This Isn't How We Got Into World War One, You Know

They've let themselves down, they've let America down, they've let the whole of Big School down. Most importantly, they have let down Britain's Head Boy, whose intervention in Syria will now be confined to braying from the sidelines and to whatever sneaking connivance he can manage. First Argentina, then Ecuador, then Spain, and now the House of Claimants itself: will nobody give him a war?

The opposition's majority in the vote was thirteen; the number of coalition rebels was about forty and included some of the Conservative Party's UKIP wing, such as the osteocephalic brothers Peter Bone and Philip Hollobone, and even a handful of Liberal Democrats, so there is much rumbling and squeaking about the historical magnitude of the decision and the consequences for our transatlantic poodledom. Those remain to be seen. So far, the vote seems little more than a tic of coalition politics, abetted by Daveybloke's characteristic combination of incompetence and self-complacency. He expected, no doubt, that at the prospect of a bit of wog-bombing the Conservatives would go into orgasm, the Deputy Conservatives would go along, and Labour would make pious noises and then go along. I confess that I myself expected much the same; but then I am not the Chillaxer-in-Chief. As in the 2010 election, Daveybloke was certainly rather miffed at having to make a case before the public, rather than entering smoothly into his birthright.

Anyway, while the Head Boy retired to work out his anti-appeasement rhetoric with Lynton Crosby, Daveybloke's best chum worried about whether Britain wants to "play a big part in upholding the international system" of institutionalised piracy and mass murder, as Daveybloke himself does when he sells weapons to the moral cousins of Bashar al-Assad. Osborne also implied that failing to bomb enough wogs would entail turning our back on the world's problems; by which he appeared to mean that it might endanger his plan to make Britain a "big open and trading nation" by turning it into a Third World haven for large-scale tax dodgers. Doubtless the logic is clear to those economists who aspire to the level of George Osborne.