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Christmas gifts solved

This is the week when I normally produce my popular annual Christmas Gift Guide, alerting readers to a range of hot, hot buys to suit all budgets, tastes and personal profiles, although obviously within reason and excluding monks.

However, I've decided this year to hand the task over to my alter ego Colin, who, if you've met him in this column before, you will remember is very fond of DIY and banality, which makes him an ideal Christmas Gift Guide compiler.

Hi, Colin here – all 'present' and correct and ready with a range of exciting gift suggestions! Enjoy!

A gift for her: The ladies love nothing more than multi-tasking and will be instantly won over by the new Four-In-One ballpoint pen. Simply choose the colour you want – from a range including, well actually wholly composed of, black, blue, green or red – then use the simple colour-coded system to depress the relevant button and hey presto! a whole world of multi-tasking colour is at your fingertips and all in one pen. Comes with a fingernail-friendly operation system ideal for the modern lady.

A gift for him: We all know that men love gadgets and that, following the example of Jamie and Gordon, they also love messing about in the kitchen. So what better gift than a spoon rest? Supplied in a range of ceramic and plastic finishes, the spoon rest has been described in cool circles as the new butter-pat maker. Do not swallow.

A gift for teenagers: It's widely recognised that today's youngsters are so obsessed with studying to get A-stars and helping others that they often ignore the important things and leave school with no idea of, for example, how to refresh a tired door architrave or measure the water flow from a low-level cistern.

The answer is to buy the teenager in your family a piece of practical equipment which will inspire a life-long interest in DIY and my own suggestion would be one of those special rollers which allow you to paint the side of the radiator nobody can see. Practical, elegant and, to put in modern parlance, groovy fab.

Damning verdict

Why have people stopped being angry about the Iraq war? I've been fuming about it since the 2003 invasion, although I don't mention it any more because it makes me sound a bit mad.

But Lord Bingham, released by retirement from the constraints of being senior England's senior law lord, has just said, quite devastatingly if you believe in the rule of law, that the crucial opinion by the then attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, that the Iraq invasion could be sanctioned under international law was "fundamentally flawed", which is the phrase law lords reach for when they mean utter tosh.

One million anti-war marchers in London in 2003 knew this perfectly well but the government never admitted it, even as the hunt for aggressive weapons of mass destruction, the only possible proper legal justification for the war, turned to farce.

And as long as there are British armed-service personnel in Iraq, we cannot, according to the government and the shriller sections of the press, discuss the rights and wrongs of the conflict because troops are risking their lives.

This, accepting the bravery of our fighting forces, is hard to argue with, except on the grounds that the govern-ment position would force us to remain in conflict until the last brave fighter was dead. We would still be fighting the Vietnam war if the armchair warriors had their way, and probably the Hundred Years war as well.

In about 2003 I wrote a couple of columns about my local Leeds Central MP Hilary Benn who was, I thought, over-zealously in favour of the war and I've never been more misunderstood in my life.

Experienced journalists, evidently a bit slow on matters of jurisprudence and democracy, not to mention the uptake, asked me what I was playing at, suggesting I had some sort of irrational prejudice against Mr Benn and were puzzled that I should take my part-time job as an elector of the Leeds Central constituency so seriously.
But while my opinion about the Iraq war is quite worthless, my opinion about my local MP has the same weight as anybody else's and, in a dull democracy, it's my duty to express it.

Lord Bingham found that ministers (including Mr Benn, then, as development secretary, a minister with an international portfolio) had breached "an overriding duty to comply with the law, including international law" but even as I write this I can feel people rolling their eyes in an 'he's off again' way.

Nobody was ever sacked or even suffered significant electoral damage over a shabby, dishonest, counter-productive, plain nasty war and since the ones that are dead are too late to save and we'll soon be out of Iraq anyway, shouldn't we just forget about it? No, we shouldn't.