If this war were down to me it would be on-again, off-again like Ken and Deirdre in Eighties Coronation Street. I don’t know what I think about it. On the one hand, I was very pleased when a million people turned up for the big peace march in London last month, because it’s great to see people showing a passion for politics in such a jaded age, and parking in Waitrose that day was much easier — right next to the trolley park! On the other hand, however, every marcher that the BBC News 24 reporters grabbed for a comment seemed to be so unbearably studenty and ill-informed about the whole thing that I felt like opening a desultory sea-port on my upper left leg, claiming I was France and signing the UN’s second resolution, plus a formal apology for the invention of the accordion, there and then.

“This war is about oil!” Yes, but so is your car and most of Western life. “War is never right!” What about the Nazis? “Tony Blair is acting like a Nazi!” No he isn’t. I can assure you that, however difficult it is to push through green-belt planning legislation, the Government isn’t going to use whatever’s left of Baghdad for Lebensraum and the fourth runway at Heathrow.

Mind you, although I know enough to know when other people are being stupid, I still don’t know enough to be clever myself. As is always the case with not being clever, this is a tremendous burden — although it’s never voiced, there is a vague tendency for people to think that, because you work for a broadsheet, you know the inside track on the current situation. A suspicion that Anatole Kaletsky has sent every fellow staff member a simple algebraic equation, called Anatole’s Mega Paradigm, explaining it all. But apart from when I met Michael Gove at a wedding, and we talked about how much we loved Ground Force for an hour, I only know other arts correspondents. We’re clueless about France’s long-term political agenda. We wouldn’t even have a wild stab in the dark at whether this war is right or wrong — all we do know is that war usually means a great many bad anti-war singles, and we’re quite strongly opposed to that. Charlie, who’s a fashion journalist, was tipped into anti-war by the thought that combat trousers would become passé in times of real military action; and James on the Telegraph is pro-war solely because light entertainment chanteuse Martine McCutcheon is anti and “she hasn’t made a decent judgment call since she was sick on Mick Hucknall from Simply Red’s hair” — but this is the extent of our informed opinions. The only person I know who seems to have any knowledge at all on the subject is my friend Andrew, who despite also being an arts correspondent — and already campaigning for the George Michael anti-war single, The Grave, to be placed within a UN cordon and then bombed back to the Stone Age — also has a father who’s second-in-command of the Australian Army. Andrew and I once spent a whole evening with him sighing “It’s just a springboard to Iran, anyway,” and smashing another George Michael CD with a hammer. But then Andrew said that the French would definitely come on board for a second resolution, “because they’re just showing off, like the French always do”, and of course the French didn’t, in the end, so I now feel I have no info-crutch at all.

My bottom line of anti-war is the feeling that, since September 11, the United States has been spoiling for a fight, and that a war with Iraq feels like George Bush randomly stuck a pin in his Texan’s Guide to World Dictators. Additionally, I feel really ticking off a third of the world’s population is something that’s going to backfire very badly at some point, and that if I’m the patsy on the Tube sitting next to the suitcase of anthrax when it explodes at Moorgate, I’m going to be very annoyed.

My pro-war bottom line, on the other hand, is that even if this is “all about oil”, then however pleased George Bush and his friends are going to be with their extra trillion dollars, they’re not going to be as pleased as the population of Iraq when they suddenly stop being starved and tortured.

And so the question isn’t “Are you pro or anti-war?” at all. The real question is “Are you pro or anti Tony Blair acting against the wishes of his party and his country in teaming up with George Bush in a pre-emptive bombing expedition in Iraq that threatens the future of the UN — and in PR terms isn’t winning us any friends east of Cairo — but which might over-throw the unquestionably vile President Saddam Hussein, albeit at the expense of burning children to death? And oil?” And as you can see, that’s 11 questions; leaving a single “yes” or “no” a further ten answers short of any kind of conclusion.

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