My rations: claret and croissants (vive la France!)

On Thursday night Mr Tony Blair made a prime ministerial broadcast to the nation. It had been recorded eight hours previously, which was necessary because he was off to Brussels for what turned out to be a somewhat bad-tempered dinner with Mr Jacques Chirac and other luminaries. No criticism can be made of him for that. What he chose to record is a different matter. He told us that, two days before, he had given "the order for British forces to take part in military action in Iraq".

Presumably this followed directly on the House of Commons vote supporting the Government. What was more important was that he refrained from telling us whether or not we were at war with Iraq. Mr George Bush has been similarly bashful. During the Suez crisis the Labour MP Sydney Silverman asked Anthony Eden whether we were at war with Egypt; answer came there none; and the Prime Minister was discredited from the start. Mr Blair ought to be able to do better than that. He went on:

"I know this course of action has produced deep divisions of opinion in our country. But I know also the British people will now be united in sending our armed forces our thoughts and prayers."

Dr John Reid, the "party chairman", said much the same on Newsnight on Tuesday. I put his title in inverted commas because it is Mr Blair's own invention. He created the post for Mr Charles Clarke when the party already had a perfectly good chairman of its own. So it has today likewise in the blameless person of Ms Diana Holland, a trade unionist.

I used to enjoy the occasional glass with Dr Reid in Annie's Bar in the 1980s. He has now relinquished strong drink completely – always, in my experience, a bad sign. In those days he was entertaining in a blackguardly kind of way. He had also, unlike most MPs, read a few books in his time, even if he was not quite as clever as he evidently thought he was. He is a former Communist. It is odd, how so many ex-Communists or Trotskyists support Mr Bush's war, as much in journalism as in politics. My own guess is that they derive a certain satisfaction from the application of great force.

At all events, Dr Reid's rise in the People's Party is inexorable. He is in the War Cabinet, together with Ms Clare Short – our greatest tragedy queen since Dame Edith Evans ceased to tread the boards. "I've done my turmoil and I'm here," she said last week, in words which Dame Edith might have deplored or considered highly original. Who can tell?

Dr Reid went further than Mr Blair. Or, rather, he put his point in a slightly different way. The country should unite, he said, because the matter was now decided. The House of Commons had voted to support the war, and that was that. The time for debate was over. The subject had been discussed, very fully, with the courtesies duly observed on both sides, and the time had come to rally round the flag.

I cannot agree either with Dr Reid or with the Prime Minister. Nor, I suspect, can millions of citizens agree with them either. The government majority was made up partly of Labour loyalists, partly of government placemen (and placewomen) amounting to some 130 and partly of a starstruck opposition. These Tories would much prefer Mr Blair to be leading them. There was a similar phenomenon in the 1980s, when a smaller group of Conservatives, led by Alan Clark, wanted Margaret Thatcher to be succeeded by David Owen. In the vote on the amendment the parliamentary party, excluding the payroll vote, split down the middle.

Certainly Mr Blair was courageous to hold the vote at all. It had never been done before in comparable circumstances. But the House of Commons is not the supreme authority in the land. On its own, it cannot make laws. A resolution of the House – a simple vote – cannot by itself alter the law of the land. If it could, we should have no need of the Provisional Collection of Taxes Act, which enables money to be extracted from the citizenry on the authority of the budget resolutions alone, before the Finance Act has been passed.

In any case, you cannot think the war wrong and then be expected to turn round and say it is right after all once the fighting has begun. Even Mr Robin Cook, whose resignation speech was not only the most lucid but the most powerful of recent times, seemed to think that honest men and women could perform acrobatics with their consciences if our troops were engaged. Nevertheless Mr Cook has emerged with his integrity enhanced.

Not so Mr Charles Kennedy. Indeed, Mr Kennedy looks flakier by the day, like a wall with rising damp in the basement at Liberal Democrat headquarters. I assume some bright spark there told him to ensure everyone understood that the Lib Dems were backing our boys. He duly did so, twice, over a week ago. In the debate on Tuesday he was barracked by both sides, but more by the Tories. This is part of their policy: but Mr Kennedy has made things worse for himself than they need have been.

Last week I quoted for his benefit the words of a former Liberal leader, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, on "methods of barbarism" in the Boer War. Here is what another Liberal, John Morley, said about the same conflict:

"Such a war will bring you no glory. It will bring you no profit but mischief, and it will be wrong. You may make thousands of women widows and thousands of children fatherless. It will be wrong. You may add a new province to your empire. It will still be wrong. You may give greater buoyancy to the South African stock and share market. You may create South African booms. You may send the price of Mr Rhodes's Chartereds up to a point beyond the dreams of avarice. Yes, even then it will be wrong."

Substitute "Iraqi" for "South African" and "Mr Perle's companies" for "Mr Rhodes's Chartereds" and the speech could just as well be made by one of Morley's successors today. Alas, Mr Kennedy does not seem to be the man. Nor was Morley alone. David Lloyd George opposed the Boer War too. Morley himself and the Labour figure John Burns resigned from the Asquith cabinet in protest against the First World War. And Bertrand Russell spent the whole of that war opposing it.

Meanwhile, as advised – or maybe instructed – by Mr David Blunkett, I have been doing my bit for the war effort by checking my emergency rations: croissants, cheese, tinned petit pois and flageolet beans, olive oil, garlic, inexpensive champagne, claret, marc du Rhône and Evian water. Vive la France!