Mr Blair is being timid in not joining the nations now resisting the hawks of Washington

The Prime Minister is right. The whole credibility of the United Nations is at stake this week. If the Security Council buckles under the US blackmail to which it is now subject over Iraq, we can discount the organisation as an independent force for international order.

Among Spectator readers there are still one or two of us who, prey to instincts we flatter ourselves to call Conservative, mistrust proposals for ruinous and dangerous military adventures. In a way we dare think consistent with remaining Tories, we doubt not America’s goodwill but her judgment in world affairs. We find ourselves stumped for words at the cheating to which our Prime Minister and his new friends on the Right have stooped in their arguments for war. Nobody would call the hawk’s mind open, but the door of his intellect does seem to have been hospitably open to a bewildering series of opposing arguments.

First we were told that the point of cleaving to Washington was to steer America away from unilateralism. Then Tony Blair announced that Britain’s support was essentially unconditional.

We were told the UN inspectorate was in Iraq to find weapons (and shown pictures of jeeps racing from site to site) – then, when they found little, that the inspectorate had never been there to search. The Foreign Secretary said that if nothing was found, that proved it must be hidden. Lewis Carroll would have enjoyed that.

We were told invasion was to be justified as self-defence – then, when this failed to impress focus groups, that the motive was humanitarian.

We were told Saddam would never show his weapons – then, when he showed some, that this only proved he must be hiding more.

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We were told Osama bin Laden was probably dead but al-Qa’eda remained linked to Baghdad – then, on the emergence of a bin Laden message which Washington pretended proved a link, that Osama was alive after all.