THE RECENT BOUT of renewed Clarkiness dates back, in my opinion, to the Chatham House report on terrorism. The money-quote, you may recall, as highlighted by Chatham House’s own press release, went like this: “Riding pillion with a powerful ally has proved costly in terms of British and US military lives, Iraqi lives, military expenditure and the damage caused to the counter-terrorism campaign.”

This was all lapped up, savoured and uncritically regurgitated at the time, as though the views had been expressed by the late Queen Mother or Rory Bremner. The problem was that this sentence doesn’t stand up to examination. First, ask yourself, had the UK not ridden “pillion”, would that have automatically meant no US invasion? If not, then the stuff about US and Iraqi lives and the damage done to counter-terrorism etc doesn’t hold.

But beyond that lies a bigger ponderable: what would have been the situation had there been no invasion? Saddam would be there, or maybe Uday, or if we got lucky, Qusay. Perhaps we would have continued the baby-killing sanctions on Iraq, believing (as Robin Cook did) that they contained Saddam’s military ambitions, or else — given that the sanctions regime was crumbling — we would have abandoned the measures and faced the prospect of Iraqi rearmament. Maybe Libya would have maintained its WMD programme, maybe the reform movements in the Lebanon and elsewhere — partly energised by the Iraqi elections — would not have been so strong. At the humanitarian level the actuarial calculation is difficult. Continuing subjugation for the Shia (better to live in bondage?) and attacks on the Kurds by Ansar al-Islam. Possibly London wouldn’t have been bombed. Or maybe it would have been bombed for something else.

Perhaps all that would indeed have been better, but you can no more look to Ken Clarke’s recent speech about terror and Iraq for thoughts on these questions, than you can look to the Chatham House report. The Clarkey/Chatham view seems to be that if we’d done nothing but carried on what we were doing before, then nothing very much would have happened. Consult your own short-term interests and tinker about a bit and it’ll be OK. The long term can take care of itself.

Perhaps this psychology explains why, of all things, Ken has made his money from tobacco. Lots of companies would have paid him well to represent them and help them to sell sanitary products or running machines. He chose to make his packet from fags. Deputy chairman of British Allied Tobacco, Ken has for years been assisting the flogging of gaspers to the world’s peoples — selling them the one product that we can be absolutely sure will do them harm.

It may not be illegal. Many bad things aren’t. But it is, arguably, immoral. A former Health Secretary could hardly be unaware of the arguments — it was, after all, on Ken’s watch, back in 1988, that the BMA first called for a smoking ban in public places. And to non-Clarkes the causal pattern is absurdly clear: smoking causes early death in many smokers, BAT sells cigarettes, therefore BAT makes money out of making people ill and Ken makes money out of BAT.

But perhaps he deals with this by calculating that the cancer is only putative and a way down the road. The heart disease is only possible and is distant. The bony chap with the scythe and dark robes is still a shadow. In the meantime Clarkes have to live, drive cars, eat good food and wear fedoras.

Clarkiness abhors the hyperactivity of the overexcited. Here is his rebuke to Blair, Bush and the neocons: “No amount of military action on however great a scale,” he said this week, “nor tough legislation of however draconian a nature are in themselves going to make us safer or usher in a saner world. Constructive political responses are far more important.”

You don’t say. If ever there was a politician creating a false dichotomy for his own purposes, honest Ken did it here. I challenge him to find a single speech from a leading administration or government figure that doesn’t emphasise the primacy of the political over the purely military or administrative. But they’ve gone much, much further. Ken could have contrasted Condi Rice’s recent speech about democracy in the Middle East with, say, the sentiments expressed in the memoirs of his friend and colleague, Douglas Hurd. Where Rice criticised America for having been too accommodating to friendly tyrannies in the region and thus having helped to create the conditions for terrorism, Hurd lavishes praise and warm epithets on princes, emirs and sultans, with whom we must do business. Condi Rice, however flawed the Administration in which she serves, has learnt something from 9/11, as have most serious American politicians, and most serious British ones. Ken seems to have learnt nothing.

It was appropriate that his stance should have been supported in these pages yesterday by Lord Lamont of Lerwick, British representative of the palaeo-conservative tendency. Lord Lamont urged us to follow the sage advice of Richard Nixon in arguing that we should not seek to spread democracy, or (in Nixon’s words) “presume to tell the people of other nations how to manage their own affairs”. To do otherwise, argued Lord Lamont, was “un-Conservative”.

Lamontian conservatism means letting people have tyrannies if the tyrants want them to. Selling everyone cigarettes, if that’s what they’ll pay for. Standing alongside Chilean dictators, because they can do us a good turn, and who’s to say that they’re not better than the alternative? The reckoning is a long way down the road. And then someone flies planes into high buildings.

Clarkiness is not all bad. Sometimes a bout of inaction is better than a spin-rush to action. But there was something awkward about the section of his speech dealing with policing terror. Far better than war and draconian police action, said the former Home Secretary, was to take co-ordinated international steps with our allies to strengthen policing and so on and so forth. All of which is sensible and all of which is, of course, being done.

As it happens it was in the early 1990s that Ken was Home Secretary. So one wonders what he made of this, less bruited section of the Chatham House report. “By the mid-1990s,” the authors argued, “the UK’s intelligence agencies were well aware that London was increasingly being used as a base by individuals involved in promoting, funding and planning terrorism in the Middle East and elsewhere. However, these individuals were not viewed as a threat to the UK’s national security, and so they were left to continue their activities with relative impunity . . .” By Ken, among others. It was, after all, a government devoted to ignoring the warning signs.

Ken is a good chap, of course, and engagingly free of pol-speak, but he is still another politician. His convenient discovery last week that the time will never be right for the euro reminded me of his attempted dream ticket with John Redwood in one of the Conservative Party’s many recent leadership elections (I forget which one).

Still, it is possible that he is more electorally popular than, say, David Davis. But what would be the purpose of him? To make the country feel better than it would under Gordon Brown, because of Ken’s brand of blokey pragmatism? Clarke is an attractive man, a latterday comfy-bummed Stanley Baldwin; his motto — like Baldwin’s — being “safety first” in a world in which there is no safety.

david.aaronovitch@thetimes.co.uk

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