The people of Hartlepool (the same who elected a monkey as their mayor) would be at grave risk, the BBC buzzed the ships at sea, on the basis that great visuals disguise a thin story, while the little papers created much more of a stink than the substances ever would. The whole project was stopped, dead in the water.

That was in November. Now enter, on the whiter-than-white charger, the FoE's rivals from Greenpeace, with full supporting cast including the local MP, one Peter Mandelson. Yesterday they decided that these ships (and many others which must be broken up) are indeed dangerous, which is why they should come here, where we know how to deal with them properly.

If we turn them away, more of them will instead be stripped down on some Far Eastern shore, and the dangerous chemicals that don't get inside some unfortunate child labourer will be washed into the sea.

Well, we rejoice at a sinner that repenteth, since we pointed out all these screamingly obvious facts in November. Peter Stephenson, the man who runs Able UK, the company which won the contract to scrap the old US navy ships, may feel less inclined to join the celebrations.

He negotiated all the regulatory hurdles that our plethora of busybodies could put in his way, but when the row blew up, the Environment Agency managed to find enough unticked boxes for the High Court to hole Mr Stephenson's contract below the waterline.

Instead of 200 new jobs, a refitted yard and the prospect of some lucrative work in a region not exactly booming, Able has had to cut back. Now that Greenpeace, Mr Mandelson and the GMB union have seen the light, it may be too late to save what they describe as "a state of the art British ship recycling industry".

Rather than grind through the bureaucratic process all over again, Mr Stephenson is considering taking some of the work to a less hostile climate overseas. After all he has been through, and with Friends like these, who can blame him?