More from The Week

Since the editor is filling this page with its former occupants, I naturally responded to his invitation by looking back to the days 20 years ago when I filled this hole. In most respects, the subject matter was the same – why doesn't the health service work, how to make peace in Northern Ireland, how the government is ignoring Parliament, why can't children read and write, the problems of tax, crime, roads, housing, defence and, of course, Europe. In the last column that I wrote for this paper before becoming its editor (24 March 1984) I was in Brussels for a summit in which Mrs Thatcher was fighting for 'our money'.

If a week is a long time in politics, how long is 12 years? The last time I wrote this column was in September 1991. Tony Blair was just a front-bench spokesman on employment; Gordon Brown ditto on trade and industry. These I had at least seen and heard. But if anyone had said to me, 'Geoff Hoon', I would have had to answer, 'Geoff Hoo?' He was not even an MP, just a Derbyshire MEP with an improbably large moustache. The biggest recent political excitement was the fall of Mrs Thatcher in 1990.

The murderous attack on the United Nations in Baghdad has brought some clarity to the situation. It has exposed the essential community of interest between the UN and the United States. Those two entities often disagree so radically about methods that the fundamental similarity of their aims is easily overlooked. In Iraq, they are engaged in a liberal imperialist exercise which has the aim of bringing the blessings of democracy to people who until earlier this year suffered under a most vicious tyranny. The UN and US suffer, therefore, from the paradox which has always afflicted the liberal imperialist, namely that in order to bring freedom to people less fortunate than himself, he must first impose his will upon them, in the first instance by force of arms.

It has become customary to preface any comment on the government's policy on school examinations with a glowing tribute to schoolchildren who have worked hard for their grades. The school standards minister David Miliband goes so far as to cite the hard work of school pupils as an excuse for avoiding debate on the issue of 'grade inflation' altogether. Nobody complained when Paula Radcliffe broke the record for the London marathon, he argued the other day; therefore, nobody should dare to insult schoolchildren by questioning the integrity of A-level examinations, the results of which are announced this week, and of GCSEs, whose results are announced next week. There is an important difference between the London marathon and school examination results.

By the time The Spectator goes to press, the record for the highest-ever authenticated measurement of air temperature in the British Isles may or may not have been broken. The only certainties are that the railway industry will have dreamed up yet more reasons why trains may only run at 20mph, that there will scarcely be a young, bikini-clad woman in Britain who remains unphotographed for the tabloids, and that spokesmen for the global warming lobby will have trousered a few more grand in television appearance fees. Not even the nation's ice-cream-sellers can be whooping with joy so loudly as our climatologists. For every degree the mercury tips over 90?F, they can expect a few more million pounds in funding. There will be more invitations to No.

It is a sad sign of the times that a man who shot a burglar dead and wounded another should have become a national hero. The frustration that millions of householders feel about the inability or unwillingness of the British state to perform its one indispensable function – namely to protect the person and property of its citizens, despite its consumption of nearly half the country's economic product – has turned Tony Martin, who was released this week, into a symbol of decency, common sense and middle-class revolt. The fact is that many a law-abiding person rejoiced to hear that Mr Martin shot his intruder dead, and wished only that a few more burglars might be shot pour encourager les autres.

We all know what we think. Week in, week out, we hear what the British view of the war in Iraq is, and the polls tell us that we are becoming ever more sceptical. We know what the Americans think. We know what the French think of it all (not a lot). Now, for the first time, we have a scientific attempt to survey the opinion of the people whose country was fought over, and in whose name the battle of Baghdad took place. To look at the polling returns from Iraq is frankly to have a sense of relief; relief not just that they do not all want an instant return to power by Saddam Hussein. It is a relief to hear the voices of those who are really engaged in the matter.

The interests of Englishmen are not threatened with impunity: and the danger of molesting them does not disclose itself till the threat has been uttered, and their enmity has been irrevocably incurred. They have a habit of sleeping up to the very moment of danger, which is equally embarrassing to their champions and their assailants. So wrote Lord Salisbury in 1873. He was echoed a century later by Enoch Powell, who observed that one of the 'peculiar faults' of the English was their 'strange passivity in the face of danger or absurdity or provocation'.

Don't be taken in by the media's hyperbole; by comparison with summers past, this government is not having a particularly rough time. Of course, depending on your media outlet of choice, Mr Blair is said to be 'reeling', 'fuming' or 'fumbling', and having the toughest two weeks of his premiership or the worst crisis since he came to power. But those with long memories and a sense of perspective know that we are light years away from the storms that used to rock Mrs Thatcher's ship and the raging internal battles that tore apart John Major's administration. Compared with previous Labour governments, Mr Blair's wobbles are a sideshow.