150,000 cases, rather than the bigger problems of its remoteness, its unaccountability and the way it constantly accretes new powers to itself.