Tomorrow the Prime Minister is going to announce our plans for Iraq, or at least they say this on the BBC, and that must count for something. Since the thing that he's going to announce (that we are going to try and get a UN resolution, but if one isn't forthcoming we're going to make war without it) is already well known, it's not on the face of it obvious why the announcement has to happen at all, let alone, as the oracles tell us to expect, in the form of a speech to the TUC conference. To the TUC conference? You could hardly come up with a more hostile audience, or one whose views mattered less. What is he playing at? Well, the answer is, he's being very clever.
The thing of it is, oddly enough, the bellicose view is, even in Britain, the minority view. It doesn't help that George Bush has, quite unfairly I think, become a figure of fun. Now it's getting to the stage that backing the war on Iraq is like being against multi-culturalism or in favour of fox-hunting; it may or may not be a sustainable position, but one never gets to advance the arguments because everyone already knows that it's a position only adopted by fringe nutters.
And this is what makes it so clever that he's going to the TUC. Because what's going to happen is that his speech will be hissed, and then some pantomime figure like Bob Crow will make the kind of speech that I often heard made at student union meetings when I was doing my A levels at an inner London FE college in the 1980s. And in the blink of an eye it will be abundantly clear who the real peripheral loonies are. I guarantee tomorrow will mark the beginning of a change in British public opinion on the coming war on Iraq. If Bob Crow thinks it's a bad idea, then it will be thought at least to merit serious consideration. By the time the war starts, most people will have come round to thinking it makes sense.