Last week, smallpox. This week, war fever

Most governments go to considerable trouble and expense to persuade us that things are better than they seem to be. In the search for re-election, they encourage what has come to be known as the "feelgood factor". This government is different. It is not exactly trying to nurture a feelbad factor. On the contrary: we are informed weekly that – despite the abandonment of a whole array of "targets" – our roads and schools and hospitals will shortly be the envy of the world.

At the same time, however, ministers go out of their way to create a feeling of insecurity and unease. Mr Jack Straw does it. So does Mr David Blunkett, all the time. The only one of them who does not do it – which may seem surprising – is Mr Gordon Brown. But the minister who goes in for it most assiduously is Mr Tony Blair. He is the Minister not only of External Threats but of the Enemy Within.

This new department of state started life on 11 September last year. It has quadrupled its activities since Mr George Bush indicated his intention to attack Iraq whatever the UN inspectors might or might not discover. So first of all Mr Blair devoted the best part of his speech at the Lord Mayor's late-autumn bunfight to warning us against terrible threats to our civilisation.

Then we were told of the possibility of poison gas on the London Underground, of cyanide at Sloane Square and strychnine at South Ken, of perils still worse extending to Morden, Cockfosters and South Ruislip. Users not normally given to panic seriously thought of relinquishing the Tube altogether but were saved by the firemen's strike, which put sections of the service effectively out of commission anyway.

Most recently we have had the great smallpox scare. Selected citizens are, it seems, to be inoculated against the disease. The Government's chief medical officer said that this activity had been brought about by the BSE crisis. The Government had learnt that it was better to be open and frank with the citizens. Well I never! Tell that to Cherie Blair and the Downing Street press officers. Or, as the Duke of Wellington remarked: if you believe that, you will believe anything.

There are several reasons for the recent spate of scare stories. One is that they distract attention from the Government's failures in other areas. Even the normally level-headed Newsnight devoted an entire item on Thursday evening to the Government's alleged lack of preparedness for some metropolitan disaster, when the real story was about Mrs Blair and her Bristol flats. And, of course, the papers love it. "Don't loaf around the office all day long like that, Sarah," the features editor will say. "Why don't you do us a good strong piece on the smallpox peril? And get the library to dig out some nice pics of punters with pustules and horrible great running sores."

Another reason lies in our tendency to follow America not only in international affairs but in our domestic preoccupations as well. When I was writing in what we old journalists have been brought up to call Another Sunday Newspaper, I asked at an editorial conference why we were publishing so much about the Philippines, Mrs Imelda Marcos being then in the news. The islands had never been a colony or part of the Empire. We had no traditional or strategic interest in their future. And yet we devoted more space to them than we did to Turkey, Greece, even France. The only reason we were so interested was that America was obsessed with them.

America is now obsessed with terrorism. So also must we be likewise. But we have had experience of the phenomenon for longer than America has, for over 30 years in fact. Does anyone, I wonder, still remember Leila Khaled? She was the much-glamorised Middle Eastern terrorist who, after an aborted hijacking attempt, was removed from this country by the Heath government in contravention of every known principle of criminal and international law, but to satisfy political convenience merely.

Naturally we have greater experience of the IRA. The House of Commons still contains numerous little oak cubicles, constructed in the 1970s at great expense, designed for identity checkers and once manned by them, but now in a state of desuetude, like those coastal concrete pill-boxes surviving from the last war.

Why then does Mr Blair adopt the conceit that, for us, terrorism is something not so far experienced but is, rather, completely new? The obvious reason is that he wants to put us in the mood for a war with Iraq. It was significant that support for the war increased here after the outrage in Bali, even though its perpetrators had nothing whatever to do with Iraq.

Last week's Foreign Office dossier on Saddam Hussein's abuses of human rights was meant to serve exactly the same purpose. Yet we all know that Iraq uses torture. We know too that horrible things go on all over the world. Saudi Arabia tortures people, as do Egypt and Pakistan. Those former favourites of the Old Left, India and Israel, are none too scrupulous about the way they treat suspects. Even Turkey, whose admission to the European Union is being urged by the US Administration, is not above a spot of torture. Mr Blair does not on that account urge the invasion of any of these countries, though he may well wish, with complete sincerity, that they would change their practices.

On one relatively small matter he was controverted by Mr Tam Dalyell. It was at Prime Minister's Questions. The dossier had alleged that the members of the Iraq football team had been caned on the soles of their feet after failing to qualify for the World Cup. As a boy I was taught, as part of General Knowledge, that this was a fiendish Arab punishment known as the bastinado. No such gratuitous learning was on display in the House. Mr Dalyell – whose considerable knowledge of Scottish football is evident from his obituaries in The Independent – contented himself with pointing out to the Prime Minister that Fifa, the international football authority, had already investigated the charge and found it to be baseless. Mr Blair was not going to take on a combination of Fifa and Mr Dalyell. He retired injured to the bench.

He will not have a country united behind him in any war with Iraq. Here we have 1.4m Muslims (for though I prefer to call them Mohammedans, because what was good enough for Gibbon is good enough for me, I do not want to have to deal with more affronted letters). There are 0.3m Jews, who occupy more prominent positions and can make more noise. They – though by no means all – will tend to support Mr Blair. He is going into something that could turn nastier domestically than Suez. Quite apart from anything else, there were not so many Muslims over here in those days. Meanwhile Mr Blair might stop trying to terrorise us himself.