LET me tell you the story of a very British scandal. It is a scandal which may be unfamiliar to you. It should not be. This story’s protagonists are Abdul-Hakim Belhaj and Fatima Boudchar. You may not recognise their names. You may not recognise their faces. But the secondary players who step in and out of their story will be well known to you. Enter Jack Straw and Tony Blair and Colonel Gaddafi, stage right.

Our story begins in an airport, Beijing, in February 2004. Belhaj is a Libyan dissident, Boudchar his wife. Belhaj is a senior figure in the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, resisting Gaddafi’s rule. The couple are living in exile in China but hope to seek asylum in the United Kingdom. In the spring of 2004, they make to board a flight to London – but for reasons unknown, are instead diverted to Kuala Lumpur. The horror begins shortly afterwards. Unlawfully detained by Malay authorities, they find themselves transferred into the custody of Thai functionaries, and then the Americans get their hands on them.

In March, they are flown – hooded, bound and gagged – to Libya in a US-registered aircraft said to have been owned by a CIA front company. Their destination? Tajoura prison, Tripoli. Ms Boudchar spends just under four months within its walls before being released in June 2004. She gives birth. Her baby weights just four pounds.

Mince no words. Use no euphemisms. Boudchar’s account of what happened during the course of her rendition is beyond appalling.

“I’ll never forget the sight of my kidnappers,” she said, “dressed all in black and wearing ski masks, waiting for me in a white cell in the Bangkok detention site. A man grabbed my head and shoved me into a truck.

“They blindfolded and trussed me. I have no idea how long I was in the Thai secret prison because no-one would let me sleep. The cell was white and stark, with nothing in it but a camera and hooks on the wall.

“The masked abductors were waiting. I was terrified. They chained me to the hooks. Because I was midway through my pregnancy, I could barely move or sit. Some of what they did to me in that prison was so awful I can’t talk about it. They hit me in the abdomen just where the baby was. To move me, they bound me to a stretcher from head to toe, like a mummy. I was sure I would shortly be killed.”

At first, Belhaj is also incarcerated at Tajoura, before being transferred to the notorious Abu Salim. Belhaj spends six years in custody. They are not gentle years. Interrogated, tortured and sentenced to death by a kangaroo court – Belhaj is finally released in March 2010.

But how, you might ask yourself, did the CIA and Gaddafi’s regime find out about their whereabouts? This is where global Britain steps in. It’s because we told them.

Sifting through the rubble of Gaddafi’s regime in 2011, Human Rights Watch uncovered a critical document. Its author? Sir Mark Allen, then head of Britain’s Mi6 counter-terrorism regime. In a fax to Mousa Koussa – the Libyan external intelligence chief – the British spymaster wrote: “I congratulate you on the safe arrival of Mr Belhaj. This was the least we could do for you and for Libya to demonstrate the remarkable relationship we have built up over recent years.”

Koussa responded confirming that the intelligence about the couple’s whereabouts “was British”. “I know I did not pay for the air cargo. But I feel I have the right to deal with you direct on this and am very grateful to you for the help you are giving us,” the Libyan torturer chortled.

Knowing Belhaj was writhing in custody when this chummy fax was dictated -- the conversation is beyond repulsive. You’d think they were two businessmen exchanging compliments on the quality of the corporate hospitality rather than traffickers in human “cargo”, seemingly deaf to their screams.

In the aftermath of this illegal rendition – goodwill flowing between Britain and its “international partners” – Tony Blair went on to sign his “deal in the desert” with Muammar Gaddafi. This week, the former Labour PM denied any involvement or awareness of the treatment meted out to Mr Behlaj and Ms Boudchar.

His successors can plead no such ignorance. Mr Belhaj went to law in 2011, demanding some recognition from the courts of the wrong this country undoubtedly did to him. And well-knowing about Mi6’s disgusting billet-doux to Gaddafi’s principal torturer, well-knowing that Britain had facilitated the kidnapping and abuse of a family in the cynical attempt to curry favour with that country’s irascible regime – how did Her Majesty’s government respond? Did the British authorities hold up their hands? Did they honour the conventional pieties about Britain and its lauded respect for the rule of law and fundamental rights? Did they hell.

Instead, Whitehall’s legal machinery used every trick in the book to spike the litigation and conceal the truth about what happened to Mr Belhaj and Ms Boudchar and why it happened. First, they denied liability. Then they demanded secret trials. Then they went to law to avoid disclosing critical documents. And when all of these evasions failed – when the courts knocked back all their excuses, all their invocations of national security and partial explanations and qualified denials – the Attorney General appears in the Commons, with a heartfelt apology from Theresa May clutched in one hand and a £500,000 payoff for Ms Boudchar in the other.

This month, the Prime Minister told the couple she found their stories “moving” and “deeply troubling,” stressing that “the UK Government believes your accounts” and accepting “the UK Government’s actions contributed to your detention, rendition and suffering”.

These are welcome sentiments. But if the Government accepted their stories, why spend the better part of a decade trying to dodge legal responsibility?

Contrition is one thing when it is spontaneous and heartfelt. It is quite another when it is torn from you, years later, only after all your legal arguments have fallen on stony ground. Mrs May is not responsible for the actions of her predecessors. But the fact the UK Government accepts Belhaj’s story does not mitigate – but aggravates – its culpability.

Justice delayed is justice denied. And until this month’s volte face, the UK Government has been content for Belhaj and Boudchar to wait, and wait, and wait. As Mr Belhaj recognised, a little justice has been done here, far too late. But if this is what “global Britain” means, if a belated apology after wrecking litigation is the highest aspiration of our foreign policy – then God rot it. I want out.