BRITAIN’s Prime Minister and Witney’s MP, David Cameron, has paid the penalty for seeking a mandate from parliament on military involvement in Syria before the United Nations weapons inspectors filed their report.

But despite what he said after the vote in the Commons it does not rule out Britain’s participation in the future. That depends on the UN inspectors’ findings and what President Assad does next.

Commentators have been quick to raise the ghost of the dodgy dossier which poisoned the debate in the run-up to the Invasion of Iraq. But for me a more haunting analogy is with the Oxford Munich by-election of 1938.

The successful candidate, Quintin Hogg – the future chairman of the Conservative Party, Lord Hailsham – backed Premier Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasing Hitler. But it was not his powers of persuasion so much as the feeling in the country that won the day.

At one of the rallies of his opponent (the non-party Master of Balliol College, A.D. Lindsay) a distraught Oxford housewife spoke angrily of the suffering her husband had endured as a result of his service in the First World War. Twenty years after, her feelings about the carnage remained as bitter as those of any who opposed the Iraq war 10 years ago.

DON CHAPMAN

Newland Street

Eynsham