Rod Liddle

Phew! Made it! Just in time, mind. And not without a rather costly rearrangement of the flights back from the Far East, I might add. And a holiday cut short as a result of a lamentable slip of the memory. But all worth it, in the end. Like you, I suspect, I couldn't have lived with myself if I'd missed the chance to vote in this week's crucial local government elections. As with most people, rarely a day goes by without my pondering what, exactly, is the best formula for calculating the amount which should be raised through rates, or the council charge, or council tax, for provision of our local services. Is my particular district eligible for a Rate Support Grant? Do they still have the Rate Support Grant? What, exactly, was the Rate Support Grant in the first place?

The Iraqi information minister, Said al-Sahaf, was still telling Western journalists that the treacherous infidel jackals of the US army had, in fact, killed themselves by swallowing poison, at the time the first looting of antiquities in Baghdad took place. For some Iraqis, clearly, it was not enough to celebrate liberation from Saddam's cruel and iniquitous yoke simply by throwing garlands of flowers at advancing US marines. Far better, far more impressive, was the idea of heading straight for the Iraqi National Museum in downtown Baghdad with a pick-axe handle and a crowbar and a Kalashnikov or two.

A dingy community hall in the back streets of Bethnal Green on a cold and miserable winter's evening. We're all here waiting for the weird, hook-handed fundamentalist cleric Sheikh Abu Hamza al Misri, the most loathed man in Britain, who is about to hold a public meeting. When I say 'we're all here', I mean the infidel scum from the Daily Mail, a bunch of whores from the BBC, a cockroach from the Standard and a lower-than-cattle news agency chap. We're all present and correct. What we're really short of at the moment is fanatics, fundamentalists or, indeed, Muslims of any gradation of fervour. When I last looked in the hall, there were three people, two of whom work for the sheikh, including his cheerful and likable press officer, Abu Aziz.

Here's something to be cheerful about. At an English Premiership football match last year, the fans of one London club were heard to be singing the following jolly refrain: 'We all agree, our coons are better than your coons.' We should be glad, because this little chanson marks what we might call a paradigm shift in the perceptions and expectations of a certain tranche of educationally subnormal white-trash football supporters. Whereas, some years ago, black players were a rarity to be derided by not-that-small-a-minority of the crowd whenever they touched the ball, they are now happily prominent in pretty much every club throughout every league in England. The dribbling, shell-suited cretins, therefore, can't pretend to themselves any more that black players are useless.

Now that Dr Blix has done his work, how will Saddam Hussein cope with the latest threat from the West to both his political stability and his sanity? It seems that, as a softening-up exercise before vaporising Baghdad with expensive ordnance, we have begun to export British lunatics to Iraq. And, because this is total war; because we are seriously angry with Saddam, it is not quite enough that we should dispatch George Galloway. We have gone further. We have thought the unthinkable. We have pushed the envelope. This week, cruelly, we have deployed our Weapon of Mash Deshtruction. You can be assured that by teatime the Iraqi dictator will be in a befuddled state of mind. He may also be bored to the point of expiry.

There's something terribly primitive about bombing the hell out of a country simply to get rid of one man (and, perhaps, his small ragbag assortment of grinning, psychopathic sons, obsequious flunkeys and hired assassins). This is what we're about to do to Iraq, if I'm not mistaken about the utter futility of this business with the weapons inspectors. We are angry with one evil man and further irritated by his devoted but minuscule coterie. And so we plan to send in the expensive bombers and those weapons of fairly widespread destruction, the missiles; and perhaps thousand upon thousand of ground troops, too, in order to be rid of him and install someone marginally less despotic. It seems an awful lot of effort, just for Saddam. You have to say, we would truly be putting ourselves out.

Caught on camera at a Remembrance service last week, Queen Elizabeth appeared, rather unexpectedly, to be crying. It was quite a shocking thing to behold: I had never seen our Queen cry before. Perhaps it was just the cold, dank weather getting to her, biting into her bones. Or maybe it was another of those confused and ill-advised attempts to be modern, something imposed upon her by her Blairite PR people. Crying is certainly the modern thing to do - as is, of course, hugging and touching and being, you know, really, really real. Poor, dead Diana cried and hugged and touched at the drop of a hat, or the opening of a children's hospital ward, at least - and she's officially now one of our greatest ever Britons, so there you are.