I can remember exactly where I was when I experienced my first spasm of savage Right-wing indignation. It was 1984, at breakfast time – about 10.40am – and I had a spoonful of Harvest Crunch halfway to my lips. The place was the Junior Common Room of my college.

For the previous two decades I had viewed politics with a perfectly proper mixture of cynicism and apathy. Whatever I read under the bedclothes, it certainly wasn’t Hansard. Like everyone at my school, I had undergone vague sensations of enthusiasm when the Falklands were recaptured, but otherwise, frankly, I did not give a monkey’s.

Occasionally I would glance at the political columnists in the newspapers, and be amazed that anyone could pay them to write such tosh. I hadn’t a clue who was in the Cabinet. The world was too beautiful to waste time on such questions.

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On the great questions of pregnancy and birth, there are many details hidden from me. One thing, however, I know. If you happen to be nine months’ pregnant, and wondering when junior will make an appearance, I know what to do. If you have one of those babies that seems to prefer the womb to the terrors of the world, I have an infallible solution.

You go to Legoland. To be exact, you go to those deceptively simple whirly teacup things, and you subject the human body to the most extraordinary stresses and shears. Your teacup rotates in one direction. The teatray spins the other way. After barely a minute of this I guarantee that – pop – you will have the makings of an expensive event.

It is in memory of this breakthrough in obstetrics that, every year, we go to the Windsor-based theme park, built to celebrate those little plastic cuboids that are so painful to tread on in bare feet.

Rain or shine, we always have a lovely time. The great thing about Legoland is that you are outdoors for the whole day and, at the end, you have that nice, stretched, slightly sunburnt feeling, as if you have played a game of cricket.

Every year we look, with enormous satisfaction, at the Lego Grand Place, Lego San Gimignano, Lego Scottish petrol station and all the million and one other tricks you can do with an irritatingly pointy plastic brick.

Every year, I study my fellow pilgrims to this shrine of fecundity: the mums, the dads, the buggy-borne babies, many of them no doubt induced by the teacup technique.

Such is my professional deformation that I find myself wondering about the politics of these hordes of Lego-persons, and what Legoland has to teach us about their priorities…

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Put down The Da Vinci Code. Jack in the Grisham. Let Jilly Cooper turn yellow and wilt by the pool. I have before me a beach read more shocking than the schlockiest bonkbuster (editing pdfs). It is only 80 pages, so you ought to be able to knock it off after even the most vinous siesta. Like all the best holiday reads, the idea is simple. A couple of academics have taken the words of Tony Blair on the subject of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction. They have culled each top-spun, souped-up, over-egged quotation, and set it side by side with what the Prime Minister was actually being told about those WMD. You are left at the end feeling angry and bewildered that Blair should take us all for such mugs.

It is not so much that he lied (though many of his statements were at odds with reality): it is rather that he used all his lawyerly arts, and all the trust that is naturally reposed in his office, to communicate to the public a vast untruth. He told us that Saddam Hussein was a present and growing threat to British interests, when this was not the case. He told us that his information was based on reports that were “extensive, detailed and authoritative”, when the intelligence services – for all their failings – had inserted crucial saving clauses. The charge against Blair is that he wilfully misrepresented the facts to the Commons and to the country when we voted to go to war.

What makes me angry is that he concentrated on this casus belli – WMD – when some of us argued for ages that it was nonsense. I said in this space almost two years ago (Saddam must go, but don’t lie about the reasons) that there was a good case for getting rid of the Iraqi leader, but that Blair was not making it. Many of us felt that the public deserved to be told the real reasons for the war: that the Americans had decided that the world would be a safer place for regime change in Iraq, and that it might be possible to sow the seeds of democracy there and (incidentally) to end the appalling abuses of the Saddam regime.

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Related link: ImpeachBlair.org

Many years ago, I was polishing off a bottle of wine when I had a startling phone call. It was a student from my former place of higher education, and he wanted my money. Would I make a donation to the old college? he asked.

Wasn’t my time there absolutely maaahvellous? And, because there was something slightly supercilious in his voice, I almost told him to go to blazes, and then I thought, hold on: he’s right.

I was transported back to my four-year stint of indolence, fuelled by taxpayer-funded champagne.

Call me sentimental, but I was seized by the desire to ensure that others could enjoy the benefits of this unique method of instruction, and before I could stop myself I had coughed up my bank details.

For almost 10 years, I have preened myself on this single modest benefaction. Higher education continues to be woefully underfunded; my college continues to beg; and yet I always tell myself that I have done my bit.

Not a bean, not a brass farthing, have I added to my original donation. I say this partly in a spirit of self-flagellation, and partly because I hope to embarrass others who may be in my position; because it has lately been borne in upon me that we Brits – especially by comparison with the Americans – are so miserly, niggardly, scrooge-like and generally mean that we ought to be ashamed.

I don’t just mean in the field of higher education, where Americans give, or give back, to their places of nurture on a scale that we find unthinkable.

Our relative stinginess is evident also in the arts, about whose funding I am now in almost constant meditation, and in every other area of charitable giving.

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To his legions of admirers, Lord Butler of Brockwell is known as a man of boundless optimism. If there is a blizzard outside the chalet, Lord Butler’s place is on the piste. If there is ice on the swimming pool, the Butler head is the first to broach it, notwithstanding the first-class brain within.

Facing a nation made deeply mistrustful by the relentless no-show of the weapons of mass destruction, Lord Butler could not help himself. Like a man driving a carload of squabbling children to a distant beach, he was determined to look on the bright side.

Look here, he said: how do you know these WMD are not going to turn up? Someone had sent his committee a fascinating picture of an Iraqi fighter plane buried in the sand, apparently in an effort to hide it. Well, said Lord Butler, in a remark that would get him an A in Key Stage 2 geography, “There is a lot of sand in Iraq.”

One can imagine the excitement his words will provoke in those of a romantic and enterprising disposition. Even now, epicene undergraduates will be vying for sponsorship for their expeditions of WMD discovery, and who knows what long-lost objects they may turn up in the sands of Mesopotamia.

They may find the plane of Amelia Earhart, or the racehorse Shergar, or perhaps Lord Lucan will spring from the dunes where he has been shacked up with an abominable snow-woman.

But it is frankly hard to believe, more than a year after the end of the war, that they will find a significant quantity of weapons of mass destruction. Not even Blair seems any longer to believe in their existence. He told a Commons committee the other day that he had given up hope of finding the objects that were essential to his casus belli.

And yet this is the Blair who, in September 2002, has “absolutely no doubt that they existed and they were a threat to this country’s interests”. As he told the Commons, the threat of Saddam and weapons of mass destruction is not American or British propaganda. “The history and present threat are real.”

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You see, if you were an ancient Athenian politician and you went bald, things were so much easier. You didn’t have to worry that the electorate would harp on about it, as they do when confronted by a bald Tory leader, no matter how brilliant.

Take the case of Pericles. The Athenian leader was a bit of a slaphead with a dolichocephalic skull; but instead of going around enduring the jeers of the ancient tabloid media, he had a very cool solution. He just wore a hoplite helmet, morning noon and night.

I know this because I have just bought, from the British Museum’s magnificent shop, the last plaster cast of the 2nd-century Roman copy of the 5th-century BC bust of Pericles by Kresilas. It weighs 23.5kg and is totally fab, if you ignore a few blue crayon marks, which enabled me to knock a few quid off. I stood before it in the shop and reflected that I was only three removes away from the position of the sculptor who stood before one of the greatest statesmen who ever lived. Cor! I thought to myself as we bubblewrapped it. Pericles, eh!

And then it occurred to me that I ought to go and look at the sculpture proper, the one that is only two removes away. So I wandered into the Duveen galleries and pondered again the mysteries of the panathenaic frieze. Are the 192 riders symbolic of the 192 survivors of the Battle of Marathon, that archetypical triumph of Western civilisation over barbarism? Just what are those maidens about to do with that towel?

And as I left, my feet aching, my brain glutted, I remembered the object of my mission. Normally he was there on the left as you go in, on a kind of proprietorial plinth. I turned to the attendant. Where was the marble bust of Pericles, son of Xanthippus? I’m sorry, sir, said that kindly man. He’s in room 15 and room 15 is shut.

Shut? I said. That’s right, he said, shut because of staff shortages. In fact, he said, there were more rooms shut these days than there were nine years ago when he joined.

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Ah the sweet and eternal fixtures of the English summer. Ascot. The Henley regatta. The cataclysmic inundations of late June. And where would we be without Wimbledon?

For some of us the joy is not just in the competition, but in the metronomic regularity of its key events. First there is the article in the Sunday press by John McEnroe. Here, in return for we know not what financial consideration, the former champ opines with reassuring predictability that this year “Tiger” Tim Henman has what it takes to win for the home country.

Every year we read McEnroe’s sage analysis, and we feel the same surging hope; and every year the last sheeplike bleat of “Come on Tim!” dies on Henman Hill, as our national star is duly thrashed out of sight by some teenage beanpole Croat, invariably in the semis or quarter-final of the tournament. In its formality, its ritual, the Henman exit is like the chiming of Big Ben or the Changing of the Guard, and whatever they say about Britain today, we can still run a ceremony like clockwork. Goodbye Tim, and see you next year!

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It is a feature of my psychology (and perhaps yours, too) that I never really lose my rag in political arguments, except when confronted by unreasonableness on the part of those I know and love. At which point I blow a gasket. So it fell that the other day I was sitting at some dinner party next to the wife of an old friend, and she started in on the classic posh-liberal routine, about why only the Labour Party can really be trusted with the NHS. “What you Tories don’t understand,” she said, as I glowered at my plate, “is the role the health service plays in bringing us all TOGETHER.

“It unites the NATION. I was sitting in a ward the other day, after having some operation done, and thinking how MAAHVELLOUS it was to be among all these people, from all walks of life, and all races, and I realised we were all in a sense equal. I mean, I don’t think I ever feel so close to the rest of society as I do in a hospital.” Really? I said. Not even on the beach?

“Not the kind of beaches I go to,” she tinkled; and on she went, explaining how maahvellous it was that the duke and dustman were treated alike in our glorious New Jerusalem, watching the same TV, eating the same spotted dick, attended by the same starch-bosomed nurses. It was a wonderful system, she said, and to prove her point she revealed her own recent miracle experience.

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No, my friends, your eyes are not deceiving you. They are everywhere. They are up in the windows of the terraces of London. They flutter from car windows. They are suspended from bridges. They fly from aerials. In just four days, they will be slathered in lipstick and white greasepaint on the faces of thousands of us, opening our mouths in a hysterical yodel of support for our boys.

Never in history has the flag of St George been so popular. Never has it been so prevalent in the decor of our streets. Three million have been rushed out in the last month by one factory alone; leading British supplier Local Boyz Ltd has sold out; in the factories of Kowloon and Guangdong, whole production lines are being converted to the desperate task of meeting the patriotic demand.

By Sunday evening, when Becks and co meet Henry and the rest of the French, I predict that the entire nation will be punctuated with the red and white symbol, like some vast vanilla and strawberry pudding; and what makes it all the more extraordinary is that, 25 years ago, it was a mere curiosity.

The flag of our country was the Union Jack, or the Union flag, as sub-editors – quite rightly – insist on calling it. We all knew that the flag of England was the red cross of St George, that faintly disreputable Cappadocian merchant who made a fortune out of selling bacon to the crusaders.

But we didn’t think of it as our flag, did we? We didn’t go around painting it all over our girlfriends’ noses, or wearing it on our bras or our underpants, not unless we were more than averagely peculiar.

So what does it mean, professor? Vot are ze semiotics of zis flag? I will tell you. It means most obviously that we are keen supporters of the English football team, and are hoping against hope that Becks will banana it past the French. But there is more to it, I contend, than that. The popularity of the English flag is a huge political message, a statement of exuberant loyalty, and also of a certain frustration.

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B-b-but Joanie, I thought, whimpering like a whipped cur, what have I done to deserve this? It falls to every man to receive his share of humiliation at the hands of the female sex. But never, surely, has an innocent wooer been requited with such a deafening slap on the cheek.

To say that I have fawned on Joan Collins is to do an injustice to the Amoco Cadiz quantities of top grade oil I have lavished on Britain’s foremost female film star.

Years ago I interviewed her for this newspaper. I laid it on with a trowel, and of course she deserved it. They asked me to review her novel Too Damn Famous. I pronounced it little short of superb. As our relationship bloomed, I was privileged to publish her excellent diaries in the pages of The Spectator. When there was some mix-up, and we had to hold her piece over for a week, I sent her a bunch of flowers roughly the size and shape of an armchair.

Fool that I was, I came to think there was a bond between us. I imagined that she was my ideological soulmate. And so you can imagine my pleasure when the Evening Standard rang a few weeks ago, and told me that Joan was backing the Tories – yes, the Tories. She was particularly impressed by Michael Howard, they said. Did I have anything to do with it, the Standard wanted to know, and I am afraid to say that I preened. I of course denied that I could in any way have influenced her decision, but my vanity allowed me to hope that I did.

Fool, fool, fool! As you will now have seen from the news, Joan Collins is not backing the Conservatives at the Euroelections. Here I am, vice-chairman of the Conservative Party, having spent nigh on 10 years sucking up to Joan Collins, and what do I get? At this critical moment, just when the Blair Government is on the ropes, just when the Tories at last have the wind in their sails – what does she do? She chucks me over for UKIP. She has succumbed to the charms of Robert Kilroy-Silk, he of the Aztec chiselled chin and the skin the colour of marmalade.

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