Peter Oborne

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.

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.

THERE has been a row during the last fortnight about whether the government should ban the English cricket team from travelling to Zimbabwe for next month's World Cup. But the cricket has obscured the real issue. And that is whether Britain and the world community will intervene to stop Robert Mugabe from torturing, terrorising and starving to death the people of Zimbabwe. I spent two weeks in this beautiful country shortly before Christmas, making a film for Channel 4. We travelled illegally. Dr Mugabe does not want the world to know what he is up to, so he has banned foreign journalists. We posed as golfers, using secret cameras. We learnt that the famine that looms for eight million Zimbabwean citizens - more than half the population - is no natural disaster.

THERE is something eerie, and a little sinister, about the rise of the Campbell-Millars, as Alastair Campbell and his longstanding partner, Fiona Millar, are known in north London. Their rise started in the 1980s when they were young, unknown and ambitious. They ingratiated themselves with Neil and Glenys Kinnock: helping with the shopping and being on hand at a moment's notice. In due course, the Kinnocks and the Campbell-Millars went on holiday together, and were in and out of each other's houses. The friendship was helpful to Alastair Campbell's budding career as a journalist. His hotline to the leader of the opposition helped him become political editor of the Daily Mirror, the most powerful reporting job on the Left, at the early age of 32.

Few issues have highlighted the more shameful qualities of the Blair government quite as starkly as hunting: its moral turpitude, instinctive mendacity, fundamental gutlessness, endless dithering, ugly populism and blind conformity to suburban prejudice. Labour MPs who favour a ban feel understandable resentment that after six years no Bill has reached the statute book. Tony Blair lied at least twice while attempting to ingratiate himself with anti-hunting audiences by asserting that he had voted for a ban, when in fact he had done no such thing. Fear of the Countryside Alliance, which has in the last five years produced the two largest demonstrations ever seen on the streets of London, temporarily at least put the government off a ban on hunting.

The origins of government mishandling of the firefighters' strike are to be found in the immediate aftermath of the general election in June last year, when Tony Blair failed to sack John Prescott. The Deputy Prime Minister had proved a strikingly incompetent transport secretary during the 1997-2001 Parliament. Commuters are suffering the consequences today. Prescott could easily have been farmed out to the backbenches: his infamous slugging match with a Welsh farm-worker during the election campaign gave an additional excuse. Some of the Prime Minister's advisers wanted Prescott out, but in the end Tony Blair lacked the courage to make a clean break. It may well be that Gordon Brown stood up for Prescott, with whom he has formed an alliance.

The memoirs of Joe Haines, now being serialised by the Mail on Sunday, are certain to rank among the most revelatory and important of the 20th century. Joe Haines was Harold Wilson's press secretary, but in truth - as with Alastair Campbell and Tony Blair - he was far more than that. Wilson told Haines that he gave him the job 'to conceal what you really do'. Haines has already revealed the existence of a plot to kill Marcia Falkender, Wilson's political secretary. He has provided testimony that Wilson and Falkender had a brief affair in the 1950s.