Loony meets butcher

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. And this is because, at his right-hand side, sipping a mug of tea, puffing on his bloody pipe, and gabbling endlessly about the Chartists and the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, and perhaps even reading aloud crucial passages from his numbing contribution to the political debate, Arguments for Socialism, will be Mr Anthony Wedgwood Benn.

For once Saddo should have a claim on our sympathy. We in Britain know well the hideous effects of long-term, unprotected exposure to Benn. And yet we are prepared to inflict it on a foreign head of state. You would think that there was something in the Geneva Convention, or the 1951 Convention on Human Rights, which precluded the use of such a weapon so early on in the hostilities; something in the small print, alongside napalm and sarin. You might even expect the world to have briefly put aside its many differences and united in a Benn Non-Proliferation Treaty.

But no; by the time you read this he will have been ensconced in his seat on the aeroplane, heading relentlessly eastwards, his trusty Dictaphone in his pocket, instructing the poor stewardess that ‘itsh all about oil, you know’ – a missile guided by strange, barking, babbling voices.