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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