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 This year’s Nobel peace prize, awarded to the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, will not be presented to him in Oslo next month because he is serving an 11-year prison sentence for subverting state power.

The medal and cheque may not be handed over at all because, under the Nobel rules, the award must be collected by the laureate or close family.

His wife, Liu Xia, has been under house arrest and his three brothers have been under close police surveillance since the award was announced. Bit of a problem, that. Fortunately, however, Nobel officials will go ahead with the ceremony, ensuring Mr Liu’s presence is felt by reading one of his texts. As with the 1991 award to Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy campaigner in Burma, which was collected by her husband and sons while she was under house arrest, the absence of Mr Liu will be eloquent evidence of the brutal repression against which he has campaigned stoically.