More from The Week

The prospect of war now eclipses everything at Westminster. To use the narrow, though reassuring, boundaries of the English racing calendar, hostilities are unlikely to break out before the final day of the Cheltenham Festival on 13 March. But they will probably have ceased, at any rate as far as the initial stage of the conflict is concerned, by the time the Grand National is run on 5 April. From a parochial perspective, the next few weeks will go far towards determining how the Blair premiership is judged by historians. Since the 2001 general election the government has on a number of occasions given the impression that it will inevitably collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. It has lost momentum, giving the impression of being cast adrift.

The government has a thing about the mediaeval period. Charles Clarke complains that universities 'have governance systems that stretch back to mediaeval times'. David Blunkett complains that the law takes 'a mediaeval view of marriage'. The Ministry of Agriculture apologises for using 'mediaeval' pyres during the foot-and-mouth outbreak. The implication, one presumes, is that mediaeval times were coarse, cruel and elitist - the very anti- thesis of the enlightened age that is Britain under New Labour. But, from Monday, those driving into central London will suffer an inconvenience and indignity that would never have been tolerated in mediaeval times: being charged to use the Queen's Highway. Drive up Cheapside between the hours of 7 a.m. and 6.30 p.m.

There is a moment in the Uncle Remus stories when Brer Rabbit is finally cornered by Brer Fox, who genially informs his victim 'I'm going to barbecue you today, for sure.' Then Brer Rabbit started talking mighty humble. 'I don't care what you do with me, Brer Fox,' says he. 'Just so you don't fling me in that briar patch. Roast me, Brer Fox,' says he, 'But don't fling me in that briar patch.' Brer Fox duly 'slung him right in the middle of the briar patch', whereupon the cunning rabbit got up and ran away. There was a moment, in the immediate aftermath of the 2001 general election, when Tony Blair, like Brer Fox, had Robin Cook where he wanted him. Cook was busted.

In the aftermath of September 11 we all instinctively felt that the world had utterly changed. In Britain at any rate that turned out not to be the case. After the initial shock, things carried on to some extent as before. But the return to normality was illusory and short-lived. September 11 indeed created new and frightening structures. In America they locked into place at once. But the new order took a long time indeed to cross the Atlantic. It finally did so in the first three or four weeks of this year. The Prime Minister set the tone, in his bleak New Year address. The wrapping-up of terror networks throughout Europe and in Britain has added to a sense of impending calamity. So has the steady build-up of troops in the Middle East.

The announcement that Michael Trend, Tory MP for Windsor and formerly chief leader-writer of the Daily Telegraph, is to step down was slipped out late on Tuesday afternoon. The news made no more than a couple of paragraphs in one or two of the morning papers. Trend seems set to sink without trace. But before he descends into his richly deserved oblivion, it is worth giving the circumstances surrounding his departure from politics a sharper look. Not because Trend was in any way memorable: until his fall from grace, he pursued a political career of crashing mediocrity. But the Trend episode, in its ghastly way, illuminates modern British public life. It goes far towards explaining why Westminster politics is held in contempt.

War with Iraq, previously a nebulous prospect, has come sharply into focus in the first two weeks of this year. Much has been resolved. In Washington Donald Rumsfeld has lost the argument. His original idea that a light and fast raiding party would, with the aid of an uprising from grateful Kurds and Shiites, be enough to destroy Saddam has been squashed by US generals. Nothing is to be left to chance. It is now clear that a more ponderous force of perhaps 250,000 will be brought to bear. The British role is also clearer: it will be much less important than at one time thought. The involvement of the British army will be as militarily negligible as it is politically significant. This is an arrangement that will suit Tony Blair as much as it does the US military.

Those who mistrust the new biotechnology have always argued that if it is technologically possible to do something, sooner or later it will be done. As far as the fundamentals of human existence are concerned, the Promethean bargain is a bad one. It is not necessary to deny the potential benefits to humanity of the new biotechnology to be deeply disturbed by the claim of Brigitte Boisselier to have successfully cloned a human being for the first time. This is not because she is associated with a bizarre sect called the Raelians, which believes that humans were created by extraterrestrial aliens.

A Cambridge geography graduate in search of solitude was recently found starving to death in a hikers' bothy in the Scottish Highlands surrounded by KitKat wrappers. No one from the anti-globalisation lobby has yet blamed the manufacturer of KitKat bars, NestlZ, for causing her death, but perhaps that is just an oversight. NestlZ has been blamed for just about every world nutritional problem. Last week, the company was threatened with an international boycott of its products for daring to demand £3.7 million from the Ethiopian government, in compensation for assets seized by a Marxist government in 1975. 'This is absurd,' complained an Oxfam spokesman. 'This is not about legal rights, it is about moral rights. When 11 million people face famine, exceptions should be made.