The Sketch: Hoon does have safe hands. Shame about the mouth

If Saddam Hussein needs something to do after the war he could always be a sketch writer. "The hissing of snakes" was his description of the parliamentary discourse of our leaders, along with "the barking of dogs".

Deft, fresh and true, poetically true at least, spiritually true, perhaps.

Perfectly good enough to get into print. And all he'd have to do to get the job would be to shoot one of the incumbents. This style of negotiation is the only kind newspaper executives fully understand.

Geoff Hoon is trying to conceal how much he is enjoying himself. Wars, you understand, are what ministers of war are for. He's walking around the Palace of Westminster with a submarine sticking out of his pants.

He tells us about the aircraft carrier he is going to deploy, the frigates, the troop carriers, the anti-mining ships. "Go he saith, and they goeth." Forty thousand men do what he tells them to do. No politician is immune from this most fundamental form of flattery.

So he has taken to leaning on the dispatch box and cocking his other elbow up behind him in a familiar pose. He has perceptibly deepened his voice, slowed his rate of utterance and affected a mild speech impediment. He almost certainly saw Albert Finney doing Churchill on television over the weekend. Mr Hoon's real speech impediment is, of course, his brain.

"If it is necessary, ultimately, to resort to military action, that, then, will be necessary." Mr Hoon is one of those poor saps who is known as a safe pair of hands. Safe hands, shame about the mouth.

Tam Dalyell asked what thinking had been done about what we'd do if and when we found ourselves in Baghdad. The minister paused fatly. "Clearly there is consideration as there always is in this kind of prospective military action of what might occur thereafter," he said. There's no excuse for that kind of talk. If I was in the Army, frankly, I'd hear that and desert.

Try it for yourself, it's Channel Four Churchill: "I will endeavour to answer his questions as best I can, given obvious reasons why some of his points should not be addressed on the floor of the House."

Douglas Hogg observed: "Many of us do not believe that the threat posed by Iraq is not sufficiently imminent or grave as to provide a moral basis for war."

Mr Hoon replied that the moral basis wasn't the point; there was a legal basis that was important (compare and contrast the captain who hanged Billy Budd. "I'm not talking about justice, I'm talking about the law!")

Whatever the minister says, the troops are going off with the sort of equipment you'd expect from the British public service.

A Tory called Flook informed the house that a training exercise in his part of the world started with 70 radios. By the end of the weekend only 22 of them were working. Terrible doubts hang over the medical preparation. "The lessons have been learnt," Mr Hoon keeps saying. What? The troops have boots, now? They have rifles that work?

Mr Hoon was, as a member pointed out, "at best reticent" about the medical personnel. Fifteen hundred reservists are being called up; our troop strength is rumoured to be in the region of 40,000.

We have 26 surgeons in place to operate on the wounded, a full eight of whom are orthopaedic surgeons. Well, maybe they can work double shifts. Mr Hoon told us so often that it was important our troops were properly supported so perhaps that is what he meant.

The snakes hiss, the dogs bark, Geoff Hoon directs our far-flung battle line, God help us all. If this is indeed a war that has to be fought, God help us all.

simoncarr75@hotmail.com