Driving out the tartan Saddam

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There is at the moment a torrent of articles and cartoons using events in Afghanistan as a device to illuminate the continuing domestic struggle between the Prime Minister and his Chancellor, who are routinely depicted as rival Afghan warlords.

Diverting as these might be, I think the analogy is misplaced. A more useful point of comparison is with the situation a decade ago, when Messrs Brown and Blair were bright young men on the make and George Herbert Walker Bush ran the White House.

Mr Blair is Bush Snr, of course, while the Chancellor is his Saddam Hussein. For some time Blair's army, led by Stormin' Ali Campbell, has been systematically destroying Brown's Republican Guard. It has now taken out every key member of his rogue administration from Charlie Whelan, Gordon's Tariq Aziz, to the former Chief Whip Nick Brown, his head of secret police.

Today, like the Iraqi dictator in 2001, Brown is as weakened and isolated as he will ever be, and the moment of crisis arrives. The question is whether Blair has the guts to make the short and militarily straightforward but politically perilous march on the Baghdad next door.

In 1991, Bush Snr decided not to, partly at least through fear of whatever chemical or biological horrors Saddam might have had up his sleeve. Thus it appears to be in Downing Street today. Beyond dispute, Mr Blair's most fervent wish is to invade, drive out the tartan Saddam, and insert a puppet regime to run the Treasury under a sort of No 10 protectorate. His problem is terror of the guerrilla warfare that would ensue. He cannot be sure precisely what weapons Brown has been developing in the No 11 labs, but he knows that they are there and will be used. Is it worth the risk?

Everyone should by now be as thoroughly sick of Mr Brown's aggressive acquisitiveness as Mr Blair himself. Brown has been allowed, unopposed, to annex all the little Kuwaits around him - Transport, for example, as Tube users know to their fury, and Health, which for years he starved of money and medicines, much as Saddam did to his Kurds.

But now Blair the war hero is at the peak of his authority, while the road to No 11 is clear. He has the power to remove a brooding egomaniacwho makes no pretence of his masterplan to rebuild his army and dominate the entire region. The campaign would be quick and bloodless, but dare he risk the reprisals? If Mr Blair is serious when he says that appeasing terrorists is a catastrophic misjudgment - that the longer you turn a blind eye, the more grief you store up for tomorrow - the answer must be yes. He will never find a better time to finish the job. But if he chickens out he will not merely look a right Herbert, but will commit a sin of omission that will one day - and far sooner than a decade down the line - give him cause for the most painful regret.

Meanwhile, another danger has been averted. Even for as fine a writer as John Sullivan, the temptation to sacrifice characterisation on the altar of a huge one-off laugh might have been too strong. However, any Trotter progress beyond the £500 question would have been a mistake, and by the time Del Boy felt obliged to label phone-a-friend Rodney a plonker, for positing that the Greek tragedian responsible for Iphigenia At Aulis was Testicles, the once great character of Derek Trotter would have become a sad pastiche.

This is in no way to trivialise the near pandemic of asthma, which so sadly killed the actress Charlotte Coleman last week, or other conditions. However, to boost the headline mortality figure to 153,000, thereby "beating" cancer and heart disease, when so many elderly people develop it only because they are dying already and cannot move (so that the fluid settles on the lungs), is an act of distortion that weakens what would otherwise be a more credible case.

Watching a documentary about Cabinet government on Saturday was a wretched experience. It wasn't that the concept has become so outmoded (like the House of Commons, it will recover once we have a government with a small majority which has no choice but to placate all the various factions within the party). What was so depressing was the archive footage of the Wilson Cabinets. Jenkins, George Brown, Callaghan, Healey, Crossman, Foot, Castle, Benn, Shirley Williams - regardless of all the internecine fighting, every one was a political titan with a first-rate mind.

Except perhaps for Gordon Brown (who, for all his craziness, does have a brain), you cannot visualise one of the current bunch, including Mr Blair, getting close to one of those Cabinets. Under Wilson, most of these pygmies would have been flattered to make Minister of State.