More from The Week

I was unable to cope when I joined the parliamentary lobby as a reporter for the London Evening Standard more than ten years ago. I faced two problems, both of them disastrous. The first was that I did not know how to recognise a political story. A grand set-piece – the sacking of a minister, or the fall of a government – was obvious enough to anyone. But the kind of event that fills the newspapers on a daily basis appeared to me arbitrary, governed by laws that I could not fathom. The second problem was even worse. Once a story had been drawn to my attention, I did not know how to write it. It was a bad time.

The late Tony Bevins, whose final public act was to resign on grounds of principle as political editor of the Daily Express the moment Richard Desmond bought the paper, was a close student of New Labour. Not long before he died he set out, in a series of articles which still repay close study, its chief characteristics. New Labour advanced, so Bevins held, by a series of curious, indirect, sideways jerks. Bevins nevertheless insisted that New Labour had clear objectives. The irregular method of progression, he maintained, was merely designed to confuse the enemy. Bevins approved of, or at any rate excused, this stratagem because he shared Tony Blair's own belief that openness and candour would prove wholly fatal to the New Labour project.

It is hard to decide which is the most ludicrous of the articles of the forthcoming EU constitution, but article 14 must be a contender. Back in October last year, the Praesidium of the European Convention produced its opening draft. The Praesidium is a group of magnificoes who have been meeting in Brussels, under the direction of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, he of the Bokassa diamonds. You may think Praesidium a pompous and fittingly Soviet-sounding word for mainly has-been European politicians. But the Praesidium clearly believes its members will be seen as the founding fathers of a new and rather superior country. It is a country called Europe, and we are all to be its citizens.

The central proposition behind the government's public-relations campaign since the end of the Iraq war is that Tony Blair has undergone some mid-life personality enhancement. We are now entreated to believe that the amiable, grinning weathercock to which we had grown accustomed has been replaced by a steely world leader. These claims do not square with the evidence of the last few weeks, during which the Prime Minister has attempted to steer the government back on to a domestic agenda. Two weeks ago, at his latest Downing Street conference, the Prime Minister described public-service reform in the kind of portentous terms he hitherto reserved for the Iraq or Kosovo wars.

The elaborate construction of the story of Tony Blair as lonely war leader, noted here last week, has continued to preoccupy Downing Street strategists as well as the political class more broadly. This ambitious enterprise, launched at an important moment for the government, urgently demands to become the subject of a serious academic treatise. One can only stand back and marvel at the energy, ingenuity and sheer volume of tender loving care that has helped engender the fantastic rodomontade of truth, falsehood, reality and fantasy that now encompasses the British Prime Minister, threatening to turn him into a barely intelligible and, in most respects, fictitious creature.

British politics has been frozen in a kind of reiterative cycle ever since Black Wednesday 1992: the Conservatives becalmed at 30 per cent in the polls, the Liberal Democrats making stealthy gains, New Labour dominant. Just six weeks ago there seemed some reason to believe that the Iraq war would bring some fluidity to this tedious state of affairs. Not so. The recent conflict has left everything the same; only more so. This means that Tony Blair has never been as strong or enjoyed so much freedom of action as is the case this weekend. The defeat of Saddam has granted him what comes the way of very few prime ministers: the chance to reinvent his premiership. Whether he is capable of making use of this opportunity remains to be seen; so far the initial signs are discouraging.

No matter how glamorous the guest-list, or how luxurious the food photographed sliding down the hostess's gullet, there is an occasion which, deep down in his thoracic cavity, the average tabloid editor knows he would rather snoop on than the wedding of Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. It is the 19th birthday party next month of the daughter of Mary Bell, who as an 11-year-old killed two children in Newcastle upon Tyne, and became for a while the nation's favourite figure of hate. Since her release from custody on licence in 1980, the reformed and renamed Ms Bell has led a life of anonymity. This week she went to the High Court to ask for that privilege to be extended for life. She has already had a taste of the future she faces should she fail.

For some reason Britain is always sunny on the outbreak of war. London basked under a heat-wave in August 1914 as Asquith almost casually condemned Britain to four years of slaughter. It was the same in September 1939. This week has seen a succession of cloudless spring days. I suppose there is always the remote hope that something will intervene, but it looks all but certain that bombs will be falling on Baghdad by the time these words are read. It is a new kind of war, corresponding to the latest manifestation of American imperialism. Old-style US conservatives, like Henry Kissinger, were pessimists. They worked with the world as they found it, merely seeking to mould intractable materials as best they could to US interests.