TONY Blair may have been speaking off the cuff and on Sky News, but his choice of words was telling. Insisting he had secret proof that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq, the Prime Minister said: "I certainly do know some of the stuff that has been already accumulated..."

At this very moment, exam markers are sharpening their red pencils to ring such sloppiness. You know the form: "Here is some of this stuff that caused the Second World War..." Or "Hamlet is always spouting stuff about how screwed up he feels."

Stuff is also what children do all day at school. When questioned further, those in my close acquaintance offer the elaboration of "school stuff".

Stuff is not what you expect from the Prime Minister when he faces a crisis about whether or not he misled the country about the reasons for embarking on a war.

Here Mr Blair was, back home from World Leader school after a hard day picking up all the fast-food rubbish and used Bibles dropped by Head Boy Bush. Asked what he'd been up to, he said: "World Leader Stuff".

Mr Blair is a conviction politician, and when he is convinced about something, there is no shaking him. Once he gets in messianic mood, you've had it. As the novelist Frederick Forsyth put it: "Tony Blair is exceptionally dangerous in that he can believe anything he wants to believe. If he wants to believe that north is south, that is what he will do."

As it happens, Forsyth sides with the prime minister in thinking the Iraqi war was justified. But to those who remain beset by doubt, the non-appearance of these weapons is alarming.

Mr Blair largely swung the argument for war on the grounds of these fabled WMD - and if the necessary evidence doesn't materialise, his justification disintegrates.

In a sense, the sort of sense Mr Blair will have in mind, none of this should matter. The war was fought, it was won (not that such an outcome was ever in doubt) and we have moved on.

Yet the trouble with all this leadership stuff, as Mr Blair might put it, is that the people's trust can crumble - especially if they suspect they've been sold a rotten argument.

There is a further dimension to all this. By the time Mr Blair was insisting that Saddam's WMD posed a threat to us all, the Americans had long since decided to have a war. They wanted Britain along for the ride to add a sheen of international respectability - and Tony Blair jumped on board, eyes gleaming and justification clutched in his hand.

George Bush doesn't care about the moral small print. He got his war and one of the world's bad guys was punished in revenge for September 11 (even if the links between Iraq and that atrocity remained elusive).

Of course, the weapons are not all that is missing. Saddam Hussein seems to be breathing the same thin air as Bin Laden. Both led to American-backed wars; and both have managed to escape the mightiest nation on earth.

YORK acclaims itself as a cycling city, and perhaps it is, if you can survive the pot holes, hazardous junctions and bike-blind drivers. Sadly, it is also bike crime city.

We had three bikes stolen at the weekend and disconsolately joined the burgeoning clan of this city's temporarily bike-less cyclists. If cycling is one way to sort out York's traffic problems, how come the frequent theft of bikes is brushed off as one of those things?

Updated: 10:28 Thursday, June 05, 2003