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.