Breakfast, west London
Ming Campbell resurfaced in public life last night. Absent from the Commons since his snap resignation, he turned up at the Tory thinktank Policy Exchange to listen to two upmarket defence analysts, Sir Michael Quinlan and Lord Charles Guthrie, who have co-authored a new book - at 50 pages, more a pamphlet really - on the concept of Just War (Bloomsbury, £10).
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I turned up too. Quinlan, who is now 77, was once a distinguished permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence, a defence intellectual and prominent Catholic layman, still very lively. A class act, whom I have never heard speak.
At the back of the hall last night my neighbour explained that Guthrie isn't as stupid as he may seem either. "You've got to pretend to be dull if you want to rise to be chief of the defence staff," he breezily declares. In the event the bluff soldier and the highbrow ex-civil servant make a good pair.
Quinlan, famous for opposing the Iraq war and for posing difficult questions for those keen to renew the Trident nuclear deterrent, constantly invokes the notion of proportionality when asked when war is justified.
How essential is it to do something rather than nothing? What are the alternatives to war? How great is the likelihood that you will do more good than harm? He gives some intriguing examples. For instance, a short war may be more humane than long-term sanctions.
Quinlan is also bothered by the international community's failure to prevent the Rwanda massacres of the early '90s (as I type the radio suggests that Hutu and Tutsi may be squaring up to each other again) which killed nearly one million people.
What if the UN had acted effectively and 5,000 people had been killed as a result? There would have been a "ruckus" - because no one could have imagined the alternative, he ruminates.
Lord Guthrie says many people in Britain felt it was "unfair" to bomb Serbia from 20,000ft because the Serbs couldn't bomb us back. Wrong. It was the quickest way to end the war.
Guthrie opposes action in Zimbabwe for pragmatic reasons. It's a huge country, we don't have the forces, it would make things worse. He defends his army's intervention in Sierra Leone's civil war without UN authority - it made a difference. "If we had left it to the UN nothing would have happened."
This is true. Iran? Both men are wary of an attack. Israel lacks the military capacity to take out Tehran's sophisticated and scattered nuclear plants. Its attack on Saddam Hussein's nuclear facility at Osirak ("O'Chirac" as the anti-French joke goes) in 1981 probably speeded up the Iraqi programme. Saddam put more men and money into it as a result, they say. A US attack on Iran might well have the same result, after some delay.
Sir Michael appears to suggest that mutual nuclear deterrence might allow Iran and Israel to co-exist. "Even Mr Ahmadinejad would realise it would spoil his afternoon if he received two or three Israeli nuclear weapons," he says with mild understatement.
The two remarks I will remember are Guthrie asking whether Britain was "justified" in fighting World War II. Most people would say yes, but we emerged much worse off than we started. "It's worth mulling over," he tells his audience.
At one point when Quinlan has been weighing up pros and cons he says of inaction in Darfur and Rwanda: "The deaths of innocents take a lot of outweighing." A flash of passion there.
Sir Ming (who has come uninvited) sits in the throng with Michael Moore, his successor as Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesman. He asks a good question about the use of nuclear weapons always being disproportionate.
Quinlan replies that disproportionality is always proportionate between two things. He cites a possible showdown between India and Pakistan - as nearly happened in 2002. Faced with overwhelming defeat Pakistan might have felt justified in using a nuclear weapon.
After the thanks (a short speech by Sir Ming), I leave the event with Labour backbench rebel Bob Marshall Andrews, who has lavishly praised both speakers as "wonderful".
Bob is usually at one's throat or knees and overdoes it in both directions, though he told a very good joke on Have I Got News For You on Friday (his fourth appearance). Asked about DIY dentists he said the best way to remove one's own teeth in Liverpool is to go into a pub and claim someone else's coat.
We go for a drink in the Strangers' Bar at the Commons and engage in robust chat with Peter Kilfoyle, another serial Labour rebel. Bob has taken to calling me Jacques - which I take to be a reference to Shakespeare's melancholy character ("All the world's a stage...") from As You Like It.
So absorbed are the pair that Alf Bates, who is nearby having a drink with Labour MPs from the north west, has to remind them to go and vote. "Speaking on behalf of the whips," says Alf, who lost his seat in the Thatcher landslide - and ceased to be a whip in 1979.
As I leave I bump into Sir Ming coming round a corner. He says it's been tough, up and down, but that resignation was the best thing to do - and done quickly. He could have stayed on to Christmas or beyond. But why?
Footnote: The BBC news reports that technical problems have shut down Hartlepool's nuclear plant. When I covered the byelection in the town after Peter Mandelson stood down as local MP I heard what must be a well-known local joke: Hartlepool is the only place which would look better after a nuclear accident. Unfair; it looked nice to me on a sunny autumn day.
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