Day two of the brave new Tory dawn, and the not-yet party leader has started to clarify just what he means by 'leading from the centre'. It means, it seems, abandoning the family. Key quote from this Torygraph interview with Michael Howard: 'Influenced partly by his wife, the ex-model Sandra Paul, he has softened his stance on social values - he no longer wants to see marriage rewarded through the tax system, for example, arguing that the Tories should recognise that many cohabiting couples live in stable relationships too'.

Oh dear. Ms Paul should go back to modelling. Cohabitation does not produce 'stable' relationships. It produces a significantly higher rate of breakup than marriage, more infidelity, violence and abuse, and most important of all an accelerating rate of fatherless children -- the single most important driving factor behind the crime rate.

Howard says he wants to be 'inclusive' and has pledged to help the vulnerable. When I hear the word 'inclusive', I reach for the sick-bag. It's code for abandoning the vulnerable -- such as the children left desolate and crippled amidst the wreckage of family disintegration. Encouraging or conniving at yet more of this social disaster is not 'inclusive'. It's immoral, ignoble and opportunistic.

Let's hope this was just a rush of blood to the head in the excitement of the moment, and not an augury of a Portillistic cross-dressing strategy.

'Piers Morgan, Editor of the Daily Mirror, said that his paper had a problem differentiating between male and female babies' -- seeking to explain away his exclusive, er, error this morning.

(For those who can't read the Times online, the Mirror proclaimed that Paul and Heather McCartney's new baby-- subsequently taking her bow as Beatrice -- was a boy).

Day one of the new Tory dawn, and Michael Howard is making the right strategic noises. He is casting himself as a one-nation leader, which indeed he has to be if he is ever to become Prime Minister. Accordingly there are overtures to Ken Clarke, a word for people in deprived areas and a pledge for a new politics based on 'rigorous honesty'. Well now, that would be a new politics indeed . He will lead the party, he says, from the centre. Ah, the centre ground of politics -- the only problem is defining it.

Meanwhile, the thing that's really exciting the fourth estate is the fact that his wife is a fomer model.

Groan.

Wonders will never cease. David Davis did actually stand aside after all to allow Michael Howard a clear run at the Tory leadership. Did he cut a secret deal with Howard? Unlikely. The tactically shrewd Howard would avoid boxing himself in -- and doesn't need to do so, given the 'big mo' is behind him. As the most authoritative report in the Torygraph makes clear, Howard didn't have to do any deals. He just spelled out to Davis the brutal mathematics.

It's easy to see why the Tories are falling into line behind Howard. They think that although Iain Duncan Smith's programme has winning potential, particularly on public service reform, he was personally hopeless and weak. So they want an effective Tory man to promote existing Tory measures. But even with Howard's undoubted political and intellectual skills, will that be enough?

It's not just a question of whether he can shed his old nasty image and start charming the birds off the trees. If the party is to win, it has to address a much more fundamental, existential problem. Public service reform, necessary as it is, isn't enough. After all, the Labour government is making exactly the same noises about decentralisation. Never mind that it's all smoke and mirrors -- that's what the public think about the Tories' programme, too.

To win, Howard will have to make clear what the Tories are fundamentally about that is totally at odds with what the Labour government is about. That's trickier than it seems, because the old Tory message about tax cuts and freedom sounds like an agenda for the rich while everyone else can go hang. What most concerns people is surely social disintegration -- and that takes them bang into all those contentious moral areas they try so hard to avoid, like family breakdown, authority of parents and teachers, real zero tolerance on crime especially all drug abuse, and so on. That's where the government is vulnerable and where it cannot possibly follow, even in rhetorical form. Howard has to provide the country with what is fashionably called a 'narrative' -- or what used to be called political vision. Can he do it?

America's satellite spy chief. Lt Gen James Clapper, has now said that Saddam did indeed conceal WMD in Syria shortly before the war. This is what the Israelis reported before war broke out, but of course this was ignored by the western anti-war media. Clapper also says that after Baghdad fell, the Iraqis took considerable trouble to conceal their WMD programme. This echoes the report by David Kay, who detailed the extraordinary lengths to which Sadam had gone to conceal an entire clandestine biological weapons programme from the UN inspectors. Of course Saddam hid all this stuff, whether inside or outside Iraq -- maybe both. On the basis of the evidence and by all the rules of rationality and logic, no-one but a fool or brainwashed bigot would think otherwise. But alas, that's exactly who we've got running our media and much of our political class.

Thanks to a reader for pointing out this expose of the sophistication of the Palestinian manipulation machine, and in particular the role of two western journalists in assisting this noble endeavour:
Eric Weiner, of National Public Radio (NPR) and Lyse Doucete of -- you've guessed it -- the BBC.

Read this, and marvel:

'Readers are first told by Weiner that, "being balanced, according to their mandate, can be frustrating" and urges the audience/reader "to present your stories on a human level and not rely on the facts." Present tear-jerkers in which Israelis "have to justify their existence, which makes it easier to get through to us."

'Ms. Doucete, who refers to homicide bombers as "honor" killers, believes "her job is to translate" rather than simply report the news, because "Israel is led by a Prime Minister who believes that it is not Israel's policy that is wrong, just that they have to explain it better." And so she admonishes the Palestinians, "if you want to beat the Israelis, you have to beat them at their own game." Thereupon follows eight pages of clear instruction on how the Palestinians can manipulate the press to their own advantage. Weiner again: "The fact that you have 1,000,000 pounds from the British government is not particularly interesting. But, if you explain why it is going to make such a difference by saying, ‘Did you know that since the closure was imposed we haven't been able to get paper through to Bethlehem?’ . . . we are far more likely to be interested."

'And still more from Doucet: "You should also know how to pick your target. Always be smart about where you pitch your story, and pitch it at the right time . . . It is true that Israel is treated with kid gloves and not held to the same standards as Iraq when it comes to UN resolutions." '

No, Ms Doucete, that is actually not true, because the contentious UN resolutions on Israel are not mandatory, unlike the ones on Iraq.

Why is the British licence-fee payer -- and the American tax-payer who funds NPR -- helping to subsidise such gross manipulation of the public?

Writing smugly about the need not to appear smug, Jonathan Freedland claims in the Guardian that everything that has happened in Iraq has proved the anti-war lobby right. Let's leave aside for the moment his bald assertion that there weren't any WMD in Iraq (if you say something that's idiotic often enough, it remains idiotic). If the anti-war mob were right, then what Freedland is effectively saying is that it would have been better for Saddam still to be running Iraq.

The fact is that Saddam was not only a monster to his own people but also a direct threat to the west, as was recognised by the UN and every western country. The anti-war defeatism also ignores the wider perspective, that most Iraqis are profoundly relieved that Saddam has gone and are optimistic about the future -- not surprising, since their living conditions and prospects are steadily improving.

Of course the current situation in Iraq is deeply difficult. Of course each terrorist outrage is a serious setback. And the American incompetence in securing the peace has been appalling. But this doesn't alter the fact that we had no sensible option but to run the Ba'athists out of Iraq. The reality of our new world order of terror is that the choices we now have to make are all very hard. There is a serious downside and terrible risks attached to all of them. But we are now in the politics of no alternative. Or to put it another way, the war against terror is the least worst option.

Just like William Hague before him, IDS has gained respectful notices for the way he has conducted himself in front of the firing squad. Today's papers have already written his obituary in advance of this evening's vote of confidence, and crowned Michael Howard. But as Matthew Parris notes in the Times, this is unlikely to solve the Tories' crisis. They have never recovered from the matricide of Mrs Thatcher; and the reason for that, although Matthew doesn't say this, predates her downfall. They adored her because she stood for something which was demonstrably a cause in which they could believe -- first, destroying the power of the trade unions to hold the country to ransom, and later on rolling back the power of the state.

But with socialism destroyed as a global threat, and with everyone now a Thatcherite free marketeer, they lost any idea of a distinctive agenda to believe in. There is indeed such an agenda waiting to be promoted. It's a moral one, because it's moral issues on which our culture is now split asunder, on which real choices need to be made, and on which the present government has taken the country in a ruinous direction virtually every single time. The cause is nothing less than to reverse the tide of cultural nihilism and social disintegration.

But most Tories run screaming from such an agenda, shrieking 'nanny state'. IDS has increasingly grasped what needs to be done, but can't project it. Michael Howard can project all right -- but would he grasp the moral nettle?

While the Tories convulse, the government's own mess gets worse. Teachers are now to be robbed of their merit rises in order to bale out the disastrous shortfall in school funding. This gap was caused in part by the usual local authority sleight of hand in failing to pass on education funding to the schools, but in large measure because the education department got its sums wrong both in redistributing funds around the country, and from one education fund to another. In short, it's mainly the government's fault -- for which the teachers are now having to pay. This sorry saga illustrates two things: the fact that under this government, nothing works; and the fact that while Whitehall remains in control, education will continue to be abused and exploited by the lethal combination of incompetence and ideology.

The real reason for the Royals' panic over Paul Burrell is the as yet undiclosed allegation about a 'senior Royal' on Princess Diana's famous 'Crown Jewels' tape, whose disappearance prompted the police raid on Burrell's house in the first place. This allegation is now common currency in media circles and it can only be a matter of time before it emerges in public. The Royal Family should now deal with it by revealing it themselves. However scandalous it is, if they don't take the initiative in this way they will continue to have the threat of blackmail hanging over them, which is clearly an intolerable situation from all points of view. If it's false, they can deny it robustly. If it's true... well, it would be a scandal, for sure, and probably fatally damaging to the Royal in question; but still not as damaging as it would be if it emerges and leaves them all on the defensive.

So they've gone and done it at last. The Tory plotters have got their coup d'etat. The assumption is that IDS is now history: he cannot possibly survive tomorrow's confidence vote in the Commons. The one thing that may just save him is if the constituencies are so infuriated with the plotters for engineering months of possibly fratricidal navel-gazing in a leadership contest that they instruct their MPs to back IDS in the vote.

A slim chance, but still possible. The plotters apparently intend to prevent a leadership war by uniting behind Michael Howard. This may annoy the constituencies still further if they feel they are being deprived of their right to help choose their leader. And anyway, can anyone really see David Davis standing gracefully aside?

That said, a Howard leadership would be interesting. As everyone agrees, he's one of an almost extinct breed -- a grown-up Tory politician. Everyone agrees he'd wipe the floor with Blair in the Commons. But then so did one William Hague, and a fat lot of good that did him.

What's really interesting is why the Portillistas are backing him. It's not that they've grown up at last. It's because they think that Howard will finally test to destruction the old, 'non-inclusive', non touchy-feely politics. In other words, they assume he will lose the next election, and by such a defeat will pave the way at last for the libertine agenda of sex, drugs and politically correct victim culture -- for which programme of social suicide the electorate will weep tears of gratitude, and restore the Tories to power with acclaim.

What a shower.

Exceedingly disturbing post on Debkafile, the investigative Jersualem-based website with apparently extensive intelligence connections. It claims that officials at the highest reaches of Nato and the EU are plotting the internationalisation and destruction of Israel. It also contains the following startling passage:

'Nineteen days before the New York article appeared, a DEBKAfile informant dining at a Knightsbridge restaurant with a highly-placed British intelligence official heard him drop this remark: “Some people in the West have come to the conclusion that the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 was a mistake.” When asked to explain whether this meant that the Jews were to be evicted from the Middle East, he replied: “Certainly. Israel has a little more than 5 million Jews. If the United States and NATO were to finance their relocation in other countries, that would solve many Middle East problems.”

This same British source is extremely well-connected in high NATO circles and has moreover established a long-running reputation for credibility. In early 1973, for instance, he asked an official of the Golda Meir government with whom he was dining in Jerusalem what Israel would do if the Arabs went to war and imposed an oil embargo. The official was taken aback by a proposition that seemed totally unrealistic at the time. Seven months later, the Yom Kippur War broke out coupled with an oil embargo.

In October 2003, the same British intelligence officer once again dropped a warning of schemes being spun in secret in Brussels to de-legitimize the Israeli democracy, whittle away its independence and eventually bring the state into eclipse'.

Is this European plot to destroy Israel true? Does this not warrant exposure in a mainstream publication? Is anyone out there listening? Does anyone care?

Tremendous piece by Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident and now Israel's minister for the diaspora, on the dire state of affairs on America's campuses where Jewish students are under siege. Sharansky has grasped what the rest of Israel's political class has failed to understand, that the Palestinian propaganda offensive has been brilliant and sophisticated, and has made a generation of people believe that lies are the truth. If he thinks America is bad, just wait until he sees Britain where he is due to visit in a few days' time. But will he be able to persuade his colleagues to start taking this seriously?

Further alarming indications that Britain is a factory for terror. The Times reports Israeli concern over British citizens who have disappeared in Syria, or are sitting in Gaza, being prepared to strike as human bombs. Israel has asked the Brits for help in tracking them down. Isn't it about time Britain did rather more to deal with this poison that has become its most shameful export?

Meanwhile, the Times has a balanced editorial pointing out the obvious danger of allowing yesterday's attempt to murder US deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in Baghdad to produce the kind of defeatism it was intended to produce. As it notes, despite the escalating attacks real progress is slowly being made in moving Iraq towards a semblance of normality. The Iraqis themselves remain pragmatic and optimistic. The situation is, in the long term, hopeful -- provided everyone keeps their nerve. And that, of course, is precisely why these attacks are increasing.

Can sense be breaking out at last? Independent schools are apparently keen on a proposed new examination at 16+ which relies on final examination rather than coursework. In other words, a return to the principle of the old O-level. Of course this is right, and would raise standards instantly. Coursework is fundamentally unjust and corrupting. As has been discovered, it often actually consists, at least in part, of contributions from teachers, parents or internet data bases. It has been a disaster and has helped turn the GCSE into a farce. Once again, it is the independent schools which are acting as the guardians of education standards. Let's hope this catches on, and that state schools will soon be able to follow suit.

Astonishing article in the Spectator by Sholto Byrnes extolling Mahathir Mohamad as 'the very model of a moderate Muslim leader' who should be cherished by the west. Let us remind ourselves of the moderate remarks by Mahathir which should make us want to cherish him:

'The Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them... They invented and successfully promoted Socialism, Communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they may enjoy equal rights with others. With these they have now gained control of the most powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world power'.

Byrnes does concede a touch of antisemitism here -- but that's okay because: 'One may feel sure that the real target of his ire was Israel and Zionist Jews (in another part of his speech he said ‘Even among the Jews there are many who do not approve of what the Israelis are doing’) rather than, say, the likes of Amos Oz or Shimon Peres'. So that's all right, then. Jews on the other hand who are not Amos Oz or Shimon Peres (who might be surprised to learn that they are not actually Zionists) but more robustly defend Israel's attempts to prevent itself from extermination -- well, hey, they're apparently fair game because they're the Jews who actually control the world.

Hardly surprising, then, that for Byrnes Mahathir is altogether a pretty cool kinda guy. The vast majority of his speech, he informs us, was 'a call for peaceful unity among Muslims and a condemnation of violence'. Uh huh. Like this condemnation of violence, perhaps, from Mahathir's speech: 'We need guns and rockets, bombs and warplanes, tanks and warships for our defence. But because we discouraged the learning of science and mathematics etc. as giving no merit for the akhirat, today we have no capacity to produce our own weapons for our defence. We have to buy our weapons from our detractors and enemies'.

Sure, he wants unity among Muslims -- in order to fight more strategically. Sure, he wants to modernise backward Islamic societies -- in order to fight more effectively the 'oppression' of Muslims by 'Europeans and Jews'. Sure, he laments the appalling waste of life in the war over 'Palestine' -- but only because he wants to fight that war more intelligently.

The terrifying thing is that Mahathir is a moderate, by the standards of the Islamic world. That is why the threat is so desperate. And that is why articles such as this one are as deeply stupid as they are repellent.

Frightening but not surprising news that Iranian spies are sizing up synagogues in Britain for terror attacks. The good news is that the British authorities are wise to it, but there's a terrible feeling that it's only a matter of time before such an attack occurs, from whatever branch of the mass murder industry. The even more terrible thing is that if, heaven forbid, this does happen, far from reversing the tide of anti-Jewish feeling now coursing through Britain, the reaction is likely to be 'they had it coming to them' -- and if a non-Jewish target is attacked, 'it's all the Jews' fault'.

Staggering and destructive inanity about higher education participation rates from...yes, you've guessed it, the new government adviser on higher education. Sir Alan Wilson, vice-chancellor of Leeds university, says that even the ludicrous target of getting half the population into university isn't enough; it should be 70%. This despite clear evidence that as more unqualified and unsuitable candidates are shoe-horned into academe, the standards of degrees are falling and the proportion of remedial work necessitated by the lamentable ignorance of new students is rising.

With all the supercilious arrogance and detachment from reality of his profession, Sir Alan brushes this aside on the basis that industry is crying out for more and more graduates. Well, the Confederation of British Industry might be, but when did that bunch of buffoons ever say anything remotely sensible or useful? What industry is really crying out for is people who are properly trained in skills and trades, something this country has never bothered to achieve. What society is crying out for, meanwhile, is fewer intellectuals, who have already done quite enough damage to society with their barking mad and deeply nihilistic ideas.

Having been out of the country for most of last week, I return to find two of Britain's core institutions in the throes of an advanced nervous breakdown. Can it be a coincidence that both the Conservative Party and the Royal Family are in the grip of such paralysing venom? The parallels are striking. Both Iain Duncan Smith and Prince Charles have done very impressive things -- unifying the Tories over Europe and public services, producing pioneering initiatives to help disadvantaged youth in the inner cities -- and yet both are said to be such personal disasters they should stand down. Both have come under public attack from former close aides -- Mark Bolland for the PofW, Dominic Cummings for IDS -- who accuse the institutions themselves of failing to engage with a world in transition.

We all can see that both IDS and Prince Charles have significant deficiencies. And both the Conservative Party and the Royal Family in general have much to answer for in terms of institutional incompetence, crass stupidity, arrogance... we can all doubtless add to the list. But I can't help thinking that their difficulties are at root due to a profound shift for the worse in the general culture.

Our society now is marked by shallowness and sentimentality; a culture where the concept of duty has all but collapsed, and notions of loyalty and trust along with it. These values have been superseded by greed and rapacity, cruelty and humiliation, manipulation and deceit, and a seemingly infinite gullibility in the face of propaganda and lies.

The revolting courtiers who disgustingly betray their trust and sell their intimate knowledge of private lives for huge gains; the revolting Tory MPs who no longer have the humility or self-discipline to buckle down to the collective task of repairing their own manifold deficiencies; the public who made Diana their icon because she told them they could behave atrociously and still look like a supermodel and have the attributes of a saint, or who punish their politicians if they ever tell them the truth about unattainable or irreconcilable goals; the intelligentsia which no longer even recognises the very concept of truth; and last but not least, the ineffable media (of which I am part) with its agenda to tear down and destroy public institutions in order to glorify and empower itself; with all this, it is so surprising that neither IDS not Prince Charles has the faintest idea how to deal with what is so respectfully called 'a changing society'?

I am travelling all this week, so postings may be intermittent.

Now let's see how the world reacted to Mahathir Mohamed's demonisation of and incitement against the Jews, which received a standing ovation from the 57 Islamic states at the OIC summit.

The Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher called it 'a good road map' toward Muslim empowerment. Like Hamid Karzai, the US-imposed leader of Afghanistan, Yemen's foreign minister Abubakar al-Qirbi also said he didn't think the comments were antisemitic. 'I think he was basically stating the fact to the Muslim world.' Uh huh.

And what of the Europeans? True to the noble traditions of his country, France's President Chirac blocked the EU from condemning the remarks as antisemitic and having no place in a decent world.

Britain's Foreign Office, meanwhile, said: '"It's unfortunate that Mahathir chose to make these remarks which we regard as unacceptable'. Unfortunate and unacceptable, eh? Mmnn, strong stuff. That's the spirit, chaps.

I am perplexed by the so-called 'Geneva accords', the fruits of a two-year secret dialogue between a group of Israelis and a group of Palestinians which purports to have solved the Middle East crisis, just like that. It seems to be a re-run of 'land for peace'. Fine; we all know that's what an eventual negotiated settlement would broadly be about. And it's certainly encouraging to see that there are Palestinians who are prepared to forgo -- in public, at least -- the demand to settle as of right in Israel as well as in their own state.

But hey -- so what? This is just a group of benignly disposed Israelis and Palestinians. They represent no-one but themselves. Probably, if a group of random, ordinary Israelis were to sit down for two years with a group of random, ordinary Palestinians, they would arrive at something that looks pretty similar.

But the crisis has been manufactured and sustained by Arab states using the Palestinians as proxy warriors, inciting and equipping them to murder Israelis and progressively de-moralise them -- in every sense. Their goal remains, as ever, the eradication of the Jewish state. That is why Amos Oz, one of the Geneva participants, both got the point and didn't get the point.

This is what he wrote in the Guardian: 'the document we signed, the Geneva Initiative, recognises, unequivocally, the right of the Jewish people to their own country, alongside the state of the Palestinian people. As far as I am aware, we have never heard from any representative Palestinian actor the words "the Jewish people," and we have certainly not heard any word of recognition of the Jewish people's national right to establish an independent state in the Land of Israel'.

Quite. And we still haven't -- at least, not from the people who can actually deliver a deal. On the contrary, when President Bush explicitly said at Aqaba that he supported Israel as a 'Jewish state', the Palestinians went crazy. That's because the goal of annihilation remains the same as it always was. That's why, when land -- including half of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, let's not forget -- was actually offered to the Palestinians in exchange for peace, the response was the three year campaign of mass murder.

The more he protests, the more we should count the national spoons. Tony Blair maintains there won't be a referendum on the EU constitution. 'Take it from me', he says,'there is nothing we are going to agree to here that's going to put at risk any of these key red lines that we have set out'. Well no, we won't take it from him, since he has retreated on the vast majority of all his previous so called red lines including the Charter of Fundamental Rights, to whose binding force he once said he would never agree. He did.

Coyly, he described the authoritative reports that the Queen is deeply worried that the constitution will subvert the Crown as 'hares and scares'. The Queen is not prone to ill-informed scares. She is deeply worried because it is true that the EU constitution will abolish our powers of self government, turn us into a province of a unified European state and reduce the monarchy to a theme-park figurehead on Westminster regional council. Blair's insistence that the constitution does not represent a fundamental change is totally untrue. It explicitly makes English law subservient to EU law and turns us into a satellite of Brussels. Forget a referendum -- it is astonishing that this will be nodded through by a UK Parliament, determined to axe its own sovereign authority.

The question is, what is the Queen going to do about it? This is unlike any past constitutional crisis between monarch and PM because this is about the irrevocable abolition of British self-government and the constitutional monarchy that ultimately guarantees its security. As the nation's protector of last resort, she is entitled to bang her sceptre and tell Blair she won't have any of it. That would mean he would have to resign and call a general election. If he subsequently won it, the Queen would be in an impossible position and might have to abdicate. But then again, if the throne is effectively being cast onto the scrapheap anyway, what's she got to lose? And anyway, the people will be cheering her on.

Come on, Your Majesty -- this is the service to your country for which you were called.

Anyone who thinks (and many do) that the threat against the west has been much exaggerated, that only a few crazies are involved and resurgent antisemitisim is a paranoid delusion, should study carefully the opening speech by the Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamed, at the Organisation of the Islamic Conference summit.

Here it is, in all its demented ghastliness -- the great cry that Islam has been left behind and colonised by the west, and the immediate slide from that into the belief that the Jews are to blame and have taken over the entire world. Key quotes: 'The Muslims will forever be oppressed and dominated by the Europeans and the Jews...The Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them...

'We are up against a people [the Jews] who think. They survived 2000 years of pogroms not by hitting back, but by thinking. They invented and successfully promoted Socialism, Communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they may enjoy equal rights with others. With these they have now gained control of the most powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world power'.

Take note, all you sceptics who maintain that Israel is the fundamental problem. This is a call to arms against Jewish power which is said to rule the world and be responsible for the backwardness of Islamic nations. In other words, this is plain, ancient, barking mad Jew-hatred. It is incitement to mass murder which, because it is based on the pathological belief that Islam is under attack from the Jewish-controlled west, is misrepresented as 'defence':

'...the defence of the ummah, the counter attack need not start only after we have put our houses in order. Even today we have sufficient assets to deploy against our detractors. It remains for us to identify them and to work out how to make use of them to stop the carnage caused by the enemy'.

This is nothing short of incitement to kill Jews and commit carnage against the west. And these are not remarks by some marginal figure. Malaysia is currently in the chair of the OIC, which consists of no fewer than 57 Islamic nations. You can assume that none of them seriously dissents from these sentiments.

And what is the response of the world? Kofi Annan delivered a pathetic wag of the finger at the 'rising hostility' between Islam and the west which he said was 'ugly, dangerous and wrong'. Big deal. Just imagine if the Pope, say, convened a conference of 57 Christian nations and called on them to wage war against the third world. There would be uproar. Yet even though -- according to Mahathir Mohamed - war has been declared upon the west and upon the Jews on behalf of 1.3 billion people, the west continues to believe that the Israeli settlements are the root of the problem. Grotesque.

Eye-popping column in the Washington Post by Richard Cohen. Key quote: 'More to the point is the administration's Westmorelandish insistence on asserting the insupportable -- that Saddam Hussein was a grave threat to the United States because he was linked to terrorism and armed to the teeth with those awful weapons. There is no truth to that -- none'.

You have to blink hard at this one. No link to terror? What about Saddam's funding and training of Palestinian terrorists? What about his involvement in the attempted assassination of President Bush 1 and the Emir of Kuwait, along with numerous other outrages? And as for the wretched WMD, what about David Kay's recent report detailing a huge clandestine biological programme, kept secret even after the war had started -- not to mention all the CBW stuff that two sets of inspectors said remained unaccounted for?

Still, I suppose if you tell a lie loudly enough and often enough, and in the Washington Post, it becomes the truth.

The indefatigable site Little Green Footballs draws attention to the Guardian's eye-poppingly responsible website, where the topic for discussion is 'Is it time to assassinate George Dubya Bush?'

Thanks to an article in FrontPage magazine for this poignant and telling riposte to the Israeli pilot refuseniks from a father grieving for his son killed in action. Somehow one can't see this being reported in Britain.

Excellent -- and chilling -- piece by David Bedein about the role played by UNRWA in disseminating lies about the Palestinian refugees. It is simply not realised what a significant part the NGOs play in creating and sustaining the west's terrifying and all-consuming culture of lies -- not least because people assume that, unlike politicians, they tell the truth. The website NGO Monitor plays a very useful role, but this message needs to get into the mainstream media.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has now amplified his opposition to the Iraq war in a lecture to the Royal Institute for International Affairs. It is deeply troubling. He effectively says that a state has no right to seek to defend itself by military means if other countries are opposed to such a course of action. His point is that unless a state acts in accordance with international law, it is effectively behaving as if it were a private individual ignoring the available recourse to law and embarking on violence which is therefore illegitimate.

But international law recognises that a state is entitled to defend itself by military means against a threat to its own security. The new potential combination of nuclear, biological or chemical weaponry with terrorism means that when such a threat surfaces, it would be suicidal not to take pre-emptive action. There can be no law, no moral code, which expects a nation to refuse to take the only action that will prevent itself from being immolated. This is surely to take the doctrine of 'turn the other cheek' to ludicrous lengths.

The Iraq war was waged in accordance with international law. It wasn't international legality that was in question, but international politics, since the UN wouldn't go along with it. How can it possibly be moral knowingly to expose the populations of the west to the risk of biological attack or nuclear blackmail because a body dominated by tyrannies, state exporters of terror and countries that get financial rewards from such states won't agree to one's own self-defense? Isn't the real moral collapse to be found in the body that is supposed to guarantee global security but in fact acts as a handmaiden to terror, tyranny and repression?

The ABofC is not a marginal figure. The church punches far above its weight in the pews. What Dr Williams says greatly influences our culture. And he is providing a so called moral rationale for appeasement. In the war on terror, the church is, alas, on entirely the wrong side.

Of course Blair and Blunkett are right to target Britain's appalling tide of antisocial behaviour. Heaven knows it's a priority. A census has shown that on just one day last month, 66,000 incidents of rowdiness, intimidation, littering, drunkenness, drug-taking and vandalism were reported to the authorities. That's a staggering number. It puts the so-called 'drop' in crime into perspective, and shows why Blair understands that he has to be seen to be doing something.

But that doesn't mean he is doing anything. On the contrary, what yesterday's announcements brutally revealed was that, despite having previously introduced a raft of fierce-sounding initiatives, he can't get the police or local councils to enforce them. This government being as it is, it automatically starts threatening these operatives with the sack. But many of these initiatives, like the anti-social behaviour orders, are virtually unworkable because they are insanely bureaucratic.

Much, much more radical action is necessary if antisocial behaviour is to be tackled effectively. For a start, the Human Rights Act and the Children Act need to be torn up and adult responsibility put firmly back in its place. These laws paralyse anyone who tries to administer authority to children. Some of these kids need to be taken out of circulation immediately, something that's impossible if you've got queues of lawyers shrieking about human rights.

The police have got to be able and willing to do their job properly again, which means radical decentralisation of the constabulary. They need to adopt a zero tolerance approach, which few are prepared or able to do. And at a deeper level, the government has to link welfare to behaviour, start addressing the scourge of family disintegration and stop driving education into ideological meltdown.

That's just for starters.

Patricia Hewitt, the uber-feminist Trade Secretary who has been a key player in the Blair government's war against traditional family values, has now donned sackcloth and ashes and confessed what has been blindingly obvious -- that the government has created the perception that all women should have jobs and made stay-at-home mothers feel worthless. Key quote:

'If I look back over the last six years I do think that we have given the impression that we think all mothers should be out to work, preferably full time as soon as their children are a few months old,' she said.

'We have got to move to a position where as a society and as a Government we recognise and we value the unpaid work that people do within their families. That's mothers but also fathers and people looking after elderly relatives or people with disabilities.'

This from a government that has done everything possible to undermine women's traditional family role. Whatever next, Patricia -- all men are not rapists?

The old joke about the Guardian, that it was a paper where facts were free but comment was sacred. still holds true. Despite some twisted reporting on the Kelly/Hutton imbroglio, its editorials on the affair have often been rather balanced. Take today's leader, in which it counsels caution about concluding that Sir Kevin Tebbit's evidence proved Blair lied about his part in the disclosure of Kelly's name. Key quote:

'Sir Kevin, by his own admission, only arrived at the July 8 meeting as it was breaking up. He gave evidence that the first he saw of the final version of the Q&A was later that day, back inside the MoD. The conflict is tantalising, but it does not provide an open-and-shut case against Mr Blair of the kind that his enemies would like'.

Quite. The Tories' opportunistic rush to leap on this bandwagon rather than behave as statesmen and wait for the final evaluation makes me think once more that -- policies apart -- they are just not government material.

Many people still think that claims of resurgent antisemitism in Britain are unwarranted. Many Jews who hate Ariel Sharon think that too. They might be advised to read this chilling post from the blog Jewish Comment to see how far things in Britain have gone.

Back from a meeting of C-Change, the socially libertine/Portillista think tank. Although I disagree with their world-view, they put on good meetings and are not afraid of robust challenges to which they respond with civility and good humour.

Tonight the redoubtable American economist and thinker Irwin Stelzer was sticking it into the hapless Tories in general and some of C-Change's ideas in particular. One thing he said, though, raised my eyebrows. 'The culture wars', he declared, 'are over'.

Well, there may be no sign of any battles in the intellectually strangled UK. But in the US, with its welfare-to-work, its sexual abstinence programmes, its stabilised births out of wedlock, its zero tolerance of crime and its eye watering tough love social rescue programmes run by the voluntary sector, I'd have thought a fightback was well under way.

Stelzer also raised the interesting question of why the American Republicans are able to be a broad church while their UK cousins in the Tory party spend all their time knifing each other. Maybe it's because the divisions in Republicanism just aren't so strong. Maybe the strength of the US churches, and their roots in the Republican party, has repelled the encroachment of the brutal utilitarianism of the left that has taken over much of the Conservative party and caused it to junk conservative notions of family, morality, authority and social order.

Tony Blair is said to be in even deeper doodoo after yesterday's final, final Hutton inquiry evidence that he chaired the meeting that led to the 'unmasking' of Dr Kelly. Leave aside the question of whether this meeting actually decided on a strategy designed to name him. Can anyone enlighten me why a civil servant, who had revealed unauthorised intelligence material to journalists and had apparently broken his duty of trust by covertly attacking his employers, should have felt entitled to expect that his name would be kept secret?

The biggest exam board in Britain has revealed that English exam essays are peppered with grossly inappropriate and sloppy slang, along with ugly verb contractions, poor spelling and empty adjectives. For example, on Anthony and Cleopatra: 'It's like, yea, Cleo is a player'; or phrases such as 'over the moon', 'coming onto him' and 'he winds her up'. In other words, a dismaying level of linguistic inadequacy and even illiteracy.

One Anne Barnes, a senior English examiner, accepted such language needed to be discouraged but took nevertheless a benevolent view. English was constantly changing, she sagely observed. As for teachers, who one might think were responsible for presiding over this travesty, well, they 'may use "trendy" language in the classroom, but this is not necessarily slang. They have to use language that grips the child'.

Can this be the same Anne Barnes who was once general secretary of the National Association for the Teaching of English, a body that set out to undermine trasditional teaching, grammar, spelling, reading and so forth, by infiltrating subversive education ideas into the mainstream? The same Anne Barnes who, in 1993 spelled out the strategy of infiltration aimed at taking control of the curriculum tests thus: '...since we had to have this sort of assessment, we should make sure we had the ownership of it and make it sit as comfortably as possible with our principles. So when the contracts went out in 1989 they felt there was a lot to play for'.

There was indeed. Game set and match, I'd say.

There is a truly disgusting essay by Professor Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books. He argues for the destruction of Israel.

The very idea of a Jewish state, he sneers, is a 19th century anachronism. No mention of the anachronistic situation that led to the creation of a Jewish state -- that medieval hatred of the Jews remained so prevalent across the world, with no country prepared to take them in after World War Two, that a state of their own was the only way of guaranteeing their safety.

In accordance with the left's doctrine that only a multicultural state is legitimate, Judt proposes that Israel becomes a 'binational' Jewish and Arab state. Apart from the fact that this idea was proposed at the end of the 19th century, it ignores the fact that for the Arabs, sharing a state with the Jews means that they must become 'dhimmi', or second class citizens. Islam will tolerate nothing else. No mention of the fact that -- far from a state composed of Europeans -- half of Israel's population were refugees from Arab countries which persecuted them. And no mention of the fact that the Arab states are 'Judenrein', as would be the putative state of Palestine -- which for Judt would not qualify, it appears, as an anachronism.

He's personally okay, of course, because he inhabits a world 'where more and more of us have multiple elective identities and would feel falsely constrained if we had to answer to just one of them'. Well, that may be just terrific for the senior common room of New York University, but possibly not quite so appealing for those Israeli Jews whose 'multiple identities' didn't work out so well in Cairo or Cracow.

Judt's modest proposal rehearses the usual libels and distortions about Israel. Thus: 'With American support, Jerusalem has consistently and blatantly flouted UN resolutions requiring it to withdraw from land seized and occupied in war'. No mention that these resolutions also require as a quid pro quo that the Arabs make peace with Israel.

Thus: 'Washington's unconditional support for Israel...' No mention that Washington has always prevented Israel from taking action that would help prevent its citizens being murdered (as in the otherwise inexplicable non-arrest of Arafat); that as a result of Washington's Oslo process, the Palestinians were given the arms and infrastructure to murder Israelis; or that Washington's road map promises a state as a reward for terror.

Thus: 'Syria is more use to the United States as a friend than an enemy'. No mention of Syria's ongoing role as a major sponsor of terror.

Thus: 'pundits slander our European allies when they dissent, speak glibly and irresponsibly of resurgent anti-Semitism when Israel is criticized...' No mention of the blood libel promulgated by 'our European allies' over the massacre of Jenin that wasn't; no mention of the commonplace assertion by 'our European allies' of the canard that the Jews are a cabal which dictates American foreign policy; no mention of the dehumanisation of Israel by 'our European allies' through their vile daily distortion and moral inversion that represents Israel's attempts at self-defence as unwarranted aggression.

Thus: 'it is a Jewish state in which one community—Jews —is set above others...' No mention that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, one in which Arabs have the vote, can serve in the army and even sit in the supreme court. And if he's taking a shot at the right of return -- well, this was a unique concession for a people unique in the history of the world in having been persecuted in virtually every country, and for whom automatic refuge was therefore a moral act. To represent this as some kind of racist discrimination is obscene.

For what it's worth, I believe the settlements are wrong, they should be dismantled forthwith and Israel should insist on a state for the Palestinians. To rule another people is not only anathema but -- the one point where Judt is correct -- will lead to the demographic destruction of the Jewish state. So call their bluff -- and then fight them, as one state against another, when they attack, which they undoubtedly will in accordance with what they have said consistently down the decades. I believe there is no acceptable alternative. But that's because I want the Jewish state to survive. Judt's call for its annihilation, by contrast, makes that appalling prospect that little bit more likely.

The Iraq war remembrance service revealed a Church of England that has become morally emptied. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, used the service to make various pointed attacks on the Prime Minister, telling him he would be 'called to account' if Iraq wasn't remade and that, in an apparent reference to the failure to find WMD, 'we have to go back and test what has happened in the light of the original vision'.

True, he acknowledged also the 'moral seriousness' of those who made the case for war. Gee, thanks. But he promptly revealed he didn't understand that case. It was not principally to remove 'atrocity and oppression', although that was of course a desirable consequence. It was to defend the west from a threat that was so grave it could not be ignored.

The idea that self defence is not only justifiable but a moral duty was entirely absent from that service. It was characterised instead by the kind of moral equivalence that says all killing is wrong, ignoring utterly factors such as aggression, motivation or responsibility.

The Archbishop's thinking was set out -- with his customary illuminating opaquenesss -- in the tiny booklet he wrote after 9/11 called Writing in the Dust. Here one finds moral equivalence and appeasement on every page. The correct response to mass murder, it appears, is to 'turn the other cheek' because a war on terror that may last many years cannot have 'moral credibility'. The definition of lawful violence is 'always fragile', and much moral capital after 9/11 was 'soon squandered'.

With morally compromised thinking like this, the church has itself become a fifth column undermining the west.

It is astounding that the arrest of three possible Muslim spies or subversives among the staff at Guantanamo Bay has not received more attention.

A chaplain who is a Chinese-American convert has now been charged with improperly handling classified information; the other two, a Syrian and a man of Egyptian origin, face more serious charges of espionage and helping the enemy, and lying and handling classified information. Whatever one thinks of Guantanamo, the fact that the Americans' principal detention centre for what they describe as some of the most dangerous people in the world has apparently been infiltrated by no fewer than three enemy agents indicates two things: the scale and geographical reach of the war against the west, and the incompetent complacency of the Americans in the face of that threat.

Here's a piece which teases out the links between anti-capitalism, totalitarianism and antisemitism.

Key quote:

'We cannot know for sure how much radical Islam picked up anti-Semitism from other statist movements, and how much it rediscovered anti-Semitism on its own. It is, however, now widely recognized that radical Islam looked to European socialism and totalitarianism for its critiques of capitalism and democracy. It is no accident that Islamic terrorists picked up the anti-Semitic part of the bundle as well.'

And that the western left has turned blood libels into radical chic.

The grand-daddy of the American neo-conservatives, Norman Podhoretz, nails the various lies now in wide circulation about the neo-cons and their supposed influence in this typically bullshit-busting interview:

'...like most non-Jewish liberals - the majority of American Jews were against the war in Iraq. Nevertheless it has been assumed all over the world that support for the war was disproportionately high among Jews. In fact, it has been charged that the Jews - euphemistically called 'neo-conservatives' - captured the White House and cajoled the Bush administration into invading Iraq solely to serve the interests of Sharon.

'This is a ridiculous idea, based on the absurd notion that the few intellectuals of Jewish origin in the administration - my own son-in-law Elliott Abrams is one of them - could manipulate such formidable leaders as George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice. Nor is it correct to characterize these leaders as neo-conservatives. None of them began on the left and moved to the right, which is what the neo-conservatives did: hence the 'neo,' meaning new'.

Indeed, and indeed. But of course, everyone from BBC presenters to Chris Patten now uses the term 'neo-con' as code for 'Jew' when articulating the received wisdom that American foreign policy has been hijacked by a dangerous cabal. Podhoretz correctly identifies the Jew-hatred that has erupted throughout the west and coalesced around the issues of Israel and the war on terror. He is also correct to identify Blair as a major pressure behind the morally corrupt and politically disastrous Middle East road map, which is based on the warped premise that Israel is the obstacle to peace. Podhoretz seems to believe, however, that Bush's innate sympathy for Israel will overcome these pressures. As things stand, this still seems to belong in the realm of prophecy.

Typically acute piece by Charles Krauthammer about Iraq's WMD.

Much sneering over the village that actually paid for an extra policeman to be returned to the beat to fend off growing lawlessness and disorder, only to find that crime and fear of crime went up as a result, ho ho. Well, not really.

Cynics should read again. For the extra bobby on the beat turned out to be anything but. The officer for whom the villagers thought they had paid North Yorkshire police was repeatedly sent on 'more urgent' business elsewhere. Even worse, this 'local bobby' was changed three times in two years, had four different police managers and was not replaced when he was sick.

They should demand their money back. What this shows is the utter inability of the North Yorkshire police to do what is essential-- put a policeman on the streets to deter and detect crime. The police now appear completely unable to fulfil the most basic function of their craft for which people are begging -- even when they pay the police to do it. Tragic.

These lapses of tone by IDS further obscure something people find so incredible that it doesn't get much coverage at all -- his Damascene conversion in the depths of Scotland's slums.

His visits to Easterhouse and Gallowgate appear to have changed his whole perspective on life. This is where his passion resides, as was seen in his speech where the emotion came through (and duly ignored). He has been profoundly shaken and moved by the circumstances of poor people who are desperately struggling to keep their heads -- and even more so, those of their children -- above the rising tide of lawlessness, drugs and social breakdown in their shattered communities. The depth of his concern has even won over some unlikely characters in these places. This is simply dismissed, of course, by the social libertines in his party, who regard the 'tough love' agenda that is essential to save the marginalised residents of Gallowgate or Easterhouse from going under altogether as utterly red-necked, atavistic and, well, just far too vulgar for people of their advanced sensibilities.

I think people are right to question IDS's tone in parts of his speech and afterwards. He should be statesmanlike and above the fray, concentrating on hammering home the positive message about his policies, which certainly have the capacity to excite interest and support.

His attack on Blair over Dr Kelly was particularly unwise. He should not have pre-empted Hutton's own conclusions. It is not the case, as he claimed on the Today programme, that it is clear beyond doubt from the published evidence that Blair lied over his role in the outing of Kelly.

IDS made two large and questionable leaps from the evidence. He has concluded that because Blair chaired a committee where the public handling of Kelly's role was discussed, Blair colluded in a decision to name him. But the issue of whether the government actually decided to out Kelly by devious means is very much a matter of how you read the evidence. It is not clear cut. So IDS should have waited.

Second, and worse, he implied that Blair was responsible for Kelly's death, and although he eventually said on Today that only Kelly killed Kelly, that implication still hangs in the air. This is distasteful and pretty preposterous opportunism.

Yes, the government used Kelly as a pawn -- but so did the BBC. The Tories have played this affair wrong from the start. They should have realised that however questionable the government's behaviour was towards Kelly, the fundamental issue was that the BBC report was wrong, the BBC subsequently behaved appallingly, the central charge that Blair took the country to war on a lie is a lie, and the whole affair, Hutton inquiry included, is part of the campaign to destabilise the war against terror.

It was a very good speech. Iain Duncan Smith finally did what was necessary. He told a story in simple and direct terms that joined up the dots, provided a coherent framework of principles on which to hang all his emerging policies, and -- at last -- spoke from the heart to explain the passion that drives him. But why on earth was he speaking as if the autocue was running down?

Hats off to Jonathan Freedland for writing a passionate and sensitive piece about the grief, anguish and despair now driving Israel's every move. It takes courage to write that in the pathologically Israel-hating Guardian.

Unreality only breaks through at the end of his piece, where he says there can be no military solution to the carnage and that the only way to stop it is round the negotiating table. Would that this were so.

The hard fact is that all attempts by Israel at negotiation, in which it has offered everything and received nothing in return except the mass murder of its citizens, have ended in failure. The truth is that negotiation with terrorists gives them the advantage and every incentive to continue their terror. The only way to defeat a terrorist war of annihilation is through a military solution.

The terrible truth is that Israel cannot impose such a solution since a) America won't let it and b) even if it did, it would run so much counter to Jewish ethics that it would destroy Israel's soul. But the current situation is also destroying Israel's soul. So it is trapped between the most lethal of rocks and the hardest of hard places, in precisely the way the Arab states evisaged when they first worked out, decades back, that they could deploy the Palestinian Arabs as the weapon of Israel's destruction, both from within Israeli society and from without.

I have just returned from the Tory party conference in Blackpool, which must be one of the wierdest events in that once great political movement's history. It was like experiencing two parallel universes.

In the first universe, there was the actual programme, which unveiled some of the most radical and refreshing ideas to come out of politics for many decades. The Tories really have got the big idea -- that public services must be accountable downwards to the people, and that politicians must be removed from them altogether. They've now fleshed this out as 'passports' for education and health, in which people can take public money and use it to secure places in the schools or hospitals of their choice. This is not only right but has enormous potential voter appeal -- provided people understand what it will mean for them. Big if; indeed, massive. In his speech tomorrow, Iain Duncan Smith must spell it out in absolutely personal and direct terms. But will he do so?

Delegates were ecstatic about this programme. The people doing the hard graft on the doorsteps understood that at last they had something tremendously attractive to sell to the punters -- control over the public services they use. There was a real sense that at last the party was onto something that would lift it out of its intellectual and political black hole. But in the second universe, shadowy plotters met and planted stories in the press about an imminent move to topple Duncan Smith, this creating an atmosphere of near hysterical crisis and the sense of a party about to implode.

Clearly, Duncan Smith has not yet found a way of catching the public's attention. And the party is still coming up with some pretty half-baked ideas. For all the understandable adulation attaching itself to Oliver Letwin's every charismatic appearance, his airy suggestion that he would dispatch all asylum-seekers to an island somewhere on the planet struck a surreal note. And his proposal to give control of the police to a board of local councillors or an elected 'sheriff' conjures up the prospect of our once uniquely independent police being told what to do by locally grown political ideologues instead of the ones in Whitehall.

Nevertheless, Letwin was on exactly the right lines in saying the Home Secretary should be removed from local policing matters, and right to say the public know better than anyone what they need to promote public safety. This localism theme is an absolute winner. Yet in his speech tomorrow the leader who has promoted it, Duncan Smith, fights for his political life against malevolent libertines, intellectual snobs, resentful has-beens, insanely ambitious opportunists and other malcontents. The parliamentary Conservative party needs to be put in a straitjacket.

The anti-war lobby has now set about rubbishing David Kay's report. The Guardian today splashes with the shock horror revelation that the Iraqi scientist who had been hiding botulinum had been concealing it since 1993. This somehow is supposed to make the finding worthless. Why?

The whole point was the suspicion that Saddam had not destroyed the supplies of WMD naterial he was known to have had for years. And by singling out this one finding, the Guardian omits Kay's discovery of an entire clandestine biological programme that was concealed from Blix, and which was being frantically hidden even after the war had started. It seems there is no limit to the twisting of this story.

For once, BBC Radio 4's Today programme tried to get a bit of balance this morning on Israel, with a sympathetic item by Orla Guerin (yes, really) interviewing Israelis near Jerusalem's Cafe Hillel that was recently bombed. The effect was somewhat spoiled, however, by the interview straight afterwards when Jim Naughtie was utterly incredulous at the suggestion by an Israeli spokesman that Israel's raid on the Syrian terrorist factory should be seen as part of the global war on terror.

Surely, he spluttered, the Israel problem was all about the occupied territories? To which the spokesman replied with the blindingly obvious -- that the only reason Israel was in the territories was because of the Arab attempt to destroy it. But of course, the BBC view, which informs virtually all its coverage, is that the Middle East impasse has been caused by Israel's occupation of the territories, thus revealing that somehow it has completely forgotten the wars and terrorism directed at Israel between 1948 and 1967, and forgoten also that the terrorist PLO was formed in 1964.

The head of Dulwich College has broken the scandalous public silence about the biggest single social problem we face. Graham Able has fingered divorce for having a shattering effect upon his independent school pupils. As he says, while many lone parents do a sterling job, children from shattered homes suffer in general from crippling damage. Able uses the words 'selfish and self-indulgent' to describe parents who put their own interests first. Goodness me, a moral judgment. The beak must be a truly brave man.

Nick Gibb, Tory MP for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton, accuses his party today of incoherence. While his point is generally true (particularly over tax) he himself betrays some confusion.

He doesn't like the emerging message of decentralisation, arguing that it paradoxically leads government to impose targets and central contol. He's muddling up contracting services out to the market -- the old Tory policy adopted so disastrously by Labour -- with the Tories' fledgling voucher policy, along with their aim to get politics out of the public services and make them accountable instead to the public.

There's a long way to go before this approach is properly thought through, not least in policing where Oliver Letwin's plan to make the police accountable to localy elected mayors and police boards begs the question of local political control. But this is a genuinely big idea, and if the Tories have the wit and courage (big if!) to develop it properly, it will be a winner.

The new Palestinian Prime Minister, Ahmed Qureia, has said he will not use force to destroy Palestinian terror. "We will not confront, we will not go for a civil war," he says. "It's not in our interest. It's not in the interest of our people, and it's not in the interest of the peace process."

Oh really?

Actually, this repudiates phase one, sentence one of the road map which says: 'In Phase 1, the Palestinians immediately undertake an unconditional cessation of violence according to the steps outlined below...'. These include: 'Palestinians declare an unequivocal end to violence and terrorism and undertake visible efforts on the ground to arrest, disrupt and restrain individuals and groups conducting and planning violent attacks on Israelis everywhere'. Note the words 'unequivocal', 'visible' and 'restrain', precisely what Ahmed Qureia and, before him, Mahmoud Abbas, have refused point blank to accept.

So where is the international outrage at the Palestinians' refusal to adhere to the first stage of the road map? Where is the American acknowledgement that their road map is a dead duck and that there will be no peace until they recognise that the Palestinian authority is the problem, not the solution? Don't hold your breath.

David Kay, head of the Iraq Survey Group, is amazed at the fact that his findings of Iraqi WMD materials have not been reported in the US press, wth the American public merely being told that he hadn't found any actual WMD. He might be even more stunned to discover exactly the same phenomenon in Britain. The published media have quite simply turned themselves into an enemy of truth and a servant of propaganda over the Iraq war.

If they could actually bring themselves to acknowledge the words on the page of Kay's report, rather than filtering them though a prism of hysterical anti-war prejudice that somehow transforms a discovery of clandestine programmes into a non-discovery, they might also care to reflect that their hero Hans Blix -- he of the theory that Saddam pretended he still had stuff he had actually destroyed, just so the allies could come and bomb his regime to bits -- somehow managed to miss what Kay has found.

Robin Cook's diaries have become the latest in his armoury of WMD to fire at Tony Blair. But his claim that Blair let slip to him before the war that Saddam had no WMD to threaten the west is palpably absurd.

Assuming the diaries are a true, in context and contemporaneous account of such a conversations -- and some passages have a certain, how shall we put it, retrospective air about them -- Blair apparently told him that the battlefield WMD were so well hidden they couldn't be activated quickly. This seems to conflict with the now infamous claim in the government's September dossier that Iraq could activate some WMD in 45 minutes.

From this, Cook deduces there was no threat from strategic missiles; therefore no threat at all. So collapse of stout PM? Not at all. The logic is ridiculous. The 45 minute claim referred only to 'some' WMD. There is no suggestion that Saddam had no longish-range missiles; indeed, the assumption was that these could reach Cyprus. Conversely, there was never any suggestion ever that he had any missiles that could reach any further; and in any event, the central claim that the 45 minute bit was the clincher for war is simply untrue. As Cook himself acknowledges, it was barely mentioned by the Prime Minister. The threat, as Blair said repeatedly, came from the combination of Saddam's WMD programme and his terrorism. It also came from his regional threats, which if backed by WMD would have paralysed the west. It is simply astounding that a former Foreign Secretary can so misrepresent what was clearly a 'serious and current' threat. Cook is merely making political mischief.

Another terrible mass murder in Israel; 20 dead and 45 injured in a restaurant bombing in Haifa. While these atrocities are perpetrated by Arabs, the West --particularly Europe --- itself has some of this blood on its hands. For the past 40 years, it has encouraged terror by responding to every outrage with promises to address the grievances that are its 'root causes'.

Now, even worse, Europe funds, lionises and supports a Palestinian cause which is fuelled by demented, homicidal Jew-hatred. In America, despite the war on terror, President Bush -- egged on by Tony Blair and the State Department -- launched the road map to annihilation, which promises the Palestinians a state as a reward for terror.

Every breach of that wretched document by the Palestinians has been ignored. The very premise on which it was launched, that Arafat would be sidelined by a proper statesman, was proved false from day one, as Arafat asserted and then consolidated his grip. Yet Bush brushed this aside, in the deluded belief that if only the Palestinians were given their state, a major source of the poison in the Middle East would dissipate.

Wrong, wrong wrong; it's the other way round. The Israel/Palestinian impasse will not be broken unless and until the sponsors of Jew-hating, America-hating, western secular democracy-hating terror in Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia are dealt with. The Palestinians could have had a state when it was offered to the Arabs in 1948; they could have had it any time between 1948 and 1967, when the West Bank was illegally occupied by Jordan and Gaza by Egypt; they could have it after 1967 when Israel offered the conquered territories to the Arabs in return for peace, which was refused; and they could have had it in 2000, when almost all the land was offered again at Taba, and to which the response was the past three years of mass murder by the Palestinians.

The Bush road map and the Europeans' approach constitute a strategy that is not merely mistaken. It has the catastrophic effect of encouraging yet more terror. This will only be addressed if Bush, Blair and European leaders finally tell the Palestinians that the game is up and that they will get no more money or support unless they stop both terror and its incitement.

But instead, victim and victimiser in the Middle East have been stood on their heads. Israel -- whose settlement policy is wrong and morally corrupting, but that is not the fundamental issue here -- has instead been demonised and dehumanised, and blamed for trying to prevent its citizens from being murdered, a defence which is represented as aggression; while the Palestinians' deliberate targeting of the innocents is said to be legitimate or understandable self-defence. It is this denial of truth, logic and history, this grotesque moral inversion, which is driving the violence in the Middle East --which, like all such terrorism, seeks to achieve precisely this kind of reversal in public opinion, in which the Europeans and Americans between them are so hideously complicit.

It is now quite clear that Robin Cook and Menzies Campbell have simply lost the capacity for rational thought. Cook says the Iraq Survey Group has told us that Saddam did not have any WMD and posed no threat to us; Campbell says it now looks more likely that Tony Blair went to war on a 'flawed prospectus'.

Now look at what that ISG report actually said.

True, Iraq was thought not to have had a 'large, ongoing, centrally controlled chemical weapons programme after 1991'. But he was exploring the possibility of resuming it, and it was still possible that his remaining chemical agents had been hidden -- the very thing that had been suspected all along. Merely a few drums of the stuff could be lethal. So why is that part of the report a 'devastating blow' to the government, as it was described in the press?

When it comes to biological weapons, moreover, the report knocks Cook, Campbell and the rest of the cerebrally twisted anti-war crowd for six. After 1996, it says, Saddam focused on small, secret operations to produce BW. The team found a 'clandestine network of laboratories and facilities' that had never previously been uncovered, and were 'key elements for maintaining a capability for resuming BW production'. Two scientists had been doing work 'directly applicable' to anthrax'. The ISG found evidence of research on new deadly biological agents, and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin.

This is indeed a 'devastating blow' - not to Blair and Bush, but to the anti-war lobby who daily assert that Saddam had destroyed his WMD programmes and was totally harmless. Why was he going to such lengths to hide all this, even after the war started, if as they assert he had nothing any more to hide? It also further underlines that he was utterly in breach of UN resolutions, the reason we went to war. And this is only an interim report.

Will the anti-war lobby now eat humble pie and admit they were utterly, totally, malevolently wrong? Not likely. For what the Iraq row has revealed is that our society now has a big problem with truth, logic and rationality. Faced with facts and evidence, it either denies them or draws from them instead the most perverse and irrational conclusions. The Iraq war is the defining event of our time, and illustrates with terrifying clarity how much of Britain has succumbed to a flight from reason itself.

Normal service will now resume after the Labour party conference failed to claim the Prime Minister's scalp (surprise, surprise). Even before The Speech on Tuesday, delegates had clearly decided to pull back from the abyss into which the media were cheerfully inviting them to leap, and allow Tony Blair to survive the week with his shamelessly stage-managed ovations.

Actually, his Olympic-standard emoting camouflaged some admirably tough talking as he stuck to his guns over Iraq and told his party to grow up a bit. But his problems haven't gone away. Iraq and Hutton apart, his biggest headaches -- over the state of the public services, crime and illegal immigration -- arise from failing to face up honestly to the difficult choices that have to be made, and then ruthlessly enforcing that incoherence from the top.

The real problem is that this is a government of tyros, who couldn't run a whelk-stall but think that idealism and 'Fuhrerprinzip' make the trains run on time. Well, now a particular idealistic chicken has come home to roost. Mr Justice Munby's ruling that NHS patients left stranded on the waiting lists have a right to go abroad for surgery and send the bill to the NHS threatens to open the floodgates -- and all because we are bound by a European law that says so, part of that European project which takes away the ability to govern of a Prime Minister who is desperate that it should do so.