The rich chocolate cake that Gen Augusto Pinochet, the former bloody dictator of Chile, received from a well-wisher in Santiago for his 83rd birthday yesterday must have turned to ashes in his mouth as he tasted it in the former mental hospital on the northern outskirts of London where he remains detained under armed guard.
It cannot have tasted good, despite being served on a silver tray which came the other day as another birthday gift from the old boys of the College of the Sacred Hearts in the general's native Valparaiso, the City of the Valley of Paradise.
Yesterday, the celebratory champagne was flowing more liberally outside Grovelands Priory, among the pro-democracy demonstrators in the cold lanes of Northwood, than it was within Gen Pinochet's place of confinement.
The surprise decision by the House of Lords that he cannot be immune from extradition to Spain for his crimes will have upset many carefully laid plans.
It will have disappointed David, Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, the son of the war hero, who has occupied a key position among the British establishment and who, alongside Baroness Thatcher, sought to help the torturer of men, women and babies and who criticised the decision to have him arrested last month on the original Interpol warrant from Spain.
It will also have disappointed the Chilean air force, whose Boeing 707 sent to the Royal Air Force base at Brize Norton will not be flying to take him home and will surely now have to return to its base across the world beside the South Pacific without him. So too will the Gulfstream III executive jet, which was originally sent from Chile to rescue him but which was judged to be of insufficient range.
The Chilean military were worried that had the smaller plane been used, it could have run into serious trouble at whatever airport it chose to land and refuel. The Chilean crews at least will have the consolation that they will not be subject to the nasty tricks that many in the Brazilian city of Recife, the favoured refuelling stop, were hoping to play on them as they landed on their way home.
The Lords' decision will present some bizarre conundrums to the government of Chile. The administration in Santiago is headed by President Eduardo Frei, an uninspiring Christian Democrat and civil engineer whose father was head of state from 1964 and who passed on the sash of office to his constitutionally elected successor, the Socialist Salvador Allende, in 1970. It was to the plaudits of most, but not all, of the Christian Democrats that Mr Allende was overthrown in Gen Pinochet's putsch three years later.
Hobbled by a constitution designed by Gen Pinochet himself to protect the privileges of the Chilean establishment who profited so massively from the years of the military dictatorship, the government in Santiago is an unsatisfactory mixture of cautious rightwing Christian Democrats and left-wingers - many of the latter no less cautious than their coalition partners.
Now this government is caught up with the promise it made under pressure from many of the rich and powerful in Chile before the Lords' judgment was known that it would send a high-level mission to London to beg Mr Blair and the Home Secretary, Mr Jack Straw, to allow the old dictator to escape extradition to Spain.
Gen Pinochet's friends have insisted that the Chilean Foreign Minister himself, Mr Jose Miguel Insulza, should lead this delegation. Mr Insulza, however, like Mr Mario Artaza, the Chilean ambassador in London, was a victim of the Pinochet regime, being forced into exile during military rule. They can hardly be called upon too energetically to the aid of their erstwhile tormentor.