After rioting that has taken around 350 lives and driven at least 100,000 people from their homes, Kenya's opposition leader has made a sensible suggestion for defusing the greatest crisis faced by the country since independence.
Raila Odinga, head of the Orange Democratic Movement, has proposed the formation of an interim government whose sole purpose would be to prepare for a re-run of last week's rigged presidential election within three months. His idea deserves the wholehearted support of the United States, Britain and its European Union partners.
The fraudulent tallying of votes, attested by EU observers, is such that nothing less will spare Kenya indefinite political instability and economic decline. That should be of strategic concern to Western powers in the fight against global terror, in which one of the most successful sub-Saharan nations has been a valued ally.
Stepping down will obviously be a hard pill for Mwai Kibaki, the declared victor, to swallow. But against his reluctance must be set the drastic loss of life since he was furtively sworn in as president on December 30, the awful reawakening of tribal violence and the immediate damage to Kenya's billion-dollar tourist trade.
To press their point, the American and EU governments should refuse to recognise the results of the December 27 election, reserving their approval for whoever emerges as winner in a re-run.
They should also insist, as Mr Odinga has suggested, that the poll be supervised by an independent body, and not the Electoral Commission of Kenya, whose members are Kibaki appointees. The United Nations is an obvious candidate for this task.
To date, David Miliband's reaction to the crisis has been vacuous hand-wringing. His reticence in proposing a serious political solution may stem from fear of being labelled neo-colonialist, a tag wielded with effect, at least in African eyes, by Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.
But the government of a country that is Kenya's largest trading partner, foreign investor and aid donor should, out of nothing more lofty than self-interest, be advocating a root-and-branch approach to the underlying problem, the stealing of the election by an incumbent corrupted by power.
Mr Kibaki will be much more susceptible to foreign pressure than the maverick Zimbabwean dictator, whose flank has been protected by President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa.
Were America and the EU jointly to withhold recognition of the December poll - a task of co-ordination for which the Foreign Secretary is ideally suited - Mr Kibaki would find himself under intense domestic and foreign pressure to submit himself again to the electorate.
That is the best way to lance the boil that has hideously disfigured Kenya over the past few days. Such a course should be a priority for Mr Miliband. He needs to break free from the habitual caution of his Foreign Office advisers.
