Frank Johnson

Last week was the week when plenty of Britons, though not their government, seemed to place themselves on guard against M. Giscard's constitution. It was appropriate, then, that it was also the 60th anniversary of one of the greatest among the many crises in the career of the first Eurosceptic.

We shall probably never know what drove someone like Crispin Blunt to carry out a suicide attack on Iain Duncan Smith. The young man was from a respectable, middle-class, and pro-European background. That is, he came from the Tory breeding ground of moderation. But not all respectable, middle-class pro-Europeans try to assassinate their leader. His neighbours on the backbenches said that they were amazed and shocked when they heard the news. To them, he was a rather ordinary man, polite and nice. None of them suspected that he would get mixed up in terrorism.

Two weeks ago, I argued here - I hope without any suggestion of great originality - that all crises produce the same people. That is, doves, hawks and a majority which is moderate or opportunistic according to taste. Thus it was possible to compare the present crisis over Iraq with the 1914 crisis over Serbia. But great powers behave similarly too. More specifically, their component parts do. There is something which links today's United States to other great powers of the not too distant past. It is the existence, within the state, of a faction which wants to spread what it sees as the state's essence. It is the desire to expand which is the link; not that which is expanded.

Female models, responsible for draping themselves over new cars and appearing in their underwear in advertisements to promote this year's British International Motor Show in Birmingham, would describe as 'out-of-date' and 'pathetic' the government's stereotyping of women into becoming politicians. It follows the case of Miss Estelle Morris who was browbeaten into becoming secretary of state for education when she would obviously have been happier reclining across the bonnet of the new Mini. Nonetheless, 'out-of-date' and 'pathetic' was how Mrs Patricia Hewitt, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, in an interview, described those girls. She called for more women engineers in the car industry.

It has come down, it seems, to two related but separate issues: there is a 'should' issue, and a 'would' issue. Should the Americans attack Iraq? Would they win a quick and relatively bloodless victory if they did - the 'less' in 'bloodless' being concerned with their forces' blood rather than Iraq's.... The 'should' question is a moral question, the 'would' a strategic one. It is the latter which concerns me here. How easily can Saddam's forces be overcome? Would he really lure the Americans and the British into the cities, including Baghdad? If he is confident that they would fight, that would be his tactic. His hope would be that, enticed into street-fighting, the Americans would not fight house-to-house with infantry.

Usually, at this time of the year, I am wandering, or renting, in Western Europe. But, for various reasons too uninteresting to recount here, I am spending this August at home. This removes the one drawback of being on holiday abroad: the search, in la France profonde, or wherever, for the British newspapers; and the knowledge, when they are found, that they are a day late, and that events must surely have moved on. This year it would have been especially agonising. Lord Tebbit discovers spotty youths in Central Office! Such a phrase, as various authorities instantly pointed out, is a euphemism for Mr Iain Duncan Smith himself. For 'spotty youths' read 'Iain has been captured by the gays, the women, and the ethnic minorities, insofar as the three categories are distinguishable'.