A photograph published 10 days ago in newspapers around the world has stayed in my mind. It showed Bob Geldof with Tony Blair at a meeting of the Geldof-inspired Commission for Africa in Addis Ababa.
The two men were, as most of the caption writers had it, "sharing a joke". Blair was bent backwards in what was obviously a moment of sheer mirth. Geldof looked like he had cracked the joke. They seemed relaxed in each other's company and looked like what they are: men of comparable charisma and influence in the world. You might almost have taken them for equals.
But what preoccupied me was something I know about Bob Geldof that only a minority of people could have the necessary experience to understand. I have a sense, because I experienced something similar myself, of how Bob Geldof was brutalised by the state over which Tony Blair presides. I know that, in a certain sense, Tony Blair is to Bob Geldof as Gustav Husak was to Vaclav Havel.
On Tuesday night last, in the course of his passionate TV onslaught on the British family law system, Geldof used a statement by Tony Blair to convey the kind of disinformation spread by those with a vested interest in protecting a corrupt system. "The Prime Minister," he said, "says - because he has been told to say it . . ."
His point seemed to be that Tony Blair was unaware of the abuses perpetrated in the British family courts system.
Much though I would like this to be true, I know that Tony Blair has been told many times of what happens on his watch behind the closed doors of secret courts.
That he has done nothing about it is to his great discredit, but also an illustration of the powerlessness of the powerful where certain matters are concerned.
Bob Geldof is now perhaps the world's leading human rights campaigner, having, in partnership with Bono, persuaded the world's political elites of the necessity for fundamental change in policy towards the Third World. He has the direct-line numbers of international leaders and bends the ears of kings over the water cooler.
The situation in Africa, in terms of hunger and disease, is appalling - the most urgent global issue of our time. The rights of human beings to live without fear of imminent death or torture, to food, clean water and medicine, are unquestionably the most immediate and urgent considerations, without which all else becomes academic.
But, in terms of human dignity, other rights follow hard on the right to the expectation of a reasonably healthy existence, including the right to the love, care and society of one's parents and the love and society of one's children. Morally, it is scarcely possible to slide a cigarette paper between these rights and those pertaining to a healthy physical existence.
This is what Geldof was talking about on Tuesday night: the withdrawal, in the "cradle of democracy" itself, of a fundamental human right from men and children who, because of the breakdown of intimate relationships, have the misfortune to come before a family court.
In analysing the reasons for what appears to be the malfunction of family law, it is possible to become drawn into the logic of a system pleading overload and good intentions - lawyers burdened with the mess of broken relationships, which they try to rectify "in the best interests of children", and so forth.
But the state does not do what it does to fathers and children because its structures and systems are in need of updating, or because those who implement the system are overworked and underpaid. These injustices occur because absolute power has been allowed to do what it always does, because operatives in a corrupt system have acquired a form of omnipotence which, in effect, grants them more power over the lives of citizens than the head of government. It's not complicated: the secrecy afforded by the in-camera rule enables unaccountable functionaries to exercise total power over the lives of other human beings.
Tony Blair has, as Prime Minister, the capacity to eliminate these abuses with a stroke of his pen. That he has failed to do so is an illustration of the impotence of the modern politician in matters that do not have the approval of the liberal mainstream. It is a measure of Blair's moral paralysis on this issue that he is prepared to risk the wrath of Bob Geldof rather than confront the hypocrisy of the British chattering classes, who prefer to moralise from a geographical distance.
We have a similar problem here. Throughout the "civilised" world, "family law" is the ultimate oxymoron, a mendacious code for state-sponsored lawlessness.
There are, in Western societies, no greater abuses of the principles of justice, equality and fairness than those veiled by the secrecy of family courts, whose daily outrages, more than any of our failures in the greater world, will cause future generations to look back at these times of ours and wonder what kind of brutes we were who lived in AD2004.