Further evidence that the British government has a seriously warped view of the war against Israel. The Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, fresh from his diplomatic triumph in shaking the hand of Robert Mugabe apparently by mistake, revealed yet further depths of intellectual rigour when he told the Labour party conference today that the Middle East conflict was:

‘the greatest challenge to international order’.

Er, hello? Greater than al Qaeda? Greater than nuclear Iran? Greater than the jihad which is murdering hundreds of thousands from Bali to Beslan to Sudan, and is bending every sinew to strike at the west in order to defeat the free world? Isn’t there a single official in the Foreign and Camel Office who can rise above its demented and vicious obsession with Israel and grasp the utterly fundamental and screamingly obvious geopolitical reality: that the greatest challenge to world order is the Islamic jihad in which Israel, far from being itself that ‘greatest challenge’, is in the front line of the defence of all of us against it — and that the second greatest threat is this country’s brain-dead failure to realise this fact?