Mr Blair knows what is good for you

The story goes that the late Graham Greene, having an audience of the Pope, was going on and on about the state of the world. The time came when His Holiness had heard enough. He placed a gentle hand on the novelist's arm:

"I understand, my son. I too am a Catholic."

This is not a claim that Mr Tony Blair can make. It often seems that he would like to be able to, but he cannot quite bring himself to take the plunge. He attends services, with or without his wife, rather as the mood takes him. I am told by friends that this is not proper behaviour: that while it is all right to attend a service on holiday, or a requiem mass for a departed friend, you cannot drop into church just because you feel like it unless you have first taken the prudent precaution of being received into it.

Whatever the proprieties may be, it is clear that Mr Blair is a religious man. He has been described as our most religious Prime Minister since W E Gladstone. He is certainly the most religious since Harold Macmillan, whose own convictions lay in the same direction as his but who kept much quieter about them.

I do not think the present Prime Minister will be greatly disturbed by the disapproval of the Pope, of the Archbishop of Canterbury and of the Archbishop of Westminster. This is because he has complete confidence in his convictions about what is right and wrong. It is not that he claims to have a private line to the Almighty, for that is more a Dissenting characteristic. It is, rather, that he knows, or thinks that he knows, what is good for people.

The idea that they should run their lives more or less as they choose, provided they do not interfere with their neighbours or frighten the horses, is foreign to his way of thinking. It is what he once described as "libertarian nonsense". It is doubtful whether he believes in a secular state, where the law is one thing and morality another, though inevitably they will be connected.

The notion that you can disapprove of some activity – even find it immoral – but nevertheless believe that citizens should be allowed to engage in it is something that Mr Blair does not understand. In this respect he is nearer to the Mohammedan fanatics on whom he has declared war than he is to any product of the Enlightenment. But then, Mr Blair's way of looking at the world also puts him at ease with Mr George Bush and those around Mr Bush, some of them Jews, others fundamentalist Christians of the most ignorant and intolerant variety.

When it became clear, some months ago, that the United States intended to attack Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein, Mr Blair confided to his friends that he could not for the life of him see what all the fuss was about. Here was a wicked tyrant, a cruel man. To bring him down would be to do the work of the Lord. It would have the additional merit of putting into practice his speech at the party conference in which, for "Education, education, education", he had substituted "Intervention, intervention, intervention". This initial response he brought out of the cupboard in his speech last Saturday, an account of which appeared under the satisfying headline "Blair's Appeal to Morality".

He had tried another appeal to morality a few days previously. He said then that the fall of Saddam would relieve the Iraqi people of the misery of sanctions. But had not sanctions been imposed by us in the first place? Yes, indeed: but the misery was being caused by Saddam on account of the way he was interpreting them. Backwards rolled the logic until reeled the mind.

On the whole, however, Mr Blair's approach has been more pragmatic. Al-Qa'ida may come and go in government propaganda, depending on the latest PhD thesis which has been disinterred by neophytes in No 10. What has remained constant is the supposed threat presented by Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, as dangerous as those possessed by other unstable powers – North Korea, Pakistan, Sir Alex Ferguson. But here too the story varies.

At one minute you might conclude that missiles would soon be discharged at our centres of population from bunkers buried deep in the Iraqi sands – which, as old Euclid used to say, is absurd. Then the slide is changed and we have a new picture on the screen. Saddam's agents are now about to distribute these weapons among disaffected Arabs, who will proceed to blow up Peter Jones and cause even greater chaos on the London Underground. In truth, the probability of such outrages is greater if we attack Iraq than if we desist. We are not told this.

Nor are we told that the idea of attacking Iraq and removing Saddam was conceived by a small group around Mr Bush before the awful events of 11 September. These served as a pretext for the implementation of the plan. Its purposes were to reorder the politics of the region – in particular, to safeguard the position of Israel – and also to ensure a regular supply of cheap oil.

When presented with this Mr Blair says, as if producing a conclusive argument, that there is no point in attacking Iraq for its oil when Saddam would gladly supply us with all we needed. But it would surely be preferable to get the stuff from sources which we controlled, or even owned, than to have to rely on someone so unreliable as Saddam? That is Mr Bush's argument.

It is inconceivable that a majority of the parliamentary party and of the Cabinet alike are unaware of it. For the moment, they are prepared to go along with Mr Blair's pieties. He has so far enjoyed great good fortune in his foreign adventures. He has also won two elections with huge majorities. He has kept MPs in their seats, ministers in their jobs. The same considerations, admittedly, did not save Margaret Thatcher, who had won not two but three elections. There was then a plausible challenger in Michael Heseltine. Who is the Heseltine of today?

Is it Mr Gordon Brown? But Mr Brown's reputation is not what it was even a few months ago. Moreover, he has made a speech favouring the Iraq operation, though it was not among his more eloquent performances. More eloquent but making even less sense was Mr John Prescott. That old hard-leftist Mrs Margaret Beckett has also chipped in on the Prime Minister's side. Ms Clare Short has made disapproving noises but Mr Robin Cook has stayed silent. If I were in the Stasi (so far loyal to Our Beloved Leader), I should keep a close eye on Mr Cook, on Mr Peter Hain – who is a year older than Mr Brown – and on Mr Charles Clarke.

But everything depends not so much on the second resolution as on gaining the authority of the UN. It depends primarily on winning nine votes in the Security Council. If these are obtained, Mr Blair can dismiss any vetoes as "unreasonable". After all, he knows what is right.