If you want to see in its raw horror the lack of comprehension among our political class about the Libyan crisis, go to the BBC iPlayer and watch the performance of Baroness Warsi, the Conservative Party chairman, on Question Time on Thursday. Supplementing her inadequate grasp of a bad Central Office brief with globules of sentiment, emotion and downright pig ignorance, Lady Warsi was taken apart by Kelvin Mackenzie, the former tabloid editor, in a manner that stunned even me.
To be fair to her, even politicians one might expect to know what they are talking about have struggled on this question – such as Alastair Burt, the Foreign Office minister, who staggered all over the Today programme on Thursday trying to find something sensible to say, and failing. This is the problem: just five months ago, the Prime Minister chose to shut down much of our defence capacity. He has now decided he wants to act as a world policeman, and help the Libyan rebels before Benghazi is flattened. However, he has absolutely no means of carrying out this intention, except in the most marginal way, or with the help of others, such as the French, who have not made the idiotic decisions about defence that he has.
That, though, is not the end of it. Having persuaded the UN to sanction everything short of an invasion, Dave and his colleagues do not appear to have paused to consider the consequences. This was the subject of Mr Mackenzie's evisceration of Lady Warsi. If we are going to assist (with our nearly non-existent RAF, and without the aircraft carrier we are just scrapping) in the relief of Benghazi, what about the civilians that YouTube videos show being attacked by the security forces in Bahrain? What about measures that may be taken against civilians by our main ally in the region, Saudi Arabia? Or shall we choose to ignore those?
But, indeed, if we start to feel that outrages perpetrated in other countries compel us not to ignore them, how should we find the means to register a protest against them, since we do not even have the capacity to be of much use in Libya? In short, do we understand what we might be getting into, thanks to Dave's cavalier determination to pretend he leads a country that still has influence? Do we understand that Wootton Bassett could find itself permanently on parade if we do not get a grip, and think of the realities of our predicament and our place in the world? What if the no-fly zone isn't enough?
