THE tension climbed, Parliament rose to the occasion, and the oratory soared into the gathering clouds.

The debate on war with Iraq, perhaps the last chance to hear the collective voice of Parliament before this is drowned by gunfire, was extraordinary in its intensity and seriousness, the most emotive and stirring parliamentary event of this Government.

In place of the burping platitudes, the ritual carping and toadying, there was real passion, and profound foreboding. Few minds, I suspect, were changed, but the arguments were delivered with gravity and feeling, as every conscience was weighed out, word by deliberate word.

War remakes the rules. The most impassioned defenders of Tony Blair were Tory; his most anxious questioners were former Labour Cabinet ministers. As conflict crept closer, civil war broke out between pacific-rebels and warrior-loyalists, but civilly, with a courtesy befitting the moment.

“This is the hardest issue I’ve ever had to deal with,” said Jack Straw, usually jolting like a stalling car, yesterday eloquent and intense. “Today Iraq has found a bomb,” he scorned, “as if it had just popped up from some gooseberry bush.”

“This may be the last chance,” declared Labour’s Chris Smith, leading the rebellion against his Government, pallid, pained, and apocalyptic. “We’re talking about going to war. We’re talking about thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of innocent lives lost; we’re talking about the alienation of moderate Muslim opinion across the world.”

Ken Clarke, an unlikely mirror image, backed the rebel amendment. Tony Blair, he said, speaking in rolling cadences and without notes, had “adopted the classic Churchillian position”. And yet he doubted, persuasively. “I cannot rid myself of doubts that the course of war we are embarked upon was decided on many months ago, primarily in Washington.”

Michael Portillo popped up from the back bench, as if from under a gooseberry bush, and gazed down, holding up his folded spectacles to one eye like a lorgnette. “Weakness would bring more terror, not less,” he flashed. The silence greeting this remark suggests Portillo may indeed have won himself the role of Tory gooseberry by trying to harvest dissent before it ripens.

Stresslines cracked across the parties. The former Labour Defence Minister Peter Kilfoyle described himself as a “party loyalist” as he hammered the “ideological hawks in the US Administration”. Straw snorted. “The Foreign Secretary laughs,” snapped Kilfoyle. “Look at the record.”

The Labour MP Ann Clwyd recounted, to a hushed House, the unspeakable horrors inflicted by Saddam on Iraq’s minorities. When Tory Bob Spink tried to intervene, he was hushed from all sides.

Alan Simpson, another Labour rebel, said the Government’s march to war showed the “sorry state of the current Parliament”; but while the tone was sorrowful in yesterday’s debate, the quality of argument was anything but.

Churchill loomed over the gallery. Here, too, was Gladstone, quoted by Tory Sir Patrick Cormack, “clearing out the Turks, bag and baggage, from the provinces they have desolated and profaned”.

High in the gallery sat another former leader: John Major, unobserved, quietly observing the battle below.

“If we allow this evil tyrant to get away with it, we will go into this century with our own credibility and the security of our own people at risk,” boomed Sir Patrick.

Major nodded. So, invisibly, did Churchill. But from end to end of the packed Labour back bench, the heads slowly shook, sombre and mutinous.

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