26 April 2003

America’s numbering of the Saddam regime’s leading members, and issuing this order of precedence in the form of a deck of playing cards to aid American troops searching for them, has surely caused much unnecessary rivalry, jockeying for position and unpleasantness to one another on the part of the war criminals and torturers thus enumerated.

The Daily Telegraph’s story about the Scottish Labour MP George Galloway is undoubtedly a cracker. In some respects it reminds me of the Guardian’s demolition of the Tory MP Neil Hamilton during the Major years. As a cocky, rather slimy Thatcherite of conspicuously ungentlemanly mien, Mr Hamilton represented everything the Guardian loathed. Similarly, though it