Diary – 18 January 2003

When the Crimean war began in 1854, the prime minister was Lord Aberdeen, who carried a deep burden of guilt. Years later he was asked to pay for the rebuilding of a church on his estate, and pleaded King David’s unworthiness: ‘But the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Thou hast shed blood abundantly and has made great war: thou shalt not build an house unto my name.’ When the Boer war began in 1899, the prime minister was Lord Salisbury, who felt intense misgivings: ‘We have to act upon a moral field prepared for us by Milner and his Jingo supporters …and all for people whom we despise and for territory that will bring no profit and no power to England.’ And when the Iraq war begins in 2003? Tony Blair may be as consciously pious as Aberdeen or Salisbury, but he seems to have neither the one’s sense of the horror of war nor the other’s appreciation of its unintended consequences.