Columns

Various explanations have been offered for the decision by the Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, to leave for his summer holiday before the funeral this week of Dr David Kelly. Mr Hoon himself has let it be known via 'friends' that he would be in trouble with his wife Elaine if he delayed a holiday that was already planned. Others have speculated that he would not have been welcome at Dr Kelly's funeral. It is possible that the speculation is accurate, but I wonder.

Let me tell you the story of the Docklands Eight, otherwise known as the Docklands ducklings. They came into my life briefly and by chance, ushered in by Kim. Kim helps me keep my London flat, by the Thames in Limehouse, clean and tidy. A great animal-lover, she comes in on Monday mornings bringing new stories of the family of ducks which has been hatching on the stones in a shallow section of canal near where we live. Last year there was a disaster when a water-disinfecting operative eliminated a whole generation of ducklings in a single morning, so this year Kim has been watching over the brood and feeding them with bread. A couple of weeks ago, most of the family were grown up enough to fly, waddle or sail away. A couple, however, stayed behind in the canal.

Has the power to curse lost its meaning for modern man? Might we, in losing it, lose something precious: the power to bless? I was made to think about this last week, in Bristol, recording for later broadcast a couple of programmes in a series I present for BBC Radio Four. Off the Page is a modest little affair in which three writers discuss with each other and with me the short columns I have commissioned from them on a single, simple subject. Each week we take a different topic and I invite different writers (some famous, some new or unknown) to join me in talking and writing about it. The result is discursive, very informal, sometimes rambling, often sharp, never thoughtless or dim. At its best it is like half an hour with The Spectator.

Why is it that not only I but millions (I suspect) of my fellow-countrymen too are left cold by the dispute raging within the Church of England about gay bishops? One has only to see the newspaper headline for the eye to slide away. It was not always thus. Such controversies used to fire many of us on both sides of the argument with passionate conviction. There was a time when I would have leapt to my laptop, determined to join the debate. Chosen as a panellist on BBC 1's Question Time in a week when such a question was likely to come up, I would have counted myself lucky.

What would you have done? Would you have left Saddam Hussein in power? The inquiry, familiar to all of us who opposed the war, is put in a finger-stabbing sort of way – as though that clinched it; as though the answer is so obvious that the peaceniks can only stammer. Just ask them what they would have done and watch them squirm! Elsewhere, the tactic is more typical of left-wing polemicists than of the Right. 'How could you stand by and see...?' is a favourite way of arguing for state intervention (and taxpayers' money) for any amount of expensive interference with nature. Any Tory with guts learns to summon them when reminded of dying patients, hungry jobseekers, sinking industries, failing railways or freezing pensioners, and asked, 'What would you do?

Imagine that opposite this page there were to appear an advertisement under the headline 'Free Return Tickets to Cape Town', worded something like this: 'Hundreds of free flights to any destination served by South African Airways! Write to us with your preferred itinerary and a brief explanation of why you would like to visit the place you have chosen.' Suppose you chose Cape Town. You would dispatch your entry more in hope than anticipation, suspicious that there must be a catch. But suppose there was no catch, and you won. Would you not be delighted? Of course you would.

Last Sunday evening, weary from digging, I staggered in to wash and eat, and then, cup of tea in hand, slumped down in my kitchen chair by the Rayburn to listen to the radio. The clocks had gone forward and it was just after nine. I enjoy digging. Since early childhood I have been fascinated by trenches, tunnels, gutters, dams and watercourses. My place on a Derbyshire hillside is a dream for anyone so inclined. Named 'The Spout' after the constant spring that supplies the water, the property is crisscrossed by underground streams. Wherever I dig, I seem to come upon another old land drain, and, just at present, new springs keep appearing in unexpected places.

The high-water mark for modish opposition to the invasion of Iraq may this week have passed. Those who, like me, remain unconvinced of the case for war should prepare for a spell of unfashionability. I write on Tuesday. I do not know whether by the time you read this the Iraqi defence effort will have begun to crumble, but it is very possible that within a week the beginnings of such a collapse will be evident - and we of the peace camp will be thrown on to the defensive. Many in that camp have persuaded themselves that, in the event of war, the case against is likely to be vindicated fast and in an obvious way. They expect the war to be long and bloody, the resistance stiff, and the result a tremendous loss of life.

The Prime Minister is right. The whole credibility of the United Nations is at stake this week. If the Security Council buckles under the US blackmail to which it is now subject over Iraq, we can discount the organisation as an independent force for international order. Among Spectator readers there are still one or two of us who, prey to instincts we flatter ourselves to call Conservative, mistrust proposals for ruinous and dangerous military adventures. In a way we dare think consistent with remaining Tories, we doubt not America's goodwill but her judgment in world affairs. We find ourselves stumped for words at the cheating to which our Prime Minister and his new friends on the Right have stooped in their arguments for war.

No popular impression is more precious to those who govern than the impression on the part of the governed that more is known than can be divulged. William Whitelaw understood this better than most. When I was a callow young Tory MP in the 1980s, and he was home secretary, I was briefly caught up in a flutter of backbench concern about telephone-tapping. More of this, it seemed, was going on than had been supposed, and the means of democratic oversight did not seem to exist. A small group of us on the government benches, all backbenchers, asked if we could talk to Willie about the problem. Alongside my friends, and not without trepidation, I entered the great man's Commons office. The home secretary roared his welcome and, spurning his big desk, gestured us into comfortable armchairs.

Brainwaves are unusual in the governance of men and it is rare that a knotty political problem invites a simple solution nobody had thought of before. But a conversation last week with The Spectator's newly appointed bullfighting correspondent (Lord Garel-Jones deplores the term but there is no other) has led us to a Eureka! moment. If anyone can see a flaw let him declare it, but his lordship and I are confident. The dilemma we can crack runs as follows. Tony Blair is Prime Minister. Gordon Brown wants to be Prime Minister. Mr Brown is under the impression that Mr Blair has promised to make way for him, and Mr Blair has never quite denied the existence of some sort of understanding. Mr Blair is enjoying being Prime Minister and is in no hurry to stop.

They asked me how I knew/My true love was true.... Or so the song goes. But who were they, and why did they ask anyway? They don't appear very sympathetic - they with their sneering inquiries about how I knew my love was true. Are they the same They as the They who don't know It's the end of the world (It ended when you said goodbye)? They pop up not only in song but all over the place in English discourse. They sound like a bossy and snooty crowd of know-it-alls. They are well placed. They are in touch. They are in the loop. They can make waves. They are depressingly indifferent to our fate. They push us around. They talk behind our backs. They don't understand how we feel. Who do they think they are? When will they ever learn?/When will they ever learn?