The Sketch: Now we're playing the game for you, Tony. Hope our Gatlings don't jam

The hush in the close has been pretty damn breathless over the past 10 days. It's been a bumping pitch all right, and a blinding light, last man in and 10 to win. Do you know the poem? In the last verse, there's a British Army square that breaks in the desert. The sands are soaked in blood. "The Gatling's jammed and the colonel's dead." And it is the voice of a schoolboy that rallies the ranks. Play up, and play the game! Makes you shudder, doesn't it. The voice of the schoolboy.

Anyway, enough maundering. Tony Blair has pulled it off; gone to war without a second resolution, and the rebellion (larger than I'd predicted) an immense disappointment to the anti-war movement (yes, I count myself firmly one of those few, those glorious few, proud to be the only real proponent of war in their company).

Three or four committee chairs voted for the rebel amendment: Chris Mullin, David Hinchcliffe, Tony Wright, Tony Banks, and that says something for the independence of the committee system. Well done, carry on.

Now, of course, it's time for Her Majesty's Loyal Sketchwriters to rally behind the Government and support it. People say it's time to do so. The constitution insists it is time to. Where's my watch? No, it's never that late.

The Prime Minister is almost certainly right, unless he's wrong. The slaughter will be enormous, or, possibly, negligible. There is no moral calculation here, just strategic hunches. The only thing we can rely on is Tony Blair's bottomless talent for obfuscation and groundless assertion. President Saddam is responsible for more deaths in one year than all the casualties of this war? Can that be right? What an odd thing to say. When is a veto not a veto? And why say it was the French who were responsible for the diplomatic collapse? Was Germany quite irrelevant? And China? The massive humanitarian operation we are promising: is our commitment really "total"?

Now that we've forgotten Afghanistan, and find ourselves in the process of walking away from it, is it time to remember how we promised never to walk away? In the last debates on Iraq, no one has really dealt with the arguments of Robin Cook's resignation speech.

One: There are those who claim Saddam is so weak and demoralised that the war will be over in days. "We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that is a threat."

Two: "Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term, namely, a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target." He was Foreign Secretary for four years; he had access, presumably, to privileged information?

And three: "Why is it now so urgent we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years, and which we helped to create?" The Prime Minister has at least answered this. Urgent military action is the blood price we must pay for our relationship with America.

Whose blood it is paid in, no one knows. It won't be Tony's.

simoncarr75@hotmail.com