Charles, I naturally don't accept that Carl Gardner has torn my case (or myself) into thin strips or any other kind of strips. If you read my various contributions to the debate on Head of Legal, you'll see that I have had perfectly tenable answers to all the objections raised by Carl (but not to your airy Tweets, Charles. They nearly all amount to vague and generalised assertions, such as diplomacy being about good manners, which are neither verifiable nor refutable but essentially gestures).

The nearest you come to advancing a concrete argument is to deny the existence of a recognised right of diplomatic asylum. There is no universally recognised right of asylum in the premises of a diplomatic mission but there are numerous examples of countries accepting fugitives of various kinds in their embassies, sometimes for many years, and no examples that I know of of host governments using their belief in the illegality of diplomatic asylum as a justification for violating the immunity of embassies from entry and search without the agreement of the relevant ambassador. The British embassy in Moscow was the home for several weeks in the 1970s to four young Soviet citizens sheltering from the KGB and the Russians, while demanding the expulsion of the refugees from the embassy, never attempted to break in and seize them. The FCO agreed at the time that the four refugees should not be forced out of the embassy against their will. I am sure of my facts on this because I was a first secretary in the embassy at the time. Your confident dismissal of this practice -- of which the Moscow episode is only one example of many -- is not supported by international precedents. It is also totally irrelevant to the question whether in principle Assange could be appointed to the diplomatic staff of the Ecuador embassy, notified to the FCO as a diplomat, and allowed to leave the country with immunity from arrest or extradition, no doubt after a challenge in the English courts. I have yet to hear a convincing reason why that should not be possible. But in any case it has nothing at all to do with diplomatic asylum.

I am putting this reply on Head of Legal also. But I shall waste no more time devising sound-bites in reply to yours on Twitter, since they degrade what should be a civil and mutually respectful debate -- as it once was.

To promise an in-out referendum in five years' time when no-one can possibly know what kind of European Union we shall belong to or want to leave, or whether a referendum then will be desirable or necessary, is the height of irresponsible folly. It may appease the Tory Europhobes for a week or two, but they'll soon be back for more. Labour is absolutely right to refuse to commit itself to a referendum so far ahead in such unpredictable circumstances.

Some of the arguments against both the promise of a referendum in the distant future and against Mr Cameron's plans for repatriating from the EU powers designed to protect the working conditions of working people all over Europe are at http://bit.ly/WZUxGa.

I am grateful for the hospitality that you offer to this Labour-supporting visitor.

No. We decided not to break into the Libyan embassy despite our right to do so under our inherent right of self-defence purely for fear of violent retaliation against our embassy in Tripoli if we did. That would have been the sole justification for breaching Art. 22 of the Vienna Convention and it doesn't apply to the Ecuador/Assange situation.

I have taken a lot of trouble over a full reply to this post, dealing especially with points on which you argue with my own earlier comment, but it has been rejected as too long. I don't have time or the inclination to split it up into a lot of mini-comments, so I have emailed it to you in the hope that you'll find a way to put it up on your blog, preferably formatted to make it more easily read, under my name.