It is as if the Serbian dictator had reoccupied the Rhineland annexed Czechoslovakia invaded Poland attacked this country and conquered France and was

It is as if the Serbian dictator had reoccupied the Rhineland, annexed Czechoslovakia, invaded Poland, attacked this country and conquered France, and was about to move against Russia. Mr Bill Clinton seems to follow breathlessly in his wake, like Franklin Roosevelt after Churchill.Indeed, Mrs Madeleine Albright had to issue a correction last week after Mr Blair was reported saying that the war would not be over until Mr Milosevic had been brought down. Mrs Albright replied sharply (or it was said on her behalf) that such an outcome formed no part of Nato policy No 10 then altered what Mr Blair was supposed to have said. Mr Milosevic must stop his present policies: that was what Mr Blair meant, or so we were informed.Even so, the aims of the alliance, as stated by Mr Blair and his government colleagues, change from week to week, sometimes from day to day. We began by bombing Serbia to try to compel that country to accept the Rambouillet agreement. In so doing - forcing another country to accept an agreement to which it was not a party - we were in breach of the Geneva Convention No matter.

On 23 March Mr Blair talked about Kosovo as a continuing part of the Yugoslav federation, with Nato forces present as observers This is what Mr Milosevic refused to accept. Mr Blair mentioned a referendum after three years about Kosovan independence. Why, he might just as well have been discussing the future of devolution in Wales.The accusation about which Mr Blair has so far proved most sensitive is that he and Mr Clinton caused the refugee crisis. Not so, say Mr Alastair Campbell, his acolytes and his imitators: Mr Milosevic caused it. As Francis Bacon wrote, it were infinite to judge causes, or the causes of causes. What is indisputable is that Mr Milosevic's cruel persecution of the Kosovo Albanians accelerated steeply after the start of the bombing and that the rate of acceleration has increased since. And what is equally manifest is that Nato went into the war to save the Kosovo Albanians.

This the alliance has signally failed to accomplish: quite the reverse in fact.The war aim has accordingly changed. The latest one, as I write (for it may change again), is that the Kosovo Albanians are to be restored to their former habitations, burnt down as most of them unfortunately are, there to reside in peace and tranquillity alongside those Serbs who may wish to join them.Mr Blair's experience in Northern Ireland must have taught him that, whatever politicians can accomplish, what they cannot do is compel people to love one another. In 1969 Wilson and James Callaghan put troops into that country to protect the Roman Catholic population of Belfast. They are still there, though it is the Catholics who, by and large, have long wanted them to leave. In 2030 we may find that the Mohammedans want us to remove ourselves from Kosovo.If there was a consensus to last week's troubled debate, it was that a vote in the Commons should precede any commitment of troops to Kosovo. As Mr Tony Benn has often had occasion to point out, under our monarchical constitution, on to which a democratic covering has been welded, only the Queen can declare war But then, we are apparently not at war either; or not yet.

We may feel we are when the fragile coffins are loaded off the big aeroplanes. The body bags may come later, when we have run out of the makeshift coffins.It may be, however, that what will turn the voters against the war will be not so much the assault on their emotions as on their wallets Two weeks ago I brought up the cost of the war. The question has since been taken up by several papers and magazines. If Mr Blair's bet is ever called in, the beneficiary may be Mr Brown.

Mr Blair may end up finding that, as the poet says, he has had no end of a lesson, which will have done him - though not necessarily the rest of us - no end of good.. Hers was a true triumph of the will. She had a certain idea of Britain which, for a decade, she forced the British people to adopt and live up to, rather as De Gaulle, by a comparable triumph of his will, forced the French people, for a time, to live up to his certain idea of France. But whereas De Gaulle was a hero built to a familiar, military pattern, the man on a white horse with a commanding eye and a silver tongue, Mrs Thatcher, at any rate as I remember her first, was anything but - a twin-set-and-pearls middle-class matron in early middle age sitting alone at a British Rail dining car table making her way to Blackpool for a party conference in the 1960s. I was on that train with Pamela Berry, my then boss's dynamic wife and a leading London hostess, and I remember with shame how unwilling we were to join her, so little by way of good company did this rather mousy figure, poring over her papers, seem to promise.