There has always been something of a Jesus complex about Tony Blair. It suits him, temperamentally, to evangelise, to parade the passion of his belief, and to accept the devotion of his followers. It would now appear that he is approaching his political Calvary. As the hymn says, 'Sometimes they strew his way, and his sweet praises sing, resounding all the day hosannas to their king...
Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said in a speech in Swansea: 'In 1938 Chamberlain was a hero when he brought back the Munich agreement. And he did it for the best of motives. He had seen members of his precious family, people he loved, die in the carnage of World War I. He was a good man. But he was a good man who made the wrong decision.' This followed a motion in the Commons on action against Iraq passed by a majority of 194, but opposed by 199 MPs - 121 of them Labour - who supported an amendment stating that the case for war was 'as yet unproven'. London is to hold an exercise simulating a 'catastrophic incident', according to Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary.
Having had a peek through the gates of Downing Street, the next item on a tourist's itinerary is a short stroll across Horse Guards Parade to the Cabinet War Rooms, from where Winston Churchill directed operations in the second world war. We don't yet know where tourists of the future will be going to view Tony Blair's own war rooms, but to judge by this week's pronouncements from the Home Office it may well require a boat trip to the Outer Hebrides. Should London be struck by a terrorist attack, we are told, the Prime Minister will be removed to a secure base outside London where he will continue to be 'visible'. Other senior ministers and their civil servants will be relocated to their own departmental headquarters at undisclosed locations throughout the country.
Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said, in an emergency statement to the House of Commons on Iraq, that 100 per cent co-operation by Saddam Hussein was necessary, and 'anything less will not do'. A day's debate followed in the Lords and Commons, where many Labour members were prepared to vote against the government. Mr Blair had visited the Pope in the company of his wife, and became the first serving prime minister to attend a papal Mass. At the General Synod of the Church of England, on the eve of the enthronment of Dr Rowan Williams as the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, prayers were offered for the British Prime Minister, the President of the United States, Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi government.
The Tory party is like some particularly gloomy man going through a mid-life crisis. His wife has left him, to universal applause. As so often in these cases, he seems unable to talk about anything except himself, thereby making his position worse. He takes a girl out to dinner, and she is prepared to give him a go, in spite of poor reviews. The more he goes on about his difficulties, and fails to discuss her own interests and attractions, the more she taps her foot. Then her eyes glaze over, and then she just walks out and leaves him to his maunderings, rather as the British electorate has now twice deserted the Tory party. There have been some notable literary examples of self-obsession.
Perhaps a million people rallied in Hyde Park after a march through London in opposition to war against Iraq. Meanwhile Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said in a speech to a Labour spring conference in Glasgow, 'I do not seek unpopularity as a badge of honour. But sometimes it is the price of leadership, and the cost of conviction.' He later announced he would go to meet the Pope in Rome. Hasil Mohammed Rahaham-Alan was charged under the Terrorism Act after a hand grenade was allegedly found in his luggage at Gatwick airport after a flight from Caracas. Since 11 September, 304 people have been arrested in Britain on suspicion of terrorism, but only three have been convicted.
Modern-day wizards in the laboratories of the world's pharmaceutical companies should take a day off from tending their test tubes and concoct a new word for 'profit'. It is needed because the existing word has been demonised to the point at which Western businessmen hardly dare utter it in public. At the World Trade Organisation in Geneva this week, a consortium of anti-globalisation pressure groups and well-meaning scientists launched their latest attack in the war against profit. They accuse Western pharmaceutical companies of condemning millions of Africans to an unpleasant death by opposing the production and distribution of cheap anti-retroviral drugs used to treat Aids.
Thousands prepared to march to Hyde Park in London to demonstrate opposition to war against Iraq; they included Mr Charles Kennedy, the leader of the Liberal Democrat party. About 400 soldiers from the Grenadier Guards and Household Cavalry with armoured cars began to patrol Heathrow airport, authorised by Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister. The England cricket team decided not to play in the World Cup in Zimbabwe out of fear of a death threat, they said. On television Mr Blair gave Mr Jeremy Paxman an undertaking about the number of applications for asylum being made: 'I would like to see us reduce it by 30-40 per cent in the next few months, and I think by September of this year we should have it halved.
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.
Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, returning from a meeting at the White House with President George Bush of the United States, said, 'I believe there will be a second resolution,' referring to a further United Nations Security Council vote for action against Iraq, the advisability of which he had tried to convince Mr Bush. Mr Blair then flew off to Paris to try, with little apparent success, to persuade President Jacques Chirac to back a new UN resolution; he took with him four Cabinet ministers - the secretaries of state for the home and foreign departments, for defence and for education - as well as Sir Michael Boyce, the Chief of the Defence Staff.
Everyone knows that the National Health Service employs too many managers and too few nurses. Enter any saloon bar in the land and you will be told as much. But this popular wisdom finds shockingly emphatic confirmation in a new pamphlet, Resuscitating the NHS, written by Dr Maurice Slevin, a cancer consultant, and published by the Centre for Policy Studies. Dr Slevin points out that since 1995 the number of senior managers in the NHS has increased by 48 per cent, and the number of managers by 24 per cent, while the number of qualified nurses has increased by only 7.8 per cent. In September 2001 the number of management and support staff employed by the NHS was 269,080, compared with 266,170 qualified nurses.
From our US edition
Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, decided to fly to Camp David for talks with President George Bush of the United States about the war against Iraq. Mr Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said: 'The Iraqi regime is responding to resolution 1441 not with active co-operation but with a consistent pattern of concealment and deceit.' The Financial Times-Stock Exchange index of the top 100 companies fell on 11 consecutive days of trading to its lowest for seven years, losing 49.8 per cent of its value at the peak reached on 30 December 1999. The banking group Cazenove postponed plans to float on the London Stock Exchange.
There are some for whom George W. Bush - or any other Republican president, for that matter - will always be a gun-slinging cowboy bursting through the swing doors of some saloon and firing off for the hell of it. For them, the American President is an irredeemable warmonger intent on attacking Saddam with the flimsiest excuse; either because he wants to get his hands on Iraq's oil, or because he sees in Saddam an enemy-by-proxy for bin Laden, the one that got away, or because he wants to avenge his Dad. It is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain views of this kind. It is over a year now since war against Iraq was first mooted, and still hostilities have yet to commence.
From our US edition
Police raided the North London Central Mosque in Finsbury Park, long suspected to have terrorist links. Seven people were arrested and a stun gun and a CS gas canister were seized. The government dispatched 30,000 troops and 120 Challenger tanks to the Gulf in preparation for an invasion of Iraq, but insisted that war was not inevitable. Half of the soldiers have bought their own boots, a Ministry of Defence survey revealed, because they didn't like the ones with which they had been issued. The Education Secretary, Charles Clarke, proposed to allow universities to charge their students up to £3,000 in tuition fees.
It is probably some time since even the keenest student of politics focused on the future of the House of Lords. Most people will remember that day the hereditary peers were expelled from the red benches, amid the horrible glee of Baroness Jay and others. Some may dimly recall a row between William Hague and Lord Cranborne, and then a period when Mr Blair flooded the place with cronies. After that a fog descends. In the next couple of weeks Parliament will try to make sense of the mess. A series of options will be presented. It goes without saying that they are all bad. The appointive system is the most obviously repulsive.
From our US edition
Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said at a press conference: 'If there is a breach of the existing UN resolution I have no doubt at all that the right thing to do in those circumstances is disarm Saddam by force.' He also said: 'If there is a breach we would expect the United Nations to honour the undertakings that were given.' The Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer followed the same line in a sudden flurry of interviews. A policeman was stabbed to death and four others wounded after they arrested three men at Crumpsall, north Manchester, in connection with the discovery of traces of ricin poison in north London. In a related operation, police arrested five men and a woman in Bournemouth.
Looking at the wan, pathetic face of Pete Townshend, the rock musician arrested for possessing child pornography from the Internet, it is hard not to feel a smidgen of sympathy for him. He has not yet been convicted of any offence, and it may turn out that he has not committed one - but his reputation has been destroyed for ever. Over the next few weeks, we are going to see pictures of many more men peering sadly out of car windows as they are driven off for questioning by the police. More than 7,000 British men are on the list of individuals who have accessed child pornography sites on the Internet. That list was passed on to British authorities by the FBI.
The aircraft-carrier Ark Royal set sail for the Gulf and 1,500 reservists were called up. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said in a speech to a conference of more than 100 British ambassadors that Britain should remain the closest ally of the United States. 'The price of British influence is not, as some would have it, that we have, obediently, to do what the US asks,' he said. 'But the price of influence is that we do not leave the US to face the tricky issues alone.' He thought that the United States should listen to opinions on the Middle East, global poverty, global warming and the United Nations.
David Blunkett has once again shown his unfailing instinct for making a bad situation worse. His declaration, after the shooting dead of two young women in Birmingham, that the courts will be told to sentence anyone caught with an illegal firearm to at least five years in jail, was typical of the Home Secretary's ill-considered desire to sound tough. Like many a loudmouth before him, he has compromised himself by uttering boasts he is quite unable to keep. It takes only a moment's thought to realise that there are some instances in which a person found in possession of an illegal firearm would deserve nothing like five years in jail.
From our US edition
A third of families entitled to working family tax credits are not claiming them; 604,000 low-income families are missing out on £1.4 billion, an average of £42 a week each. The Tories are looking for ways to cut taxes, according to Mr Howard Flight, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury; 'It could be up to 20 per cent,' he said. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, and his family returned to Sharm el Sheikh, in Egypt, for an end-of-year holiday; they are paying for the holiday instead of letting the Egyptian government do so, as it did last year. There was an argument about who should decide if the England cricket team should play in Zimbabwe.