Whatever Gordon Brown does, it is always too late. He was too late to express half a view on the release of the Lockerbie bomber. If he had said that he was "repulsed" by the scenes of celebration in Tripoli that greeted the man convicted of the worst terrorist murder in Britain on the day, when the sentiment was still fresh, it might have seemed genuine.
We might even have overlooked his rather obvious dodging of questions about his opinion of the prisoner's release itself. It was mostly because five days passed between the flight to Tripoli last week, and Brown's appearance in No 10 to shake hands with the Israeli prime minister on Tuesday that his response, when it came, seemed so inadequate.
I am not allowed by a self-denying ordinance to mention his predecessor, and especially not for comparative purposes, but can anyone imagine that a different prime minister would have said nothing on such an issue for five hours, let alone five days?
This has nothing to do with devolution. Of course, the decision to release Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi was the responsibility of the Scottish Justice Secretary. But Gordon Brown was not responsible for Ted Kennedy's death, yet he had an opinion on that yesterday. He was not responsible for England winning the Ashes (except in the imagination of Guido Fawkes, the professional Brown-hater, who says England won only because "Jonah" Brown was on holiday), yet he had an opinion on that, too.
This has everything to do with a pattern of behaviour, an inbuilt caution that served Brown well enough on the road to No 10, but which is disastrous in anyone actually holding the top job. Coming to a view too late has been Brown's way of working for as long as anyone can remember. His standard operating procedure as Chancellor was to hold back from expressing a view and then suddenly hit his Cabinet colleagues with a fully worked-out position backed up with Treasury papers at the last minute, so that they had little time to respond. Ask Alan Milburn. Or Charles Clarke. Or that bloke whose name shall not be mentioned.
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